Outcome Memories Quotes

When it's a memory, you already know the outcome so it's easy to think it was an easier time. Looking forward is much more uncertain, and is more complicated. But I don't think it is. Not really.

Reason this: When you think from your past memories, you can only create past experiences. As all of the “knowns” in your life cause your brain to think and feel in familiar ways, thus creating knowable outcomes, you continually reaffirm your life as you know it. And since your brain is equal to your environment, then each morning, your senses plug you into the same reality and initiate the same stream of consciousness.

Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)

In a small company, the CTO, R&D, the COO, and even the CEO or cofounders or owners can be responsible for reviewing documentation. Don’t rely on your memory; write it down. Ideas become reality when we speak them and write them. So document them in an idea journal (digital or traditional) without judgment at the time. Inventors (and especially software developers) tend to edit or judge ideas and conclude they are not patentable because they were simple—even though they solve important problems and do not exist elsewhere.

When it’s a memory, you already know the outcome, so we believe it was an easier time.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.

kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them.

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams.

The past, memories, and outcomes are all very lonely things. They want a companion.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how much control you have over your surroundings. THE TRUTH: You often believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or are too complex to predict.

When it's a memory, you already know the outcome, so we believe it was an easier time. Looking forward is much more uncertain, and so feels more complicated. But I don't think it is. Not really.

Hasan emphasized that the question was not whether his country *deserved* reparations but, not unlike the debate in the United States, "What are we going to repair?" Hasan was not opposed to figuring out the logistics of financial compensation, but he emphasized the need for a sort of moral compensation. "Some people prefer a sense of memory," he said. "Once you get money, you say, 'Okay. Now you received money. We repaired everything. Don't talk about it anymore.'" That is not the outcome Hasan wants. What he wants is an apology for what happened, and then to have that apology, that reckoning, inform how economic, cultural, and political decisions are made moving forward.

Fortunately, being mindful of family time—making a commitment to be there physically and mentally and enjoy life while doing so—makes memories possible. We control a lot less about our children’s outcomes in life than we think. They are their own people. But one thing parents do shape is whether kids remember their childhoods as happy. Creating a happy home is a conscious choice, as is creating a happy marriage.

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...

What is Destiny? Is it a doctrine formulated by aristocrats and philosophers arguing that there is some unseen driving force predicting the outcomes of every minuscule and life altering moment in one's life? Or is it the artistry illustrated by those under-qualifed and over-eager to give their future meaning and their ambitions hope? Is it a declaration by those who refuse to accept that we are alone in this universe, spinning randomly through a matrix of accidental coincidences? Or is it the assumptions made by those who concede that there is a divine plan or pre-ordained path for each human being,regardless of their current station? I think destiny is a bit of a tease.... It's syndical taunts and teases mock those naive enough to believe in its black jack dealing of inevitable futures. Its evolution from puppy dogs and ice cream to razor blades and broken mirrors characterizes the fickle nature of its sordid underbelly. Those relying on its decisive measures will fracture under its harsh rules. Those embracing the fact that life happens at a million miles a minute will flourish in its random grace. Destiny has afforded me the most magical memories and unbelievably tragic experiences that have molded and shaped my life into what it is today...beautiful. I fully accept the mirage that destiny promises and the reality it can produce. Without the invisible momentum carried with its sincere fabrication of coming attraction, destiny is the covenant we rely on to get ourselves through the day. To the destiny I know awaits me, I thank you in advance. Don't cry because it's over....smile because it happened.

even the Cooper women, strong-minded though they were, had to take a chance and give the good and bad the opportunity to fight it out, and have faith that the outcome would be the right one, no matter if it meant leaving oneself defenseless and leaving one’s loved ones to figure it out on their own.

The quality of your life is the outcome of your own thoughts

It isn’t an outside influence that determines their outcome. We all have the freedom to choose what we focus on and in the end, it will determine the beliefs we carry around with us.

Most people go through life assuming that we’re right about everything all the time and that people who don’t see things our way are wrong. We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is. The subject doesn’t matter: we’re right about politics, other people, our memories; you name it. We mistake what we believe for the true facts. Of course, we can’t be right about everything all the time. Everyone makes mistakes or misremembers some things. But we still want to feel right all the time, and ideally get other people to reinforce that feeling. Hence, we channel inordinate amounts of energy to proving to others—or ourselves—that we’re right. When this happens, we’re less concerned with outcomes and more concerned with protecting our egos.

One by one our skies go black. Stars are extinguished, collapsing into distances too great to breach. Soon, not even the memory of light will survive. Long ago, our manifold universes discovered futures would only expand. No arms of limit could hold or draw them back. Short of a miracle, they would continue to stretch, untangle and vanish – abandoned at long last to an unwitnessed dissolution. That dissolution is now. Final winks slipping over the horizons share what needs no sharing: There are no miracles. You might say that just to survive to such an end is a miracle in itself. We would agree. But we are not everyone. Even if you could imagine yourself billions of years hence, you would not begin to comprehend who we became and what we achieved. Yet left as you are, you will no more tremble before us than a butterfly on a windless day trembles before colluding skies, still calculating beyond one of your pacific horizons. Once we could move skies. We could transform them. We could make them sing. And when we fell into dreams our dreams asked questions and our skies, still singing, answered back. You are all we once were but the vastness of our strangeness exceeds all the light-years between our times. The frailty of your senses can no more recognize our reach than your thoughts can entertain even the vaguest outline of our knowledge. In ratios of quantity, a pulse of what we comprehend renders meaningless your entire history of discovery. We are on either side of history: yours just beginning, ours approaching a trillion years of ends. Yet even so, we still share a dyad of commonality. Two questions endure. Both without solution. What haunts us now will allways hunt you. The first reveals how the promise of all our postponements, ever longer, ever more secure – what we eventually mistook for immortality – was from the start a broken promise. Entropy suffers no reversals. Even now, here, on the edge of time’s end, where so many continue to vanish, we still have not pierced that veil of sentience undone. The first of our common horrors: Death. Yet we believe and accept that there is grace and finally truth in standing accountable before such an invisible unknown. But we are not everyone. Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts. There are some who reject such an outcome. There are some who still fight for an alternate future. No matter the cost. Here then is the second of our common horrors. What not even all of time will end. What plagues us now and what will always plague you. War.

I was traumatizing her. I could only hope that at three she was too young to retain any of this in memory, that in the years to follow I could make up for any future need for therapy I was creating now. Could I? Or would she always have a deep insecurity, the kind that send people careening from one disastrous romance to the next? And why did I have to live my life obsessed with these kinds of concerns, this constant attempt to control the most uncertain of outcomes, my own effect on someone else's mind?

In the business world I had been used to “making things happen” and focusing on results. I was continually pushing or pulling the outcomes of events and circumstances rather than focusing my highest intention and then allowing the optimum outcome to unfold.

Self-reflection enables every person to alter the trajectory of their personal storyline by reviewing a series of episodic occurrences and making value judgments regarding the past. How we perceive our history colors the present, our deeds of today script the future outcome of individual persons, and the outcome of many people making conscious decisions using their cognitive processes including the ability to remember and share memories influences the direction of human development and the progress of society.

