Overlooking View Quotes

…. ‘George said he needed a break. And there was something about Jonathan taking over …’   ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said Maxwell, ‘It seems like there’s all kinds of goings on there now.’ ‘What did the agents say then?’ ‘Your brother … he must still have a key. I told them to check, I told them. I expect they overlooked it. Hugo’s been going in and there are some women there apparently, I mean at the Manor House, Jonathan’s up to his usual tricks taking in every Tom, Dick and Harry and giving all kinds of undesirables a home, and there’s something about them chasing Hugo and taunting him, yesterday the buyers were viewing again and measuring up for curtains and things, I said they could, and they saw something going on outside, some shouting and laughing …’   ‘Women! What women? Jonathan’s not like that …’   ‘Not like that huh! He’s flesh and blood like the rest of us.’  ‘That’s not what I meant. Please don’t be angry Max, it’s not my fault.’ ‘Jonathan this and Jonathan that. Why do people think he’s so bloody marvellous eh! What the hell does he think he’s doing. People spilling over into my garden and wrecking the peace and quiet. George was completely mad to do this …

The art of a successful business lies in identifying and mitigating the risk. Not overlooking and avoiding the risk.

Freedom from stress, freedom from anxiety, freedom from depression; freedom is autonomy from all that stagnates growth in this ever complex and noisy world. By the fear of being in the unknown, we often overlook and forget the serene view of being on the raft: the glowing virgin stars, the gentle ways that the waves moves, and the endless possibilities that exist under the sun. The fundamental principle of freedom is to be lost and our state of mind never differs too far from this analogy of being stranded in the middle of the ocean.

Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

George received permission to go, then Bess called her house. Mrs. Marvin said her daughter might accompany Nancy, and added that if Mr. Drew had not already chosen a place for them to stay, she would recommend the Long View Motel on top of the hill overlooking Deep River and the valley.

Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are "merely aesthetic". That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilisations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity.

For the soul, depression is an initiation, a rite of passage. If we think that depression, so empty and dull, is void of imagination, we may overlook its initiatory aspects. We may be imagining imagination itself from a point of view foreign to Saturn; emptiness can be rife with feeling-tone, images of catharsis, and emotions of regret and loss. As a shade of mood, gray can be as interesting and as variegated as it is in black-and-white photography. If

A Hard Life With Memory I’m a poor audience for my memory. She wants me to attend her voice nonstop, but I fidget, fuss, listen and don’t, step out, come back, then leave again. She wants all my time and attention. She’s got no problem when I sleep. The day’s a different matter, which upsets her. She thrusts old letters, snapshots at me eagerly, stirs up events both important and un-, turns my eyes to overlooked views, peoples them with my dead. In her stories I’m always younger. Which is nice, but why always the same story. Every mirror holds different news for me. She gets angry when I shrug my shoulders. And takes revenge by hauling out old errors, weighty, but easily forgotten. Looks into my eyes, checks my reaction. Then comforts me, it could be worse. She wants me to live only for her and with her. Ideally in a dark, locked room, but my plans still feature today’s sun, clouds in progress, ongoing roads. At times I get fed up with her. I suggest a separation. From now to eternity. Then she smiles at me with pity, since she knows it would be the end of me too.

At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.

There's something about the way that you always see the pretty view Overlook the blooded mess, always lookin' effortless And still you, still you want me

He had known it would not be some stupid fantasy of showing Laurent his country; of Laurent leaning against the marble balcony at Ios, turning to greet him in the cool air overlooking the sea, his eyes bright with the splendour of the view. So

Being guided by a fragmentary self-world view, man then acts in such a way as to try to break himself and the world up, so that all seems to correspond to his way of thinking. Man thus obtains an apparent proof of the correctness of his fragmentary self-world view though, of course, he overlooks the fact that it is he himself, acting according to his mode of thought, who has brought about the fragmentation that now seems to have an autonomous existence, independent of his will and of his desire.

THEY FOUND LEO AT THE TOP of the city fortifications. He was sitting at an open-air café, overlooking the sea, drinking a cup of coffee and dressed in…wow. Time warp. Leo’s outfit was identical to the one he’d worn the day they first arrived at Camp Half-Blood—jeans, a white shirt, and an old army jacket. Except that jacket had burned up months ago. Piper nearly knocked him out of his chair with a hug. “Leo! Gods, where have you been?” “Valdez!” Coach Hedge grinned. Then he seemed to remember he had a reputation to protect and he forced a scowl. “You ever disappear like that again, you little punk, I’ll knock you into next month!” Frank patted Leo on the back so hard it made him wince. Even Nico shook his hand. Hazel kissed Leo on the cheek. “We thought you were dead!” Leo mustered a faint smile. “Hey, guys. Nah, nah, I’m good.” Jason could tell he wasn’t good. Leo wouldn’t meet their eyes. His hands were perfectly still on the table. Leo’s hands were never still. All the nervous energy had drained right out of him, replaced by a kind of wistful sadness. Jason wondered why his expression seemed familiar. Then he realized Nico di Angelo had looked the same way after facing Cupid in the ruins of Salona. Leo was heartsick. As the others grabbed chairs from the nearby tables, Jason leaned in and squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “Hey, man,” he said, “what happened?” Leo’s eyes swept around the group. The message was clear: Not here. Not in front of everyone. “I got marooned,” Leo said. “Long story. How about you guys? What happened with Khione?” Coach Hedge snorted. “What happened? Piper happened! I’m telling you, this girl has skills!” “Coach…” Piper protested. Hedge began retelling the story, but in his version Piper was a kung fu assassin and there were a lot more Boreads. As the coach talked, Jason studied Leo with concern. This café had a perfect view of the harbor. Leo must have seen the Argo II sail in. Yet he sat here drinking coffee—which he didn’t even like—waiting for them to find him. That wasn’t like Leo at all. The ship was the most important thing in his life. When he saw it coming to rescue him, Leo should have run down to the docks, whooping at the top of his lungs. Coach Hedge was just describing how Piper had defeated Khione with a roundhouse kick when Piper interrupted. “Coach!” she said. “It didn’t happen like that at all. I couldn’t have done anything without Festus.” Leo raised his eyebrows. “But Festus was deactivated.” “Um, about that,” Piper said. “I sort of woke him up.” Piper explained her version of events—how she’d rebooted the metal dragon with charmspeak.

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed. In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses.

But too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find—there’s no other word for it—deplorable. And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them. And they did it without demanding the basics that Americans used to expect from all presidential candidates, from releasing tax returns to offering substantive policy proposals to upholding common standards of decency.

take the opposite approach: Voters’ lack of decisiveness changes everything. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not. The naive view of democracy, which paints it as a public forum for solving social problems, ignores more than a few frictions. It overlooks the big story inches beneath the surface. When voters talk about solving social problems, they primary aim is to boost their self-worth by casting off the workaday shackles of objectivity.

It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him.

Justin: I am falling so in love with you. Her body electrified. Celeste wiped her eyes and read his text again. The drone of the plane disappeared; the turbulence was no more. There was only Justin and his words. Justin: I lose myself and find myself at the same time with you. Justin: I need you, Celeste. I need you as part of my world, because for the first time, I am connected to someone in a way that has meaning. And truth. Maybe our distance has strengthened what I feel between us since we’re not grounded in habit or daily convenience. We have to fight for what we have. Justin: I don’t know if I can equate what I feel for you with anything else. Except maybe one thing, if this makes any sense. Justin: I go to this spot at Sunset Cliffs sometimes. It’s usually a place crowded with tourists, but certain times of year are quieter. I like it then. And there’s a high spot on the sandstone cliff, surrounded by this gorgeous ice plant, and it overlooks the most beautiful water view you’ve ever seen. I’m on top of the world there, it seems. Justin: And everything fits, you know? Life feels right. As though I could take on anything, do anything. And sometimes, when I’m feeling overcome with gratitude for the view and for what I have, I jump so that I remember to continue to be courageous because not every piece of life will feel so in place. Justin: It’s a twenty-foot drop, the water is only in the high fifties, and it’s a damn scary experience. But it’s a wonderful fear. One that I know I can get through and one that I want. Justin: That’s what it’s like with you. I am scared because you are so beyond anything I could have imagined. I become so much more with you beside me. That’s terrifying, by the way. But I will be brave because my fear only comes from finally having something deeply powerful to lose. That’s my connection with you. It would be a massive loss. Justin: And now I am in the car and about to see you, so don’t reply. I’m too flipping terrified to hear what you think of my rant. It’s hard not to pour my heart out once I start. If you think I’m out of mind, just wave your hands in horror when you spot the lovesick guy at the airport. Ten minutes went by. He had said not to reply, so she hadn’t. Justin: Let’s hope I don’t get pulled over for speeding… but I’m at a stoplight now. Justin: God, I hope you aren’t… aren’t… something bad. Celeste: Hey, Justin? Justin: I TOLD YOU NOT TO REPLY! Justin: I know, I know. But I’m happy you did because I lost it there for a minute. Celeste: HEY, JUSTIN? Justin: Sorry… Hey, Celeste? Celeste: I am, unequivocally and wholly falling in love with you, too. Justin: Now I’m definitely speeding. I will see you soon.

My office window overlooks a parking lot. I’ve got the best view on the whole submarine.

I had uncovered a widely held but overlooked attachment: our attachment to the view that every problem must have a solution. We delude ourselves that we can think our way out of a problem or we see it as a matter of finding the right person to advise us. We become beggars for our problems, asking numerous people for an opinion. So often, we refuse to relax until a problem is fixed, only to discover our inability to relax was most of the problem.

Error regarding life necessary to life. - Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it. If one knows how to keep the exceptions principally in view, I mean the greatly gifted and pure of soul, takes their production for the goal of world-evolution and rejoices in the effects they in turn produce, one may believe in the value of life, because the one is overlooking all other men: thinking falsely, that is to say. And likewise if, though one does keep in view all mankind, one accords validity only to one species of drives, the less egoistical, and justifies them in face of all the others, then again one can hope for something of mankind as a whole and to this extent believe in the value of life: thus, in this case too, through falsity of thinking. Whichever of these attitudes one adopts, however, one is by adopting in an exception among men. The great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do: everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual fruits but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. - But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.

Why do we have this perception of solidity? Why is it so deeply conditioned as our view of reality? This hallucination of perception arises from the great rapidity of changing phenomena. When we go to the movies we cannot see the separate frames of film. They move too quickly to be noticed, and so we remain in the illusion of appearances, overlooking the reality of how the magic works. Of course, in a movie theater that is the whole idea; we go specifically for the illusion. However, when we overlook the reality of our life, it has more serious and far-reaching consequences.

