New Pathways Quotes

Buddhist say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientist confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you've been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn't set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating mental circuits.

Follow your Dreams - They give pathway to the wonder of who you are.

In the beginning, doing other than yelling when you are angry will be extremely difficult. But each time you succeed, the new pathway is strengthened. Eventually the urge to yell is so small that it's easy to ignore

Here in my heart, my happiness, my house. Here inside the lighted window is my love, my hope, my life. Peace is my companion on the pathway winding to the threshold. Inside this portal dwells new strength in the security, serenity, and radiance of those I love above life itself. Here two will build new dreams--dreams that tomorrow will come true. The world over, these are the thoughts at eventide when footsteps turn ever homeward. In the haven of the hearthside is rest and peace and comfort.

Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another. She walked through another gate. It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn't.) She walked through another gate. What was a gate, anyway? A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before. By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn't have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.

It’s interesting-most people think about therapy as something that involves going in and undoing what’s happened. But whatever your past experiences created in your brain, the associations exist and you can’t just delete them. You can’t get rid of the past. Therapy is more about building new associations, making new, healthier default pathways. It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore. Therapy is building a better alternative, a new default. And that takes repetition, and time, honestly, it works best if someone understands how the brain changes. This is why understanding how trauma impacts our health is essential for everyone.

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

There is a tension between what is good for someone and what they want to do. This is because people, especially older people, like to do things as they've always done them. The problem is that when the brain develops ingrained habits, it doesn't need to think anymore. Things get done very quickly and efficiently on automatic pilot, often in a very advantageous way. This creates a tendency to stick to routines, and the only way of breaking these is to confront the brain with new information.

Our challenge is to join forces of the old and the new- experience and experiment, history and destiny, the world of man and the new world of science- but always in accordance with the never-changing word of God.

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

Organic farming appealed to me because it involved searching for and discovering nature's pathways, as opposed to the formulaic approach of chemical farming. The appeal of organic farming is boundless; this mountain has no top, this river has no end.

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco.

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes; depression, anxiety, obsession, and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it. On the spectrum he lays out (in his entropic brain article) ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction, and disorders of obsession all fall on the too-much-order end. (Psychosis is on the entropy end of the spectrum, which is why it probably doesn’t respond to psychedelic therapy.)

I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started, brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask; How is this book changing mine?

NirVana chakra is the chakra of neuroplasticity. It allows the brain to continuously change and adapt, and build new neural connections as needed, and abandoning the pathways that drags people down.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.

When we are unable to change an event that has already been written in the stars, we are always presented the opportunity to surrender to the heart and find a new pathway to peace. Understanding Divine Reason allows us to honor God’s Divine Plan.

The adolescent brain makes important new pathways and connections, but the cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex, the seat of judgment, don’t mature until around age twenty-five. (The emotional control functions follow at around thirty-two!)

As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our government, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

Don’t always complain the way isn’t there. If you can’t find the way, create it.

New year is the glittering light to brighten the dream-lined pathway of future

Boredom, passivity, stagnation: these are the beginning of mental illness, which propagates itself like the scum on a stagnant pond.

I could literally feel my brain coming to life, as if new pathways were firing up in places that had been dark and barren. Reading was teaching me what it meant to be alive, to be human.

People don’t really learn when you tell them something. They don’t even really learn when they do something. They start learning, start creating new neural pathways, only when they have a chance to recall and reflect on what just happened.

The panic attacks have been a part of Zinnia’s life for almost six months. They allow no pathway back to the innocent complacency with which she once made sense of the world around her. With every new attack more of her identity crumbles. Every day the panic rubs something else out that has been achieved with application, sometimes with inspiration.

Of course, every time you have sex, it will not be identical: moods, spaces, times, touches, intentions all drift and mingle, forming new pathways, reflecting and drawing from past journeys, and ending somewhere that may look similar. But isn’t.

Sometimes life events break your heart. Even as you grieve, allow light to seep through the cracks, uplift, and illuminate a healing. Baby turtles emerge from the cracking of shells; new life can burst forth. Clear away all broken belongings as a metaphorical pathway fresh, loving experiences in uncharted waters.

Our minds have the incredible capacity to both alter the strength of connections among neurons, essentially rewiring them, and create entirely new pathways. (It makes a computer, which cannot create new hardware when its system crashes, seem fixed and helpless).

Healing is essential for lasting change. ...healing is a transformation, not just a quick fix; a change from an inhibited or impaired state to one of greater health, integration and connection. What was damaged must be soothed, repaired, restored, and given new pathways in which to grow and flourish. In order for change to be thorough, old patterns need to be dissolved, and new, more coherent and refined constructs, formed. In creating coherency in new forms, what has become fragmented or separated, injured or diseased must be made whole again, or perhaps made whole for the first time.

Uncertainty is where things happen. Uncertainty is your personal pathway to opportunity. It's the environment in which you grow, experience new things and produce new, unprecedented results. Uncertainty is where new happens.

I was at a Byron Katie seminar once when I heard her say something I never forgot. She said, “Do you know what I love most about the past? It’s over!

It is within your loving and welcoming arms that a new generation will arrive & be greeted.

We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

She was a very old soul, which meant that her life was driven by love and not ego.

Until you consciously employ the brain it will go to sleep on you. You must feed it, challenge it and use it. That is the way to get it fully engaged in life.

You are all pulling light, which is data and information, onto the planet, and as you do this you create new pathways for consciousness to explore without even saying a word.

When we fail, we learn, we grow and we mature. It opens our eyes to new pathways toward reaching our goals and connecting the dots where we hadn't before.

Key to innovation = finding new pathways. Pathways in business are 3fold: priorities, practices, payments. When aligned = scale.

When we become an expert in our trauma history and know how we self-victimize and drop into denial, we have an opportunity to create a new reality with a new neural pathway in our brain.

When you repeat something enough times, you establish new neural pathways in the brain that your habit flows through effortlessly and automatically, allowing you to literally fuggetaboutit.

The old adage we usually hear is that “practice makes perfect.” Based on what we know about neuroplasticity and deliberate practice, we should rephrase that to read, “practice makes permanent.” As you organize yourself for this self-reflective prep work, remember that it is not about being perfect but about creating new neural pathways that shift your default cultural programming as you grow in awareness and skill.

As one moves along the evolutionary pathways and one's frequencies become more and more rapid, the old ways of conducting business cease to work or cease to function easily and smoothly. New guidelines are essential.

I have to keep hope that maybe one day, in the not so distant future, that I’ll be able to simply think about my awful past and it won’t make my stomach churn. Hope is all I have creating my pathway for this new journey.

Therapy is more about building new associations, making new, healthier default pathways. It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore.

On the lower levels of consciousness, which are characterized by egotism, there is so much concern with self-gain that there is little energy or thought given to our effect on others. On the level of courage, we no longer identify solely with the small self. The world is no longer seen as the depriving or punishing bad parent. Instead, the world is seen as challenging and presenting opportunities for growth, development, and new experiences. Thus, this level is characterized by optimism and the feeling that with the correct facts, education, and orientation, sooner or later most problems can be worked out satisfactorily.

In the end, what I love most about contemporary yoga is its ability to synthesize the everyday with the extraordinary, the practical with the visionary, the mundane with the sacred. I love that yoga can work to release my tense muscles, negative emotions, and psychic detritus at the same time. That it can connect me to my body in ways that create new neural pathways in my brain. That it offers a practical tool for coping with everyday stress, as well as an intuitive opening to the hidden magic of everyday life.

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. … if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Don’t strive to be a well-rounded leader. Instead, discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else. Admitting a weakness is a sign of strength. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t make a leader less effective. Everybody in your organization benefits when you delegate responsibilities that fall outside your core competency. Thoughtful delegation will allow someone else in your organization to shine. Your weakness is someone’s opportunity. Leadership is not always about getting things done “right.” Leadership is about getting things done through other people. The people who follow us are exactly where we have led them. If there is no one to whom we can delegate, it is our own fault. As a leader, gifted by God to do a few things well, it is not right for you to attempt to do everything. Upgrade your performance by playing to your strengths and delegating your weaknesses. There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing. My competence in these areas defines my success as a pastor. A sixty-hour workweek will not compensate for a poorly delivered sermon. People don’t show up on Sunday morning because I am a good pastor (leader, shepherd, counselor). In my world, it is my communication skills that make the difference. So that is where I focus my time. To develop a competent team, help the leaders in your organization discover their leadership competencies and delegate accordingly. Once you step outside your zone, don’t attempt to lead. Follow. The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Only those leaders who act boldly in times of crisis and change are willingly followed. Accepting the status quo is the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. Where there’s no progress, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, there’s no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life. So leaders find themselves in the precarious and often career-jeopardizing position of being the one to draw attention to the need for change. Consequently, courage is a nonnegotiable quality for the next generation leader. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees. A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent. Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside. The first person to step out in a new direction is viewed as the leader. And being the first to step out requires courage. In this way, courage establishes leadership. Leadership requires the courage to walk in the dark. The darkness is the uncertainty that always accompanies change. The mystery of whether or not a new enterprise will pan out. The reservation everyone initially feels when a new idea is introduced. The risk of being wrong. Many who lack the courage to forge ahead alone yearn for someone to take the first step, to go first, to show the way. It could be argued that the dark provides the optimal context for leadership. After all, if the pathway to the future were well lit, it would be crowded. Fear has kept many would-be leaders on the sidelines, while good opportunities paraded by. They didn’t lack insight. They lacked courage. Leaders are not always the first to see the need for change, but they are the first to act. Leadership is about moving boldly into the future in spite of uncertainty and risk. You can’t lead without taking risk. You won’t take risk without courage. Courage is essential to leadership.

We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill. Computer scientists use the term "open architecture" to describe a system that is versatile enough to change--or rearrange--to accommodate the varying demands on it.

I was starting to realize that you can’t really grow and learn unless you have a language to grow within. I could literally feel my brain coming to life, as if new pathways were firing up in places that had been dark and barren. Reading was teaching me what it meant to be alive, to be human.

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world. Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay 'The Dreams of Readers', 'more alert to the inner lives of others'. We become vampires without being bitten. In other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quickfire virtual world it offers, doesn't.

After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Neuroscientists have been trying for years to pin down what it is about travel that alters us, how it effects mental change. Neural pathways become ingrained, automatic, if they operate only by habit. They are highly attuned to alterations, to novelty. New sights, sounds, languages, tastes, smells stimulate different synapses in the brain, different message routes, different webs of connection, increasing our neuroplasticity. Our brains have evolved to notice differences in our environment: it’s how we’re alerted to predators, to potential danger. To be sensitive to change, then, is to ensure survival.

Into darkness will I fade, Into a night that Man has made, But through that gloom shall gleam the sun When I am lost, and again am won. Release! Release! I call to thee In new lands across the sea: Let, another on narrow pathways, come to me. Furthest and Highest, yet not beyond reach. Choose thou well a path that will teach How the sunken is raised and emptiness is filled and a wandering heart can finally be stilled. Seek the great stone! Mark it well,with a sign. That the one who shall follow Shall see it is mine, and seeing, shall ponder and certainly know As the Ancients have writ: "As above, so below." And I shall guard the Source of Greatness; Waiting by a teardrop From neither joy nor sorrow born, In silver bound, beneath the ground, I am the spiral horn.

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you'll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.

Your conscious repetitive thoughts and experiences create new neural pathways and remove the blockages of the 72000 Nadis and rewire your brain and the subconscious mind.

This means that although the brain changes are permanent, we can find new synaptic pathways to create healthy behaviors.

We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

This Christmas may you courageously venture - toward each new and unfolding horizon.

May you enter into a new phase in your life. One that affirms your life's purpose.

Dreams give birth to passion and passion produces action. Your work ethic, consistency and determination deliver excellent results.

Business ideas are like human reproduction – they never cease to be birthed as long as there is constant interaction between the brain and questions of life.