While Diana remained poised and calm in front of the press, in private she cared desperately about Prince Charles and the outcome of the courtship. She expressed her concern to me: “I will simply die if this doesn’t work out. I won’t be able to show my face.

Consciousness is an outcome of a recursively comparative memory in which previous self-nonself categorizations are continually related to ongoing present perceptual categorizations and their short term succession, before such categorizations have become part of that memory.

It’s odd—when you look back, things seem simpler, but they weren’t.” “Really?” “When it’s a memory, you already know the outcome, so we believe it was an easier time. Looking forward is much more uncertain, and so feels more complicated. But I don’t think it is. Not really.

We spend too much time either imagining the future, that vast expanse of unborn possibility, or else wandering the past, the land of the dead. And yet I return there, again and again, as if watching it unfold in my memory can affect the outcome. As if the past could ever be as changeable as the future.

So you'll be keeping the Sea Devil," she said. His light eyes roamed over her, settled for a moment on her breasts. "I'm keeping her. The ship holds a number of interesting memories I wouldn't want to forget." His eyes said he was remembering their numerous encounters-and the final delicious outcome-and a faint smile tugged at his lips.

I had a hamster or a gerbil or something when I was a kid. Then I forgot about it." He waited for the familiar pang that usually came with childhood memories, but it wasn’t there. Interesting. "I think my mom released it." Still no pang. "My mom sometimes forgets my dad at the store." Cam shrugged. Remy cracked up. "Does she ever release him into the wild?

RETROSPECTIVE‌ FALSIFICATION «D. H. Rawcliffe coined this term to refer to the process of telling a story that is factual to some extent, but which gets distorted and falsified over time by retelling it with various embellishments. The embellishments may include speculations, conflating events that occurred at different times or in different places, and the incorporation of material without regard for accuracy or plausibility. The overriding force that drives the story is to find or invent details that fit with a desired outcome. …The original story gets remodeled with favorable points being emphasized and unfavorable ones being dropped. The distorted and false version becomes a memory and record of a remarkable tale.»

I don't really believe that people can predict the future,' he admitted. 'People predict the future every day, Stenwold Maker,' she replied, studying the rainbow carefully as the glass panels shifted slightly on the creaking wooded framework. 'If you drop a stone, you may predict that it shall fall. If you know a man to be dishonest, you may predict that he will cheat you. If you know one army is better trained and led, you may predict that it will win the battle.' He could not help smiling at that. 'But that is different. That is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome.' 'And that is also predicting the future, Stenwold Maker,' she said. 'The only difference is your source of knowledge. Everything that happens has a cause, which same cause has itself a cause. It is a chain stretching into the most distant past, and forged by necessity, inclination, bitter memories, the urge of duty. Nothing happens without a reason. Predicting the future does not require predestination, Stenwold Maker. It only requires a world where one thing will most likely lead to another.

This experience I had with predicting the outcome of games and remembering the actual outcomes afterward more firmly than I remembered games about which I had not made predictions reflects a basic principle that memory researchers have been exploring for many years now: making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later.

At the very beginning of love, as at its end, we are not exclusively attached to a single beloved: it is the yearning to love, of which that person will be the loved outcome, and later the echo left in the memory, that wanders voluptuously in a place full of charms—sometimes deriving only from contingencies of nature, bodily pleasures, or habitation—interchangeable and interrelated enough for it to feel in harmony with any of them.

It is important to remember that, as Ken Auletta wrote in his definitive Greed and Glory on Wall Street, “no reporter can with 100 percent accuracy re-create events that occurred some time before. Memories play tricks on participants, the more so when the outcome has become clear. A reporter tries to guard against inaccuracies by checking with a variety of sources, but it is useful for a reader—and an author—to be humbled by this journalistic limitation.

It's a sad fact that most people can't even spot a story when they see one. Most people don't know that stories aren't confined by the covers of books or by half-hour slots on TV. The world is made of stories. The world is driven by stories. When a sunburned-friend tells you about their holiday, it's not a straight list of everything that happened to them - it's a story, an anecdote with a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Each one of their holiday snaps is a story too. When you're making a decision, and you imagine the possible outcomes - what are you doing if not telling yourself a story? History is a story. Society is a story. Countries are stories. Your plans are stories. Your desires are stories. Your own memories are stories - narratives selected, trimmed and packaged by the hidden machinery in your mind. Human beings are story engines. We have to be - to understand stories is to understand the world.

EMDR is a bizarre and wondrous treatment and anybody who first hears about it, myself included, thinks this is pretty hokey and strange. It's something invented by Francine Shapiro who found that, if you move your eyes from side to side as you think about distressing memories, that the memories lose their power. And because of some experiences, both with myself, but even more with the patients of mine who told me about their experiences, I took a training in it. It turned out to be incredibly helpful. Then I did what's probably the largest NIH-funded study on EMDR. And we found that, of people with adult-onset traumas, a one-time trauma as an adult, that it had the best outcome of any treatment that has been published. What's intriguing about EMDR is both how well it works and the question is how it works and that got me into this dream stuff that I talked about earlier, and how it does not work through figuring things out and understanding things. But it activates some natural processes in the brain that's helped you to integrate these past memories.

My dearest brother,” Marjorie replied with a sorrowful smile. “I am only sorry your heart has been broken.” “Cassius was right to refuse me,” Merrick replied even as the words ripped the fresh wound along the seams again. “He was only protecting himself. His reputation.” The words stuck in his throat. Had Merrick thought about the repercussions, he would’ve chosen a different route last night. He would not have done it so publicly perhaps, for Cassius’s sake, no matter what they’d whispered to each other their last night together. “I do not care who knows. It is only the harm it could do that holds me back. If I could, I would walk proudly by your side.” But what then? It was a jumbled mess no matter the outcome. Marjorie shook her head. “Cassius was protecting you. That much was evident.” The words only warmed Merrick for a brief instant. He knew Cassius cared for him. But now he understood that the idea of them being together was only a fool’s wish, no matter how many times he recited the words of Cas’s poem from memory and wished them true with all his might

Sherri Solvig had had cancer, lymphatic cancer, but due to valiant efforts by her doctors she had gone into remission. However, encoded in the memory-tapes of her brain was the datum that patients with lymphoma who go into remission usually eventually lose their remission. They aren’t cured; the ailment has somehow mysteriously passed from a palpable state into a sort of metaphysical state, a limbo. It is there but it is not there. So despite her current good health, Sherri (her mind told her) contained a ticking clock, and when the clock chimed she would die. Nothing could be done about it, except the frantic promotion of a second remission. But even if a second remission were obtained, that remission, too, by the same logic, the same inexorable process, would end. Time had Sherri in its absolute power. Time contained one outcome for her: terminal cancer. This is how her mind had factored the situation out; it had come to this conclusion, and no matter how good she felt or what she had going for her in her life, this fact remained a constant. A cancer patient in remission, then, represents a stepped-up case of the status of all humans; eventually you are going to die.