Simply being in the presence of natural landscapes tends to reduce stress and promote relaxation. Such experiences lower mental fatigue and boost mental clarity while enhancing both work performance and healing. One early study found that surgery patients recovered faster and required less pain medication if their hospital room had a window overlooking a natural setting. Another found similar effects in a prison population: prisoners with windows facing out toward rolling farmland and trees had 24 percent fewer sick call visits than their counterparts with views of an empty interior courtyard.

The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the scene.

When I stopped viewing girls as potential girlfriends and started treating them as sisters in Christ, I discovered the richness of true friendship. When I stopped worrying about who I was going to marry and began to trust God’s timing, I uncovered the incredible potential of serving God as a single. . . . I believe the time has come for Christians, male and female, to own up to the mess we’ve left behind in our selfish pursuit of short-term romance. Dating may seem an innocent game, but as I see it, we are sinning against each other. What excuse will we have when God asks us to account for our actions and attitudes in relationships? If God sees a sparrow fall (Matthew 10:29), do you think He could possibly overlook the broken hearts and scarred emotions we cause in relationships based on selfishness? Everyone around us may be playing the dating game. But at the end of our lives, we won’t answer to everyone. We’ll answer to God. . . . Long before Seventeen magazine ever gave teenagers tips on dating, people did things very differently. At the turn of the twentieth century, a guy and girl became romantically involved only if they planned to marry. If a young man spent time at a girl’s home, family and friends assumed that he intended to propose to her. But shifting attitudes in culture and the arrival of the automobile brought radical changes. The new “rules” allowed people to indulge in all the thrills of romantic love without having any intention of marriage. Author Beth Bailey documents these changes in a book whose title, From Front Porch to Backseat, says everything about the difference in society’s attitude when dating became the norm. Love and romance became things people could enjoy solely for their recreational value. Though much has changed since the 1920s, the tendency of dating relationships to move toward intimacy without commitment remains very much the same. . . . Many of the attitudes and practices of today’s dating relationships conflict with the lifestyle of smart love God wants us to live.

That environmentalists need the goodwill of children would seem self-evident- but more often than not, children are viewed as props or extraneous to the serious adult work of saving the world. One often overlooked value of children is that they constitue the future political constituency, and their attention or vote- whicich is ultimately based more on a foundation of personal experiance than rational deciscion making- is not guaranteed.

Sometimes we also find a tendency to view everything that's indigenous as good and anything "European"-such as Spain-as evil. That view overlooks such historical realities as the Aztec empire's oppressive domination of other indigenous societies and its class system, which privileged priests and the military. That view also forgets Spain was not a typically European nation after 600 years of rule by the Moors, an Arab/Berber people from Africa.

He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel insecure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody's tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

When people say things that we find offensive, civic charity asks that we resist the urge to attribute to immorality or prejudice views that can be equally well explained by other motives. It asks us to give the benefit of doubts, the assumption of goodwill, and the gift of attention. When people say things that agree with or respond thoughtfully to our arguments, we acknowledge that they have done so. We compliment where we can do so honestly, and we praise whatever we can legitimately find praiseworthy in their beliefs and their actions. When we argue with a forgiving affection, we recognize that people are often carried away by passions when discussing things of great importance to them. We overlook slights and insults and decline to respond in kind. We apologize when we get something wrong or when we hurt someone's feelings, and we allow others to apologize to us when they do the same. When people don't apologize, we still don't hold grudges or hurt them intentionally, even if we feel that they have intentionally hurt us. If somebody is abusive or obnoxious, we may decline to participate in further conversation, but we don't retaliate or attempt to make them suffer. And we try really hard not to give in to the overwhelming feeling that arguments must be won - and opponents destroyed - if we want to protect our own status or sense of worth. We never forget that our opponents are human beings who possess innate dignity and fellow citizens who deserve respect.

Bill and Fleur’s cottage stood alone on a cliff overlooking the sea, its walls embedded with shells and whitewashed. It was a lonely and beautiful place. Wherever Harry went inside the tiny cottage or its garden, he could hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature. He spent much of the next few days making excuses to escape the crowded cottage, craving the cliff-top view of open sky and wide, empty sea, and the feel of cold, salty wind on his face.

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.

As engine vibrated under him, he tried to tell himself it was all going to work out. It had to. Now that he’d found The One, there was no way in hell he was letting her get away. If that meant he had to move heaven and earth to find a good life for her and her pack mates here in the city, he’d do it. If being with Jayna meant he had to empty out his bank account and sell everything he owned, he was okay with that too. He had friends in other places he could turn to, Family too. His parents owned a huge house and a lot of land outside of Denver. If he showed up with Jayna, her pack, and no job, his family would welcome them with open arms. Okay, maybe his mom would be a little shocked when she found out his girlfriend came with an extended family, but she’d overlook it if there was a possibility of a grandchild in the near future. Becker was still daydreaming about kids with Jayna someday when headlights suddenly appeared in his rear- view mirror. He glanced over, swearing when he saw two vehicles speeding up behind him and closing fast.

To hold typically liberal views, therefore, and to assume that if we liked we could all settle down to love one another and live in perfect amity and harmony together, is possible only to those idealists who are congenitally blind to the true character of all life; whilst as for those numskulls who begin to see and think of the Will to Power only when figures like Napoleon, Stalin or Hitler appear, and who overlook it wholly in themselves, their wives, their children and their cat, they are even more dangerous than the idealists aforesaid

Surrender” might be the most powerful word in the world, but now I’m caught between the life I know and the one I don’t. Can I just take a walk on Killiney Hill with my best friend, who happens to be my wife, and sit on that wooden seat that overlooks the bay and not check the phone to see what’s going on somewhere else in the world? Can I take in the view without having to be in it? Can I not take that call, in favor of this other call, to stillness? Is this what vision over visibility looks like now? I bow to no one in my love and respect for Leonard Cohen, but I can’t see myself following him up that mountain on his Zen retreat. I’m not sure I’m made to climb that hill. But then the drip, drip, drip. I hear the words of another Sufi, the poet Rumi. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Maybe I’m discovering surrender doesn’t always have to follow defeat and may be all the fuller after victory. When you’ve won the argument you now understand you never needed to have. The argument with your life

An acquiescence in the Lord's will, founded in a persuasion of his wisdom, holiness, sovereignty, and goodness.--This is one of the greatest privileges and brightest ornaments of our profession. So far as we attain to this, we are secure from disappointment. Our own limited views and short-sighted purposes and desires, may be, and will be, often over-ruled; but then our main and leading desire, that the will of the Lord may be done, must be accomplished. How highly does it become us, both as creatures and as sinners, to submit to the appointments of our Maker! And how necessary it is to our peace! This great attainment is too often unthought of, and overlooked: we are prone to fix our attention upon the second causes and immediate instruments of events; forgetting that whatever befalls us is according to his purpose, and therefore must be right and seasonable in itself, and shall in the issue be productive of good. From hence rise impatience, resentment, and secret repinings, which are not only sinful, but tormenting: whereas, if all things are in his hand; if the very hairs of our head are numbered; if every event great and small, is under the direction of his providence and purpose; and if he has a wise, holy, and gracious end in view, to which every thing that happens is subordinate and subservient; then we have nothing to do, but with patience and humility to follow as he leads, and cheerfully to expect a happy issue. The path of present duty is marked out; and the concerns of the next and every succeeding hour are in his hands. How happy are they who can resign all to him, see his hand in every dispensation, and believe that he chooses better for them than they possibly could for themselves!

Yes, for here was one of the final strongholds of true yuppieism, a place where man was free to practice the religion of eighties greed, greed at all costs, without pretense of doing otherwise. No hypocrisy here. Investment houses were not about helping the world. They were not about providing a service to mankind or doing what was best for all. This haven had a simple, clear-cut, basic goal. Making money. Period. Win had a spacious corner office overlooking Park and Fifty-second Street. A prime-time view for the company’s number one producer. Myron knocked on the door.

If we understand the signals they are giving us, middle school kids can be fun and adventurous. If wse can find it in our hearts to overlook some of their quirky and mysterious behaviors, we can find them to be energetic and curious about how the world works around them. If we see the world as they view it, we can take their hand and guide them across the narrow bridges and frightening valleys they see sprawling before them. And finally, if we can reveal the patience to talk with them about the issues that confuse and bedevil them, we can find a world open for discussion and journey.

I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.

In awe at the sheer beauty of the setting, Celina stepped onto the balcony, which overlooked a terrace garden of fruit trees. "It's so beautiful here." She breathed in, catching the scent of fruit trees below. "What type of fruit are you growing?" "Mostly lemon," Sara said. "But also olive, grapefruit, orange, fig, and pomegranate. With our temperate climate, most everything thrives." Celina peered over the balcony's edge. To one side, a cliff dropped to the sea, while on the other, a terrace sprawled along the hilltop perch. Flaming pink bougainvillea and snowy white jasmine curled around the corners of grapevine-covered archways that framed the shimmering ocean view.

In that moment Ned felt a swelling, a ripping expansion, a hugeness that rang through him for the length of his life, a feeling that was sometimes rivalled but never quite matched. Not at weddings, not at births, not at funerals. Not when he worked his way north to Longreach, where he finally saw Toby again, finding him cocky, funny and largely unchanged. Not during good seasons or bad. Not when he was alone on cold waterways, not when he was in the grip of people he loved. Not as he poured dirt into graves, not as he watched his children, then his grandchildren, play. Not on the white sands of hidden beaches. Not in the shade of ancient trees, in whose canopies he imagined he could see the darting of cream-brown quolls. Not on rocky mountain roofs. Not in the presence of whales, not while viewing fine ships. Not at the scent of Huon pine. Not as Callie's last breath eased out of her, in their house overlooking kanamaluka, the eastern sun warming her face right up to the final moments of her life. Not at his ninetieth birthday, surrounded by his family and what was left of his friends, as he felt both powerfully loved and profoundly alone. Not even then, at the very end of his life, did he feel it again, although he always remembered it: this hugeness of feeling. This undamming of a whole summer's fear, this half-sickening lurch to joy. (pp.225-6)

Major Brown called on them to surrender; the Yavapais responded with hoots of derision—that is, until rocks rained down on them, hurled by soldiers who had clawed up the palisade to the bluff overlooking the cave. From inside came the baleful and monotonous intoning of death songs. Determined to finish the business rapidly, Major Brown ordered his men to ricochet bullets off the roof of the cave into the unseen mass of Indians. In three minutes, the cave fell silent. Lieutenant Bourke stepped inside. “A horrible spectacle was disclosed to view. In one corner eleven dead bodies were huddled, in another four; and in different crevices they were piled to the extent of the little cave.