Neuroplasticity means that the brain can grow and change throughout our life. Old self-destructive neural pathways can be diminished and new healthier ones can replace them.

Any neural pathway is built and strengthened through repetitions. This is why practice is so vital.

Any neural pathway is built and strengthened through repetitions. This is why practice is so vital

Complexity theory shows that great changes can emerge from small actions. Change involves a belief in the possible, even the “impossible.” Moreover, social innovators don’t follow a linear pathway of change; there are ups and downs, roller-coaster rides along cascades of dynamic interactions, unexpected and unanticipated divergences, tipping points and critical mass momentum shifts. Indeed, things often get worse before they get better as systems change creates resistance to and pushback against the new. Traditional evaluation approaches

The best source of business ideas is a gap in the market. Look for it and start a business that provides a new product or service to fill it or improve on an existing product or service.

Each in His Own Tongue A fire mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jellyfish and a saurian, And caves where the cave men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod — Some call it Evolution, And others call it God. A haze on the far horizon, The infinite, tender sky, The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields, And the wild geese sailing high; And all over upland and lowland The charm of the goldenrod — Some of us call it Autumn, And others call it God. Like tides on a crescent sea beach, When the moon is new and thin, Into our hearts high yearnings Come welling and surging in; Come from the mystic ocean, Whose rim no foot has trod — Some of us call it Longing, And others call it God. A picket frozen on duty, A mother starved for her brood, Socrates drinking the hemlock, And Jesus on the rood; And millions who, humble and nameless, The straight, hard pathway plod — Some call it Consecration, And others call it God.

I become influenced while I'm reading. I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started. Brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life.

Meditation has also been proven scientifically to untangle and rewire the neurological pathways in the brain that make up the conditioned personality. Buddhist monks, for example, have had their brains scanned by scientists as they sat still in deep altered states of consciousness invoked by transcendental meditation and the scientists were amazed at what they beheld. The frontal lobes of the monks lit up as bright as the sun! They were in states of peace and happiness the scientists had never seen before. Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge. Meditation, in this sense, is a fire that burns away the old or conditioned self, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is known as the Yajna; “All karma or effects of actions are completely burned away from the liberated being who, free from attachment, with his physical mind enveloped in wisdom (the higher self), performs the true spiritual fire rite.

I learned years later that my gratitude practice actually helped me form new neural pathways. The hippie rituals of positive affirmations are not just baloney. Gratitude doesn’t exist only in your mind—you have to feel it in your whole being. Feelings are the shadows of thoughts. When we have negative thoughts, our emotions mirror them with anxiety. You can often see what you are thinking by reverse engineering and studying your feelings.

This sequence of creation means, in the second place, not only that life should and will manifest itself more abundantly but also that it will do so in the constant upward spiral—from good to very good—that might serve as the definition of heaven itself. That is Jacob’s Ladder, the process that is eternally making everything as it should be but is somehow also improving, finding new pathways to higher orders of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

like abstract mathematics. Scientists have studied “brain plasticity,” the ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways based on new experiences. It appears that different types of plasticity are dominant at different ages.

Every new way I get to touch her is an explosion in my brain of neural pathways opening up and digging a memory into my brain. Wires crossing and sparking to life a piece of myself I never knew existed. It was lying dormant until this

Prolific libraries take on an independent existence, and become living things...We may have chosen its themes, and the general pathways along which it will develop, but we can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the room, climbs to the ceiling, annexes the other rooms one by one, expelling anything that gets in the way. It eliminates pictures hanging on the walls, or ornaments that obstruct its advance; it moves on with its necessary but cumbersome acolytes -- stools and ladders -- and forces its owner into constant reorganization since its progress is not linear and calls for ever new kinds of diviion. At the same time, it is undeniably the reflection, the twin image of its master. To anyone with the insight to decode it, the fundamental character of the librarian will emerge as one's eye travels along the bookshelves. indeed no library of any size is like another, none has the same personality. (pp. 30-31)

A single cell can grow 15,000 connections with its neighbors. This chain reaction of growth ensures the pathway of thought responsible for the behavior grows strong, making it easier to kick this new resource into action in the future.

Later, as the moon rose and tangled in the winter-bone branches of thorn trees, she asked, 'Can you guide your dreaming? can you move your dreams along pathways of desire? do your dreams shift in the spaces between dreaming and waking? and, when you wake, do you remember the pathways your dreaming mind has walked? or do your dreams dissolve in the light of each new day?' She could not tell if he was asleep or awake, if her words were a lullaby. And still she has more questions.

Buddhists say that thoughts are like drops of water on the brain; when you reinforce the same thought, it will etch a new stream into your consciousness, like water eroding the side of a mountain. Scientists confirm this bit of folk wisdom: our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you’ve been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn’t set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating new mental circuits. I

Then the ice on the black pathways through the park fixed an unreflecting gaze upward month after month, the cold unwavering through what should have been spring, so that even in April, in the Bowery in New York City, the braziers still glowed on street corners, and a man trying to warm his hands could watch the firelight picked up and carried in the windows above his head and imagine the glow traveling all the way along the avenues, square by square above the streets, all the way uptown and into the warm apartments of those who, pausing on the threshold to turn off the light, left their rooms and descended in woolens and furs, grumbling about the cold—good god, when will it end?—until it turned without fanfare one morning in May, and spring let loose at last.

Elie Wiesel is right: the road to Auschwitz was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the road’s pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America.

These I have loved: Pork with apple sauce; tea in a heavy mug; The smell of new books, and musty ones; A girl with red coils for curls --Her scream--Her smile; The slap of a blonde dog's tongue Against my face; and an old face--Nana's; A broken fence--a secret pathway between two houses; The sinking into a familiar bed; Sheets white and crispy clean; The return of a woman in a green coat-- Imperfect and human; The sound of poetry; And of pencil lead scuffing the page as I write; Made-up stores; and Truth. These I have loved.

The animals’ neural pathways have woven themselves into a new map that corresponds to the new arrangement of nerves in their hands. At first, he can’t believe what he’s seen. Like every other neuroscientist, he’s been taught that the structure of the adult brain is fixed.

One of the most common areas in which we see this emotional crippling is after divorce. All too often it is followed by bitterness and the impaired capacity to create a new loving relationship. The unwillingness to let go of the blame continues the emotional crippling, which can go on for years, or even a lifetime. When we come upon bitterness, what we have really discovered is an unhealed area in our own emotional makeup, and the effort that we put into healing it will bring enormous rewards. In any situation which involves suffering, we have to ask ourselves: “How long am I willing to pay the cost? What were the karmic propensities to begin with? How much blame is enough? Is there a time to call an end to it? How long will I hang on to it? How much sacrifice am I willing to pay to the other person for their wrongs, real or imaginary? How much guilt is enough? How much self-punishment is enough? When will I give up the secret pleasure of the self-punishment? When does the sentence come to an end?” When we really examine it, we will always find that we have been punishing ourselves for ignorance, naïveté, innocence, and lack of inner education.

In life, you’ll have moments of uncertainty when you’re just don’t know what to do or what to choose. You’ll be confused and unsure. Those moments are rare opportunities of possibility. Most of the time, we know what we will decide before it’s even presented to us. We’re so sure of what we want or don’t want that we rarely sit in the openness of possibility. But in the moments when we’re uncertain, in the moments of confusion, anything is possible. Instead of letting that paralyze you, let it inspire you and open you up to a new pathway. It just might be exactly what you need right now.

[T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.

Above the thighs in the abdomen there are two rows of five points on each side. They are henggu (K11), dahe (K12), qixue (K13), siman (K14), and zhongzhu (K15); wailing (ST26), daju (ST27), shuidao (ST28), guilai (ST29), and qichong (ST30). This is the pathway transversed by the kidney qi, therefore referred to as the thoroughfare of the kidneys. The liver, kidney, and spleen channels converge on the inside of the leg. The kidney channel counts six points on each leg, collectively called taichong, or the great thoroughfare. They consist of dazhong (K4), zhaohai (K6), fuliu (K7), jiaoxin (K8), zhubin

autophagy pathways that recycle or destroy damaged cell components (with the help of calcium and zinc), pathways that bolster your immune system and make you more resilient to stress, and pathways that promote neuroplasticity, your brain’s ability to grow new cells and wire them together in new patterns.

With courage, there is the willingness to take chances and to let go of former securities. There is the willingness to grow and benefit from new experiences. This involves the capacity to admit mistakes without indulging in guilt and self-recrimination. Our sense of self-worth is not diminished by looking at areas that need improvement. We are able to admit the presence of problems without being diminished. As a result, energy, time, and effort are put into self-improvement. On this level, statements of intention and purpose are much more powerful and envisioned results tend to manifest. We are much more enterprising and creative, because our energies are not drained by the constant preoccupation with emotional or physical survival. Because of greater flexibility, there is a willingness to examine issues with a view to changing overall meaning and context. There is a willingness to risk shifting paradigms.

People don’t want coaching. They want what coaching can do. They want their problems solved, their habits changed, their opportunities realized. They want more income, or better relationships, or more peace on the inside, or more fun and adventure on the outside. They want less suffering and more happiness

The following interventions are meant to be used in calmer moments, prime time for improving your relationship with your child, building new skills, and developing pathways for change. When things feel off in my own family, I begin with these strategies, which essentially result in connection capital deposits.

Pick any time of the day or night and somewhere, everywhere, stories are being told. They overlap and flow across one another, the pull away again just as waves do upon a shore. It is this knack that stories have of rubbing up against one another that makes the world an interesting place, a place of greater possibility than it would be if we told our tales alone. This is impossible, of course. Make no mistake, everyone's stories touches someone else's. And every brush of one life tale upon another, be it ever so gentle, creates something new: a pathway that wasn't there before. The possibility to create a new tale.

ASANA Now I shall instruct you regarding the nature of asana or seat. Although by 'asana' is generally meant the erect posture assumed in meditation, this is not its central or essential meaning. When I use the word 'asana' I do not mean the various forms of asana’s such as Padmasana, Vajrasana, Svastikasana, or Bhadrasana. By 'asana' I mean something else, and this is what I want to explain to you. First let me speak to you about breath; about the inhaling breath-apana, and the exhaling breath-prana. Breath is extremely important in meditation; particularly the central breath-madhyama-pranan, which is neither prana nor apana. It is the center of these two, the point existing between the inhaling and exhaling breaths. This center point cannot be held by any physical means, as a material object can be held by the hand. The center between the two breaths can be held only by knowledge-jnana – not discursive knowledge, but by knowledge which is awareness. When this central point is held by continuously refreshed awareness – which is knowledge and which is achieved through devotion to the Lord – that is, in the true sense settling into your asana. “On the pathway of your breath maintain continuously refreshed and full awareness on and in the center of breathing in and breathing out. This is internal asana." (Netra Tantra) Asana, therefore, is the gradual dawning in the spiritual aspirant of the awareness which shines in the central point found between inhaling and exhaling. This awareness is not gained by that person who is full of prejudice, avarice, or envy. Such a person, filled with all such negative qualities, cannot concentrate. The prerequisite of this glorious achievement is, therefore, the purification of your internal egoity. It must become pure, clean, and crystal clear. After you have purged your mind of all prejudice and have started settling with full awareness into that point between the two breaths, then you are settling into your asana. “When in breathing in and breathing out you continue to maintain your awareness in continuity on and in the center between the incoming and outgoing breath, your breath will spontaneously and progressively become more and more refined. At that point you are driven to another world. This is pranayama." (Netra Tantra) After settling in the asana of meditation arises the refined practice of pranayama. ‘Pranayama’ does not mean inhaling and exhaling vigorously like a bellow. Like asana, pranayama is internal and very subtle. There is a break less continuity in the traveling of your awareness from the point of asana into the practice of pranayama. When through your awareness you have settled in your asana, you automatically enter into the practice of pranayama. Our Masters have indicated that there are two principle forms of this practice of ‘asana-pranayama’, i.e. cakrodaya and ajapa-gayatri. In the practice of ajapa-gayatri you are to maintain continuously refreshed full awareness-(anusandhana) in the center of two breaths, while breathing in and out slowly and silently. Likewise in the practice of cakrodaya you must maintain awareness, which is continually fresh and new, filled with excitement and vigor, in the center of the two breaths – you are to breathe in and out slowly, but in this case with sound.