Then, late in the morning of February 24, I answered the telephone in my bedroom and heard the voice of a friend in London . . . “Mary, it’s Dena. Your girl made it!” I knew she meant that Diana’s engagement to Prince Charles had just been announced. I gave a big shout and literally jumped for joy, banging my head on the low dormer ceiling. I couldn’t have been prouder of Diana if I’d been her mother. I was so happy for her I could have burst! I knew how desperately she had wished for this outcome. The past fall, she had told me that she would “simply die” if the romance didn’t work out. How wonderful that her dream had come true.

Pleasure Principles What you pay attention to grows. This will be familiar to those who have read Emergent Strategy. Actually, all the emergent strategy principles also apply here! (Insert eggplant emoji). Tune into happiness, what satisfies you, what brings you joy. We become what we practice. I learned this through studying somatics! In his book The Leadership Dojo, Richard Strozzi-Heckler shares that “300 repetitions produce body memory … [and] 3,000 repetitions creates embodiment.”12 Yes is the way. When it was time to move to Detroit, when it was time to leave my last job, when it was time to pick up a meditation practice, time to swim, time to eat healthier, I knew because it gave me pleasure when I made and lived into the decision. Now I am letting that guide my choices for how I organize and for what I am aiming toward with my work—pleasure in the processes of my existence and states of my being. Yes is a future. When I feel pleasure, I know I am on the right track. Puerto Rican pleasure elder Idelisse Malave shared with me that her pleasure principle is “If it pleases me, I will.” When I am happy, it is good for the world.13 The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.14 Commit yourself fully to the process, the journey, to bringing the best you can bring. Detach yourself from ego and outcomes. Make justice and liberation feel good. Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice. Moderation is key.15 The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is. Related: pleasure is not money. Pleasure is not even related to money, at least not in a positive way. Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure.

Shantideva. the Indian Buddhist sage, talks about licking honey off the edge of a blade. No matter how sweet, the price we pay is much higher. By wallowing in my own nostalgic memories, spending so much time thinking about a relationship that had moved on, I had been needlessly carrying pain. Suffering. We begin to believe that our happiness depends on a certain outcome or person or lifestyle. That's the superstition. It can be useful to have goals. Purpose. But we should never believe that our happiness depends on achieving them. The two are really quite separate. Don't allow your thoughts to be like thieves, stealing your own contentment. Thinking too much about oneself is a cause of much suffering, the Dalai Lama said. Anxiety, depression, resentment, fear - these become much worse with too much attention to the self. The mantra "me, me, me" is not so good.

The truth is, you can do all of the right things and still not feel whole. For the most part, I knew "how to do grief" after my pregnancy loss, but when I'd check in with myself, I didn't feel like it was helping. I felt like a big fucking mess. I was still challenged to live my daily life, my grief blanketed everything, and I didn't know what to do. My new loss challenged my assumptions of what I knew about loss. I thought that I could rely on the muscle memory of grief to get me through this loss. Many people will say, "I've already been through the worst," or "I've been here before," but that's not how grief or healing works. You can't create a program around your pain or healing. Each new loss has a rhythym of its own. There are different waves and challenges for every occurrence in your life where you experience grief - whether it's through death or some other kind of loss, a breakup or friendship ending, losing a job. Any kind of loss introduces a new set of feelings and new requirements for your healing. Every new loss also has something to teach us, whether we like it or not. My pregnancy loss taught me that effort does not always align with outcome. I poured everything I had into getting pregnant - I literally let someone electrocute my fucking uterus - and it just didn't work.

We kept our fingers crossed and eagerly scanned the newspapers and magazines for news of an engagement between Diana and Charles. Then, late in the morning of February 24, I answered the telephone in my bedroom and heard the voice of a friend in London… “Mary, it’s Dena. Your girl made it!” I knew she meant that Diana’s engagement to Prince Charles had just been announced. I gave a big shout and literally jumped for joy, banging my head on the low dormer ceiling. I couldn’t have been prouder of Diana if I’d been her mother. I was so happy for her I could have burst! I knew how desperately she had wished for this outcome. The past fall, she had told me that she would “simply die” if the romance didn’t work out. How wonderful that her dream had come true. Almost immediately, a mischievous picture popped into my mind of the future and royal Diana, scheduled for an official day of handshaking, ribbon cutting, or tree planting and wishing she could have a friend call to cancel those tedious engagements. As Princess of Wales, she would not be able to cancel on short notice, if at all, as she had when she was baby-sitting for me. I wondered how the lively, spontaneous, and very young Diana would adjust to her official duties. I felt a bit sorry for her as I dimly realized how rigid and structured her new life might be.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get “rattled” in the recitation-room? Those who think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who are most indifferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the overactive conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy of one’s interlocutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this? On the other hand, conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

So, instead of venting hurt pride, he preferred to speak in a way that would be of some profit for me. “There is no such thing,” he said, “as a man, however clever he may be, who has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory. He should not find this absolutely a matter for regret, as he cannot be sure he would ever have become as wise as he is, if indeed getting wisdom is a possibility for any of us, had he not traversed all the silly or detestable incarnations that are bound to precede that final one. I know there are young men, sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose tutors, since their earliest high-school years, have taught them every nobility of soul and excellent precept of morality. The lives of such men may contain nothing they would wish to abolish; they may be happy to endorse every word they have ever uttered. But they are the poor in spirit, the effete descendants of doctrinarians, whose only wisdoms are negative and sterile. Wisdom cannot be inherited—one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things. The lives of men you admire, attitudes you think are noble, haven’t been laid down by their fathers or their tutors—they were preceded by very different beginnings, and were influenced by whatever surrounded them, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. Each of them is the outcome of a struggle, each of them is a victory. I can understand that the image of what we were in an earlier time might be unrecognizable and always irksome to behold. It should not be rejected for all that, as it is testimony to the fact that we have lived, that, in accordance with the laws of life and the spirit, we have managed to derive, from the common constituents of life, from the life of the studio and artists’ cliques, if we’re talking of painters, something that surpasses them.”91

One idea that has been repeatedly tested is that low mood can make people better at analyzing their environments. Classic experiments by psychologists Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy focused specifically on the accuracy of people’s perceptions of their control of events, using test situations that systematically varied in how much control the subject truly had. In different conditions, subjects’ responses (pressing or not pressing a button) controlled an environmental outcome (turning on a green light) to varying degrees. Interestingly, subjects who were dysphoric (in a negative mood and exhibiting other symptoms of depression) were superior at this task to subjects who were nondysphoric (in a normal mood). Subjects who were in a normal mood were more likely to overestimate or underestimate how much control they had over the light coming on.7 Dubbed depressive realism, Alloy and Abramson’s work has inspired other, often quite sophisticated, experimental demonstrations of ways that low mood can lead to better, clearer thinking.8 In 2007 studies by Australian psychologist Joseph Forgas found that a brief mood induction changed how well people were able to argue. Compared to subjects in a positive mood, subjects who were put in a negative mood (by watching a ten-minute film about death from cancer) produced more effective persuasive messages on a standardized topic such as raising student fees or aboriginal land rights. Follow-up analyses found that the key reason the sadder people were more persuasive was that their arguments were richer in concrete detail (see Figure 2.2).9 In other experiments, Forgas and his colleagues have demonstrated diverse benefits of a sad mood. It can improve memory performance, reduce errors in judgment, make people slightly better at detecting deception in others, and foster more effective interpersonal strategies, such as increasing the politeness of requests. What seems to tie together these disparate effects is that a sad mood, at least of the garden variety, makes people more deliberate, skeptical, and careful in how they process information from their environment.