[After a period of separation, Phaeton and Daphne are cuddling.] Diomedes, meanwhile, was leaning to look behind Helion, staring with open fascination at the display Phaethon and Daphne made. “I have not seen non-parthenogenic bioforms before. Are they going to copulate?” Atkins and Helion looked at him, then looked at each other. A glance of understanding passed between them. Atkins put his hand on Diomedes’s elbow, and pulled him back in front of Helion. “Perhaps not at this time,” Atkins said, straight-faced. “They are young and in love,” explained Helion, stepping so as to block Diomedes’s view. “So perhaps the excesses and, ah, exuberance of their, ah, greeting, can be overlooked this once.” Diomedes craned his neck, trying to peer past Helion. “There’s nothing like that on Neptune.” Helion murmured, “Perhaps certain peculiarities of the Neptunian character are thereby clarified, hmm…?” “It looks very old-fashioned,” said Diomedes. Helion said, “It is that most ancient and most precious romantic character of mankind which impels all great men to their greatness.” Atkins said, “It’s what young men do before they go to war.” Diomedes said, “It is not the way Cerebellines or Compositions or Hermaphrodites or Neptunians arrange these matters. I’m not sure I see the value of it. But it looks interesting. Do all Silver-Gray get to do that? I wonder if Phaethon would mind if I helped him.” “He’d mind.” Atkins interrupted curtly. “Really. He’d mind.

The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness. Cancer, pernicious anemia, and diabetes are just fine, and even people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease may continue to go far in the company until they are no longer allowed to go on at all. But unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be ruined.

I do not need a ring. I tried marriage before, as many know. Let me state here that Tom Dennis was a good, decent man who treated me gently and, when I asked, he let me go. I do believe he loved me. But my fiancé was no easy roommate, leaving glasses on wood tables (wood tables, dear reader!) and dropping socks and candy wrappers whenever they ceased being of immediate use; he became like those beachgoers who assume their litter will go out with the tide. I should have known from this that my relationship was in some trouble. But I knew all couples had these fights, and I assumed they were not a detour from love but its bumpy path. So imagine my surprise when (Tom Dennis far in the rearview mirror) I moved into the Shack with Less and this new roommate began to exhibit the same tendencies—socks on the floor, underwear behind the bathroom door, unwashed plates—and, reader, I didn’t care at all! I remember making the bed and finding underneath his pillow a mushroom-like profusion of tissues (for his morning nose-blow) and being filled with…not rage, but tenderness! With Tom Dennis, it was a chore I was willing to bear. With Less—I did not care at all. I stared at those tissues, stupefied. I did not care at all. The difference, you see, dear reader, is that I love him. How do I put it? He is not the best, God knows. He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

The man who experiences his way of being merely as something totally provisional is no longer taking his life quite seriously. So he is at risk of a kind of life in which he does not actualize the possibilities that are offered to him, but rather he forfeits them: he lets them pass him by. He constantly waits for something, without doing his part to make it happen. He becomes fatalistic. Instead of acting from the consciousness of a responsibility, he has the point of view that he should let things go, laissez aller, and let other people do as they please-laissez faire. He changes from a human subject into a mere object-an object of circumstances, of current conditions, of the moment in history. But he overlooks the fact that in history nothing has already been done-rather, everything is to be done. He overlooks the extent to which current conditions depend on him, the fact that they are creatively shapeable; he forgets that he bears a share of the responsibility.

Had Elizabeth’s opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing opinion of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly of their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments. To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given. Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her father’s behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and and to banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible. But she had never felt so strongly as now the disadvantages which must attend the children of so unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising from so ill-judged a direction of talents; talents, which, rightly used, might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters, even if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife.

There's a faulty signal on this line, about halfway through my journey. I assume it must be faulty, in any case, because it's almost always red; we stop there most days, sometimes just for a few seconds, sometimes for minutes on end. If I sit in carriage D, which I usually do, and the train stops at this signal, which it almost always does, I have a perfect view into my favourite trackside house: number fifteen. Number fifteen is much like the other houses along this stretch of track: a Victorian semi, two storeys high, overlooking a narrow, well-tended garden which runs around twenty feet down towards some fencing, beyond which lie a few metres of no man's land before you get to the railway track. I know this house by heart. I know every brick, I know the colour of the curtains in the upstairs bedroom (beige, with a dark-blue print), I know that the paint is peeling off the bathroom window frame and that there are four tiles missing from a section of the roof over on the right-hand side.

Students of human nature and philosophers have long ago taught us that we do wrong to value our intelligence as an independent force and to overlook its dependence upon our emotional life. According to their view our intellect can work reliably only when it is removed from the influence of powerful incitements; otherwise it acts simply as an instrument at the beck and call of our will and delivers the results which the will demands. Logical argumentation is therefore powerless against affective interests; that is why arguing with reasons which, according to Falstaff, are as common as blackberries, are so fruitless where our interests are concerned. Whenever possible psychoanalytic experience has driven home this assertion. It is in a position to prove every day that the cleverest people suddenly behave as unintelligently as defectives as soon as their understanding encounters emotional resistance, but that they regain their intelligence completely as soon as this resistance has been overcome.

Compare a medieval French peasant to a modern Parisian banker. The peasant lived in an unheated mud hut overlooking the local pigsty, while the banker goes home to a splendid penthouse with all the latest technological gadgets and a view to the Champs-Elysées. Intuitively, we would expect the banker to be much happier than the peasant. However, mud huts, penthouses and the Champs-Elysées don’t really determine our mood. Serotonin does. When the medieval peasant completed the construction of his mud hut, his brain neurons secreted serotonin, bringing it up to level X. When in 2014 the banker made the last payment on his wonderful penthouse, brain neurons secreted a similar amount of serotonin, bringing it up to a similar level X. It makes no difference to the brain that the penthouse is far more comfortable than the mud hut. The only thing that matters is that at present the level of serotonin is X. Consequently the banker would not be one iota happier than his great-great-great-grandfather, the poor medieval peasant.

Moreover, the change hinted at in this statement does not concern merely the social position of the artist. With it, the canon of artistic creation, or expressed differently, the structure of art, also changed. But such connections do not emerge very clearly if the transition from art production for a personally known employer or patron to art production for a paying public, from patronage to the free, more or less anonymous market, is considered merely as an economic event. To take this view is to overlook an essential point: that this was a structural change in the relation of people to each other, which can be precisely defined. In particular, it involved a power-gain by the artist in relation to his public. This human change, this change in the balance of power — not simply between individuals as such but between them as representatives of different social functions and positions, between people in their capacity as artists and as public — remains incomprehensible as long as the pattern of our thinking aims solely at spinning out dehumanised abstractions.

Male power and patriarchy are clearly part of the picture. Men historically created the workplace rules and influenced social norms that overlooked sexual harassment. An evolutionary perspective highlights an underlying sexual psychology that influences these male-biased practices. Studies by psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues, for example, explored the unconscious links between power and sex.25 One study found that men experienced an unconscious association between the concepts of power and sex, but this occurred only for men who scored high on a “likelihood to sexually harass” scale. In these men’s minds, concepts like “authority” and “boss” were automatically linked with concepts like “foreplay,” “bed,” and “date.” Their second study primed men to think about power and subsequently asked them to rate the attractiveness of a female confederate in the room who the men believed was just another study participant. Again, only men scoring high in likelihood to sexually harass viewed the woman as especially attractive and expressed a desire to get to know her. In short, power and sex are linked, but primarily in the minds of a subset of men. This may explain why only a minority of men in positions of power over women sexually harass them; many men with power do not.

Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and “uneconomic.” From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential difference between nonrenewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does… As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.

There is an excellent short book (126 pages) by Faustino Ballvè, Essentials of Economics (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education), which briefly summarizes principles and policies. A book that does that at somewhat greater length (327 pages) is Understanding the Dollar Crisis by Percy L. Greaves (Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1973). Bettina Bien Greaves has assembled two volumes of readings on Free Market Economics (Foundation for Economic Education). The reader who aims at a thorough understanding, and feels prepared for it, should next read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1949, 1966, 907 pages). This book extended the logical unity and precision of economics beyond that of any previous work. A two-volume work written thirteen years after Human Action by a student of Mises is Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (Mission, Kan.: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1962, 987 pages). This contains much original and penetrating material; its exposition is admirably lucid; and its arrangement makes it in some respects more suitable for textbook use than Mises’ great work. Short books that discuss special economic subjects in a simple way are Planning for Freedom by Ludwig von Mises (South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press, 1952), and Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). There is an excellent pamphlet by Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Santa Ana, Calif.: Rampart College, 1964, 1974, 62 pages). On the urgent subject of inflation, a book by the present author has recently been published, The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978). Among recent works which discuss current ideologies and developments from a point of view similar to that of this volume are the present author’s The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies (Arlington House, 1959); F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945) and the same author’s monumental Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, 1969) is the most thorough and devastating critique of collectivistic doctrines ever written. The reader should not overlook, of course, Frederic Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms (ca. 1844), and particularly his essay on “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Those who are interested in working through the economic classics might find it most profitable to do this in the reverse of their historical order. Presented in this order, the chief works to be consulted, with the dates of their first editions, are: Philip Wicksteed, The Common Sense of Political Economy, 1911; John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth, 1899; Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, The Positive Theory of Capital, 1888; Karl Menger, Principles of Economics, 1871; W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 1871; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848; David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817; and Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

Lost Things" There are many ways to understand the word lost, my love. When you were born, the last Pyrenean ibex, a tawny female named Celia, had not yet lived to see the view from Torla overlooking Monte Perdido, but her great- grandsire stood on the cliffs of Ordesa, positioned on hoof-tips dainty as dimes, and he shook his impregnable skull, a coffer of brass and nobility crowned with bayonets, as though in defiance of all who dwelt in the highlands from Catalonia to Aquataine. Their kind is vanished now. Forever lost. Perdido. And when you dressed in a Girl Guide’s uniform of Persian blue on Tuesday nights, my love, in the long-lost basement of Grace United Church, to play indoor baseball and make believe that faerie magic could make you rich or important or happy, pods of baiji dolphins still swam in a river you’d never heard of and would not think about until years later, when together we would learn from the evening news that the baiji were lost, at last, from the Yangtze, and in their place there came a universal emptiness. There are many ways to understand the word lost, but it does not help to imagine a secret place where lost things go. When last I held you in my arms, my love, the West African black rhinoceros was still magnificent and still alive, but now the gentleness of your breath on my bare neck is as lost as the dusty, confident snort of that once breath-taking beast. Great strength is no protection, and neither is love. We are born, and our births are lost. We can’t go back to them. Each embrace ends with an ending. When we become, what we once thought we’d be is lost. We keep becoming.