This is one of the most urgent problems for civilized man. He has created civilization to give himself security. Security for what? For boredom? His chief problem seems to be that most human beings need a certain amount of challenge, of external stimulus, to stop them from sinking into the blank stare and blank consciousness of the idiot.

Lexium (TM): Trouble with limited vocabulary? These slow-release capsules are imbued with the latest in infra-cerebral nanobots that will gradually encode your brain with hundreds of thousands of new words while reinforcing the neural pathways to facilitate retention and recall. Now available in French. Kane Faucher, Metapharm, Journal of Experimental Fiction #39

Spiral pathways wound their way downward like a whirlpool in pursuit of copper, the life food of a new age begun by the discovery of bronze. Bronze was an alloy more durable than its copper predecessor, being used in everything from tools and decoration to weapons and armor. It was discovered by mixing tin with copper, which resulted in the harder bronze that would last longer and kill more efficiently in weaponry. For all those reasons, especially the last, gods and kings needed plenty of bronze to build their kingdoms. Extracting copper ore from the ground was laborious work. It required many men to unearth the volume demanded by such rulers. The necessary work force could be met by only one thing: Slaves, and lots of them.

The frequent hearing of my mistress reading the bible--for she often read aloud when her husband was absent--soon awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn. Having no fear of my kind mistress before my eyes, (she had given me no reason to fear,) I frankly asked her to teach me to read; and without hesitation, the dear woman began the task, and very soon, by her assistance, I was master of the alphabet, and could spell words of three or four letters...Master Hugh was amazed at the simplicity of his spouse, and, probably for the first time, he unfolded to her the true philosophy of slavery, and the peculiar rules necessary to be observed by masters and mistresses, in the management of their human chattels. Mr. Auld promptly forbade the continuance of her [reading] instruction; telling her, in the first place, that the thing itself was unlawful; that it was also unsafe, and could only lead to mischief.... Mrs. Auld evidently felt the force of his remarks; and, like an obedient wife, began to shape her course in the direction indicated by her husband. The effect of his words, on me, was neither slight nor transitory. His iron sentences--cold and harsh--sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit: the white man's power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. "Very well," thought I; "knowledge unfits a child to be a slave." I instinctively assented to the proposition; and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom. This was just what I needed; and got it at a time, and from a source, whence I least expected it.... Wise as Mr. Auld was, he evidently underrated my comprehension, and had little idea of the use to which I was capable of putting the impressive lesson he was giving to his wife.... That which he most loved I most hated; and the very determination which he expressed to keep me in ignorance, only rendered me the more resolute in seeking intelligence.

The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.

Let us begin with the fine-structure constant. ... The fine-structure constant is really the ratio of two natural units or atoms of action. ... We obtain action when we multiply energy by time. ... We are challenged to find a unified theory of electric particles and radiation in which the electrostatic type of action and the quantum type of action are traced to their source.

A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. A system must be managed. The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We cannot afford the destructive effect of competition.” – W. Edwards Deming The New Economics

Robin Carhart-Harris’ theory of the entropic brain represents a promising elaboration on this general idea and a first stab at a unified theory of mental illness that helps explain all three of the disorders we’ve examined in these pages. A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes. Depression, anxiety, obsession and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it. On the spectrum he lays out in his entropic brain article, ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction and disorders of obsession all fall on the too much order end. Psychosis is on the entropy end of the spectrum which is why it probably doesn’t respond to psychedelic therapy. The therapeutic value of psychedelics, in Carhart-Harris’ view, lies in their ability to temporarily elevate entropy in the inflexible brain, jolting the system out of its default patterns. Carhart-Harris uses the metaphor of annealing from metallurgy: psychedelics introduce energy into the system, giving it the flexibility necessary for it to bend and so change.

Neural pathways become ingrained, automatic, if they operate only by habit. They are highly attuned to alterations, to novelty. New sights, sounds, languages, tastes, smells stimulate different synapses in the brain, different message routes, different webs of connection, increasing our neuroplasticity. Our brains have evolved to notice differences in our environment: it’s how we’re alerted to predators, to potential danger. To be sensitive to change, then, is to ensure survival. Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist who has studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that ‘Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.

What Writing Can Help Us Do: Name our experience so we can more fully understand it. Give language to the future we want to create so it stops feeling vague and begins to seem achievable. Build a bridge (neural pathways) between the now we’re experiencing and the future we’d like to create. Heal and engineer our own resilience from past experience. Find perspective for life’s challenges, large and small. Invent brand-new solutions for age-old problems. Build our confidence. Increase our working memory and overall cognitive power. Cultivate more gratitude and contentment. Provide clarity for our decisions. Increase satisfaction in our romantic partnerships. Level up our immune system, help us sleep better, etc. Combat and curb anxiety, stress, and depression. Tune out the well-meaning and critical voices around us so we can finally understand what we think.

Pathways toward a New Shabbat Do 1. Stay at home. Spend quality time with family and real friends. 2. Celebrate with others: at the table, in the synagogue, with friends or community. 3. Study or read something that will edify, challenge, or make you grow. 4. Be alone. Take some time for yourself. Check in with yourself. Review your week. Ask yourself where you are in your life. 5. Mark the beginning and end of this sacred time by lighting candles and making kiddush on Friday night and saying havdalah on Saturday night. Don’t 6. Don’t do anything you have to do for your work life. This includes obligatory reading, homework for kids (even without writing!), unwanted social obligations, and preparing for work as well as doing your job itself. 7. Don’t spend money. Separate completely from the commercial culture that surrounds us so much. This includes doing business of all sorts. No calls to the broker, no following up on ads, no paying of bills. It can all wait. 8. Don’t use the computer. Turn off the iPhone or smartphone or whatever device has replaced it by the time you read this. Live and breathe for a day without checking messages. Declare your freedom from this new master of our minds and our time. Find the time for face-to-face conversations with people around you, without Facebook. 9. Don’t travel. Avoid especially commercial travel and places like airports, hotel check-ins, and similar depersonalizing encounters. Stay free of situations in which people are likely to tell you to “have a nice day” (Shabbat already is a nice day, thank you). 10. Don’t rely on commercial or canned video entertainment, including the TV as well as the computer screen. Discover what there is to do in life when you are not being entertained.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

WAY OF THE SEAL DRILL Making Variety a Habit Make a list of all the routines in your daily and weekly life. What time do you wake? Do you brush your teeth before or after taking a shower? Do you check your e-mail before brushing your teeth? What ritual patterns of thought can you detect? We are good self-deceivers, so why don’t you ask your best friend or spouse what your routine habits and thoughts are? Armed with the list, make a parallel list of ways you will break these routines. Get up at a different time every day. Take a different route to work. Do not check e-mail first thing, but only twice a day. Fast for a day or do a juice cleanse. Make a new routine out of shaking things up. This will forge new pathways in your brain, help you to avoid blind spots and rutted thinking, and spice up your life in general. You can easily apply this drill at a team level, also.

Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.

Seeking miraculous experiences simply for the sake of experiencing the miraculous makes us spiritual drug addicts who simply want to get “high.” This book is about learning to love God, not learning to join a spiritual circus. Enthusiasts need to be especially careful to remain true to seeking and loving God rather than searching for new experiences. When we seek “spiritual experiences” for their own sake, they can actually become, and be used for, evil.

Even though the effects of any single gene are tiny, these findings are important because they illustrate one sort of pathway from genes to politics: the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences.19 These are two of the main personality factors that have consistently been found to distinguish liberals and conservatives.

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*?

By learning to relax and easing excessive effort, you stimulate neurons to find new awareness pathways. Proprioception is stimulated. This is an awareness of where the body is in space that does not rely on visual cues. Grace is the natural result of making the right use of effort and will. The body begins to move in a naturally gracious manner in all activities, for the training is not limited to the time spent on the yoga mat. The training affects all motions that the anatomy makes.

the primary pathway to a life of lasting confidence and trust in yourself is to steadily and regularly step outside of your “comfort zone.” This involves doing things that you used to avoid, and approaching what scares you in social interactions. At first, this might feel incredibly uncomfortable, like jumping off the high dive at a pool. However, over time you will start to see that you get accustomed to trying new things, and that what once scared you no longer seems so intimidating.

We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What “play” would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?

We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed.40 “Writing and print and the computer,” writes Walter Ong, “are all ways of technologizing the word” and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.41 But the world of the screen, as we’re already coming to understand, is a very different place from the world of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted.

I believe that all learning is relational. Teachers who try to teach without first having created a positive relationship with their students may only be wasting much of their great knowledge. Establish an encouraging relationship with a child, and you can teach him or her almost anything. Establish a strong therapeutic alliance with your client, and he or she might even be willing to build new neuronal pathways that indicate that trust, love, and unconditional worth are possible for him or her too.

I can now trace my manic adult tendencies to this moment. It was the first time I felt deeply thrilled about something just a fraction of an instant after being completely crushed. I believe those three words “We want you” were enough to cause my brain to rewire itself, and from then on, I would require MORE than other people. At the same time, my tolerance for alcohol was instantly increased, and a new neural pathway was created for the future appreciation of crack cocaine and prescription painkillers.

The bare elms, dressed in a white robe of ice crystals, showed the way in an enchanting alley resembling a pathway to an elfin world. Whispering secrets, the snow-draped branches entwined amorously in a wide, cathedral-like canopy. The coarse, dark barks wrinkled with centuries-old wisdom, eyeing the pedestrians in solemn silence. “I’ll just give this pathway another name,” Maude decided. “Whispering Walkway will be its new name because if you listen closely enough, the trees’ rustling sound like a melodious murmur.” “I

They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented escape, offered pathways to literary landscapes that intrigued and engrossed...From childhood on, books had been the hot air balloons that carried them above the angry mutterings of quarreling parents, schoolyard rejections, academic boredom...They were of a kind, readers from birth.

Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. “Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.” When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge—whether from a song or an intention or a therapist’s suggestion—can powerfully influence its future course. Robin Carhart-Harris’s theory of

Research shows that practices like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state. In fact, functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans confirm this,23 showing tangible evidence that consistent consciousness practices actually thicken the prefrontal lobes, the area where our conscious awareness actually lives. Other forms of compassion-based meditation (or just closing your eyes and thinking about someone you love) help strengthen an area called the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. All of this work helps to rewire our brain, disrupt our default thought patterns, and wake us up out of our subconscious-driven autopilot. From this foundation of consciousness we can then begin to witness the conditioned patterns in our thoughts, beliefs, and relationships. This honest self awareness shows us our pathway towards change and ultimately healing.