Myth 1: Infants don’t remember anything, so experience in infancy doesn’t really matter. Reality: The infant brain has a huge capacity for memory. Memories from infancy are stored in the brain as implicit memory, which makes up the emotional brain, the unconscious mind, and the foundation for lifelong mental and physical health. Myth 2: Responding to cries spoils an infant or teaches an infant to be dependent. Reality: Responding reliably strengthens a baby’s emotional brain circuits, helps them grow confidently independent, and gives them the gift of stress regulation for life. Myth 3: Babies can and need to learn to self-soothe, which means go from a state of high stress to a state of safety on their own. Reality: Babies cannot self-soothe because they do not have the brain parts to do so until way beyond infancy. Myth 4: Babies are resilient, so experience in infancy doesn’t matter. Reality: Experience in infancy matters. It interacts with genes to influence mental health. Myth 5: We can’t make a difference to our baby’s mental health outcomes if our baby inherits mental health genetics and intergenerational trauma through epigenetics. Reality: Nurture makes an impact on inherited DNA and epigenetics to reduce or silence mental health effects. Myth 6: Everyone falls in love with and knows what to do with their baby right away. Reality: Lots of time touching, smelling, and looking into your baby’s eyes slowly builds your love, knowledge, and relationship with your baby. Myth 7: Having a baby impairs your brain function. Reality: Having a baby changes your brain to give you nurturing superpowers. Myth 8: Being with my baby is doing nothing. Reality: Being with my baby is vital brain-building, circuit-sculpting, cycle-starting activism for my baby’s future. Myth 9: Only pay attention to your baby’s stress and emotions when there’s a reason for them. Reality: All of your baby’s stress and emotions need to feel welcome and safe. Myth 10: Since my baby will be with a grandparent, a nanny, or at daycare, I should reduce my care at home to prepare them. Reality: Providing my baby with as much nurture as possible when we are together is what they need to build their brain. Myth 11: You need to buy things for your baby’s brain development. Reality: Your presence is the key to your baby’s brain development. Myth 12: I need swings, seats, and containers to take care of my baby. My baby needs lots of classes and socialization to thrive. Reality: The sensory experiences from my body are the only thing my baby needs. Myth 13: I should feed my baby on a schedule. Reality: Feed your baby when their body is experiencing physiological signals of hunger and showing hunger cues. Myth 14: Breastfeeding or body feeding past six or twelve or twenty-four or thirty-six months is extra, spoiling, or for no reason. Reality: Breastfeeding or body feeding at six or twelve or twenty-four or thirty-six months is brain-building and nurturing. Myth 15: Holding a baby is doing nothing. Reality: Holding a baby is seriously hard and brain-building work. Myth 16: Newborn babies are happy with a swaddle, hat, pacifier, and bassinet. Reality: Newborns are happy on someone’s skin, chest-to-chest, covered by a blanket—no swaddle, hat, pacifier, or bassinet needed. Myth 17: Babies’ stress and emotions don’t matter and can be ignored. Reality: Babies feel transformational stress and a huge range of emotions that influence how their brains and bodies develop. Myth 18: If we respond to our crying, clinging babies, we teach them that that behavior is good, so they learn to cry and cling more. Reality: When we respond to crying and clinging, babies cry less, and we build the infant brain to be more independent later. Myth 19: There’s no difference if I hold my crying baby; they’re crying anyway. Reality: Holding my crying baby provides a nurture bath to their brain regardless of how long they cry...

All the sounds, words, emotions and memories of previous experiences cannot prepare us enough for the encounters with the unexpected, challenging our values, preconceptions and beliefs. It is then that one is either rewarded for his faith or punished for the lack of it. The ultimate test, however, emerges in the form of what one desires the most hidden beneath the layer of what is simultaneously feared. No one knows the outcome of this invisible battle until its very end. It is when the heart is finally offered to that confrontation that one faces the last gate of his own mortal life, and in doing so, is led to either an immediate rebirth or a slow death.

your memory is fundamental to nearly everything you do. There’s really no way to unlimit yourself without having a well-trained memory, because memory governs your ability to reason, to calculate possible outcomes, and to serve as a resource to others.

While the mind usually shuts down during a traumatizing experience, the bodily sensations associated with immobilization and helplessness carry the memories of having absolutely no control over the outcome of your life: the fate of trauma survivors is lived out in heartbreak and gut-wrenching sensations.

In his view, therapists’ memories were prone to subjective interpretation, morphing over time, while their desires might run counter to what their patients wanted. Taken together, memories and desires can create biased notions that therapists hold about the treatment (known as formulated ideas). Bion wanted clinicians to enter each session committed to hearing the patient in the present moment (rather than being influenced by memory) and remaining open to various outcomes (rather than being influenced by desire).

However, the worst horrors of unhappy love should not blind us to the enrichment that may occur even in painful love. When the outcome of love is unhappy, the lover may nonetheless have experienced the liberating effects of love and be able to preserve the fruits of that liberation, whether in expanded creativity, enlarged insight, or a subtle internal re-ordering of personality. There are even instances in which an unrealized love has served as the organizing force in a creative life: Dante is the classic example. For some, the memory of a lost love may provide the sweetness of an entire life.

In the mid-twentieth century, the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion posited that therapists should approach their patients “without memory or desire.” In his view, therapists’ memories were prone to subjective interpretation, morphing over time, while their desires might run counter to what their patients wanted. Taken together, memories and desires can create biased notions that therapists hold about the treatment (known as formulated ideas). Bion wanted clinicians to enter each session committed to hearing the patient in the present moment (rather than being influenced by memory) and remaining open to various outcomes (rather than being influenced by desire).

Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past. Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will.

My Aunt and Uncle can’t stop me. The other contestants can’t break me. The judges do not decide my fate. ♬ “It won’t always be like this.” ♬ It is a song wrapped in a memory. A memory wrapped in a song. And it is all mine. No matter the outcome. No matter the prize. This moment is all mine, and no one can take that away from me. ♬ “But the beauty is here to stay.” ♬ The piano notes had already stopped as I sing out my last line. Like it was just me, vulnerable and real, as I leave it all on that stage.

In the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory

True Fun, I realized, is the feeling of being fully present and engaged, free from self-criticism and judgment. It is the thrill of losing ourselves in what we’re doing and not caring about the outcome. It is laughter. It is playful rebellion. It is euphoric connection. It is the bliss that comes from letting go. When we are truly having fun, we are not lonely. We are not anxious or stressed. We are not consumed by self-doubt or existential malaise. There is a reason that our moments of True Fun stand out in our memories: True Fun makes us feel alive.

