Pain That Cannot Be Explained Quotes

Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a "right" to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals' pain in our hearts.

Teccam explains there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. There secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. They they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

Oh God just look at me now... one night opens words and utters pain... I cannot begin to explain to you... this... I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn't it? I am a ghost. I am not here, not really. You see skin and cuts and frailty...these are symptoms, you known, of a ghost. An unclear image with unclear thoughts whispering vague things... If I told you what was really in my head, you''d never let me leave this place. And I have no desire to spend time in hell while I'm still, in theory, alive.

Many animals experience pain, anxiety and suffering, physically and psychologically, when they are held in captivity or subjected to starvation, social isolation, physical restraint, or painful situations from which they cannot escape. Even if it is not the same experience of pain, anxiety, or suffering undergone by humans- or even other animals, including members of the same species- an individual's pain, suffering, and anxiety matter.

I cannot really play. Either at piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweep us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Dispair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?

I know what it's like to be in pain and not be able to explain why. I know why you're not with James tonight. Because when we are in pain, we are flayed open, and when we are flayed open, we cannot hide our true selves. And you cannot bear for him to know that you love him.

The most beautiful and painful experiences can only be felt,they cannot be expressed or explained.

Love is a connection with another person, either through birth or through something else that I cannot even explain. It is often just an attraction at first. But it goes far deeper than that. It is a determination to care for the other person no matter what and to allow oneself to be cared for in return. It is a commitment to make the other happy and to be happy oneself. It is not possessive, but neither is it a victim. And it does not always bring happiness. Often it brings a great deal of pain, especially when the beloved is suffering and one feels impotent to comfort. It is what life is all about. It is openness and trust and vulnerability.

Pain and evil confront us as a surd. Suffering, our own and that of others, is an experience through which we have to live, not a theoretical problem that we can explain away. If there is an explanation, it is on a level deeper than words. Suffering cannot be “justified”; but it can be used, accepted—and, through this acceptance, transfigured. “The paradox of suffering and evil”, says Nicolas Berdyaev, “is resolved in the experience of compassion and love.”31

If I've learned anything in my life, it's that there is no darkness so absolute that it cannot be dispelled by the faintest of light," she explained. His face softened as his eyes touched her, and his boot slid forward. "My sweet Fairy." He exhaled on a painful breath. "You can't imagine darkness. You are the only light I've ever known." His tender words didn't match his pitiless features, but Farah still found hope. "You must believe that my light is more powerful than your darkness. And so let me touch you, instead. And everywhere that my fingers touch your flesh, they will clear away the blood and filth that you see, and will leave behind the light I've always wanted to give to you.

Our stomach sits much higher in our abdomen than we think. It begins just below the left nipple and ends below the bottom of the ribcage on the right. Any pain felt farther down than this lopsided little pouch cannot be stomachache. Often, when people say they have stomach problems, the trouble is actually in the gut. The heart and the lungs sit on top of the stomach. This explains why we find it more difficult to breathe deeply after eating a lot.

In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned [...] with what the ordinary man understands by his religion, that system of doctrines and pledges that on the one hand explains the riddle of this world to him with an enviable completeness, and on the other assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a future existence for any shortcomings in this life. The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other from but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

I love her with all my soul. Why, she is a child! She's a child now — a real child. Oh! you know nothing about it at all, I see." "And are you assured, at the same time, that you love Aglaya too?" "Yes — yes — oh; yes!" "How so? Do you want to make out that you love them BOTH?" "Yes — yes — both! I do!" "Excuse me, prince, but think what you are saying! Recollect yourself!" "Without Aglaya — I — I MUST see Aglaya! — I shall die in my sleep very soon — I thought I was dying in my sleep last night. Oh! if Aglaya only knew all — I mean really, REALLY all! Because she must know ALL — that's the first condition towards understanding. Why cannot we ever know all about another, especially when that other has been guilty? But I don't know what I'm talking about — I'm so confused. You pained me so dreadfully. Surely — surely Aglaya has not the same expression now as she had at the moment when she ran away? Oh, yes! I am guilty and I know it — I know it! Probably I am in fault all round — I don't quite know how — but I am in fault, no doubt. There is something else, but I cannot explain it to you, Evgenie Pavlovitch. I have no words; but Aglaya will understand. I have always believed Aglaya will understand — I am assured she will." "No, prince, she will not. Aglaya loved like a woman, like a human being, not like an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince? The most probable explanation of the matter is that you never loved either the one or the other in reality.