I chose a man and he chose me You should have simply let it be I chose a man and he chose you Now this choice you both shall rue You stole mine so I'll steal yours Each mother's child that she adores From every generation born The first new child she will mourn This curse unbroken now shall be Down into eternity Unless you find the pathway through And solve the riddle with this clue A rose's cry at rock enchanted The sun's bright ray where none is slanted A magic key to a gift divine True love must merge when stars align

This movement to which he had dedicated his life could not be snuffed out by a few opportunists, a sackful of dollars and a cunt in the Kremlin. It was as old and as strong as the human spirit itself. It would come back, with fresh vigour, soon, very soon. It might have a different name, a different banner. But men and women would always want to walk that path, that tricky uphill path across the river of stones and through the damp cloud, because they knew that at the end they would burst into the bright sunshine and see the mountain top clear above them. Men and women dreamed of that moment. They would link arms again. They would have a new song – no longer ‘Stepping the Red Pathway’ as it had been on Rykosha Mountain. But they would sing this new song to the old tune. And they would gather themselves to make that mighty second jump. Then the ground would shake and all the capitalists and imperialists and plant-loving Fascists and filth and scum and renegades and fucking intellectuals and boy prosecutors and Judases with birdshit on their skulls would shit themselves one final, mighty time.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

At this point, I must describe an important study carried out by Clare W. Graves of Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. on deterioration of work standards. Professor Graves starts from the Maslow-McGregor assumption that work standards deteriorate when people react against workcontrol systems with boredom, inertia, cynicism... A fourteen-year study led to the conclusion that, for practical purposes, we may divide people up into seven groups, seven personality levels, ranging from totally selfpreoccupied and selfish to what Nietzsche called ‘a selfrolling wheel’-a thoroughly self-determined person, absorbed in an objective task. This important study might be regarded as an expansion of Shotover’s remark that our interest in the world is an overflow of our interest in ourselves—and that therefore nobody can be genuinely ‘objective’ until they have fully satiated the subjective cravings. What is interesting—and surprising—is that it should not only be possible to distinguish seven clear personality-ypes, but that these can be recognised by any competent industrial psychologist. When Professor Graves’s theories were applied in a large manufacturing organisation—and people were slotted into their proper ‘levels’—the result was a 17% increase in production and an 87% drop in grumbles. The seven levels are labelled as follows: (1) Autistic (2) Animistic (3) Awakening and fright (4) Aggressive power seeking (5) Sociocentric (6) Aggressive individualistic (7) Pacifist individualistic. The first level can be easily understood: people belonging to it are almost babylike, perhaps psychologically run-down and discouraged; there is very little to be done with these people. The animistic level would more probably be encountered in backward countries: primitive, superstitious, preoccupied with totems and taboos, and again poor industrial material. Man at the third level is altogether more wide-awake and objective, but finds the complexity of the real world frightening; the best work is to be got out of him by giving him rules to obey and a sense of hierarchical security. Such people are firm believers in staying in the class in which they were born. They prefer an autocracy. The majority of Russian peasants under the Tsars probably belonged to this level. And a good example of level four would probably be the revolutionaries who threw bombs at the Tsars and preached destruction. In industry, they are likely to be trouble makers, aggressive, angry, and not necessarily intelligent. Management needs a high level of tact to get the best out of these. Man at level five has achieved a degree of security—psychological and economic—and he becomes seriously preoccupied with making society run smoothly. He is the sort of person who joins rotary clubs and enjoys group activities. As a worker, he is inferior to levels three and four, but the best is to be got out of him by making him part of a group striving for a common purpose. Level six is a self-confident individualist who likes to do a job his own way, and does it well. Interfered with by authoritarian management, he is hopeless. He needs to be told the goal, and left to work out the best way to achieve it; obstructed, he becomes mulish. Level seven is much like level six, but without the mulishness; he is pacifistic, and does his best when left to himself. Faced with authoritarian management, he either retreats into himself, or goes on his own way while trying to present a passable front to the management. Professor Graves describes the method of applying this theory in a large plant where there was a certain amount of unrest. The basic idea was to make sure that each man was placed under the type of supervisor appropriate to his level. A certain amount of transferring brought about the desired result, mentioned above—increased production, immense decrease in grievances, and far less workers leaving the plant (7% as against 21% before the change).

bureaucracy … Grants excessive credence to the views of precedent-bound leaders Discourages rebellious thinking Creates long lags between sense and respond Calcifies organizational structures Blinds silo-dwelling leaders to new opportunities Suboptimizes trade-offs Frustrates the rapid redeployment of resources Discourages risk taking Politicizes decision making Creates long and tortuous approval pathways Misaligns power and leadership capability Caps opportunities for individual contribution Undermines frontline accountability Systematically devalues originality

In one of the few memoirs of self-injury, Caroline Kettlewell describes her recovery in terms of neural pathways—the “groove” worn into her mind, the “wrong turns and dark corridors” marked by her history of cutting. Once she learns how to stand “the awful agony of unhappiness” without reverting to the bodily jolt of broken skin, she changes the map of psychological struggle in her mind. “[E]very time I gut it through and survive,” she concludes, “I’m reshaping the structure and the chemistry of my thoughts, wearing new paths less tortured and convoluted than the old ones.”   Cutting

It is so rare to have a new tent appear that Celia considers canceling her performances entirely in order to spend the evening investigating it. Instead she waits, executing her standard number of shows, finishing the last a few hours before dawn. Only then does she navigate her way through nearly empty pathways to find the latest edition to the circus. The sign proclaims something called the Ice Garden. and Celia smiles at the addendum below which contains an apology for any thermal inconvenience. Despite the name, she is not prepared for what awaits her inside the tent. It is exactly what the sign described. But it is so much more than that. There are no stripes visible on the walls, everything is sparkling and white. She cannot tell how far it stretches, the size of the tent obscured by cascading willows and twisting vines. The air itself is magical. Crisp and sweet in her lungs as she breathes, sending a shiver down to her toes that is caused by more than the forewarned drop in temperature. There are no patrons in the tent as she explores, circling alone around trellises covered in pale roses and a softly bubbling, elaborately carved fountain. And everything, save for occasional lengths of whet silk ribbon strung like garlands, is made of ice. Curious, Celia picks a frosted peony from its branch, the stem breaking easily. But the layered petals shatter, falling from her fingers to the ground, disappearing in the blades of ivory grass below. When she looks back at the branch, an identical bloom has already appeared. Celia cannot imagine how much power and skill it would take not only to construct such a thing but to maintain it as well. And she longs to know how her opponent came up with the idea. Aware that each perfectly structured topiary, every detail down to the stones that line the paths like pearls, must have been planned.

In conclusion, I return to Einstein. If we find a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, its image, captured by a camera travelling at a fifth of light speed, will be slightly distorted due to the effects of special relativity. It would be the first time a spacecraft has flown fast enough to see such effects. In fact, Einstein’s theory is central to the whole mission. Without it we would have neither lasers nor the ability to perform the calculations necessary for guidance, imaging and data transmission over twenty-five trillion miles at a fifth of light speed. We can see a pathway between that sixteen-year-old boy dreaming of riding on a light beam and our own dream, which we are planning to turn into a reality, of riding our own light beam to the stars. We are standing at the threshold of a new era. Human colonisation on other planets is no longer science fiction. It can be science fact. The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilisation began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. I hope for the best. I have to. We have no other option.

The lexicon must make room for white patriarchy's specific way of disregarding the humanity of Black women in literal physical spaces like New Orleans during and after Katrina, and in the narratives and policy making that either created a pathway home or left them stranded. Every step of the Katrina response "depresenced" Black women, forced them to bear the weight of natural disaster while carrying the cellular memory of trauma one can imagine will pass through bloodlines like so many others. Unlike erasure, which requires one's presence to be recognized so it can be obliterated, depresencing never acknowledges presence at all. When deployed, people just look right through Black women as if they weren't there. As violent and silent as depresencing is, there's an antidote. The response to Hurricane Katrina was not the first time the U.S. government abandoned Black women, and it would not be the last. Black women resisted by showing up in the story of their lives, by loving, learning, and leading--despite the systemic barriers and humiliations designed to make them small enough to practically disappear. But Black women did not disappear, and they will not disappear because we know something established power does not: we are something.

Raising Nedda was painful in ways he hadn’t anticipated, as though a cord connected them, its pull as strong as any chemical bond. One day, it would break and she would leave. Eleven was a spectacular age. Her brain was blooming, her mind ripe for learning. She was building new cells to contain everything she learned, forging new neural pathways, and each day she was different, a little more, a little brighter. All the while, his brain was wearing down; every brain over twenty-five was. Nedda was at the point of infinite potential, the moment where genius was born. What an incredible thing it would be to hold on to that precise moment.

I find the intellectual compulsion to break apart the pieces of nature and examine them one by one both interesting and troubling. I understand it's the way science typically works: to understand a system, you have to understand the parts, find the mechanism, put your flag on a piece of new ground. The poets would find this is nonsense. It's not just the smell of a cypress, or the sound of the birds, or the color green that unlocks the pathway to health in our brains. We're full sensory beings, or at least we were once built to be. Isn't it possible that it's only when you open all the doors - literally and figuratively - that the real magic happens? (p. 127)

...[H]uman beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance... Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him... When faced with abundance, the brain's ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress. In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.

Before running into the ocean, we’d put our hands to the sky, say a short prayer and take three very deep breaths, before proceeding to run in, whooping like the children we are at heart. Greg also taught me that when you’re coming out of the water you should raise your hands to the sky and say thank you, to show gratitude for everything you have in your life. Greg told me that Einstein had appeared to him in a dream, saying that walking backwards off the beach would create new neural pathways. So we always walked backwards off the beach, keeping our eyes on the ocean, picking up pieces of littered plastic along the way. “Try to leave every environment better than when you found it,” he told me.

The ancient rituals have been continuing for generations. Over time, the rituals have connected to the greater realms; creating pathways to the sky. All the realms are controlled by sound. That is the GREAT SECRET. The rituals have created channels that connect the earth with these realms. They are called the ‘Channels of the Realms’. I have provided you with the new information (as told in “Oracle of Compassion: the Living Word of Kuan Yin”) but you also need the ancient wisdom in order for the earth to be fully balanced. An important part of this is, of course, focusing upon the image of Kuan Yin. Sound vibration is carried through the DNA (cellular memory) to the next generations. The Elders know this.” ~ Kuan Yin

NAMING THE EARTH (a poem of light for national poetry day) And the world will be born again in circles of steaming breath and beams of light as each one of us directs our inner eye upon its name. Hear the cry of wings, the sigh of leaves and grass, smell the new sweet mist rising as the pathway is cleared at last. Stones stand ready - they have known since ages and ages ago that they were not alone. Water carries the planet's energy into skies and down to earth and bones. The cold parts steadily as we come together, bodies and hearts warm, hands tingling. We are silent but our eyes are singing. We look, we feel, we know, we trust each other's souls, we have no need to speak. Not now, but later, when the time is right, the name will ring within the iron core of each other's listening - and the very earth's being. Every creature, every plant, will hear it calling, tolling like a bell - a sound we've always felt but never dared to hope to hear reverberating - true at last, at every level of existence. The poets come together to open the intimate centre. Believe in life and air - breathe the light itself, for these are the energies and rhythms that we need to see, to touch, to reach, to identify, to say, the NAME. Colours on your skin fuse and dissolve - leave the river clean for pure space and time to enter and flow in. We all become one fluid stream of stillness and motion, of flaring thought pulses discovering weird pools and twists within where darkness hides from the flames in our eyes but will not snare us. We probe deeper still, journeying towards a unity which will be more raw and yet also more formed than anything written or spoken before. Our fragile bodies fall away - and the trees, and the roots of trees, guide us - lead us away from the faces we remember seeing each day in the mirror - into an ocean of dreams seething with warmth, love, where the beginning is real, ripe, evolving. And the world is born again in circles of steaming breath and beams of light. An ache - a signal - a trembling moment - and the time is right to say the name. We sing as one whole voice of the universal - all the words, the names of every tiny thirsting thing, and they ring out together as one sound, one energy, one sense, one vibration, one breath. And the world listens, beats, shines, glows - IS - Exists!

The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery, for this unorthodox process would only prove to be the cerebral equivalent of tracking a creature one was not even sure existed: surely one could happen upon some new species deep in the caverns somewhere and assume it to be the goal of one’s trek, but then there was a certain idiocy to this notion, as one would never be sure this newfound entity should prove to be what one wished it to be; taken further, this very need to find something, to begin with, would only lead one to clamber more deeply inward along rigorous paths and over unsteady terrain, the entirety of which could only be traversed with the arrogant resolve of someone who has already determined, with a misplaced sense of pride in his own assumptions, that he was undoubtedly making headway in a direction worthwhile. And assuming still that this process was the only viable option available, and further assuming that Morell could manage to find a way to track down the beast lingering ostensibly inside of Princess Cookie, what was he then to do with it? Exorcise the thing? Reason with it? Negotiate maybe? How? Could one hope to impose terms and conditions upon the behavior of something tracked and captured in the wilds of the intellect? The thought was a bizarre one and the prospect of achieving success with it unlikely. Perhaps, it would be enough to track the beast, but also to let it live according to its own inclinations inside of her. This would seem a more agreeable proposition. Unfortunately, however, the possibility still remained that there was no beast at all, but that the aberration plaguing her consciousness was merely a side effect of some divine, yet misunderstood purpose with which she had been imbued by the Almighty Lord Himself. She could very well have been functioning on a spiritual plane far beyond Morell’s ability to grasp, which, of course, seared any scrutiny leveled against her with the indelible brand of blasphemy. To say the least, the fear of Godly reprisal which this brand was sure to summon up only served to make the prospect of engaging in such measures as invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery seem both risky and wasteful. And thus, it was a nonstarter.