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. PTSD is not uncommon in cases of spiritual abuse. After fearful, dangerous, or traumatic events, people often suffer for months (even years) with the aftereffects of those events, including upsetting memories, fear, sadness, nervousness, and bursts of anxiety.6 In short, “people who have PTSD may feel stressed or frightened even when they’re no longer in danger.”7 For spiritual abuse survivors, experiences that remind them of their abusive pastor or church situation usually trigger these effects. These triggers could be something as simple as going to church, hearing a sermon, or seeing individuals from their former church. A complicating factor in spiritual abuse cases is that the abuse is perpetrated by an institution or a person the victim knew and trusted, known as “institutional betrayal.”8 Studies have shown that abuse within a trusted relationship is significantly more traumatic than abuse by a stranger. And there is a natural trust that is fostered between a church member and their pastor (and the larger leadership body). Smith and Freyd show that such betrayal has a substantial emotional impact: “Betrayal trauma is associated with higher rates of a host of outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociation, anxiety, [and] depression.

A related but more complex aspect of working memory gives us the ability to draw on past learning or experience and apply it to the situation at hand or predict future outcomes.

It’s not about your past or your former experiences. The possibility for an amazing outcome is always just as likely as a horrible one. If you only dwell on the worst possible outcomes, it will take away your ability to create happy memories in the moment and sabotage your future. You need to let go of your fear. You need to let yourself be excited.

You can't escape it, no matter how you struggle. No matter where you go, the past will follow you. No matter how hard you try to forget, no matter if you die and let it all disappear, the past will always be right behind you, chasing you down. Chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing... Do you know why? Because it's lonely. The past, memories, and outcomes are all very lonely things. They want a companion.

If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.” - Robert Goolrick "it is better to be prepared for the worst case scenario, than to be crushed when positive outcomes do not come to pass" - Matt Mcconathy "the truth is not what you see everyday, it's on a narrow road which is not the broad-road of media, and society norms - those who search for it will find it" - Matt Mcconathy "it may be comforting to stay in the safety of this place for years, but time is telling, the only safety for your life is there's a whole world out there waiting on you" - Matt Mcconathy "When your a kid you want to be exactly like your father, when your a teenager your cant stand rules, when your an adult you will appreciate what your father taught you" - Matt Mcconathy "the more you love a memory; the stronger and stranger it becomes" - Vladimir Nabokov "when diplomacy fails, there's only one alternative: violence, force must be applied without apology" - Captain Kathryn Janeway "a dumb liar doesn't connect the story and forgets details, an intelligent liar is a conspirator and can deceive many" - Matt Mcconathy "It seems strange my life should end in such a terrible place, but for 3 years I had roses, and apologized to no one" - Valerie (V for Ventetta movie quote) “There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it" - Shannon L. Adler "I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you know that even though I do not know you, and that i will never meet you, laugh with you, or be with you, I love you" - Valerie (V for Ventetta movie)

If we direct our intention toward doing (when possible) that which seems meaningful right now and noticing that any outcome is enough, we might discover a terribly obvious yet effective strategy for perpetual contentment. Of course to do this—to open ourselves up to changing and living according to the meaning of the present month or moment—is a frightening proposition. If we do, we will surely witness our tastes and whims recycle and transform. We will watch as our personalities modify in subtle ways. And although a small number of passions might stay with us throughout our lives, many more will certainly fall away or be replaced. In other words, to admit that in this second I am not a static being is to admit that I will be something different tomorrow, something unknown a year from now, and possibly something unrecognizable to myself in a decade. This notion is uncomfortable because it forces us to countenance the passing of time, the fading of past selves, our eventual physical death. To change is to vacate the past and move ever-closer to the end of our story. It’s no wonder that we bury our proverbial talons in the interests, attributes, memories, and tendencies of our past selves and insist that “who we are” has long been established. But what might we become if we accept that, in the grammar of the universe, our nature is verb-like, transitory, ever-moving? We might become anything. The possibilities are endless and exciting. It seems natural to hold tightly onto the past. We tend to feel that if don’t have the past, we don’t have anything. Our pasts provide all of the context with which we are equipped to navigate the present. Without our memories and stories, we would indeed be directionless and alone. But it seems that we often overcompensate, desperately clinging to the “good old days”, trying to relive them in our minds, and simultaneously attempting to freeze the present moment, to capture the past before it becomes the past. This latter point can be plainly observed in our modern tendency to photograph even the most mundane of moments and to record hours of video that we’ll never revisit. But if we spend significant amounts of time trying to immortalize and live vicariously through the past, we may relinquish a measure of ability to see the possibilities of the present and future. We may cease to fully capitalize on the surrounding opportunities for novel experience, reflection, and appreciation. We may eschew the potential to become a marvelously different-yet-somehow-still-the-same version of ourselves.

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fulness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should kept on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is not more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

Life, with all its surprises, is full of moments that, although predictable, keep surprising us. Every sensation, although already written, makes us feel each moment uniquely. And yet, we think about the future and the past, while insisting in forgetting the present. All memories and imaginations replace love with the feeling of sadness, a sadness built upon repetitions that match the undesired future and past. To lose is always harder than to forget, but to feel what can’t be changed is harder than losing it. It is hard to know without the capacity for creating, to see without the potential to predict, and to pay for what we know and see without any positive outcome at sight. But that is the life of many, a life that in their despair, is called real, as real as their self-destruction within it; for such is the consequence of venerating ignorance while in huger for reason. Many so live in evil, destroying the good that comes to them, emptying their soul in the process, and alchemically merging with the physical world, while disappearing in it; for such is life claiming their soul before claiming their body. Evil consumes the soul just as Earth consumes the body. To do evil is to commit suicide before death presents itself; and the endless nightmares of such creatures are merely manifestations of the bridge they’ve been building for themselves, between their illusions inside the material world and their fate within the spiritual world; for such is the state of slavery of the ignorant, dead in spirit and active in body but without any achievements in life; and yet, if the end of the illusion came, the root of all truth would merely expand itself furthermore, for one cannot come to itself before being with everything else; one cannot live without first experiencing the death of itself; for all that comes from the spirit has once occupied the place of many egos, just as the state of being comes from the activity of manifesting conscience in many things, many lives, many perspectives; for one is all, but all cannot come into one, not until each one of that all is present in its fullness as one. And so, we could very well say that the expansion of one is the direction towards the truth, while the retrocession in being one is the direction towards the lie. And since all lies exist within the truth, we can also say that self-destruction, or evilness, is nothing more than the process of delaying the inevitably of life, to expand into thousands of years what could be achieved in one second. But wouldn’t that be expectable from one that fears life while wanting to experience it to its fullness? Such person is merely reducing the level in which he can live, even when, but mainly while, reducing himself in front of his own existence, including when diminishing himself before life. And that’s why the end of all things will always reveal the beginning of them, for such end is merely a delaying of what already was and should keep on being. It is the need to delay being that expands the being beyond itself, only and merely to simply bring it back to itself at the end. That is all for now, and the now in that all; for life is no more than an eternal present, redistributing its colors to create a big picture, one in which the vision shows the first spot in which all began. And that is enlightenment, as much as it is forgiveness, as much as it is sadness and joy, regret and responsibility, love and hate, emotions and emotionless, action and non-action, the one and the nothingness manifesting themselves at the exact same time and in the same place, allowing us the illusion of time and distance when, deeply within, we know they’re not real. But what is real? That is the journey of life; for one cannot say that there are different perspectives, but merely different states of conscience. In a perfect world, there is but one conscience.