As a physician, I was trained to deal with uncertainty as aggressively as I dealt with disease itself. The unknown was the enemy. Within this worldview, having a question feels like an emergency; it means that something is out of control and needs to be made known as rapidly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible. But death has taken me to the edge of certainty, to the place of questions. After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. "I don't know" had long been a statement of shame, of personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once. But as I listened to more and more people with life-threatening illnesses tell their stories, not knowing simply became a matter of integrity. Things happened. And the explanations I offered myself became increasingly hollow, like a child whistling in the dark. The truth was that very often I didn't know and couldn't explain, and finally, weighed down by the many, many instances of the mysterious which are such an integral part of illness and healing, I surrendered. It was a moment of awakening. For the first time, I became curious about the things I had been unwilling to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies I had glibly explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions and draw them out about stories I would have otherwise dismissed. What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy. I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us. Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times that were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder. After twenty years of working with people with cancer, I find it possible to neither doubt nor accept the unprovable but simply to remain open and wait. I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don't seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places, life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For optimists, this fact plays no part in their existential computations. For pessimists, however, it is axiomatic. Whether a pessimist urges us to live “heroically” with a knife in our gut or denounces life as not worth living is immaterial. What matters is that he makes no bones about hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy to observe. But this problem can be solved only by establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that would enable us in principle to say which is more desirable—existence or nonexistence. While no airtight case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of human life, pessimists still run themselves ragged trying to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When they do argue for the desirability of human life it is only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even though no airtight case has ever been made regarding that desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.” His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Words cannot explain the bruise that festers into a river that runs deep filled with pain n sorrows which only the visible can cure

There is something in me I cannot quite explain - it is like peace infected with the sweetest pain.

What I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal's deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted one me.

I am not myself. As you know, better than anyone. You have seen how I am, these last months. I don’t know how to explain it, it is beyond any words that I have to describe. But it is as if there is a tempest in my mind, and I cannot see through the murk of it. I cannot think clearly—indeed, much of the time I cannot think at all. There is only a weight in my heart, a formless dread that shapes itself into pain. And then a greater dread of more pain

When I asked the Reb, Why do bad things happen to good people?, he gave none of the standard answers. He quietly said, “No one knows.” I admired that. But when I asked if that ever shook his belief in God, he was firm. “I cannot waver,” he said. Well, you could, if you didn’t believe in something all-powerful. “An atheist,” he said. Yes. “And then I could explain why my prayers were not answered.” Right. He studied me carefully. He drew in his breath. “I had a doctor once who was an atheist. Did I ever tell you about him?” No. “This doctor, he liked to jab me and my beliefs. He used to schedule my appointments deliberately on Saturdays, so I would have to call the receptionist and explain why, because of my religion, that wouldn’t work.” Nice guy, I said. “Anyhow, one day, I read in the paper that his brother had died. So I made a condolence call.” After the way he treated you? “In this job,” the Reb said, “you don’t retaliate.” I laughed. “So I go to his house, and he sees me. I can tell he is upset. I tell him I am sorry for his loss. And he says, with an angry face, ‘I envy you.’ “‘Why do you envy me?’ I said. “‘Because when you lose someone you love, you can curse God. You can yell. You can blame him. You can demand to know why. But I don’t believe in God. I’m a doctor! And I couldn’t help my brother!’ “He was near tears. ‘Who do I blame?’ he kept asking me. ‘There is no God. I can only blame myself.’” The Reb’s face tightened, as if in pain. “That,” he said, softly, “is a terrible self-indictment.” Worse than an unanswered prayer? “Oh yes. It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody’s out there.

Dr. Brené Brown’s research has shown that expressing one’s most vulnerable feelings is a sign of strength and facilitates health. She explains, “We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

the most precious beings to her, and so is June. She likes to imagine a place, a safe place, where she can live one day with June and the children. June is older, wiser. She knows. She knows that two women cannot live together like a couple and be treated normally. This may occur in New York, perhaps, but not in Paris. Not in 1973. Certainly not in the kind of society the Rey family live in. She tries to explain this to Clarisse. She says they need to wait, to take their time, that things can happen quietly, slowly, with less difficulty. But Clarisse is younger and more impatient. She doesn’t want to wait. She doesn’t want to take her time.” The pain is setting in at last, like a familiar, dangerous friend you let in with apprehension. My chest feels constricted, too small to contain my lungs. I stop and take a couple of deep breaths. Angèle comes to stand behind me. Her warm body presses against mine. It gives me the strength to carry on. “That Christmas is a dreadful one for Clarisse. Never has she felt lonelier. She misses June desperately. June has her busy, active life in New York, her gallery, her society, her friends, her artists. Clarisse has only her children. She has no friends apart from Gaspard, the son of her mother-in-law’s maid. Can she trust him? What

I can't believe he's going to make me give him the speech. I am livid that he's going to make me give him the speech. I do it, piecing it together from times I've seen it done on TV and in movies. I tell him that there are many people who love him and would be crushed if he were to kill himself, while wondering, distantly, if that is the truth. I tell him that he has so much potential, that he has so many things to do, while most of me believes that he will never put his body and brain to much use at all. I tell him that we all have dark periods, while becoming ever more angry at him, the theatrics, the self-pity, all this, when he has everything. He has a complete sort of freedom, with no parents and no dependents, with money and no immediate threats of pain or calamity. He is the 99.9th percentile, as I am. He has no real obligations, can go anywhere at any moment, sleep anywhere, move at will, and still he is wasting everyone's time with this. But I hold that back--I will save that for later--and instead say nothing but the most rapturous and positive things. And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car.