A clearer picture of what is happening in the brain during non-REM sleep,14 during sleepwalking,15 and during confused arousals16 has been achieved through neuroimaging and EEG. It appears that the brain is half awake and half asleep: the cerebellum and brainstem are active, while the cerebrum and cerebral cortex have minimal activity. The pathways involved with control of complex motor behavior and emotion generation are buzzing, while those pathways projecting to the frontal lobe, involved in planning, attention, judgment, emotional face recognition, and emotional regulation are zoned out. Sleepwalkers don’t remember their escapades, nor can they be awakened by noise or shouts, because the parts of the cortex that contribute to sensory processing and the formation of new memories are snoozing, temporarily turned off, disconnected, and not contributing any input to the flow of consciousness.

Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.

I could only reply that I think—I theorise—that something—something else—happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions—resentment, a sense of injustice, relief—and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be contradiction. But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? That ugly letter of mine provoked remorse in me. Veronica’s account of her parents’ deaths—yes, even her father’s—had touched me more than I would have thought possible. I felt a new sympathy for them—and her. Then, not long afterwards, I began remembering forgotten things. I don’t know if there’s a scientific explanation for this—to do with new affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways. All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me. So,

In our own bodies, only the liver is capable of limited regeneration, but chop a limb off a starfish or a salamander, and it will grow a new one. We are starting to understand the molecular signals that are used by these species to regenerate limbs in adult life. Mammals seem to only use this signalling pathway during the growth of the early embryo but it is a pathway that may well have the potential to be reactivated. Following surgical removal, the wings can grow back in embryonic chickens when the production of a protein called wnt is switched on. Frog limb regeneration can also take place later in the life cycle when wnt protein is expressed. Tadpoles have this ability but it is normally lost when they metamorphose into frogs. The expression of wnt signalling protein around an injury is thought to cause a reprogramming or transdifferentiation of mature cells into stem cells capable of producing the cell types needed for the limb. Very young children have been known to re-grow severed fingertips, and so there are intriguing possibilities for human tissue regeneration.

Whatever a student hears in class or reads in a book travels these pathways as he masters yet another iota of understanding. Indeed, everything that happens to us in life, all the details that we will remember, depend on the hippocampus to stay with us. The continual retention of memories demands a frenzy of neuronal activity. In fact, the vast majority of neurogenesis—the brain’s production of new neurons and laying down of connections to others—takes place in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to ongoing emotional distress, because of the damaging effects of cortisol. Under prolonged stress, cortisol attacks the neurons of the hippocampus, slowing the rate at which neurons are added or even reducing the total number, with a disastrous impact on learning. The actual killing off of hippocampal neurons occurs during sustained cortisol floods induced, for example, by severe depression or intense trauma. (However, with recovery, the hippocampus regains neurons and enlarges again.)20 Even when the stress is less extreme, extended periods of high cortisol seem to hamper these same neurons.

A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis, say, does not produce a child with an altered response to tuberculosis. Most epigenetic “memories” are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways, and cannot be confused with our longing to affix desirable legacies on our children. As with genetics in the early twentieth century, epigenetics is now being used to justify junk science and enforce stifling definitions of normalcy. Diets, exposures, memories, and therapies that purport to alter heredity are eerily reminiscent of Lysenko’s attempt to “reeducate” wheat using shock therapy. Mothers are being asked to minimize anxiety during their pregnancy—lest they taint all their children, and their children, with traumatized mitochondria. Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Mendel. These glib notions about epigenetics should invite skepticism. Environmental information can certainly be etched on the genome. But most of these imprints are recorded as “genetic memories” in the cells and genomes of individual organisms—not carried forward across generations. A man who loses a leg in an accident bears the imprint of that accident in his cells, wounds, and scars—but does not bear children with shortened legs. Nor has the uprooted life of my family seem to have burdened me, or my children, with any wrenching sense of estrangement. Despite Menelaus’s admonitions, the blood of our fathers is lost in us—and so, fortunately, are their foibles and sins. It is an arrangement that we should celebrate more than rue. Genomes and epigenomes exist to record and transmit likeness, legacy, memory, and history across cells and generations. Mutations, the reassortment of genes, and the erasure of memories counterbalance these forces, enabling unlikeness, variation, monstrosity, genius, and reinvention—and the refulgent possibility of new beginnings, generation upon generation.

Viruses, for instance, perform a really irritating function of intermingling the DNA from every species on Earth with every other. As Richard Lewontin puts it . . . It used to be thought that new functions had to arise by mutations of the genes already possessed by a species and that the only way such mutations could spread was by the normal processes of reproduction. It is now clear that genetic material has moved during evolution from species to species by means of retroviruses and other transposable particles. . . . What is so extraordinary in its implications for evolution is that transposition can occur between forms of life that are quite different, between distantly related vertebrates, for example, or even between plants and bacteria. . . . Thus, the assumption that species are on independent evolutionary pathways, once they have diverged from each other and can no longer interbreed, is incorrect. All life-forms are in potential genetic contact and genetic exchanges between them are going on. . . . The evolutionary “tree of life” seems the wrong metaphor. Perhaps we should think of it as an elaborate bit of macramé.16

Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb When yer laggin' behind an' losin' yer pace In a slow-motion crawl of life's busy race No matter what yer doing if you start givin' up If the wine don't come to the top of yer cup If the wind's got you sideways with with one hand holdin' on And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it And the wood's easy findin' but yer lazy to fetch it And yer sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long And you start walkin' backwards though you know its wrong And lonesome comes up as down goes the day And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin' And yer rope is a-slidin' 'cause yer hands are a-drippin' And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe's a-pourin' And the lightnin's a-flashing and the thunder's a-crashin' And the windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops a-shakin' And yer whole world's a-slammin' and bangin' And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm And to yourself you sometimes say "I never knew it was gonna be this way Why didn't they tell me the day I was born" And you start gettin' chills and yer jumping from sweat And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air And the whole world's a-watchin' with a window peek stare And yer good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flying And yer heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin' And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet And you need it badly but it lays on the street And yer bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat And you think yer ears might a been hurt Or yer eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush When you were faked out an' fooled white facing a four flush And all the time you were holdin' three queens And it's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean Like in the middle of Life magazine Bouncin' around a pinball machine And there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying That somebody someplace oughta be hearin' But it's trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed And no matter how you try you just can't say it And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead And the lion's mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth And his jaws start closin with you underneath And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign And you say to yourself just what am I doin' On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin' On this curve I'm hanging On this pathway I'm strolling, in the space I'm taking In this air I'm inhaling Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard Why am I walking, where am I running What am I saying, what am I knowing On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailin' On this mandolin I'm strummin', in the song I'm singin' In the tune I'm hummin', in the words I'm writin' In the words that I'm thinkin' In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinkin' Who am I helping, what am I breaking What am I giving, what am I taking But you try with your whole soul best Never to think these thoughts and never to let Them kind of thoughts gain ground Or make yer heart pound ...

Blocks of flats could change everything, thought Mma Ramotswe. They were designed for people, but people were not necessarily designed for them. These flats at the edges of the Village, though, were made more human by the washing that was hung out to dry from their balconies; by the children who congregated in their doorways, or played with skipping ropes and dogs on their pathways; by the music that the residents listened to, melodies that drifted out of the open windows and throbbed with life. All of this made it harder for large new buildings to deaden the human spirit. It was like the bush: you could clear it and build something where once there had been nothing but trees and grass and termite mounds, but if you turned your back for a moment, Africa would begin to reclaim what had always been hers. The grass would encroach, its seeds carried by the wind; birds would drop the seeds of saplings that would then send tiny shoots up out of the ground; the termites would marshal their exploratory troops to begin rebuilding their own intricate cities of mud in the very places they had claimed once before. And sooner or later the bush would have covered all your efforts and it would be as it was before, the wound on nature completely healed.

Here is what one sexual abuse survivor told me about his practice: "I tend to go into these four-day funks of self- destruction. My therapist showed me a diagram with baseline emotions for people who have not suffered trauma, and superimposed over it a diagram of baseline emotions for pople who have. Apparently people who have suffered severe traume build neuropathways that lead them to predict traumatic events and then react to them, even if they aren't happening, and the fucks people up their entire lives. She believes it's my yoga practice and daily zazen that keeps my funks to four, maybe five days, instead of lasting for months, or even years. She went on to explain a bit about neurogenesis and studies being done right now about building new neuropathways. I think zazen is beneficial for trauma survivors because it instills in them enough calm and insight to not react in ways that have long-term self-destructive effects. On top of which it builds new neuropathways, rewiring conditioned reactions to trauma, both real and imaginary." We human beings generally subject our brains to a lot of abuse. WE create neural pathways where they are not needed by constantly rehashing pleasurable or painful experiences in order to more fully develop our sense of self.

your mother about you and let her know that you are at our place. So, there will be no reason for her to worry about you.” They sat for a little time at the dinner table, trying some dainty things and telling each other interesting stories. At last the hedgehog said to his new friend: “It is time to go home! My mother won’t like the fact that I was visiting you for such a long time.” The beaver-mother decided to see the hedgehog off and the three of them proceeded to the beaver’s pathways. When they found out the hare’s pathway, the beaver said: “Go down this path and after three hundred feet, if you’ll stay on the path and not turn off of it, you will arrive at the rootstock above your house.” The hedgehog thanked him and asked in the end: “How do you manage to know the forest so well?” The beaver explained: “My mom often reads books to me about different travelers and their journeys. I have learned about our forest and the beast’s pathways from these books. Also, I’ve learned about the wolf’s wide roads and how the wolves walk along these ways. I have also learned about the paths which little foxes walk along towards the fields in the evening. There they train their eyesight in order to be able to look afar. These books also tell about the hare’s paths. The hares scamper all day long from one glade to another, where the delicious sorrel and sappy sedge grows. In these books,

Paying for power was so common that in 2012 the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the national authority on language, was compelled to add the word maiguan—“to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu. In a small town in Inner Mongolia, the post of chief planner was sold for $103,000. The municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000. It followed a certain logic: in weak democracies, people paid their way into office by buying votes; in a state where there were no votes to buy, you paid the people who doled out the jobs. Even the military was riddled with patronage; commanders received a string of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers beneath them. A one-star general could reportedly expect to receive ten million dollars in gifts and business deals; a four-star commander stood to earn at least fifty million. Every country has corruption, but China’s was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.

Atonement theology is not the pathway to life. The ability to give ourselves away to others in love is. It is not the winners who achieve life’s meaning; it is the givers. That is the basis upon which a new Christianity can be built for a new world. Atonement theology was born in Gentile ignorance of Jewish worship traditions. It was fed over the centuries by literalizing biblical narratives in ways that Jewish worshippers, who knew about storytelling, would never have understood. I say it again: Biblical literalism is nothing less than a Gentile heresy. Its results are now revealed in the fact that Christianity has been transformed into a religion of victimization. For centuries we have practiced our faith by building up ourselves as winners, survivors, the holders of ultimate truth, while we have denigrated the humanity of others. That is the source of evil. That is why Christianity has given birth to anti-Semitism. That is why the crusades were initiated to kill “infidels.” That is why we gave our blessing to such things as the divine right of kings, slavery, segregation, and apartheid. That is why we defined women as sub-human, childlike, and dependent. That is why we became homophobic. That is why we became child abusers and ideological killers. What human life needs is not a theology of human denigration. That is what atonement theology gives us. What we need is a theology of human fulfillment.