Message of Joan of Arc The crucible of love is carried forth in your hearts. The pain and sorrow of past injustices are being transformed through each loving word and deed. As the past merges with the present, physical and emotional bodies respond. There is so much that you carry, so much you transform. The conscious awareness of your soul’s purpose, the knowledge that you have come again to aid in this most transforming time magnifies the outcome of each mission. As past injustices merge with present injustices you respond with an awakening, an awakening of remembrance of all that has gone before and all that feels familiar in your lives and your world of today. And as you perceive and awaken, and as a betrayal or injustice today brings back those of times past, you feel, you weep, you cry out, and you may fall. Then the power within rises, the feminine power of love, the feminine power of strength, the alchemical magic awakens and rises with a power and strength stronger than the past, more powerful than a memory or injustice of today. And as the power rises within, and as you feel, acknowledge and respond, you choose the path of the spiritual warrior with a feminine strength present throughout the ages. For you are bearers of truth and soldiers of freedom. And through your awareness so vigilant and so true, through each conscious kindness, each voice raised in truth, you transform one by one, a hardened heart or bitter injustice. Yes the task is mighty and the road long, and you have walked this path again and again but I ask you now to feel in your heart, the power of love and the root of forgiveness. For only these shall usher in the New World, only these shall move you into the fullness of your true spiritual nature. Walk the path with your head held high feeling and knowing your power and strength. Know that battles once fought for truth and for freedom carry you forth in this time and this place. Feel the protection of your spiritual armour, carry the sword of truth and enlightenment. Work your alchemical magic as you transform and transcend all worldly concerns. Bring forth the balance of masculine and feminine, the strength of the armour and the beauty of love. Know, that which you endure and overcome shall strengthen you…. and that which you forgive shall free you." I (…state name aloud.) bow my head and consecrate my heart and with the greatest love and power I breathe in the Breath of The Holy Spirit and breathe out the names Isis and Magdalene.

I think of how my husband and I plan a new vacation to take our kids on. My husband and I have it all planned out. We know the way, the cost, the activities and the outcome. But our children know none of this. They must trust us that we know what we are doing. As the parents we know the roads we will take to get there, we know where we are taking them and yet our children must trust we will bring them home safely and with good memories. Think of this autism journey in the same way. Our heavenly Father knows the way, the cost, the activities and the outcome. He even knows that we will get through this journey safely and with some happy memories!

The human personality is not an object, it's a process, a constant state of becoming, that depends on a web of interdependencies, binding us to one another with invisible filaments, to our time, to memories and possessions, and back to our changing selves. And even that image probably overstates the solidity and integrity of the human personality. Strip a person away from the relationships that constitute his identity—the friends, the loved ones, the familiar sounds—and the outcome is bound to be breakdown and madness.

Greatly relieved by the outcome of the confrontation with the Secret Police, I asked him who the other gentleman was. He told me that the other man was an informer, who came to report to the police that in the evening we pulled down the shades, proof that something unlawful was going on. Of course, if a crime would be discovered after an investigation, we could be deported and the informer could claim the apartment and the household within. Mr. Andreescu told me that he knew right away that it was a false charge, because people, who live with a packed knapsack next to their beds would not try anything that dangerous.

Outcomes, Agenda, Roles and Rules. These four categories spell OARRs, which becomes a memory device, if you think of a meeting as being like a river and your process as being like rowing a boat on it. All you need to do to succeed is “grab your OARRs.

In the recovery world, we often speak of outcomes: who succeeds in treatment; who relapses or disappears or dies. My ability to stay sober was more than explained by my ACE score, the metric for Adverse Childhood Experiences, which in my case was an almost unheard-of zero. Loving family; no incarceration, addictions, or domestic violence—all of which raised the question of why I’d turned to drugs in the first place. Was there some trauma I’d repressed? That was entirely possible; Own Your Unconscious has turned up all kinds of repressed brutalities, and thousands of abusers have been convicted based on the evidence of their victims’ externalized memories, viewed as film in courtrooms. But what I kept coming back to was my cousin Sasha.

The skepticism with which too many Germans regarded the Weimar Republic wasn’t primarily the result of its questionable efficacy. By August 1928, less than ten years after it had come into existence, it had gone through no fewer than ten chancellors, yes. But over the past two to three years it had undoubtedly made economic advances. The resentment of the great nations defeated in the First World War lay not in the realm of finance but in cultural memory: the republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States (Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights), France (French Revolution), and, with a great deal of historical benevolence, England (Magna Carta). Even Switzerland had its Pledge of Allegiance to the Confederation, but in terms of democratic creation myths, on the other hand, Germany pretty much drew a blank. From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but an accident of the country’s own history, a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war, along with the reparations imposed at Versailles, and not much easier to bear. For this reason a truly self-defined Germany would—on the basis of its own history—be many

Hindsight bias adds to the ruckus caused by knowing the outcome, distorting your memory of what you knew at the time of the decision in two ways: You did know what was going to happen—swapping out your actual view at the time of the decision with a faulty memory of that view to conform to your postoutcome knowledge. You should (or could) have known what was going to happen—to the point of predictability or inevitability.

In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction.

In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction. In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die.

reject the notion of perfection Looking for a perfect outcome can easily keep us stuck in an indecisive place.

deal with disappointment If you ever feel as though a decision you made wasn’t the best or the results were disappointing, don’t let it overcome you. Instead, maintain a positive attitude and look for opportunities to learn from the situation so you are better prepared to make decisions in the future. Accept the outcome, learn from it, and move on.

When we challenge ourselves, just as when we learn new things, we also develop new neural connections and encourage brain plasticity. And when there are positive outcomes, we gain a new perspective that challenges our traditional way of thinking.

ANT Types 1. All-or-Nothing ANTs: Thinking that things are either all good or all bad 2. Less-Than ANTs: Where you compare and see yourself as less than others 3. Just-the-Bad ANTs: Seeing only the bad in a situation 4. Guilt-Beating ANTs: Thinking in words like should, must, ought, or have to 5. Labeling ANTs: Attaching a negative label to yourself or someone else 6. Fortune-Telling ANTs: Predicting the worst possible outcome for a situation with little or no evidence for it 7. Mind-Reading ANTs: Believing you know what other people are thinking even though they haven’t told you 8. If-Only and I’ll-Be-Happy-When ANTs: Where you argue with the past and long for the future 9.