Grief is a winding, nasty road that has no predictable course, and the best thing you can do as a friend is to show up for the ride. You cannot rush grief. Read that again, and let it soak in as you either walk through it or alongside someone who is in the midst of it. One of the best things you can do for friends who are suffering through loss is to remind them of this over and over. Don’t mention how other people have “coped so well” with their losses or how “it seems like so-and-so has come out of this better than you have.” I have heard from people who have heard these exact sentences, and while I have a feeling their friends wanted to encourage them into a place of recovery, they weren’t helped by such remarks. It stings to feel like your grief isn’t normal or that you aren’t recovering the way you should be. There is no normal. There is the loss, and there is the Lord. That balance dictates the season, not the changing leaves or the anniversaries of death. I love the way Gregory Floyd explains the delicate balance of hope and pain, “Our faith gives us the sure hope of seeing him again, but the hope does not take away the pain.”1

As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.) It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

The dawn! The dawn, I repeated. Henry thought it was the dawn itself which was a new experience. I could not explain what I felt. It was the first time I had not felt the compulsion to escape; it was the first time I had abandoned myself to fraternity, exchange, confessions, without feeling suddenly the need to take flight. All night I had stayed there, without experiencing that abrupt end to fusion, that sudden and painful consciousness of separation, of reaching ultimately and always the need of my own world, the inability to remain outside, estranged, at some moment or other, from everyone. This had not happened, this dawn had come as the first break in the compulsion and tyranny of inadaptation. (The way I once concealed from myself this drama of perpetual divorce was to blame the clock. It was time to go, in place of now I must go, because relationship is so difficult for me, so strained, so laborious, its continuance, its flow.) I never knew what happened. At a party, at a visit, at a play, a film, came a moment of anguish. I cannot sustain the role, the pretense that I am at one with others, synchronized. Where was the exit? Flight. The imperative need of flight. Was it the failure to remove the obstacles, the walls, the barriers, the effort? Dawn had come quietly, and found me sitting at ease with Henry and Fred, and it was the dawn of freedom from a nameless enemy.

THE THEOPHANY, TECCAM writes of secrets, calling them painful treasures of the mind. He explains that what most people think of as secrets are really nothing of the sort. Mysteries, for example, are not secrets. Neither are little-known facts or forgotten truths. A secret, Teccam explains, is true knowledge actively concealed. Philosophers have quibbled over his definition for centuries. They point out the logical problems with it, the loopholes, the exceptions. But in all this time none of them has managed to come up with a better definition. That, perhaps, tells us more than all the quibbling combined. In a later chapter, less argued over and less well-known, Teccam explains that there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them. Modern philosophers scorn Teccam, but they are vultures picking at the bones of a giant. Quibble all you like, Teccam understood the shape of the world.

But the reality is that it is impossible to explain, to verbalize, to articulate the fear that they instill in you. The people who judge, the people who criticize, who don’t get it—you have to understand, they’re coming at the situation from a position of safety, of security, of self-esteem. You cannot imagine, when you’re well and safe and contented, that you could ever feel otherwise. When you’re in it... it’s like a vortex, a dark, whirling whirlpool that swallows up everything that you ever thought was you, your thoughts, your values, your beliefs, and leaves you with an empty, shattered shell. And that shell, you realize painfully, gradually, is you.

My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less that men are ennobled on account of their virtue, that priests are advanced for their piety or learning, soldiers for their conduct or valor, judges for their integrity, senators for the love of their country, or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself, continued the king, who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

It is precisely in that relationship to the Reader that you will find most of the classic faults of style: pretension, condescension, servility, obscurantism, grandiosity, vulgarity, and the like--even academicism. That's why most faults of style can be described in language relevant to human relations. Is your style frank and open...does it have some understated agenda...is it out to prove something it does not or cannot admit...is it trying to impress...show off...is it kissing up...groveling...maybe just a tad passive-aggressive, with a mumbling half-audible voice that is unwilling to explain...is it trying to convince...overwhelm...help...seduce...give pleasure...inflict pain...There is no area of the writer's work that is more responsive to the psychology of human connection than style.