You know,” I said, “you don’t owe New Fiddleham anything. You don’t need to help them.” “Look,” Charlie said as we clipped past Market Street. He was pointing at a man delicately painting enormous letters onto a broad window as we passed. NONNA SANTORO’S, it read, although the RO’S was still just an outline. “That Italian restaurant?” “Yes,” he smiled. “They will be opening their doors for the first time very soon. Sweet family. I bought my first meal in New Fiddleham from that man. A couple of meatballs from a street cart were about all I could afford at the time. He’s an immigrant, too. He’s going to do well. His red sauce is amazing.” “That’s grand for him, then,” I said. “I like it when doors open,” said Charlie. “Doors are opening in New Fiddleham every day. It is a remarkable time to be alive anywhere, really. Do you think our parents could ever have imagined having machines that could wash dishes, machines that could sew, machines that do laundry? Pretty soon we’ll be taking this trolley ride without any horses. I’ve heard that Glanville has electric streetcars already. Who knows what will be possible fifty years from now, or a hundred. Change isn’t always so bad.” “Your optimism is both baffling and inspiring,” I said. “The sun is rising,” he replied with a little chuckle. I glanced at the sky. It was well past noon. “It’s just something my sister and I used to say,” he clarified. “I think you would like Alina. You often remind me of her. She has a way of refusing to let the world keep her down.” He smiled and his gaze drifted away, following the memory. “Alina found a rolled-up canvas once,” he said, “a year or so after our mother passed away. It was an oil painting—a picture of the sun hanging low over a rippling ocean. She was a beautiful painter, our mother. I could tell that it was one of hers, but I had never seen it before. It felt like a message, like she had sent it, just for us to find. “I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.” “I think I like Alina already. It’s a heartening philosophy. I only worry that it’s wasted on this city.” “A city is just people,” Charlie said. “A hundred years from now, even if the roads and buildings are still here, this will still be a whole new city. New Fiddleham is dying, every day, but it is also being constantly reborn. Every day, there is new hope. Every day, the sun rises. Every day, there are doors opening.” I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “When we’re through saving the world,” I said, “you can take me out to Nonna Santoro’s. I have it on good authority that the red sauce is amazing.” He blushed pink and a bashful smile spread over his face. “When we’re through saving the world, Miss Rook, I will hold you to that.

Mrs. Barnstable took her to a beautiful room with windows overlooking the gardens. “This is yours,” the housekeeper said. “No one has occupied it before.” The bed was made of light blue upholstered panels, the bedclothes of white linen. There was a graceful lady’s writing desk in the corner, and a satin maple wardrobe with a looking glass set in the door. “Mr. Merripen personally selected the wallpaper,” Mrs. Barnstable said. “He nearly drove the interior architect mad with his insistence on seeing hundreds of samples until he found this pattern.” The wallpaper was white, with a delicate pattern of flowering branches. And at sparse intervals, there was the motif of a little robin perched on one of the twigs. Slowly Win went to one of the walls and touched one of the birds with her fingertips. Her vision blurred. During her long recuperation from the scarlet fever, when she had grown tired of holding a book in her hands and no one had been available to read to her, she had stared out the window at a robin’s nest in a nearby maple tree. She had watched the fledglings hatch from their blue eggs, their bodies pink and veined and fuzzy. She had watched their feathers grow in, and she had watched the mother robin working to fill their ravenous beaks. And Win had watched as, one by one, they had flown from the nest while she remained in bed. Merripen, despite his fear of heights, had often climbed a ladder to wash the second-floor window for her. He had wanted her view of the outside world to be clear. He had said the sky should always be blue for her. “You’re fond of birds, Miss Hathaway?” the housekeeper asked. Win nodded without looking around, afraid that her face was red with unexpressed emotion. “Robins especially,” she half-whispered.

Despite the popularity of this view, the DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their assumption they used Fourier's equations to convert plaid and checkerboard patterns into simple wave forms. Then they tested to see how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the patterns. Only one conclusion could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics—the same mathematics holography employed—to convert visual images into the Fourier language of wave forms. 12 The DeValoises' discovery was subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world, and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory was correct. Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was responding not to patterns but to the frequencies of various wave forms, he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses. It didn't take long for him to realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by twentieth-century scientists. Over a century before the DeValoises' discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called osmic frequencies. Bekesy's work had clearly demonstrated that our skin is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis. Interestingly, Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of vibration were also of the Fourier genre.

According to this view the present state of our warring capacities would not be a state of culture, but only a stage on the way. Opinions will, of course, be divided about this, for by culture one man will understand a state of collective culture, while another will regard this state merely as civilization8 and will expect of culture the sterner demands of individual development. Schiller is, however, mistaken when he allies himself exclusively with the second standpoint and contrasts our collective culture unfavourably with that of the individual Greek, since he overlooks the defectiveness of the civilization of that time, which makes the unlimited validity of that culture very questionable. Hence no culture is ever really complete, for it always swings towards one side or the other. Sometimes the cultural ideal is extraverted, and the chief value then lies with the object and man’s relation to it: sometimes it is introverted, and the chief value lies with subject and his relation to the idea. In the former case, culture takes on a collective character, in the latter an individual one. It is therefore easy to understand how under the influence of Christianity, whose principle is Christian love (and by counter-association, also its counterpart, the violation of individuality), a collective culture came about in which the individual is liable to be swallowed up because individual values are depreciated on principle. Hence there arose in the age of the German classicists that extraordinary yearning for the ancient world which for them was a symbol of individual culture, and on that account was for the most part very much overvalued and often grossly idealized. Not a few attempts were even made to imitate or recapture the spirit of Greece, attempts which nowadays appear to us somewhat silly, but must none the less be appreciated as forerunners of an individual culture.

Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.” A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing. “Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!” A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name. “Why is it so sheeting cold in here?” yelled someone up the front near the guide. “If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it,” the guide responded promptly. Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do? “But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.” Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter what.

I continued my explorations in a cobbled yard overlooked by broken doors and cracked windows. Pushing open a swollen door into a storeroom, I found a stream running across paving stones and a carpet of slippery green moss. My explorations took me beneath a gateway surmounted by a clock face, standing with hands fixed permanently at eleven o'clock. Beyond stood derelict stables; then the park opened up in an undulating vista, reaching all the way to a swathe of deep forest on the horizon. In the distance was the twinkle of the river that I realized must border my own land at Whitelow. The grass was knee-high and speckled with late buttercups, but I was transported by that first sight of the Delafosse estate. In its situation alone, the Croxons had chosen our new home well. I dreamed for a moment of myself and Michael making a great fortune, and no longer renting Delafosse Hall but owning every inch of it, my inheritance spinning gold from cotton. Turning back to view the Hall I took a sharp breath; it was as massive and ancient as a child's dream of a castle, the bulk of its walls carpeted in greenery, the diamond-leaded windows sparkling in picturesque stone mullions. True, the barley-twist chimneys leaned askew, and the roofs sagged beneath the weight of years, but the shell of it was magnificent. It cast a strange possessive mood upon me. I remembered Michael's irritation at the house the previous night, and his eagerness to leave. Somehow I had to entice Michael into this shared dream of a happy life here, beside me. Determined to explore the park, I followed the nearest path. After walking through a deep wood for a good while I emerged into the sunlight by a round hill surmounted by a two-story tower. A hunting lodge, Mrs. Croxon had called it, but I thought it more a folly. It had a fantastical quality, with four miniature turrets, each topped with a verdigris-tarnished dome. Above the doorway stood a sundial drawn upon a disc representing a blazing sun. It was embellished with a script I thought might be Latin: FERREA VIRGA EST, UMBRATILIS MOTUS. I wondered whether Michael might know the meaning, or Anne's husband perhaps. As for the sundial's accuracy, the morning light was too weak to cast a line of shadow.

The final examination came and my mother came down to watch it. She hated watching me fight. (Unlike my school friends, who took a weird pleasure in the fights--and more and more so as I got better.) But Mum had a bad habit. Instead of standing on the balcony overlooking the gymnasium where the martial arts grading and fights took place, she would lie down on the ground--among everyone else vying to get a good view. Now don’t ask me why. She will say it is because she couldn’t bear to watch me get hurt. But I could never figure out why she just couldn’t stay outside if that was her reasoning. I have, though, learned that there is never much logic to my wonderful mother, but at heart there is great love and concern, and that has always shone through with Mum. Anyway, it was the big day. I had performed all the routines and katas and it was now time for the kumite, or fighting part of the black-belt grading. The European grandmaster Sensei Enoeda had come down to adjudicate. I was both excited and terrified--again. The fight started. My opponent (a rugby ace from a nearby college), and I traded punches, blocks, and kicks, but there was no real breakthrough. Suddenly I found myself being backed into a corner, and out of instinct (or desperation), I dropped low, spun around, and caught my opponent square round the head with a spinning back fist. Down he went. Now this was not good news for me. It was bad form and showed a lack of control. On top of that, you simply weren’t meant to deck your opponent. The idea was to win with the use of semicontact strikes, delivered with speed and technique that hit but didn’t injure your opponent. So I winced, apologized, and then helped the guy up. I then looked over to Sensei Enoeda, expecting a disapproving scowl, but instead was met with a look of delight. The sort of look that a kid gives when handed an unexpected present. I guess that the fighter in him loved it, and on that note I passed and was given my black belt. I had never felt so proud as I did finally wearing that belt after having crawled my way up the rungs of yellow, green, orange, purple, brown--you name it--colored belts. I had done this on my own and the hard way; you can’t buy your way to a black belt. I remember being told by our instructor that martial arts is not about the belts, it is about the spirit; and I agree…but I still couldn’t help sleeping with my black belt on that first night. Oh, and the bullying stopped.