When you first became a disciple, your days were days of delight and joy, the words and will of the Master thrilled and comforted you, and you walked in His ways with a joy and gladness that filled the days with song. The people you touched in daily life saw the beauty of Jesus in you. Gentle, long-suffering, strong and pure, you incarnated His lessons, and your heart was glad, and other lives were influenced Godward. All has changed. Prayer is a duty. The scriptures are dull and burdensome. You have no quick sense of the Lord's will. Your Christianity has become a restriction through which you would like to break, an encumbrance of which you would fain be rid. These are confessions you never make, but they tell the true inner story of your life. Now what does this really mean ? Just this. Somewhere back in the past you will find a day when the Teacher gave you some new vision of truth that straightway revealed an opportunity for you to know the glory of that truth in the pathway of obedience. Something to be given up. Something to be done. Some word to be said. You paused, argued, disobeyed. No other lesson has been given, nor can be. Every other depended upon that. That was not final. It was preparatory, and until that is learned by obedience there can be no advancement, and so for weeks, perchance months, aye, even years, you have been a disciple making no progress, and there is no wonder that you are weary of it all.

The sacred site thus created is a space that nurtures the sense of the continuum in which we are immersed. Many indigenous cultures still have this sacred relational sense of the world that is nurtured by ceremonies; and many of a variety of cultures in these times of great change seek such a relational sense – and who may identify as being in “recovery from Western civilization” . I have been engaged for decades now, in re-turning to my indigenous religious heritage of Western Europe, re-creating, and re-inventing a ceremonial practice that celebrates the sacred journey around Sun: it has been an intuitive, organic process synthesizing bits that I have learned from good teachers and scholars, and bits that have just shown up within dreams and imagination, as well as academic research. It has been a shamanic journey: that is, I have relied on my direct lived experience for an understanding of the sacred, as opposed to relying on an external authority, external imposed symbol, story or image. It has not been a pre-scriptive journey: I have scripted it myself, self-scribed it, and in cahoots with the many who participated in the storytelling circles, rituals and classes over decades. The pathway was and is made in the walking. It is part of a new fabric of understanding – created by new texts and contexts, both personal and communal - that have been emerging in recent decades, and continue so, at awesome speed in our times.

A region of the brain becomes mature when it settles down into a lean, functionally well-organized system. A good proxy for neural pruning in the brain is the relative density of gray versus white matter in a given region. Gray matter, the neuron-rich part of the brain that does the bulk of the computational work, decreases in density as a region matures. As gray matter density decreases, the density of white matter—the myelinated axons that transmit information, the outputs of the computational work done by gray matter—increases, resulting in greater efficiency and speed but less flexibility. One way to envision this is to see an immature, gray-matter-rich region as an undeveloped, open field, where one can wander in many directions unconstrained, but not very efficiently. In order to get to that wonderful blackberry bush to harvest some fruit, I have to bushwhack my way through vegetation and ford streams. The gradual replacement of gray matter by white matter reflects the development of this field: As roads are laid and bridges are built, I can move around more easily and quickly, but now I’m going to tend to move only along these established pathways. The new paved road to the blackberry bush makes gathering blackberries much more convenient, but rushing along on the new road I will miss the delicious wild strawberries I would have otherwise stumbled upon in the brush. There is a trade-off between flexibility and efficiency, between discovery and goal achievement.

The pathway is smooth. Why do you throw rocks before you?’ Using the Pain-to-Power Chart to help, you can begin to clear the rocks in front of you. These steps will help you clear the way: 1. Draw a large copy of the Pain-to-Power Chart and stick it on your wall. Just the simple act of making it larger will make you feel a little more powerful. You are already taking action! Remember that much of the trick of moving from pain to power is taking action – action is very powerful! Once the chart is on your wall it will always remind you of where you want to go in life – from pain to power. Awareness, knowledge, is half the battle. Having the chart on your wall will also help you to keep moving forward. 2. Put a pin at the place on the chart where you see yourself at this moment in your life. Are you in the middle, where you sometimes feel depressed and stuck, and at other times more in control? Or do you find yourself on the far left side, where there is little you are able to do to pull yourself out of the rut? Or perhaps you are already on the right side, where you feel you are really moving ahead with your life, with only a few areas that need to be worked on. I doubt that anyone reading this book has reached their goal of gaining total power over the self. Even the Buddhas don’t have power over their selves all the time! There are always new events that challenge a sense of personal power. 3. Each day look at the chart and ask yourself, ‘Do I see myself at the same place, or have I moved?’ Move the pin if you have moved. 4. If you keep in mind the way you want to go, it will help you make choices about what you are doing in your life. Before you take any action in life, ask yourself: ‘Is this action moving me to a more powerful place?’ If it isn’t, think again about doing it. A word of warning – if you go ahead anyway, knowing the action will keep you in a place of pain, don’t get angry with yourself about it. Use your mistakes to learn more about yourself. 5. Make your use of the chart fun. Having it as a game keeps you relaxed about how you are getting on. If you have children, they can create their own charts, and you can make a family game out of the fun of growing. 6. You might want to make different charts for different areas of your life. To be really powerful, you need to be in charge of all aspects of your life – your work, relationships, home, body, and so on. Often people are very powerful in some parts of their lives and very weak in others. For example, I am very powerful in terms of my career, but need to work on the area of exercise. To help you on your Pain-to-Power path, it’s important that you begin to develop Pain-to-Power words. The way you use words has a huge impact on the quality of your life. Certain words make you weaker; others make you powerful. Choose to move to Pain-to-Power Words as follows: PAIN-TO-POWER VOCABULARY • ‘I can’t’ suggests you have no control over your life, but ‘I won’t’ puts an issue in the area of choice. From this moment on, stop saying, ‘I can’t’.

ASANA Now I shall instruct you regarding the nature of asana or seat. Although by 'asana' is generally meant the erect posture assumed in meditation, this is not its central or essential meaning. When I use the word 'asana' I do not mean the various forms of asana’s such as Padmasana, Vajrasana, Svastikasana, or Bhadrasana. By 'asana' I mean something else, and this is what I want to explain to you. First let me speak to you about breath; about the inhaling breath-apana, and the exhaling breath-prana. Breath is extremely important in meditation; particularly the central breath-madhyama-pranan, which is neither prana nor apana. It is the center of these two, the point existing between the inhaling and exhaling breaths. This center point cannot be held by any physical means, as a material object can be held by the hand. The center between the two breaths can be held only by knowledge-jnana – not discursive knowledge, but by knowledge which is awareness. When this central point is held by continuously refreshed awareness – which is knowledge and which is achieved through devotion to the Lord – that is, in the true sense settling into your asana. On the pathway of your breath maintain continuously refreshed and full awareness on and in the center of breathing in and breathing out. This is internal asana. (Netra Tantra) Asana, therefore, is the gradual dawning in the spiritual aspirant of the awareness which shines in the central point found between inhaling and exhaling. This awareness is not gained by that person who is full of prejudice, avarice, or envy. Such a person, filled with all such negative qualities, cannot concentrate. The prerequisite of this glorious achievement is, therefore, the purification of your internal egoity. It must become pure, clean, and crystal clear. After you have purged your mind of all prejudice and have started settling with full awareness into that point between the two breaths, then you are settling into your asana. When in breathing in and breathing out you continue to maintain your awareness in continuity on and in the center between the incoming and outgoing breath, your breath will spontaneously and progressively become more and more refined. At that point you are driven to another world. This is pranayama." (Netra Tantra) After settling in the asana of meditation arises the refined practice of pranayama. ‘Pranayama’ does not mean inhaling and exhaling vigorously like a bellow. Like asana, pranayama is internal and very subtle. There is a break less continuity in the traveling of your awareness from the point of asana into the practice of pranayama. When through your awareness you have settled in your asana, you automatically enter into the practice of pranayama. Our Masters have indicated that there are two principle forms of this practice of ‘asana-pranayama’, i.e. cakrodaya and ajapa-gayatri. In the practice of ajapa-gayatri you are to maintain continuously refreshed full awareness-(anusandhana) in the center of two breaths, while breathing in and out slowly and silently. Likewise in the practice of cakrodaya you must maintain awareness, which is continually fresh and new, filled with excitement and vigor, in the center of the two breaths – you are to breathe in and out slowly, but in this case with sound. ― Swami Lakshmanjoo

Aging with all my self. To my younger self, I'm not twenty-something anymore, and in just a month's time I shall walk into another decade of a whole new experience. I don't have youth on my side, but I have a heart of Life enlightened with the very spirit of Life itself, something that draws youth on its lap. Wisdom has been churned out from the mistakes and failures, and lessons have been disguised as soul fillers, and gratitude dances on my lips, waving my heart with a bunch of memories. Perhaps, the memories have been earned. Earned at the cost of those lost turns, cold betrayals, numb tears, forced smiles and a voyage walking through a rainbow of mad jest of Life. With that being said, I wouldn't go back and change even a bit. Through all of that heartache, I have unearthed a heart that is resilient, and pliant, I have met a soul that is strong and loving, and deeper than any thousand paged novel I could get lost in. I have come across beautiful souls in beautiful lands, I have soaked in different cultures and walked my way through observing hearts, listening to stories that run beyond time and tide. I have grown with each one of those smiles and tears, the sands of places that mark my soles make my soul whole in a strange but palpable tune. I have got lost in pathways and met a gypsy soul wandering in the space of infinite time, weaving moments through Life to take back a bunch of images and experiences from a journey called Life. My story has been filled with pages of ups and downs and my cup of Life has had several toxic turns, but in all of that, I have grown, along with one or two grey hair. My pages have often tasted Life in the most happy hue from voyages and dreams that kept overlapping and smiling across the tips of Time. And all of this, has helped me to nurture and nourish an invincible desire to live a life, with a passion no longer on hold, but a heart that is free forever to fly in the tunes of its own whisper. So as I open another day, walking closer to close the page of this twenty-something, I wear a smile that the youth of wisdom paints on my heart. And age, with all the grace that only Age can bring, while loving, forgiving and embracing my younger self in every air of Time. Love, a soul aging gracefully with the Smile of Life.

Another day, sheltering beneath trees in a rain-shower, I uncovered a doorway long obliterated by undergrowth. After pulling shrubbery aside, I stepped inside a long deserted summerhouse, fronted by cracked marble columns and ironwork, the rear extending deep into the hillside. Though still filthy, even after I cleared away the tenacious vines, the windowpanes gave sufficient greenish light for me to sketch indoors. In a cobwebbed corner stood a gardener's burner that must once have coaxed oranges or other delicate shrubs to life. With that alight, I found a chair and sat with my shawl muffled around me as I sketched. The marble statues that lined the walls were fine copies of the Greek masters, with muscular limbs and serene faces, though sadly disfigured with a blueish-green patina. As an exercise, I copied a figure of a handsome boy, admiring the sculptor's rendering of tensed muscle, the body frozen just an instant before extending in action. My mind drifted to Michael, the uncertainty hanging over us, my urges to please him, my need to move beyond this stupid impasse. As I sketched the statue's blind eyes I half-heartedly followed his line of sight. I stood and looked more closely at the statue. "What are you looking at?" I said out loud. A green stain blotted the boy's cheek, ugly but also strangely beautiful, for the color was a peacock's viridian. For the first time I noticed the description, "HARPOCRATES- SILENCE", engraved on the pediment, and had a vague recollection of a Roman boy-god who personified that virtue. He held one index finger raised coyly to his lips, while his other hand pointed towards a low arch in the wall. I paced over to the spot at which he pointed. The niche was filled with gardener's trellis that I removed with rising excitement. Behind stood an oak doorway set low in the wall. As I lifted the latch, it opened onto a blast of chilly darkness. Lighting the stub of a candle at the stove, I propped the door open and ventured inside. At once I knew this was no gardeners' store, but another tunnel burrowing into the hillside. Setting forth with the excitement of new discovery, my footsteps rang out and my breath fogged before me in clouds. The place had a mossy, mineral smell, and save for the dripping of water, was silent. Though at first the tunnel ran straight, it soon descended an incline, and my feet splashed into muddy puddles. Who, I wondered, had last passed through that door?