The dream of a society ruled by loving kindness, reason and justice is a dream as old as civilized man. Does it have to be an impossible dream? Karl Popper, explaining his abiding optimism in so troubled a world as ours, said that the darkness had always been there but the light was new. Because it is new it has to be tended with care and diligence. It is true that even the smallest light cannot be extinguished by all the darkness in the world because darkness is wholly negative. It is merely an absence of light. But a small light cannot dispel acres of encircling gloom. It needs to grow stronger, to shed its brightness further and further. And people need to accustom their eyes to the light to see it as a benediction rather than a pain, to learn to love it. We are so much in need of a brighter world which will offer adequate refuge to all its inhabitants. Notes

Teccam explains that there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

Historically, holism had been a break from the reductionist methods of science. Holism (...) is a way of viewing the universe as a web of interactions and relationships. Whole systems (and the universe can be seen as an overarching system of systems) have properties beyond those of their parts. All things are, in some sense, alive, or a part of a living system; the real world of mind and matter, body and consciousness, cannot be understood by reducing it to pieces and parts. 'Matter is mind' – this is perhaps the holists' quintessential belief. The founding theories of holism had tried to explain how mind emerges from the material universe, how the consciousness of all things is interconnected. The first science, of course, had failed utterly to do this. The first science had resigned human beings to acting as objective observers of a mechanistic and meaningless universe. A dead universe. The human mind, according to the determinists, was merely the by-product of brain chemistry. Chemical laws, the way the elements combine and interact, were formulated as complete and immutable truths. The elements themselves were seen as indivisible lumps of matter, devoid of consciousness, untouched and unaffected by the very consciousnesses seeking to understand how living minds can be assembled from dead matter. The logical conclusion of these assumptions and conceptions was that people are like chemical robots possessing no free will. No wonder the human race, during the Holocaust Century, had fallen into insanity and despair. Holism had been an attempt to restore life to this universe and to reconnect human beings with it. To heal the split between self and other. (...) Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. It has been formalized and canonized, and taught to the swarms of humanity searching for a fundamental unity. Only, human beings have learned it as a theory and a doctrine, not as an experience. A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger, and snowworms roasting over a fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child) to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across the light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each haemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone. It was partly the fault of holism that a whole civilization had suffered the abandonment of its finest senses, ten thousand trillion islands of consciousness born into the pain and promise of neverness, awaiting death with glassy eyes and murmured abstractions upon their lips, always fearing life, always longing for a deeper and truer experience of living.

who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. “The fanatical atheists,” he explained in a letter, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’—cannot hear the music of the spheres.”13 Einstein would later engage in an exchange on this topic with a U.S. Navy ensign he had never met. Was it true, the sailor asked, that Einstein had been converted by a Jesuit priest into believing in God? That was absurd, Einstein replied. He went on to say that he considered the belief in a God who was a fatherlike figure to be the result of “childish analogies.” Would Einstein permit him, the sailor asked, to quote his reply in his debates against his more religious shipmates? Einstein warned him not to oversimplify. “You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth,” he explained. “I prefer the attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

For what is worth: Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic person, capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. „Such a person, working alone“, he says, „is invariably ignored as a lunatic.“ The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas, and who testifies that the first specialist is far from mad. „A person like that working alone“, he says, „can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be“. The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pig-headed they may be. „He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,“ says Slazinger. „Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of vulnerability. From the Latin word vulnerare, “to wound,” vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; “if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” Intuitively, we all know that it’s better to feel than not to feel. Beyond their energizing subjective charge, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful and meaningful. When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness described above. The wondrous power of a drug is to offer the addict protection from pain while at the same time enabling her to engage the world with excitement and meaning. “It’s not that my senses are dulled — no, they open, expanded,” explained a young woman whose substances of choice are cocaine and marijuana. “But the anxiety is removed, and the nagging guilt and — yeah!” The drug restores to the addict the childhood vivacity she suppressed long ago.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior.