Flynn lived in a shiny glass apartment tower on the water in Melbourne. The building looked like hundreds of mirrors reflecting the bright blue sky. He lived at the top of the high-rise. Kope and I stepped off the elevator and looked down the hall at Flynn’s door. We’d been silent. Nodding to each other, we sent our hearing into the apartment. With a quiet gasp, I yanked my auditory sense back to normal. Flynn was busy with company at the moment. Very busy. Kope made a low sound and closed his eyes, shaking his head as if to clear away the sounds he’d heard. My face heated and I shifted from foot to foot, fighting back the nervous smile that always wanted to surface at inappropriate times. I found a small sitting area around the corner with glass walls overlooking the city. We sat, taking in the view. When my stupid urge to smile finally settled, I braved another look at Kope and pointed to myself, using my new, limited sign-language skills to tell him I’d listen. Given the new information about his inclination for lust, it was only fair. I quickly looked away, embarrassed by the crassness of the situation. I wasn’t going to listen the whole time. I’d just pop in for a quick check. Ten minutes passed. Still busy. Half an hour passed. Busy. Forty-five minutes passed. I shook my head to let Kope know they were still at it. He fidgeted and paced, out of his normal, calm comfort zone. An hour and ten minutes passed, and I took a turn at stretching my legs. I was getting hungry. I thought we’d be through with our talk by this time. We could interrupt Flynn, but I didn’t want him to freak out in front of somebody. We needed his guest to leave so we could talk alone. At the hour and a half mark, Kope checked his watch and looked at me. I sent my hearing into the room. Oh, they weren’t in the bedroom anymore. Finally! I wiggled my hearing around until it hit the sound of running water. A shower. This was a good sign. But wait . . . nope. I shook my head, eyes wide. Was this normal? Kope did something uncharacteristic then. He grinned, giving a little huff through his nose. This elicited a small giggle from me and I pressed both hands over my mouth. It was too late, though. At this point, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I could feel the crazy, unfortunate amusement rising. I jumped up and ran as spritely as I could to the stairwell with Kope on my heels. We sprinted down several flights before I fell back against the wall, laughter bubbling out. It went on and on, only getting worse when Kope joined in with his deep chuckling, a joyful rumble.

What is a friend? A friend is one of the nicest things you can have – and one of the best things you can be. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You (published 1999) Have steppingstones to look forward to, milestones to look back upon, and -- in between -- do everything it takes to have an abundance of connect-the-dot days that lead to happiness. – Douglas Pagels, from 30 Beautiful Things That Are True About You May you remember that though the roads we take can sometimes be difficult, those are often the ones that lead to the most beautiful views. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You Love of family and love of friends is where everything beautiful begins. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You I want you to be reminded from time to time that you are a wonderful gift, and one of the nicest things in this entire world... is your presence in it. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You Do your part for the planet. Do all those things you know you “should” do. Our grandchildren will either have words of praise for our efforts and our foresight, or words that condemn us for forgetting that they will live here long after we are gone. Don’t overlook the obvious: This is not a dress rehearsal. This is the real thing. Our presence has an impact, but our precautions do, too. – Douglas Pagels, from Words That Shine Like Stars The wisest people on earth are those who have a hard time recalling their worries and an easy time remembering their blessings. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You Expressing your creativity is done more by the way you are living than by any other gesture. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You If your pursuit of wealth causes you to sacrifice any aspect of your health, your priorities are heading you in the wrong direction. Don’t hesitate to make a “you” turn. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You The more you’re bothered by something that’s wrong, the more you’re empowered to change things and make them right. The more we follow that philosophy as individuals, the easier it will be to brighten our horizons outward from there, taking in our communities, our cultures, our countries, and the common ground we stand on. The crucible of peace and goodwill is far too empty, and each of us must, in some way, help to fill it. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You We can always do more and be more than we think we can. Let’s think less and imagine more. – Douglas Pagels, from These Are the Gifts I’d Like to Give to You

The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

What is the motive for this ‘fugitive’ way of saying “I”? It is motivated by Dasein’s falling; for as falling, it *flees* in the face of itself into the “they.” When the “I” talks in the ‘natural’ manner, this is performed by the they-self. What expresses itself in the ‘I’ is that Self which, proximally and for the most part, I am *not* authentically. When one is absorbed in the everyday multiplicity and the rapid succession [*Sich-jagen] of that with which one is concerned, the Self of the self-forgetful “I am concerned” shows itself as something simple which is constantly selfsame but indefinite and empty. Yet one *is* that with which one concerns oneself. In the ‘natural’ ontical way in which the “I” talks, the phenomenal content of the Dasein which one has in view in the "I" gets overlooked; but this gives *no justification for our joining in this overlooking of it*, or for forcing upon the problematic of the Self an inappropriate ‘categorial’ horizon when we Interpret the “I” ontologically. Of course by thus refusing to follow the everyday way in which the “I” talks, our ontological Interpretation of the ‘I’ has by no means *solved* the problem; but it has indeed *prescribed the direction* for any further inquiries. In the “I,” we have in view that entity which one is in ‘being-in-the-world’. Being-already-in-a-world, however, as Being-alongside-the-ready-to-hand-within-the-world, means equiprimordially that one is ahead of oneself. With the ‘I’, what we have in view is that entity for which the *issue* is the Being of the entity that it is. With the ‘I’, care expresses itself, though proximally and for the most part in the ‘fugitive’ way in which the “I” talks when it concerns itself with something. The they-self keeps on saying “I” most loudly and most frequently because at bottom it *is not authentically* itself, and evades its authentic potentiality-for-Being. If the ontological constitution of the Self is not to be traced back either to an “I”-substance or to a ‘subject’, but if, on the contrary, the everyday fugitive way in which we keep on saying “I” must be understood in terms of our *authentic* potentiality-for-Being, then the proposition that the Self is the basis of care and constantly present-at-hand, is one that still does not follow. Selfhood is to be discerned existentially only in one’s authentic potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self—that is to say, in the authenticity of Dasein’s Being *as care*. In terms of care the *constancy of the Self*, as the supposed persistence of the *subjectum*, gets clarified. But the phenomenon of this authentic potentiality-for-Being also opens our eyes for the *constancy of the Self*, in the double sense of steadiness and steadfastness, is the *authentic* counter-possibility to the non-Self-constancy which is characteristic of irresolute falling. Existentially, “*Self-constancy*” signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness. The ontological structure of such resoluteness reveals the existentiality of the Self’s Selfhood." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 368-369

If miracles are to be common, everyday occurances, normal and not extraordinary, they cease to attract attention, and lose their very reason of existence. What is normal is according to law. If miracles are the law of the Christian life they cease to serve their chief end. The contention of the faith-healers overlooks numerous important Biblical facts. Primarily the fact that the miraculous gifts in the New Testament were the credentials of the apostles, and were confirmed to those to whom the apostles had conveyed them--whence a presumption arises against their continuance after the apostolic age. ... Paul did not share the views of our modern faith-healers.

There has been a persistent trend in the history of ideas, stretching all the way back to Plato, that characterizes emotions as the unruly and animalistic elements of a human life. Our emotions, according to this perspective, disrupt our tranquility and impede our ability to think rationally. But this view is one-sided and overlooks the prospective role of emotions. For our emotions, when functioning properly, help us adapt to our environment; they provide information as to the good and bad of our life, and they direct our attention at a speed that often surpasses that of our cognitive mind. While all emotions can provide us with information, it is often the most distressing emotions that are packed with the most important information. Fear can focus us to a threat, anxiety can alert us to the fact that we are taking a wrong path in life, while guilt and shame can signal that our behaviour is not in line with our moral compass.

If we are to have any hope of achieving this type of transformation we need to accept that our current attitude is not a singularly accurate product of our life thus far. It is easy to overlook this fact and to believe that a poor attitude on our part is justified by what we have had to endure. A difficult upbringing, mistreatment by others, or plain bad luck can easily convince us that our attitude, while perhaps not ideal, is based on the reality of our situation. This belief, however, overlooks two important considerations. Firstly, humans are susceptible to all sorts of biases, prone to self-deception and capable of the greatest delusions. But even if we were to grant that much of what sculpted our attitude is based in fact, and not on our distorted view of these facts, this brings up the following set of questions: ‘Which facts?’, ‘Why those facts?’ and ‘Why not others?’ For as William James put it, the world is a “blooming, buzzing confusion” and for order to emerge, whether it be the order of a scientific theory, or the order that creates our sense of self and our attitude toward life, we must be selective about which facts we focus on, which ones we diminish and which ones we completely ignore.

He took hold of my hand, his voice husky.  ‘You have been the most irritating intrusion into my life.  And honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.  You’ve forced me to stop feeling sorry for myself.  You’ve forced me to see things from other people’s point of view.  You’ve forced me to overlook the fact that you say criminy more than any person ever should.  Basically, you’ve forced me to be a less grumpy version of myself.

19. Judicial Opinions. In disposing of controverted cases, a judge should indicate the reasons for his action in an opinion showing that he has not disregarded or overlooked serious arguments of counsel. He thus shows his full understanding of the case, avoids the suspicion of arbitrary conclusion, promotes confidence in his intellectual integrity and may contribute useful precedent to the growth of the law. It is desirable that Courts of Appeals in reversing cases and granting new trials should so indicate their views on questions of law argued before them and necessarily arising in the controversy that upon the new trial counsel may be aided to avoid the repetition of erroneous positions of law and shall not be left in doubt by the failure of the court to decide such questions.

In 1984, a psychologist named Roger Ulrich studied patients recuperating from gallbladder surgery at a Pennsylvania hospital. Some patients were assigned to a room overlooking a small strand of deciduous trees. Others were assigned to rooms that overlooked a brick wall. Urlich describes the results: “Patients with the natural window view had shorter post-operative hospital stays, had fewer negative comments in nurses’ notes . . . and tended to have lower scores for minor post-surgical complications such as persistent headache or nausea requiring medication. Moreover, the wall-view patients required many more injections of potent painkillers.” The implications of this obscure study are enormous. Proximity to nature doesn’t just give us a warm, fuzzy feeling. It affects our physiology in real, measurable ways. It’s not a giant leap to conclude that proximity to nature makes us happier. That’s why even the most no-nonsense office building includes a park or atrium (in the belief, no doubt, that a happy worker is a productive one).

Healthy Nines are natural mediators. They see and value the perspective of other people and can harmonize what seem to be irreconcilable points of view. They are unselfish, flexible and inclusive. These Nines are seldom attached to their own way of seeing and doing things. They’ve learned to make decisions based on the right priorities. They are inspiring, self-actualized people. Average Nines, while they come off as sweet and easygoing, are stubborn and out of touch with their anger. These Nines overlook themselves. Though they generally feel unimportant, they occasionally wake up and realize they have to work on investing in themselves. They are willing to stand up for justice on behalf of others but would not likely risk doing much to stand up for themselves. They don’t ask for much though they appreciate what others do for them.