ANT / ANT Type:[2] Question 1. Is it true? Sometimes this first question will stop the ANT because you already know the thought is not true. Sometimes your answer will be “I don’t know.” Question 2. Is it absolutely true? Do you know it with 100 percent certainty? This often cracks the thought. Question 3. How do I feel when I believe this thought? How do I act with this thought? What is the outcome of having this thought? Question 4. How would I feel and act, and what would be the outcome, if I couldn’t have this thought? Question 5. Turn the thought around to its opposite. Then ask if the opposite of the thought is true or even truer than the original thought. Here’s

Negativity can feel familiar if that’s where you’re used to living. If you expect that things won’t work out, you can’t be disappointed, right? In fact, the mind is wired to emphasize negativity. The brain evolved to prioritize the sight of a predator over the aesthetic perfection of the sunset framing that predator as it bounds toward you with supper in mind. By default, we watch for predators and miss the sunsets entirely. This hardwired instinct is a liability in the modern world. It’s literally poisonous. Negative thinking releases stress hormones, raises blood pressure, suppresses your immune system, and leads to a host of other health problems. Negative thinking impairs your cognitive ability and memory. Worst of all, negativity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you expect a negative outcome, you tune your intuition to act accordingly, creating the dreaded outcome and reinforcing that negative response: “See? I told you it was going to turn out like this!” It’s a downward spiral that’s also contagious. When you take a cynical view of life, your toxic outlook infects everyone around you, at home and at work.

Children are some of the best teachers when it comes to living in the now. They embrace moments full of enthusiasm and curiosity. Children do not retain memories from their childhoods and do not worry about the future, so they can only be aware of what is occurring in the here and now. They have no preconceived notions or expectations about how things should be. They enjoy the process of learning and creating, without overthinking the outcomes.

Probability has amnesia: each future outcome is completely independent of the past. But we persist in thinking that its memory is not only there but personal to us. We’ll be rewarded, eventually, if we’re only patient. It’s only fair.

the emotional signal can operate entirely under the radar of consciousness. It can produce alterations in working memory, attention and reasoning so that the decision-making process is biased toward selecting the action most likely to lead to the best possible outcome, given prior experience. The individual may not ever be cognizant of this covert operation.16

Historically, the shock of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the open wound of lost territories have served as potent instruments for building national solidarity and forging a strong national identity. The partitions of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century wiped the Polish state off the map of Europe but served as a starting point for the formation of modern Polish nationalism, while the Napoleonic invasion of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave rise to pan-German ideas and promoted the development of modern German nationalism. Memories of defeat and lost territory have fired the national imaginations of French and Poles, Serbs and Czechs. Invaded, humiliated, and war-torn Ukraine seems to be following that general pattern. The Russian annexation of the Crimea, the hybrid war in the Donbas, and attempts to destabilize the rest of the country created a new and dangerous situation not only in Ukraine but also in Europe as a whole. For the first time since the end of World War II, a major European power made war on a weaker neighbor and annexed part of the territory of a sovereign state. The Russian invasion breached not only the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1997 but also the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which had offered Ukraine security assurances in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons and acceding to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear state. The unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine threatened the foundations of international order—a threat to which the European Union and most of the world were not prepared to respond but one that demands appropriate counteraction. Whatever the outcome of the current Ukraine Crisis, on its resolution depends not only the future of Ukraine but also that of relations between Europe’s east and west—Russia and the European Union—and thus the future of Europe as a whole.

In seeking to understand the centrality of history in the Ayodhya movement and the ineffectiveness of professional historians attempting to influence its violent outcome, some scholars have condemned the politicization of history and reiterated the need to emphasize its boundaries as a scholarly, scientific discipline. Simply reinforcing disciplinary boundaries, however, only serves to widen the current gap between scholarly and popular domains without any further understanding of the making of popular narratives and their appeal.16 Others have persuasively argued that rather than retreating further into the ivory tower, professional historiography needs to engage more seriously with popular narratives of the past.

You are not getting out of here without me,” he laughed as he watched her look about. “I will be leaving with you – whether I drag you out of this room dead or alive is entirely your choice.” “The problem with clichés,” Ari told him coldly, “is that the speaker usually fails to perceive any outcome other than the one he expects.

Listen to me, Emma Mather. This is not your fault. Your brother’s pain is not your responsibility.” “He was my twin. I could have stopped him.” “No.” He cupped her cheek. “No, you could not have stopped him. We cannot force people to heal. We cannot force them to be better. He knew you loved him, and that’s why he went to the aether wishing to keep you safe above all. Life is full of regrets. You will look back on this and think of all the things you could and should have done. And maybe there might have been a different outcome. Or maybe you would have had more memories to cherish. But it doesn’t matter. We’re here. There is nothing you can do about the decisions that were made.

If those emotions cannot yet be tolerated by the client, access to the underlying schema is also blocked. Therefore, making those emotions workable for the client to feel is necessary in order to then access the underlying schema, bring conscious awareness to it, and subject it to disconfirmation and unlearning. Facilitating direct experience of previously blocked emotion tends, in itself, to alleviate certain symptoms, and has been shown to correlate strongly with positive therapeutic outcome (e.g., Elliott et al., 2003; Missirlian et al., 2005), but will not by itself achieve transformational change unless, in addition, the underlying schema undergoes disconfirmation.

So when the two come into conflict in a child’s life, the outcome is well-nigh predetermined. If the choice is between “hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need” and “being myself and going without,” I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel. The fact that we don’t consciously choose such coping mechanisms makes them all the more tenacious. We cannot will them away when they no longer serve us precisely because we have no memory of them not being there, no notion of ourselves without them. Like wallpaper, they blend into the background; they are our “new normal,” our literal second nature, as distinct from our original or authentic nature. As these patterns get wired into our nervous system, the perceived need to be what the world demands becomes entangled with our sense of who we are and how to seek love. Inauthenticity is thereafter misidentified with survival because the two were synonymous during the formative years—or, at least, seemed so to our young selves. Here we see the perilous downside of our much-vaunted and wondrous capacity to adapt to diverse and challenging circumstances. After all, most adaptations are meant for specific situations, not as eternally applicable responses in every possible case. Here’s an analogy plucked from the headlines: At the time of this writing, freezing weather has enveloped Texas.[*] People are adapting by wearing extra clothing, heating their homes when power is available, wrapping themselves in warm blankets—all necessary strategies for surviving inclement winter conditions. Those same adaptations, meant to be temporary, would jeopardize health and life if not discarded by the time of summer’s blazing heat. The internal adaptations we make to our own personalities in order to survive adversity early in life carry the same risks as conditions shift, but we are far less wise to the danger. No matter how the weather changes, the protective gear, welded as it is onto the personality, never comes off. It is sobering to realize that many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when.