In families in which parents are overbearing, rigid, and strict, children grow up with fear and anxiety. The threat of guilt, punishment, the withdrawal of love and approval, and, in some cases, abandonment, force children to suppress their own needs to try things out and to make their own mistakes. Instead, they are left with constant doubts about themselves, insecurities, and unwillingness to trust their own feelings. They feel they have no choice and as we have shown, for many, they incorporate the standards and values of their parents and become little parental copies. They follow the prescribed behavior suppressing their individuality and their own creative potentials. After all, criticism is the enemy of creativity. It is a long, hard road away from such repressive and repetitive behavior. The problem is that many of us obtain more gains out of main- taining the status quo than out of changing. We know, we feel, we want to change. We don’t like the way things are, but the prospect of upsetting the stable and the familiar is too frightening. We ob- tain “secondary gains” to our pain and we cannot risk giving them up. I am reminded of a conference I attended on hypnosis. An el- derly couple was presented. The woman walked with a walker and her husband of many years held her arm as she walked. There was nothing physically wrong with her legs or her body to explain her in- ability to walk. The teacher, an experienced expert in psychiatry and hypnosis, attempted to hypnotize her. She entered a trance state and he offered his suggestions that she would be able to walk. But to no avail. When she emerged from the trance, she still could not, would not, walk. The explanation was that there were too many gains to be had by having her husband cater to her, take care of her, do her bidding. Many people use infirmities to perpetuate relationships even at the expense of freedom and autonomy. Satisfactions are derived by being limited and crippled physically or psychologically. This is often one of the greatest deterrents to progress in psychotherapy. It is unconscious, but more gratification is derived by perpetuating this state of affairs than by giving them up. Beatrice, for all of her unhappiness, was fearful of relinquishing her place in the family. She felt needed, and she felt threatened by the thought of achieving anything 30 The Self-Sabotage Cycle that would have contributed to a greater sense of independence and self. The risks were too great, the loss of the known and familiar was too frightening. Residing in all of us is a child who wants to experiment with the new and the different, a child who has a healthy curiosity about the world around him, who wants to learn and to create. In all of us are needs for security, certainty, and stability. Ideally, there develops a balance between the two types of needs. The base of security is present and serves as a foundation which allows the exploration of new ideas and new learning and experimenting. But all too often, the security and dependency needs outweigh the freedom to explore and we stifle, even snuff out, the creative urges, the fantasy, the child in us. We seek the sources that fill our dependency and security needs at the expense of the curious, imaginative child. There are those who take too many risks, who take too many chances and lose, to the detriment of all concerned. But there are others who are risk-averse and do little with their talents and abilities for fear of having to change their view of themselves as being the child, the dependent one, the protected one. Autonomy, independence, success are scary because they mean we can no longer justify our needs to be protected. Success to these people does not breed success. Suc- cess breeds more work, more dependence, more reason to give up the rationales for moving on, away from, and exploring the new and the different.

But nature has protected the lower animal by endowing them with instincts. An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction. It is very simple. Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neuro-chemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else. But look at man, the impossible creature! Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience. Not only in front of his nose, in his umwelt, but in many umwelten. He can relate not only to animals in his own species, but in some ways to all other species. He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden that man bears, the experiential burden. As we saw in the last chapter, man can't even take his own body for granted as can other animals. It is not just hind feet, a tail that he drags, that are just "there," limbs to be used and taken for granted or chewed off when caught in a trap and when they give pain and prevent movement. Man's body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Man's very insides-his self-are foreign to him. He doesn't know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange. Each thing is a problem, and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, "It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods." There it is again: gods with anuses.

This does not mean that God never heals in miraculous ways; I am certain that at times He does. But there are also many times when He does not. We cannot understand why some people appear to glide effortlessly through life, while others always seem to be in the throes of pain and sorrow. We cannot explain why some withered bodies are healed, while others suffer and die. We cannot know why some prayers are answered the way we hoped they would be, while others seemingly go unanswered. We cannot pretend that life in Christ will always guarantee us victory and material success as defined by human standards. On the other hand, when we tell only the stories of victory, we tell just a part of the truth. When we imply that the Christian faith involves no yoke and no burden, we tell less than the whole truth. Half-truths and easy answers are the weapons of deceit. Sometimes God brings healing, either through modern medicine or through miraculous means. But sometimes He doesn’t—and His way is always best, because He loves us and knows what is best for us. Never forget: for the Christian, this life is not all, nor should our physical well-being be our life’s highest goal. Christ is our life, and someday we will go to be with Him for all eternity.