The point is not that there is no reality outside our mind, the point is rather that there is no mind outside reality. The distortion of reality occurs precisely because our mind is part of reality. So when Lenin claims that we can only arrive at objective reality in an endless asymptotic process of approximation, what he overlooks is that our distortions of reality occur precisely because we are part of reality and therefore do not have a neutral view of it: our perception distorts reality because the observer is part of the observed. It is this universalized perspectivism which, I think, contains a radically materialist position.

Unlike President Hu, Wen seemed comfortable exchanging views extemporaneously—and was straightforward in his defense of China’s trade policies. “You must understand, Mr. President, that despite what you see in Shanghai and Beijing, we’re still a developing country,” he said. “One-third of our population still lives in severe poverty…more people than in the entire United States. You can’t expect us to adopt the same policies that apply to a highly advanced economy like your own.” He had a point: For all of his country’s remarkable progress, the average Chinese family—especially outside the major cities—still had a lower income than all but the very poorest of Americans. I tried to put myself in Wen’s shoes, having to integrate an economy that straddled the information age and feudalism while generating enough jobs to meet the demands of a population the size of North and South America combined. I would have sympathized more had I not known that high-ranking Communist Party officials—including Wen—had a habit of steering state contracts and licenses to family members and siphoning billions into offshore accounts. As it was, I told Wen that given the massive trade imbalances between our two countries, the United States could no longer overlook China’s currency manipulation and other unfair practices; either China started changing course or we’d have to take retaliatory measures.

In a book published originally in 1962 and curiously often overlooked today, Arthur Wainwright also directly addressed the question. He contended that although the doctrine of the Trinity is not stated formally in the NT there is evidence that "the problem of the Trinity was in the minds of certain New Testament writers, and that they made an attempt to answer it."24 As Wainwright distinguished the terms, a "doctrine" represents an answer to a theological "problem." Wainwright defined "the problem of the Trinity" as prompted "because Christians believed that Jesus was divine," and they expressed this belief "both in the writings of the New Testament and in the worship which was practised by the earliest Christian communities." Because early Christians also dominantly "upheld the Jewish belief in the unity of God, the belief in Christ's divinity raised a serious problem." How could "the Father" and Jesus both be treated as divine "and yet God be one?"25 Granting readily that in the second century C.E. and thereafter Christian efforts to grapple with the problem of the Trinity "became more and more systematized"; he nevertheless insisted, "New Testament writers were aware of the trinitarian problem and made an attempt to answer it," although in the NT texts "it is easier to see the first attempts to clarify the problem than the first attempts to answer it."26 It is, of course, technically a verbal anachronism to use the word Trinity in discussions of NT texts, for the word and the elaboration of the many issues involved appeared in subsequent centuries. But, equally, it would be historically simplistic to disconnect these later developments from the phenomena of NT beliefs and devotional practices that we have analyzed in this book. So, Wainwright was correct in probing the connections and also, in my view, in contending that in NT texts we see earlier evidence that Christians recognized the basics of "the problem" involved. Wainwright was also perceptive in emphasizing the importance of worship practices as evidence of how Jesus had come to complicate (if I may use the term) the question of "God" for believers, already in the first century C.E. The problem of the Trinity was from the beginning closely connected with Christian worship. It was not the concern of the scholar alone, but was a vital issue for the worshipping Christian. . . . The nature of Christian worship influenced the development of Christian thought, and, conversely, the development of thought influenced the nature of worship. Such an interplay of thought and worship helps to explain the emergence of the problem of the Trinity.27 As we have seen (especially in chapter 3), the devotional practices reflected in the NT constitute significant evidence, particularly for taking stock of the place of Jesus

How to Make a Game Plan 1. Zoom out and take an overhead view of all the steps in all the dishes you’re making. Then break the recipes apart and weave them back together into one mega recipe. 2. Think about how you can make your movements more efficient: What can you prep in advance? Make use of inactive time: You don’t always have to do all your cleaning/prepping first. For example, get something sautéing while you chop stuff for the next step. Group together similar tasks, like vegetable prep, brining proteins, or making sauces and vinaigrettes. Think about how long each task takes—long cooking steps should start first while quick sautés should be last. And make dessert and breads in advance whenever possible. 3. Don’t ever get too set into a game plan. Mistakes happen, steps get overlooked, so always be flexible enough to adapt as you cook.

The tendency to view the diversity of forms as bothersome illusions (maya) to be transcended is a common trap in certain nondual teachings. There is often a desire to move beyond the inconvenient multiplicity of parts back to the oneness of pure awareness. However, this practice of discarding the relative in favour of the absolute only leads to further separation and more walls dividing self from Self. Rather than escaping our parts, we can become curious about their unique vantage points. This presents opportunities for connection and appreciating our shared essence. Completely discarding maya overlooks the value of this multiplicity in allowing the absolute to fully know and express itself. The parts are not obstacles to be overcome, but rather vehicles on the path—the teachers in the schoolhouse we call life. What's in the way, is the way. As Rumi's 'Guest House' poem expresses, each part has come for a reason, bringing gifts to share. Rather than rejecting these 'visitors,' we can open the door wide to welcome their presence. By listening to their wisdom with curiosity and compassion, we can deepen our understanding and connection to the whole.

To only consider Nietzschean thought for its nihilistic, pessimistic, and destructive aspect is to only understand it partially. This view misses its real motivation and its creative and spiritual side. It's true that this destructive side is essential to Nietzsche's philosophy, but it's not the complete picture. Many often overlook Nietzsche’s spiritual and creative aspects. To him, nihilism was an essential part of his philosophy, but it wasn't the end goal. Today, many people mistakenly view it as such. Nietzsche used nihilism as a tool to destroy the false ideals of Judeo-Christian beliefs. However, he also differentiated these beliefs from Christ's original teachings. His ultimate goal was the "transvaluation", or revaluation, of all values. Nietzsche’s nihilism was a necessary but transitory phase which was meant to precede his grand and veritable task of reconstruction, of creation: the Übermensch, the Superman, who embodies the advanced stage of a superior humanity which would have transcended its "human, all-too-human" nature, to reach a supra-human, post-human stage, in conformity with the Nietzschean vital principle of eternal becoming and self-overcoming.

The castle overlooking Alfama and the rest of the city is perhaps Lisbon’s most emblematic landmark, and the view it offers is staggering. As the sun sets over the Atlantic—if you sailed that way, the first land mass you would come to is North America—the electric blue sky shifts through a kaleidoscope of colours. The sun fades to apricot, followed by more delicate hues: candy-pink and lilac, before a triumphant dying blast of violet, magenta and crimson.

The question is not whether or not we have needs—needs are a fact of our existence—but rather how we relate to them. When our only perspective is a personal view of need gratification (“my needs” or “your needs” being satisfied), we tend to relate to them with a quality of grasping. Depending on our conditioning, we may overlook the reality of others’ needs or erase the importance of our own. We may narrow our primary aim to gratifying certain needs and ignoring others, which often leads to conflict and tension. When we widen our view to a more universal perspective, to appreciating needs in and of themselves, we can remain fully committed to meeting both our own and others’ needs, without being defined by the outcome. Letting go doesn’t mean that we give up on our values, stop caring, or cease working for change.10 It means that we recognize that the outcome of our efforts is not completely in our hands because in many ways we don’t control the context.

Those who protest against changes brought about since Vatican II, insinuating that the Church has abandoned its tradition, obviously take a rather shortsighted view of tradition. They have in mind only the traditions of the past 400 years or so and overlook changes that actually occurred in the Church during the centuries following the Council of Trent. More importantly, they lose sight of the 2,000-year history of growth and renewal in the Church, which is the great tradition of Catholicism

Associating with Benjamin was fraught with considerable difficulties, though on the surface these seemed insignificant in view of his consummate courtesy and willingness to listen. He always was surrounded by a wall of reserve, which could be recognized intuitively and was evident to another person even without Benjamin’s not infrequent efforts to make that area noticeable. These efforts consisted above all in a secretiveness bordering on eccentricity, a mystery-mongering that generally prevailed in everything relating to him personally, though it sometimes was breached unexpectedly by personal and confidential revelations. There were primarily three difficult requirements. The first was respect for his solitude; this was easy to observe, for it was dictated by a natural sense of limits. I soon realized that he appreciated this respect, a sine qua non for associating with him, and that it heightened his trust. The observance of the second requirement was particularly easy for me: his utter aversion to discussing the political events of the day and occurrences of the war. Some reviewers of the Briefe expressed astonishment at the fact that the published letters contain no reference to the events of the First World War (which, after all, so decisively influenced our generation) and blamed the editors (I was the one responsible for this period) for an incomprehensible omission or, worse, censorship. The fact of the matter is that in those years anyone who wished to have a closer association with Benjamin either had to share this attitude (as I did) or respect it. ...The third requirement, that of overlooking his secretiveness, often demanded a real effort, because there was something surprising, even ludicrous, about such secretiveness in someone as sober, as melancholy as Benjamin. He did not like to give the names of friends and acquaintances if he could avoid it. When circumstances of his life were mentioned, there frequently was attached an urgent request for absolute secrecy; more often than not this made very little sense. Gradually, but even then only partially, this secretiveness (which by that time others had noticed as well) began to dissipate, and Benjamin began to speak of people without the accompanying stamp of anonymity, at least when he had initiated the discussion. It was in keeping with this aversion that he tried to keep his acquaintances separate; for a time this was more effective with me, who came from another environment—Zionist youth—than it was with those from the same sphere as he, namely members of the German-Jewish intelligentsia. Only occasionally did it turn out that we had mutual acquaintances, such as the poet Ludwig Strauss or the philosopher David Baumgardt. Other friends and acquaintances of his I did not meet until years later, from 1918 on, some of them only after 1945. In short, then, to associate with Benjamin took a great deal of patience and consideration—qualities that were by no means natural to my temperament and that, to my own surprise, I was able to muster only in my association with him.