To their surprise, they found that dopamine actively regulates both the formation and the forgetting of new memories. In the process of creating new memories, the dCA1 receptor was activated. By contrast, forgetting was initiated by the activation of the DAMB receptor. Previously, it was thought that forgetting might be simply the degradation of memories with time, which happens passively by itself. This new study shows that forgetting is an active process, requiring intervention by dopamine. To prove their point, they showed that by interfering with the action of the dCA1 and DAMB receptors, they could, at will, increase or decrease the ability of fruit flies to remember and forget. A mutation in the dCA1 receptor, for example, impaired the ability of the fruit flies to remember. A mutation in the DAMB receptor decreased their ability to forget. The researchers speculate that this effect, in turn, may be partially responsible for savants’ skills. Perhaps there is a deficiency in their ability to forget. One of the graduate students involved in the study, Jacob Berry, says, “Savants have a high capacity for memory. But maybe it isn’t memory that gives them this capacity; maybe they have a bad forgetting mechanism. This might also be the strategy for developing drugs to promote cognition and memory—what about drugs that inhibit forgetting as a cognitive enhancers?” Assuming that this result holds up in human experiments as well, it could encourage scientists to develop new drugs and neurotransmitters that are able to dampen the forgetting process. One might thus be able to selectively turn on photographic memories when needed by neutralizing the forgetting process. In this way, we wouldn’t have the continuous overflow of extraneous, useless information, which hinders the thinking of people with savant syndrome. What is also exciting is the possibility that the BRAIN project, which is being championed by the Obama administration, might be able to identify the specific pathways involved with acquired savant syndrome. Transcranial magnetic fields are still too crude to pin down the handful of neurons that may be involved. But using nanoprobes and the latest in scanning technologies, the BRAIN project might be able to isolate the precise neural pathways that make possible photographic memory and incredible computational, artistic, and musical skills. Billions of research dollars will be channeled into identifying the specific neural pathways involved with mental disease and other afflictions of the brain, and the secret of savant skills may be revealed in the process. Then it might be possible to take normal individuals and make savants out of them. This has happened many times in the past because of random accidents. In the future, this may become a precise medical process.

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

Neither the onset of epistemic evolution nor that of the Anthropocene can easily be assigned a singular date, cause, or origin. From this perspective, the primary question is less what or who caused the Anthropocene but how humanity can live with it. Each potential genesis proposed above catches important aspects of the long-term historical development that drove us and the planet we inhabit into this new stage. There is nog question that power, violence, exploitation, and oppression were crucial factors. In examining the dark side of history, we see indeed that not all cats are gray; we may well distinguish the oppressors and the oppressed. But identifying causes and culprits does not necessarily put us into a better position for predicting which solutions are equal to the challenges of the Anthropocene. We cannot simply bail out or excuse ourselves from the evolution of knowledge, but we may attempt to understand it better, including the detailed pathways that have brought us to where we now stand - and whence we will be launched into the future.

What is lighting?...It is not presented as an aim of our perception, it is the auxiliary or the mediator of our perception. It is not itself seen, but makes the rest be seen...The lighting directs my gaze and leads me to see the object, so in one sense it knows and sees the object...Reciprocally, our vision does nothing but take up for itself and follow out the encompassing of the spectacle through the pathways traced out for it by the lighting, just as in hearing a phrase we are surprised to find the trace of an external thought. We perceive according to light, just as in verbal communication we think according to others...We can only understand this phenomenon if the spectacle, far from being a sum of objects, or a mosaic of qualities spread out before an acosmic subject, circumvents the subject and offers him a pact. Lighting is not on the side of the object, it is what we take up, what we adopt as a norm, whereas the illuminated thing stands in front of us and confronts us. Lighting is in itself neither color, nor even light, it is prior to the distinction between colors and lights. And this is why it always tends to become 'neutral' for us...We must say that yellow light, by taking on the function of lighting, tends to situate itself as prior to every color, tends toward the absence of color, and that correlatively objects distribute the colors of the spectrum according to the degree and to the mode of their resistance to this new atmosphere. Every color-quale is thus mediated by a color-function and is determined in relation to a level that is variable. The level is established, and along with it all of the color values that depend upon it, when we begin to live within the dominant atmosphere and redistribute upon the objects the colors of the spectrum in function of this fundamental tacit agreement. Our settling into a certain colored milieu, along with the transpositions of all color relations that it entails, is a bodily operation; I can only accomplish this by entering into this new atmosphere because my body is the general power of inhabiting all of the world's milieus, and the key to all of the transpositions and all of the equivalences that keep the world constant.

My name,” he said, “is Marco Inaros, commander of the Free Navy. We are the legitimate military voice of the outer planets, and we are now in a position to explain both to the oppressors on Earth and Mars and also to the liberated people of the Belt the terms on which this new chapter of human liberty, dignity, and freedom are founded. We recognize the right of Earth and Mars to exist, but their sovereignty ends at their respective atmospheres. The vacuum is ours. All travel between the planets of the solar system are the right and privilege of the OPA and will be enforced by the Free Navy. All taxes and tariffs imposed by Earth and Mars are illegal, and will not be respected. Reparations for the damage done by the inner planets to the free citizens of the system will be assayed, and failure to repay them for the benefit of the full human race will be considered a criminal act.” A throbbing had come into the man’s voice without it ever seeming to make his words affected or musical. He leaned in toward the camera, and it felt both intimate and powerful. “With the opening of the alien gates, we are at a crossroads in human history. We have already seen how easy it would be to carry our legacies of exploitation, injustice, prejudice, and oppression to these new worlds. But there is an alternative. The Free Navy and the society and culture of the Belt are representatives of that new pathway. We will begin again and remake

It’s easy to imagine a world in which genes have control over our minds, and for many animals they do. But once we took the evolutionary pathway toward greater intelligence and a lifestyle that relies on learning rather than inborn knowledge, our genes had no choice but to relinquish much of their control.

Some ideas may come to you with a flash of great excitement showing you new ways to live your life. At first you may not see ways to carry them out, but as you play with them a pathway will appear by which you can get from where you are now to where you want to be.

If the genes themselves are unchanged, then deciphering the underlying genetic code at great expense is of limited usefulness. By the time work on the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) started, it was already well known that changes in DNA methylation are vital to the development of some cancers.3 A number of known carcinogens are considered to act through epigenetic pathways. In colon cancer, up to 10 percent of protein-coding genes are methylated differently from normal colon cells, emphasizing the role of epigenetics.

Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one. In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act. Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage. Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.

Although transmission lineages in Zen begin with the Seven Buddhas of Antiquity, the seventh of which is Shakyamuni Buddha, many Zen practitioners do not understand the core of their practice to depend on the historical existence of even Shakyamuni Buddha, much less the six mythical Buddhas that are said to have preceded him. If historical scholarship were to one day prove that Jesus was a fictional character made up by the authors of the New Testament, that would be doctrinally devastating to Christianity. Christians would have to fundamentally rethink their understanding of the Incarnation as a unique historical event. By contrast, many Zen Buddhists have said that even were it to be revealed someday that Shakyamuni Buddha did not exist as a historical person, the core teachings and practices of Zen Buddhism would remain unaffected.

Another study from the University of Salford in England showed that matcha green tea, a form of powderized tea leaf, can interrupt the metabolic pathway of breast cancer stem cells, depriving them of energy and causing them to

When growing during early pregnancy, the human brain is adding 250,000 neurons a minute. Between birth and 18 years of age, it triples in size. Although it doesn’t grow bigger after that, it keeps adding surface area in a series of ever-more-complex folds. Neurons connect with each other using extensions called synapses. A single neuron can have as many as 7,000 synapses and network with thousands of other neurons in this way. New synapses may be formed rapidly, and when you stimulate a neural bundle by passing information through it, the number of synapses increases. In an hour of repeat signaling, the number of synaptic connections can double. As you use neural pathways, they grow. 3.1. In an hour of repeat stimulation, the number of synapses in a neural bundle can double. If you stop using a neural pathway, it begins to shrink. After about 3 weeks, the brain notices you’re not sending information through that channel anymore and begins to disassemble the cells of which it is composed. As a result, the brain regions you use most grow larger and/or signal faster, while the ones you don’t use atrophy and shrink.

new insight into out-of-body experiences (OBEs) has emerged from Swiss neurologist Olaf Blanke’s research on epileptic seizures. Searching for the source of a female patient’s epilepsy, Dr. Blanke used electrodes to map her brain, pairing brain areas with the functions each controlled. When he stimulated the angular gyrus, part of the TPJ, the patient had a spontaneous OBE. She reported to Blanke that she was looking down on herself from above. Blanke discovered that each time he stimulated that area, his patient would go into an OBE. Blanke theorizes that in the flood of information entering the TPJ, neural pathways in epileptics might get crossed, leading to a momentary release from the borders of one’s body. In meditation, this is a side effect of deliberate practice. A similar mechanism might be at work in near-death experiences (NDEs). Physician Melvin Morse, MD, had this thoughtful comment on the relationship of these brain states to objective reality: “Simply because religious experiences are brain-based does not automatically lessen or demean their spiritual significance. Indeed, the findings of neurological substrates to religious experiences can be argued to provide evidence for their objective reality.” By activating this hub of emotional intelligence, meditation upgrades a whole host of positive qualities, including altruism, adaptability, empathy, language skills, self-awareness, conscientiousness, and emotional balance.

good tea is magnificent. Rich in polyphenols, which activate important longevity gene pathways, repair cells, prime the immune system, and reduce inflammation, high-quality black or green tea is powerful. (The difference between black and green is just the timing of the harvest.) Buy organic tea, because conventionally grown tea is one of the most pesticide-laden crops, and enjoy two, three, four cups a day.

I'd strutted past his ground-floor grotto a gazillion times, but one day, my nosy nature nudged me to take a peek. Holy hoarders. The place was stuffed to the rafters with ancient artifacts and dust-bunny colonies, all carefully curated over eons. A skinny pathway, barely lit, snaked through the clutter, kind of like Dorothy's obstacle course to Oz. Except here, not even a desperate Dorothy would be clicking her ruby slippers, chanting, "There's no place like home." -Kim Lee ‘The Big Apple Took a Bite Off Me’ Now on Amazon Books and Kindle

Research shows that practices like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state. In fact, functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans confirm this,23 showing tangible evidence that consistent consciousness practices actually thicken the prefrontal lobes, the area where our conscious awareness actually lives.

Endorphin release could be another means by which sun exposure reduces the risk of heart disease: by promoting feelings of relaxation, it may combat the negative effects of stress on the heart. Endorphins also activate the reward system, a pathway in the brain that triggers feelings of pleasure in response to specific stimuli -- in this case sun exposure -- encouraging us to seek them out again. Some regular sunbed users even exhibit physical withdrawal symptoms, similar to those associated with coming off heroin, if they stop tanning.

I am repeatedly heartened to read the accumulating evidence from neuroscience research that proves the neuroplasticity of the brain. Neuroplasticity means that the brain can grow and change throughout our life. Old self-destructive neural pathways can be diminished and new healthier ones can replace them.

Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left-brain cognition to intense right-brain emotional activation. It fosters the recoveree’s ability to put words to feelings, and ultimately to accurately interpret and communicate about his various feeling states. When this process is repeated sufficiently, new neural pathways grow that allow the left- and right-brain to work together so that the person can actually think and feel at the same time.