My God!” Sophia sat back, her eyes wide with horror. “It’s a drug! He’s drugging her and she doesn’t even know it.” Here we go. “It’s common knowledge that we’re genetic traders—the fact that we have more than one means to attract a mate of an entirely different species should come as no surprise,” he pointed out. “You…you cold blooded bastard.” Sophia shook her head. “Poor Liv—she has no idea what he’s doing to her.” “It wouldn’t matter even if she did,” Sylvan explained patiently, ignoring her insults. “The mating scent is too strong to fight, even with advanced warning. Stronger species than yours have tried and they have all failed. With very few exceptions.” He closed his eyes briefly thinking of Feenah, of her pure white hair and pale crystal eyes. I’m sorry, Sylvan… “It’s not right. You’re not fighting fair.” Sophia’s words pushed back the painful memory and Sylvan opened his eyes again to see the look of despair and anger on her lovely face. She looked almost on the brink of tears. Wonderful—she was even more upset and irrational than he had thought she would be. He supposed he ought to feel irritated. Instead, the illogical urge to hold and comfort her came over him so strongly that he had to sit back and cross his arms over his chest to keep from reaching for her. “I believe you humans have a saying that covers this—‘All’s fair in love and war.’ Is that right?” he said softly. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean—” Sylvan leaned forward again and took her soft, small hands between his own larger ones. “You must understand, Sophia—Baird isn’t trying to trick your sister into anything. He’s simply using every power at his disposal to keep her. Because he needs her—he loves her. She is the only woman in the entire universe for him and the bond that will form between them will be one of undying love and devotion.” “Maybe for him.” She looked down as though mesmerized by the sight of her own small hands being engulfed in his much larger ones. “But not for Liv. He’s going to trick her into having bonding sex with him —whatever that is—and then she’ll spend the rest of her life hating him once she finds out how he did it.” She looked up at Sylvan. “You don’t know her like I do—she hates being lied to. Her last boyfriend cheated on her and then lied about it and she dumped him and never looked back. If she knew what Baird was doing to her…” “It’s not as though it’s a conscious choice on his part,” Sylvan tried to explain. “It’s the way our bodies react chemically to our chosen mates. We can’t turn it off, even if we try. Sometimes it comes even when it’s not wanted. We have a saying for it—‘The blood knows what the mind does not wish to see.’” Lifting a hand, he cupped her cheek and brushed away the single tear that had escaped her wide green eyes with his thumb. “It cannot be helped.” Sophia

In simple presence with what is right here now, be it joyful or painful, an amazing freedom reveals itself. It cannot be described or explained in words. It is the freedom to be totally, effortlessly the way things are at this moment. ‌—‌Toni Packer

Who can explain the difference between something chosen by the mind and something decided by the heart? Words are not kelp string. They cannot bind pain into neat packs to be stored away like food in a cache.

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

Loving you Loving you like creating my own destiny Because it just drives me crazy it feels like a symphony You see my love for you is like an ocean It matches swiftly with my heartbeat as it glides through the motion Loving you is like a burning desire That's because there's really nothing else I want but it is actually your love that I most certainly require That's because you came into my life and took my sorrows away This is why I will always love,care, cherish and need every single day in every step of the way Loving you is like something I just cannot explain But one thing I know for sure is being left by you would leave my heart torn apart with such imense pain You see loving you was not just a choice I had take nor a decision I had make but a wonderful journey which was worth the date

Loving you Loving you like creating my own destiny Because it just drives me crazy it feels like a symphony You see my love for you is like an ocean It matches swiftly with my heartbeat as it glides through the motion Loving you is like a burning desire That's because there's really nothing else I want but it is actually your love that I most certainly require That's because you came into my life and took my sorrows away This is why I will always love,care, cherish and need every single day in every step of the way Loving you is like something I just cannot explain But one thing I know for sure is being left by you would leave my heart torn apart with such imense pain You see loving you was not just a choice I had take nor a decision I had make but a wonderful journey which was worth the date

America's legacy of oppression and dispossession of dark people is in large part met with the ethos of "We Shall Overcome," "Si Se Puede," and "We Gon' Be Alright." This is not to say that we have not resisted, rioted, rebelled, rightfully so and with righteous rage. It is these acts of rebellion that have allowed us to create a collective identity and, therefore, build schools, educate our children, use the church as a place of worship and community building, gather the best legal minds to argue for basic human rights, take to the streets as a demonstration of our commitment, and withdraw or withhold our money from companies and institutions that demean us and deny us. It is these acts that have allowed us to produce beautiful, visceral, and eloquent literature, photography, visual art, and films that explain and endure our suffering, soundscapes for all to enjoy (but which only those in the struggle can feel and heal from), body movements that express pain and joy simultaneously, food that can only be made from love, and a joy that cannot be replicated outside of the dark body. We have created in the void, defiant of the country's persistent efforts to killed and commodify us. Finding ways to matter.

In our conscious experience, we do not find ourselves like other inanimate objects in the universe. Our bodies might be having the same inanimate matter that is also part of non-living objects, but we have consciousness. Other life-forms also have consciousness. We know that we are not our creators. If we had the power to create ourselves, why would we be not able to avoid pain, illness and death? Another alternate conjecture is that we have come to exist in this universe by accident. But, science has shown that it is next to impossible to have life by accident in its most sophisticated manifestation as we see it, experience it and then die after at most few million breaths under the sun. Life exists on a knife’s edge. Other life-forms and inanimate objects are also composed of the elements that exist in the universe and their existence cannot be explained through self-creation.

I cannot imagine the simple chemical and physical forces without attributing the movement of material particles to conscious sensation." The same author says again: "We may ascribe the feeling of pleasure and pain to all atoms, and so explain the electric affinity in chemistry." 12.