Identify Your Strengths With Strengths Finder 2.0 One tool that can help you remember your achievements is the ‘Strengths Finder’ "assessment. The father of Strengths Psychology, Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D, along with Tom Rath and a team of scientists at The Gallup Organization, created StrengthsFinder. You can take this assessment by purchasing the Strengths Finder 2.0 book. The value of SF 2.0 is that it helps you understand your unique strengths. Once you have this knowledge, you can review past activities and understand what these strengths enabled you to do. Here’s what I mean, in the paragraphs below, I’ve listed some of the strengths identified by my Strengths Finder assessment and accomplishments where these strengths were used. “You can see repercussions more clearly than others can.” In a prior role, I witnessed products being implemented in the sales system at breakneck speed. While quick implementation seemed good, I knew speed increased the likelihood of revenue impacting errors. I conducted an audit and uncovered a misconfigured product. While the customer had paid for the product, the revenue had never been recognized. As a result of my work, we were able to add another $7.2 million that went straight to the bottom line. “You automatically pinpoint trends, notice problems, or identify opportunities many people overlook.” At my former employer, leadership did not audit certain product manager decisions. On my own initiative, I instituted an auditing process. This led to the discovery that one product manager’s decisions cost the company more than $5M. “Because of your strengths, you can reconfigure factual information or data in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, or offer solutions.” In a former position, product managers were responsible for driving revenue, yet there was no revenue reporting at the product level. After researching the issue, I found a report used to process monthly journal entries which when reconfigured, provided product managers with monthly product revenue. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…increase productivity.” A few years back, I was trained by the former Operations Manager when I took on that role. After examining the tasks, I found I could reduce the time to perform the role by 66%. As a result, I was able to tell my Director I could take on some of the responsibilities of the two managers she had to let go. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…solve a problem.” About twenty years ago I worked for a division where legacy systems were being replaced by a new company-wide ERP system. When I discovered no one had budgeted for training in my department, I took it upon myself to identify how to extract the data my department needed to perform its role, documented those learnings and that became the basis for a two day training class. “Sorting through lots of information rarely intimidates you. You welcome the abundance of information. Like a detective, you sort through it and identify key pieces of evidence. Following these leads, you bring the big picture into view.” I am listing these strengths to help you see the value of taking the Strengths Finder Assessment.

Before Schopenhauer, the artist was generally seen as someone who manufactured things – things that were admittedly difficult to manufacture, and of a special order, such as concertos, sculptures and plays – but it was still a matter of manufacture. This is, of course, a legitimate point of view – and Schopenhauer would be the last person to overlook the difficulties in conceiving and executing a work of art. (People these days sometimes try to get back to this idea in order to minimize art, to make it a little more harmless, as when novelists are considered as mere story tellers, and contemporary artists chatter about their craft.) But the original point, the generating point of all creation, is fundamentally quite different; it consists in an innate (and thus not teachable) disposition for a passive and, as it were, dumbstruck contemplation of the world. The artist is always someone who might just as well do nothing but immerse himself contentedly in the world and in the vague daydream associated with it. Today, when art has become accessible to the masses and generates considerable financial flows, this has very comical consequences. Thus, the ambitious and enterprising individual with a range of social skills who nurses the ambition to have a career in art will rarely succeed; the palm will always go to pathetic blob-like folk who everyone initially thought were just losers.

It’s an unfortunate fact but in a number of ways, most social psychology textbooks present a distorted view of our species. Most notably, they focus almost entirely on interactions among strangers, and thus largely ignore the fact that kin occupy a central place in most people’s lives. This is no minor oversight. Kinship is important not only in the West or even only in our species; it’s important right across the living world. In species that live in groups composed of both kin and non-kin, individuals usually favor the former over the latter. This is just as true of our own species as of any other, and yet many psychologists and psychology textbooks overlook that fact.

On my mom’s final day of consciousness, she woke up weak and started to lose control of her speech. Later in the day, in a burst of energy, she urged us to take her to the place where she would soon be buried—a rustic forest grove overlooking fields and ocean, just three minutes from her house. We quickly drove her there and took her in a wheelchair to the natural burial site. My mom expressed amazement at the beauty of the ocean view and the trees she would soon be buried under, and we hugged as a family. She asked my dad to kneel beside her in the wheelchair and cupped his face in her hands. She looked at him and talked about how magical their life was together. On this small patch of earth with the Pacific Ocean behind them, they exchanged silent looks that expressed emotion and gratitude for each other that are impossible to fully convey in words. The awe and connection they shared as they exchanged their final embrace will forever be my definition of the meaning of life. “It’s just . . . so perfect and beautiful,” my mom burst out as she looked at her family embracing her at her final resting site. Minutes later, she lost consciousness. Two days later, surrounded by her family holding hands around her, she died. The final thirteen days I shared with my mom were the most meaningful of my life. If we had taken the advice of the medical system, they wouldn’t have happened.

Emma, we’ve got to elope—now. Tonight. That way, I’ll be able to present you to Mother as a fait accompli.” Stunned, Emma jerked her arm from his grasp. “Fulton, I’ve told you…” He laid a fingertip to her lips. “Don’t say it. I know Mother intimidates you, Emma, but once you’re my wife, she’ll accept you, I know she will.” The pain Emma felt must have been visible in her eyes when she looked up at Fulton, but if he saw it, he didn’t react. Perhaps he would listen if she approached the subject from his point of view, rather than her own. “Fulton, there’s a lot of talk about me, and—” His hands grasped her shoulders. “I don’t care, Emma,” he whispered. For the first time, she noticed that his lower lip was cut and slightly swollen. She touched the wound gently. “What happened?” Again his eyes skirted hers. “It’s nothing you need to worry about, darling,” he said. “Now, listen to me. We must get married right away!” “I can’t do that,” Emma said miserably. “I know women like a church wedding, but—” “That isn’t the reason. Fulton, I don’t love you. It would be a dreadful mistake for us to marry.” He was still holding her shoulders, and he gave her an angry little shake. “You’ll have tender feelings for me soon, Emma, I promise you. Come away with me tonight!” Emma pulled free. “I can’t.” “Is it true, then, Emma—what everybody’s saying about you and Fairfax?” The question was so direct that it startled Emma. “I guess that depends on what’s being said,” she replied sadly. Then, holding her shawl more closely around her against the evening chill, she started up the bank toward Chloe’s house. Fulton had no choice but to follow. He stopped her at the edge of the lawn, again by taking her arm. This time his hold was too tight for her to pull out of. “I don’t care if it’s all true,” he sputtered. “Do you hear me, Emma? I don’t care. I still want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything!” Emma sighed. “What are they saying?” she asked, braced for the worst. Fulton’s hand dropped from her arm and he lowered his head. “That you spent the nights in his room.” Emma’s cheeks flamed, but her chin rose to an obstinate level. “That’s a lie.” A bright smile broke over Fulton’s face. “I knew it was.” Guilt pummeled Emma like an invisible fist. “You’d want to marry me, even if I’d said the rumors were true?” Fulton nodded. “It’s no secret that I’m eager for the—solaces of marriage, Emma. I’m willing to overlook a great deal to have you.” The

Such stories ask us to remember that there are little things in the world around us that we hardly notice but which contain great beauty and strength; that we might learn by taking a closer at places we already thought we knew; that we overlook important knowledge by not asking enough questions of the land around us; that some places in the wilderness are not for us to visit; that there are always small, secret wonders hiding in nature, just out of view.

Such stories ask us to remember that there are little things in the world around us that we hardly notice but which contain great beauty and strength; that we might learn by taking a closer at places we already thought we knew; that we overlook important knowledge by not asking enough questions of the land around us; that some places in the wilderness are not for us to visit; that there are always small, secret wonders hiding in nature, just out of view.

Since I’m an outdoors type of guy, it didn’t take me long to become frustrated at seminary. I hate being cooped up in a room with no windows (it’s the same problem I currently have with the duck call shop), especially during hunting season! I actually learned how to sleep with my eyes open in some of the more boring lectures. To break up the monotony, I ended up becoming the class clown and troublemaker. I constantly argued with instructors and fellow classmates. My main point of conflict was that I felt sometimes we studied the Bible as a legal document instead of a letter from God. I’m still convinced my point of view was correct, but I did a terrible job of communicating it. In fact, I nearly started several fights with my classmates. Our classes lasted from eight o’clock in the morning to four o’clock in the afternoon, five days a week. During duck season, I got up very early to hunt before going to class, and then I went back to the blind as soon as classes were over. By the end of the school day, I was itching to get out of there! Well, one day this guy asked a question at four P.M. Then he asked a follow-up question after the bell rang. “Hey, why don’t you shut up?” I told him. Well, three guys met me in the parking lot after school. They were trying to rebuke me in a godly way for being rude. I responded with a misuse of Galatians 2:9: “How about I give you my right hand of fellowship?” Fortunately, they overlooked my anger, we resolved our differences in a Christian manner, and there were no fisticuffs.

Next Day Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical Food-gathering flocks Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James, Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise If that is wisdom. Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves And the boy takes it to my station wagon, What I’ve become Troubles me even if I shut my eyes. When I was young and miserable and pretty And poor, I’d wish What all girls wish: to have a husband, A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish Is womanish: That the boy putting groceries in my car See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me. For so many years I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me, The eyes of strangers! And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile Imaginings within my imagining, I too have taken The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog And we start home. Now I am good. The last mistaken, Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm Some soap and water-- It was so long ago, back in some Gay Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss My lovely daughter Away at school, my sons away at school, My husband away at work--I wish for them. The dog, the maid, And I go through the sure unvarying days At home in them. As I look at my life, I am afraid Only that it will change, as I am changing: I am afraid, this morning, of my face. It looks at me From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate, The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look Of gray discovery Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old. And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral I went to yesterday. My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers, Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body Were my face and body. As I think of her I hear her telling me How young I seem; I am exceptional; I think of all I have. But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I’m anybody, I stand beside my grave Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

Green will typically look at history, for example, and whenever it finds a society in which there is a widespread lack of green values, it assumes that these green values would normally and naturally be present were it not for the fact that they have been maliciously oppressed by the dominator hierarchies found in that society. All individuals would possess worldcentric green values of pluralism, radical egalitarianism, and total equality, except for the oppressive controlling powers that crushed those values wherever they appeared. […] The existence of strong and widespread oppressive forces cannot be doubted. The problem comes in the claim to know what their source and cause is. For green postmodernism, the cause of the lack of worldcentric green values in any culture is due to an aggressive and intensively active repressive and oppressive force (usually the male sex; or a particular race— white in most parts of the world, coupled with a rampant colonialism— and/or due to a particular creed—usually religious fundamentalism of one sort or another; or various prejudices—against gays, against women, against whatever minority that is oppressed). In short, lack of green values (egalitarian, group freedom, gender equality, human care and sensitivity) is due to a presence of oppression. […] The major problem with that view taken by itself is that it completely overlooks the central role of growth, development, and evolution. We’ve already seen that human moral identity grows and develops from egocentric (red) to ethnocentric (amber) to worldcentric (orange then green) to integral (turquoise; and this is true individually as well as collectively/historically). Thus, the main reason that slavery was present, say, 2000 years ago, is not because there was an oppressive force preventing worldcentric freedom, but that a worldcentric notion of freedom had not even emerged yet anywhere on the planet. It wasn’t present and then oppressed, as green imagines, it simply had not yet emerged in the first place—there was nothing to oppress. This is why, as only one example, all of the world’s great religions, who otherwise teach love and compassion and treating all beings kindly, nonetheless—precisely because they were created during the great ethnocentric Mythic Age of traditional civilization —had no extensive and widespread conception of the fundamental worldcentric freedom of human beings—or the belief that all humans, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed, were born equal—and thus not one of them strenuously objected to the fact that a very large portion of their own population were slaves. Athens and Greek society, vaunted home of democracy, had 1 out of 3 of their people who were slaves—and no major complaint on a culture-wide scale. Nor was there a widespread culturally effective complaint from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism et al. It wasn’t until the emergence of the worldcentric Age of Reason that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” actually came into existence—emerged evolutionarily—and thus started to be believed by the average and typical member of that culture.