Take courage, my soul, as you read this epitaph. Your journey, through grace, is one of faith, not sight, and this has always been the pathway of the brightest and the best. Faith was the orbit in which these stars of the first magnitude shone in their day; and happy are you to be in their company. Look again tonight to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of your faith, and thank Him for giving you like precious faith with souls now in glory.

What results from these practices is that my clients begin to work with one another mindfully and intentionally. They become willing to see different perspectives or challenge one another healthily. They intuitively began to use dialogue skills as a pathway to co-create new possibilities. They take collective action that yields lasting results because, through the process of collaboration, they have learned how to align and adapt under constantly changing circumstances.

ROOT CHAKRA—MULADHARA The Root Chakra is at the root of your tailbone and is your equilibrium hub. You feel stressed, shaky, and dizzy or as if you have a vertigo when it's out of balance. You feel unable to make progress in your life, on personal or professional grounds, when this chakra becomes overactive and you feel stuck in your key relationships. All situations feel deeply unsettling to you, as if the change rests on your very being. This is because the Root Chakra is your prime balance point between the ‘Below and the Above’. An unbalanced or unattended Root Chakra can influence any aspect of your life, which is why many energy workers and Reiki practitioners take a bottom-up approach to chakra practice, beginning from the Root (or even deeper from the Earth Star) and moving upward to the Third Hand, Crown, and Soul Star Core networks. You are free to move freely in the universe when your Root Chakra is healthy, visible and working well, realizing you are safe, protected and seen. In Sanskrit, this chakra's name, Muladhara, means "foundation" or "pillar." That's where male sexual energy resides in the physical body (the Sacral Chakra sits on feminine sexual energy). Where the Earth Star Chakra is a gateway to the Earthly Kingdom of rocks, stones, and subterranean pathways of spirit animals and insects, the Root Chakra is a portal to our connection with our own physical realm— the physical goods and systems that keep us safe in the three-dimensional world we inhabit right now. The Root Chakra's masculine strength isn't explicitly male; it's a protective force field that can offer anybody a profound sense of comfort regardless of their sexual orientation or affiliation. You will find a stable partner for your journey as you begin to communicate with the masculine energy source, one that can support, sustain, and lead you toward the best outcome for your work and life. In terms of energy, manifestation is the act of forming thought, or of creating your desires. The very act of creation demands that you indulge in a greater density of matter, drawing in forces to create new form that involves a strong binding of your soul to the Earth. If you manifest from an ungrounded place, it will be temporary and fleeting to your creations. Imagine building a building without a firm foundation. You wouldn't even imagine doing this, would you? Well then, neither should you try to create or manifest from an ungrounded floating position within the ethers.

Several chaos-minded cardiologists found that the frequency spectrum of heartbeat timing, like earthquakes and economic phenomena, followed fractal laws, and they argued that one key to understanding heartbeat timing was the fractal organization of the His-Purkinje network, a labyrinth of branching pathways organized to be self-similar on smaller and smaller scales.

Working with a coach is about taking control of your life. And that’s why I love it! Watching people get excited as they figure out solutions to their own challenges or see new pathways for their life is incredibly rewarding.

In our qualitative interviews, we discovered that people don’t learn to follow Jesus simply by having lots of great head knowledge about him (although having the right beliefs matters, as we’ll see). Experiencing Jesus is found along a relational pathway with family, friends, and other people who love and experience Jesus. We are loved into loving Jesus.

The LORD says, “I will guide you along the best pathway for your life. I will advise you and watch over you.

What we are engaged in creating is the opportunity for people to participate in the transformation of people’s lives and of life itself. This context of transformation is a context of freedom and opportunity, of empowerment and human joy, of contribution and of participation. Participation in this transformation is, for me, the fullest expression of being. ~ Werner Erhard

by

was starting to realize that you can’t really grow and learn unless you have a language to grow within. I could literally feel my brain coming to life, as if new pathways were firing up in places that had been dark and barren. Reading was teaching me what it meant to be alive, to be human.

As well as protection, Athena brings further gifts to the work of healing from trauma. Past trauma can be transformed through ‘physical experiences that directly contradict the helplessness, rage and collapse that are part of trauma’ and which foster a renewed sense of self-mastery. Because trauma tends to be experienced in ‘isolated fragments,’ treatment particularly needs to engage the entire organism, ‘body, mind, and brain.’ Athena’s domain includes reading and writing, weaving and handicraft: creative skills which help the survivor engage fully in activities which strengthen new neural pathways for pleasure and joy.

The key elements in creating a micromovement consist of five things to do and six principles: 1. Publish a manifesto. Give it away and make it easy for the manifesto to spread far and wide. It doesn’t have to be printed or even written. But it’s a mantra and a motto and a way of looking at the world. It unites your tribe members and gives them a structure. 2. Make it easy for your followers to connect with you. It could be as simple as visiting you or e-mailing you or watching you on television. Or it could be as rich and complex as interacting with you on Facebook or joining your social network on Ning. 3. Make it easy for your followers to connect with one another. There’s that little nod that one restaurant regular gives to another recognized regular. Or the shared drink in an airport lounge. Even better is the camaraderie developed by volunteers on a political campaign or insiders involved in a new product launch. Great leaders figure out how to make these interactions happen. 4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement. Money exists merely to enable it. The moment you try to cash out is the moment you stunt the growth of your movement. 5. Track your progress. Do it publicly and create pathways for your followers to contribute to that progress.

Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition. These elements help build neural pathways and activate myelination. They help neurons fire and wire together in ways that make learning “sticky.” Collectivist cultures use social interactions such as conversation and storytelling as learning aids. Because of society’s history of segregation and unequal educational opportunities, many communities of color continue to use the natural learning modalities in the home and community. As a result, their neural pathways are primed to learn using story, art, movement, and music.

To the extent you identify and honor your true path in this lifetime, you will know genuine satisfaction. Real peace in your own skin. You will be infused with vitality and a clarified focus. New pathways of possibility appear, where before there were obstacles. You will know a peace that will buffer you against the madness of the world. A clarity, a direction, that will carry you from one satisfaction to another. Life will still have its challenges, but you will interface with them differently. Coded in an authenticity of purpose, that sees through the veils, to what really matters. To the extent that you avoid the quest for purpose, you will live frustrated. A half-life. Your avoidance manifests in all manner of disease. Perpetual dissatisfaction. Emotional problems. Depression. Addictive patterns. All reflections of your own alienation from the purposeful root of your being. There is really no escape from reality. There is only postponement. You should be more afraid of avoiding your path, than walking it. You are sacred purpose.

Il n'y a qu'une chose qui puisse arrêter le cheminement d'un peintre et c'est le succès. Van Gogh a vu cela bien avant moi. La peinture est un cheminement dans l'espace - et non dans le temps. Le peintre cherche en permanence la couleur et le style. S'il rencontre le succès, il bloque son style, il le fige. Pourquoi ? Simplement parce que l'acheteur - le marchand - demande uniquement le style qui se vend, le style qui a du succès. Voyez Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali ou Bernard Buffet...etc, etc. L'artiste connu et reconnu est condamné, à vie, à se copier lui-même ; à copier un moment de son cheminement. Alphonse Daudet disait que le succès (la gloire), c'était la même chose que de fumer un cigare par l'autre bout. Le bout de la braise; donc. Et il avait raison. Mais comme personne n'a le choix - s'agissant du destin - on se situe ici par-delà le bien et le mal et tout jugement moral n'a ici aucune portée *** There is only one thing that can stop the pathway of an artist and this thing is called : success. Van Gogh wrote it long before me. Painting is a pathway through space - and not through time. The painter is constantly looking for new color and new style. If he meets success, he blocks his style, he freezes it. Why ? Simply because the buyer - the merchant - asks only for the style that can be sold, the style that is successful. See Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Bernard Buffet ... etc, etc. The successful artist is therefore condemned, for life, to copy himself; to copy a moment of his pathway. Alphonse Daudet said that success (glory) was the same as smoking a cigar on the other side. The side of the embers. And he was right. But since no one has the choice - when it comes about fate - we are here beyond good and evil and any moral judgment has no value.

The universe you inhabit and the life you have today come from God’s hand as something you do not deserve. Your life is on loan for a short while, and one day God will call time and take it back, just like the library will recall that overdue book on your shelf. So embrace life for what it is rather than what you’d like it to be. Live it before God with reverence and obedience. This is the pathway to joy, even though as you walk it, there will be mystery and pain. Have some nice food. Enjoy a good wine if you want—​​​but be sure to enjoy whatever good things come your way. Chapter 4 adds a new layer to this picture. As you enjoy, share. Share what you have with others. It’s as simple as

We demand shorter and shorter books that will accommodate our diminished focus and present to us more like what we read online. We are becoming less tolerant of friends who voice opinions we dislike, so accustomed we are to being able to mute or delete that which discomforts us. We are becoming much more anxious, unable to accept stillness or silence that cuts against our daily intake of new noise. These real, offline effects emerge from our online habits because, in God’s providential design, our minds are also brains—physical objects with pathways and neurons and adaptability

Here’s a TOAST to expanding your success and capacity for growth! You did it! You recognize that consistent personal growth coupled with ongoing successful results require leveling up in these powerful, yet key, inner-character traits: TRUST. Having faith in yourself by behaving beyond your level of trauma. Reducing and/ or removing fear and wounds as an excuse not to trust. OPEN-MINDEDNESS. Being open to learn. Learning new perspectives opens up pathways to infinite opportunities, more successes, and peace. ALIGNMENT. Connecting to our real selves versus our egoic selves so that we may authentically follow our heart, truths, and higher energy versus living story after story, through excuse after excuse. SELF-WORTH. You’'re enough. Always have been, always will be. Lead with an awareness of and connection toof your value, intelligence, creativity, and ability to learn, in a worthy and deserving way. TRUTH. Embracing and facing your authenticity where things have happened in your life FOR you, not TO you. Be generous in sharing those lessons.

It could be as straightforward as the notion of a "mental reboot"- Matt Johnson's biological control-alt-delete key- that jolts the brain out of destructive patterns (such as Kessler's "capture"), affording an opportunity for new patterns to take root. It could be that, as Franz Vollenweider has hypothesized, psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity. The myriad new connections that spring up in the brain during the psychedelic experience, as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial College, and the disintegration of well traveled old connections, may serve simply to "shake the snow globe," in Robin Carhart-Harris's phrase, a predicate for establishing new pathways. Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: "Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet." Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. "In time, it become more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. "Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways." When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge-whether from a song or an intention or a therapists's suggestion- can powerfully influence its future course. p384

Words are potent. Our minds are powerful. Together, affirmations can rewire our brains and create new pathways. They are even more powerful when we embody them.

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

Examine any famous street in Paris, Cairo, London, or New York, and you’ll find plenty of shops where you can buy clothes or coffee, have your hair styled or nails polished. But where are the shops selling the secrets to full satisfaction and a truly happy life? The Yoga Wisdom Literatures The wisdom texts of the Vedic tradition specialize in happiness. Veda means “knowledge,” and the Vedas are ancient but ageless texts containing knowledge that lead us to happiness. We learn from them that human life is meant for self-inquiry and that whatever we do should lead to self-discovery and the purification of our body, mind, and consciousness. Vedic teachers show by example how to live a more peaceful and balanced life. They don’t neglect science or technology, but instead teach us how to use them purposefully so that we can attain our full potential.

when you commit to growth, your old habits will not make it easy. doubt will roar and shout and try to trick you into thinking you've made much less progress than you really have, the mind likes to retrace its deepest grooves again and again, weaving a dense barrier to change. luckily, with persistence, you can work through even the dense mental patterns, establishing new pathways that nourish you. persistence is your greatest asset in your transformational quest.

To open up to Truth you have to first be so utterly hopeless and to the point you see no good way out of this life. That is where you are pushed to find out for yourself, whether it even exists or not, whether you have a chance, because Truth, Reality, or what some true teachers call God cannot be found in those parts of us that are familiar or known. If you're comfortable with your acquired ideas, your life situation and memories you will never pursue this