Fasting followed by a vegetarian diet has a favorable influence on disease activity in some patients with rheumatoid arthritis. This effect cannot be explained entirely by psychobiologic factors, immunosuppression secondary to energy deprivation, changes in the plasma concentration of eicosanoid precursors, or changes in antibody activity against dietary antigens. Changes in disease activity were found to be associated with concurrent alterations in the fecal microflora and in the antibody activity against P. mirabilis. These findings may indicate that the beneficial effect of dietary treatment is caused by alterations in the microflora secondary to changes in the diet.

Consoler of our misery, religion is at the same time the most natural of our emotions. Unknown to us, all our physical sensations, all our moral feelings, awake it in our hearts. All that appears to us without limits, and that generates the notion of immensity - the sight of the sky, the silence of the night, the vast extent of the seas- all that leads us to tenderness or to enthusiasm - the consciousness of a virtuous action, of a generous sacrifice, of a danger bravely confronted, of the pain of another aided or comforted - all that stirs up in the depths our soul the primitive elements of our nature - the contempt for vice, the hatred of tyranny - feed our religious feeling. This feeling is intimately connected with all the noble, delicate and deep passions. Kike all these passions, it has something mysterious about it: for common reason cannot satisfactorily explain any of these passions.

I concluded that all of the postural muscles are targets for tension but that some are more susceptible than others (see Figure 8). Perhaps the explanation for this is that the most important postural muscles are the ones most frequently involved. Note the high proportion of patients with buttock tenderness: 77 percent on the left and 78 percent on the right. The buttock muscles keep the trunk upright on the legs, a very important job. The neck muscles keep the head erect on the trunk, and the muscles at the top of the shoulders stabilize the arms so that they can be used properly; if the shoulder muscles are not functioning properly, arm function will be severely curtailed. The higher numbers involving the right neck and shoulder may have something to do with the fact that most of us are right-handed. The importance of this pain on pressure cannot be overemphasized. Muscle tenderness on pressure is the hallmark of TMS; it is the only objective evidence of the alteration in muscle physiology brought about by TMS. It explains the "trigger points" that doctors have been talking about for years, which can now be recognized as the central zone of a wider area of muscle pain induced by blood deprivation. Only the postural muscles and their associated nerves are targets for TMS; the muscles of the arms and legs are not similarly involved. This is a clinical fact, similar to the fact that the stomach or colon may be a target organ for tension, so it is not necessary to know why. One wonders, however, if the nature of their work is what makes postural muscles selectively susceptible to TMS. Because they are responsible for maintaining head and trunk posture and supporting the arms at the shoulders, they are constantly active during one's waking hours and,

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture- one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce- rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of dysregulation arises. This temporaily reduces conscious emotional pain in the child living with chronic trauma, but those who characterologically use the emotion-deadening defense of dissociation to cope with stressful interpersonal events subsequently dissociate to defend against both daily stresses, and the stress caused when implicitly held memories of trauma are triggered. In the developing brain, repeated neurological states become traits, so dissociative defense mechanisms are embedded into the core structure of the evolving personality, and become a part of who a person is, rather than what a person does. Dissociation, which appears in the first month of life, seems to be a last resort survival strategy. It represents detachment from an unbearable situation. The infant withdraws into an inner world, avoids eye contact and stares into space. Dissociation triggered by a hypoaroused state results in a constricted state of consciousness, and a void of subjectivity. Being cut off from our emotions impacts our sense of who we are as a person. Our subjective sense of self derives from our unconscious experience of bodily-based emotions and is neurologically constructed in the right brain. If we cannot connect to our bodily emotions then our sense of self is built on fragile foundations. Many who suffered early relational trauma have a disturbed sense of their bodies and of what is happening within them physiologically as well as emotionally. The interview moved along to the topic of how we can possibly master these adverse and potentially damaging relational experiences. Schore replied by explaining that the human brain remains plastic and capable of learning throughout the entire life span, and that with the right therapeutic help and intervention we can move beyond dissociation as our primary defense mechanism, and begin to regulate our emotions more appropriately. When the relationship between the therapist and the client develops enough safety, the therapeutic alliance can act as a growth-facilitating environment that offers a corrective emotional experience via “rewiring” the right brain and associated neurocircuits.

Teccam explains there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. There secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. They sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.