4. It teaches a different outcome. One aspect of anxiety that makes it so different from other disorders is the physical symptoms. Because anxiety brings the sympathetic nervous system into play, when you sense your heart rate and breathing picking up, that awareness can trigger anxiety or a panic attack. But those same symptoms are inherent to aerobic exercise—and that’s a good thing. If you begin to associate the physical symptoms of anxiety with something positive, something that you initiated and can control, the fear memory fades in contrast to the fresh one taking shape. Think of it as a biological bait and switch—your mind is expecting a panic attack, but instead it ends up with a positive association with the symptoms.

The human brain has evolved methods of warfare that go beyond the use of weapons. For example, greater access to information may influence those called upon to fight, or support, such wars (e.g. encouraging group cohesion or demonizing an enemy: the ‘narrative’ of war151); but there are increasingly powerful methods of disseminating misinformation by those wishing to promote conflict. It is these newer areas of the brain that enable the extraordinary and unique technological evolution in humans. One consequence of this has been to alter the biological and social advantages of going to war. But deeper in the brain lie other, more ancient mechanisms, respondent to testosterone (and other hormones) that can bias such decisions one way or another. As in so many other contexts, at some point one has to consider the brain as a whole, rather than ascribing individual actions or outcomes to specific areas. Logic, memory, cognition, and emotion are intertwined in decisions to go to war. But testosterone lies at the core of this mix. We cannot always rely on ancient tendencies being moderated by more recently developed parts of the brain.

How well you do know your own mind? This is, no doubt, a sobering question. Yet it must be answered before proceeding. The utility of any tool is defined, in part, by consistency in deployment and predictability of outcome—the absence of unforeseen surprises once it is in use. A pencil sharpener whose blade engages erratically is no asset and should be culled from your tool kit. So, too, is a mind whose unseen contours hide jarring or potentially compromising impulses, memories, panics, prejudices, weaknesses, and the like.

Optimism bias – A cognitive bias that causes people to believe that they are less at risk of a negative outcome, or more likely to enjoy a positive outcome, than other people in a given situation. Overly specific answer – A verbal deceptive behavior in which the person’s response is too narrow and technical at one extreme, or too detailed and exhaustive at the other. Perception qualifier – A verbal deceptive behavior employed to enhance credibility. Examples: “frankly,” “to be perfectly honest,” “candidly.” Presumptive question – A question that presumes something to be the case. Process/procedural complaint – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person takes issue with the proceedings. It may be a delaying tactic or an attempt to steer the proceedings down a different path. Projection of blame – An element of a monologue that is designed to encourage a person to share truthful information by suggesting that the blame for the matter at hand does not rest exclusively with him. Psychological alibi – An attempt to deceive through the use of selective memory or ostensibly limited knowledge. Psychological entrenchment – The condition in which a person feels compelled to dig his heels in the ground and stick to his story, making the information collection process especially difficult. Question prologue – A short, narrative explanation preceding a question that is designed to prime the information pump, so that if the person is on the fence about whether or not he’s going to give you something, it will help to influence him to come down on your side of the fence. Rationalization – An element of

In times of danger, only you were with me. In good times, you are leaving me. When the good memories in the past no longer exist, when sadness has become an inevitable outcome and cannot be changed- I choose to give up.

Self-knowledge enables a person to grasp what future decisions will define their final formation. The human mind habitually hits the rewind button and replays past events. Can looking back over the rim of time and engaging in thoughtful criticism of the precursor events of my formative years be of any possible assistance to expose the indurate truth of factual reality? Can I employ the tools of memory and imagination along with the techniques of logos – reasoned discourse – to escape strife and pathos? Does it make sense to write the story of my life so that I can ascertain who I am? With these unsettling thoughts and these maieutic questions in mind, I began writing an enantiomorphism-like scroll. The crystal molecules that comprise this text construct a mirror that replicates the multiple dimensions of a risky adventure into self-psychology. I harbor no expectation regarding the outcome of this reflective venture. Regardless of the consequences, all I can do is follow the psychic flow generated by this writing enterprise. I do not know where this positional analysis will take me or how this psychodynamic field study will end. I am simply dedicating all remaining personal energy reserves to capitulating to a tornado-like process of self-study, a turbulent procedure with an unpredictable outcome. Perhaps something sensible will result from deploying a series of narrative personal essays to deconstruct the parasitic evolution of an egocentric self.

Character is what is needed to transform practices, change paradigms and shift power dynamics in order to pursue justice, stand for what you believe is right, speak for the voiceless, act for the fearful, honor the memory of the fallen and seek more equitable outcomes for the neglected and ignored.

This issue of Stvar we dedicate to the anniversaries. Each effort that commences from historical years and epochal dates, however, is not only supposed to cope with the legacy and lessons of evoked events and figures, but also to question a certain (dominant) relation to the past and history. In other words, the task is not a commemorative one, that is, a fetishist relation to the epoch of decisive dates and big events, but rather the radical grasping of the materiality of history following its work where social contradictions require that fight for emancipation and progress is to be taken up. What is at stake here is not an academic requiem or a leftist memorial service to the era of revolutions and great revolutionaries; it is all about casting our gaze toward the past in order to better examine those moments where the past opens itself toward the future. The relation toward past, therefore, should contain perspectives of different future. Amputation of the future is nowadays one of the features of many current academic, scientific and ideological discourses. Once this perspective of different future has been eliminated, the resignification of Marx, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Lenin and others becomes possible, because their doctrines and results have been quite depoliticized. On the contrary, it is the memory that calls for struggle that is the main cognitive attitude toward the events remembered in the collected texts in this issue. Not nostalgic or collectionist remembrance but critical memory filled with hope. The main question, thus, is that of radical social transformations, i.e. theory and practice of revolution. In this sense, Marx, Kollontai, Lenin and other Bolsheviks, and Gramsci as well, constitute the coordinates in which every theoretical practice that wants to offer resistance to capitalist expansion and its ideological forms is moving. The year 1867, when the first Volume of Marx’s Capital is brought out in Hamburg, then October 1917 in Russia, when all power went to the hands of Soviets, and 1937, when Gramsci dies after 11 years of fascist prison: these are three events that we are rethinking, highlighting and interpreting so that perspective of the change of the current social relations can be further developed and carried on. Publishing of the book after which nothing was the same anymore, a revolutionary uprising and conquest of the power, and then a death in jail are the coordinates of historical outcomes as well: these events can be seen as symptomatic dialectical-historical sequence. Firstly, in Capital Marx laid down foundations for the critique of political economy, indispensable frame for every understanding of production and social relations in capitalism, and then in 1917, in the greatest attempt of the organization of working masses, Bolsheviks undermined seriously the system of capitalist production and created the first worker’s state of that kind; and at the end, Gramsci’s death in 1937 somehow symbolizes a tragical outcome and defeat of all aspirations toward revolutionizing of social relations in the Western Europe. Instead of that, Europe got fascism and the years of destruction and sufferings. Although the 1937 is the symbolic year of defeat, it is also a testimony of hope and survival of a living idea that inspires thinkers and revolutionaries since Marx. Gramsci also handed down the huge material of his prison notebooks, as one of the most original attempts to critically elaborate Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine in new conditions. Isn’t this task the same today?