There is no word to describe exactly what the High Line is to the non-architects among us, nor the collective reframing process required to see beyond its dingy path. 24 The promenade’s landscaping and minimal architectural interference is meant to find a balance between “melancholia and exuberance,” Diller told me. “Whatever that intermediate thing is, it’s ineffable and is kind of what makes the High Line so popular.” “Part of what is so successful about the High Line is that it looks like it’s about nothing,” Diller said. Everything is prohibited on the promenade but the act of moving forward or stopping to look at the vistas from that vantage point. A dedicated place for strolling, where there are no dogs, no bicycles, or wheeled objects of any kind, it is “radically old fashioned,” designed to let us do what we ordinarily don’t, like taking time to linger and gaze at passing traffic. There is even a “sunken overlook” viewing station with movie-theater-style rows of descending seats and a window instead of a screen to see Tenth Avenue’s traffic instead of a featured film. Looking at the path beneath our feet and the view before us are the High Line’s activities. The High Line’s path will extend up the island in nearly interminable stages, “perpetually unfinished.” 25 As if to underscore it, on the west-facing side of the High Line, with views of the skyline and the Hudson River, sculptor Anatsui erected a monumental mural, Broken Bridge II, a three-dimensional painting the size of a city block made of flattened, dull-finish tin and mirrors with expert placement and hours of scaling. The vista in its upper reaches blends sky and land “in such a way that you do not know where mirrors end and sky begins.” 26 Anatsui, known for his radiant, monumental murals with a unique luster, fashioned as they are out of recycled metal bottle caps from his studio in Nigeria, starts his work from an approximate center with exquisite discards. He then builds outward, unscrolling the once-scattered shards so that they shine in their new form, as if they could unfurl to the full extent of vision.

In fact, contemporary systematic theology frequently generates dissertations on, say, John Owen’s view of the atonement (which properly belongs to historical theology) or perichoresis and personhood in the Trinity (which largely turns on philosophical theology), with relatively little work devoted to the kind of constructive, normative theology that builds a case, starting from the Bible, of what Christians ought to believe. Moreover, systematicians are sometimes at least as disdainful of rigorous exegesis as biblical scholars are of systematic theology.

The Caribbean is still an exciting destination. I have been to just about every notable island surrounding this sea and have yet to be bored. Some of the islands are administered by other countries like Saint Martín; some are independent countries such as Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The languages differ from island to island and include English, French, Spanish, Dutch Haitian Creole and Papiamento although English is understood on most islands. This time I returned to the Dominican Republic, an island nation that I first visited when Santo Domingo was called Ciudad Trujillo in 1955 and have returned numerous times. I have also been to Haiti the country that shares the Island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and I have stood at the mountainous border dividing the two countries. Driving around the country offers magnificent views with every turn in the road. On this visit I enjoyed the northern Atlantic coast named the Amber Coast because of the amount of amber found there. The primary site along the northern coast is La Cordillera Septentrional. The amber-bearing stones named clastic rocks are usually washed down the steep inclines along with sandstone and other debris and are even found in deep water at the end of the run. The Amber Coast of the Dominican Republic has mostly low mountains and beautiful beaches. Overlooking the city of Puerto Plata is Mount Isabel de Torres, which is covered by dense jungles but can be ascended by a cableway. Some of these jungle areas were used as sites for the movie Jurassic Park. A new 30 acre tourist port for Carnival Cruise Lines has been constructed in Amber Cove at a cost of $85 Million. It is one of the newest destinations to visit in the Caribbean and well worth the effort.

I stood on a rise, overlooking the plague valley. Matthew was beside me. The last thing I remembered was crawling into my sleeping bag after the whiskey had hit me like a two-by-four to the face. Now my friend was here with me. “I’ve missed you. Are you feeling better?” How much was this vision taking out of him? “Better.” He didn’t appear as pale. He wore a heavy coat, open over a space camp T-shirt. “I’m so relieved to hear that, sweetheart. Why would you bring us here?” “Power is your burden.” I surveyed all the bodies. “I felt the weight of it when I killed these people.” “Obstacles multiply.” “Which ones?” A breeze soughed over the valley. “Bagmen, slavers, militia, or cannibals?” He held up the fingers of one hand. “There are now five. The miners watch us. Plotting.” “But miners are the same as cannibals, right?” He shuffled his boots with irritation. “Miners, Empress.” “Okay, okay.” I rubbed his arm. “Are you and Finn being safe?” His brows drew together as he gazed out. “Smite and fall, mad and struck.” I looked with him, like we were viewing a sunset, a beautiful vista. Not plague and death. “You’ve told me those words before.” “So much for you to learn, Empress. Beware the inactivated card.” One Arcana’s powers lay dormant—until he or she killed another player. “Who is it?” “Don’t ask, if you ever want to know.” Naturally, I started to ask, but he cut me off. “Do you believe I see far?” He peered down at me. “Do you believe I see an unbroken line that stretches on through eternity? Centuries ago, I told an Empress that a future incarnation of hers would live in a world of ash where nothing grew. She never believed me.” I could imagine Phyta or the May Queen surveying verdant fields and crops, doubting the Fool. “Now I tell you that dark days are ahead. Will you believe me?” “I will. I do. Please tell me what will happen. How dark?” “Darkest. Power is your burden; knowing is mine.” His expression turned pleading, his soft brown eyes imploring. “Never hate me.” I raised my hands, cradling his face. “Even when I was so mad at you, I never hated you.” “Remember. Matthew knows best.” He sounded like his mom—when she’d tried to drown him: Mother knows best, son. I dropped my hands. “It scares me when you say that.” “Do you know what you really want? I see it. I feel it. Think, Empress. See far.” I was trying! “Help me, then. I’m ready. Help me see far!” “All is not as it seems. What would you sacrifice? What would you endure?” “To end the game?” His voice grew thick as he said, “Things will happen beyond your wildest imaginings.” “Good things?” His eyes watered. “Good, bad, good, bad, good, good, bad, bad, good-bye. You are my friend.

[O]ne could assume an incompatibility, at one and the same level of reference, between two philosophical propositions, both of which cannot be true in accordance with the principle of contradiction. Alternatively, one might perhaps suppose a complementarity - perhaps even an incommensurability - between two doctrines that relate to different levels of reference or discourse, and which are accordingly not mutually exclusive or contradictory."`- In fact, this is precisely one of the major points in Dolpopa's original presentation of self-emptiness and other-emptiness that was often overlooked by later proponents of other-emptiness as well as their opponents. Despite the claims of his opponents, Dolpopa's use of this distinction is epistemological in nature and not ontological or reifying. In his main work, A Mountain Dharma, The Ocean of Definitive Meaning,'`" he himself makes a clear distinction between a "philosophical system" (Skt. siddhanta, Tib. grub mtha') based on certain explanations and arguments and a "point of view" in the sense of an outlook (Skt. darsana, Tib. Ita ba). For him, the latter is understood in the broad sense of including what is directly experienced in meditative equipoise. This is what he calls "Great Madhyamaka" and "other-emptiness," the outlook of noble beings who see how things really are. As such, it is clearly contrasted with Madhyamaka as a mere philosophical system. 'T'hus, on these two levels, the entire perspective of mind and, consequently, the way of discourse are quite different.

With the imposition of chastity, women become unchaste under the pressure of their sexual demands; the sexual brutality on the part of the male, and the corresponding conception on the part of the female that for her the sexual act is something disgraceful, takes the place of natural orgastic sensuousness. Extramarital sexual intercourse, to be sure, is not done away with anywhere. With the shifting of the valuation and the abolition of the institutions that previously protected and sanctioned it in a matriarchal society, it becomes involved in a conflict with official morality and is forced to lead a clandestine existence. The change in the social attitude toward sexual intercourse also effects a change in the inner experience of sexuality. The conflict that is now created between the natural and "sublime morality" disturbs the individual's ability to gratify his needs. The feeling of guilt now associated with sexuality cleaves the natural, orgastic course of sexual coalescence and produces a damming up of sexual energy, which later breaks out in various ways. Neuroses, sexual aberrations, and antisocial sexuality become permanent social phenomena. Childhood and adolescent sexuality, which were given a positive value in the original matriarchal work-democracy, fall prey to systematic suppression, which differs only in form. As time goes on, this sexuality, which is distorted, disturbed, brutalized, and prostituted, advocates the very ideology to which it owes its origin. Those who negate sexuality can now justifiably point to it as something brutal and dirty. That this dirty sexuality is not natural sexuality but merely patriarchal sexuality is simply overlooked. And the sexology of latter-day capitalistic patriarchy is no less affected by this evaluation than the vulgar views. This condemns it to complete sterility.

From a distance, even the most violent events in nature can seem innocuous and easily overlooked. Thousands of feet above the Earth, viewed from tiny cabin windows, even the mightiest river – all that tumultuous and chaotic force – becomes just another blue scratch on the land below. The collapse of a star, an explosion a billion miles wide, wreaking havoc on an entire galaxy, becomes just a pin prick of light in the night sky. Had a casual observer been scanning that same night sky on the morning it began the falling object would most likely have been overlooked. From a distance, the tiny object made its way serenely and