Whereas happiness appears to be very difficult to attain in this life, “unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.” Freud explains: “We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.” Freud dismisses out of hand the large number of people who find that spiritual resources help free them from this “unrest,” “unhappiness,” and “anxiety.” He calls religious faith “an attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of reality . . . and no one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

I do not know, Mikhail. Something here makes me uneasy,” Gregori warned. “Something not quite right.” “I feel it also,” Jacques agreed, “although I cannot explain what it is exactly. It is as if this is all prearranged, and we are walking into a spider’s web. I know this place. I can feel the pain and torment as if it was happening all over again.” And he was, his insides writhing and his gut clenching. It was difficult to maintain his outward calm when his flesh crawled and pain tore at him, splintering his mind so that he didn’t know what was real and what was part of his never-ending nightmare. “Perhaps you are feeling Byron’s pain,” Mikhail suggested with concern. Jacques’ face remained impassive, but the lines in his skin deepened, and crimson smeared his forehead. Jacques, are you hurt? I will come to you. Shea’s soft voice swirled in his mind, caught fragments of his thoughts and seemed to piece him back together. She was, as always, his one and only anchor to reality. Stay there, but stay connected to me, Shea. Being so close to this place is disorienting me. I need you to keep me together. He was begging, but Jacques had no choice. She was his lifemate, and her presence in his mind could mean the difference between success and failure to their mission. He did not want to be the cause of the others’ deaths. A grim smile touched Gregori’s sensual mouth, his silver eyes humorless and pierced with dangerous light. “They mean to capture us, Mikhail. Us, the two most powerful of our kind. Perhaps they need a real demonstration in power.

Whereas happiness appears to be very difficult to attain in this life, “unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.” Freud explains: “We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.

Roland Bainton in his effort to make the best of Luther declared that Luther's view of the Jews "was entirely religious and by no means racial."'`' True; the crackpot version of social Darwinism that gave rise to "racial" anti-Semitism was a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther hated the Jews because they rejected Christ. But his fury was no less cruel and vicious because its underlying motives were different or because his suggestions for carrying his cruelty to some final solution were less comprehensive and efficient. His fury culminated in his vicious book of 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies. In late 1542 Pope Paul III had issued a call for the great reforming council to assemble at Trent beginning in 1545. It was to become a Catholic and papal triumph. What Trent would become was unclear in 1542, but Luther could see clearly enough that it represented a defeat for the evangelical cause. Through these years his attacks on foes of all kinds became even more vulgar and inflammatory because, as Heiko Oberman has said, he felt his work threatened on every Personal issues may also have been an influence. His beloved daughter Magdalena died in his arms on September 20, 1542. Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ.-'' This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Chrisitians would enjoy no victory over the grave. Whatever the cause, his outrageous attack in On the Jews and Their Lies represents one of those rhetorical horrors that may be explained in the various ways that we explain the cruelties that human beings inflict on others when the tormentors feel their own place in the universe threatened with annihilation. Yet explanation cannot finally excuse the horror. After raging against the Jews for dozens of pages of tedious vehemence, Luther recommended what should be done with them: Their synagogues should be burned down; their books should be taken from them, "not leaving them one leaf"; they should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"; and they should "be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing."22 Christians were guilty for not taking vengeance against the Jews for having killed Christ and for having killed innocent Christians for three hundred years after the Crucifixion, for not "striking them to death."23

Kierkegaard says that all speculative philosophy cannot equal in complexity the dialectic of a woman who has been deceived. He goes on to explain that such a woman cannot find an object for her pain, because love cannot grasp the thought that it has been deceived. In art, it is the system itself that holds out the false promise, that deceives. We might almost say that art is in pain, because it is unable to believe this deception is taking place. The artist feels his work goes badly because he is not reaching technical perfection. Actually, he is looking into the eyes of a deceiver, who constantly throws him back into the dilemma — the paradox. Is it lying to me or not, he asks himself. He ends by believing the lie, in the face of all evidence against it, because he needs this lie to exist in his art.

As they moved into a nonreactive parenting style, at first they felt as if they weren’t disciplining their son at all, that they were allowing him to get away with the unbelievable. They found this approach frustrating and painful. I explained to them that we cannot parent toxic people with the parenting skills we would use with healthy children. When someone is toxic, we have to apply an inverse technique to parenting, which involves not rewarding bad behavior with any attention or emotional reaction.

Luther had outfoxed his enemies; he had made the speech he was to have been prevented from making, and by his account at least von der Ecken was furious and shouted at him. He had not answered the question. The imperial officer attacked with a litany of names, heresies already condemned in the past that Luther was now resurrecting as if they were new discoveries. Heretics had always claimed the support of scripture against the church, he said. The worst heresies were those in which a little error was mixed with a lot of true doctrine-perhaps a slap against those in the room like Glapion who had said that Luther's books contained much good. Luther was a man who could stumble and err, and scripture could not be interpreted by one fallible man. We cannot draw things into doubt and dispute that the Catholic Church has judged already, things that have passed into usage, rite, and observance, things that our fathers held onto with firm faith, for which they suffered pain and torture, for which even thousands suffered death rather than reject one of them! And now you want to seduce us from the way to which our fathers were true! And what would the Jews and Turks and Saracens and the other enemies of our faith say when they heard about it? Why, they would burst into scornful laughter! Here are we Christians beginning to argue whether we have believed correctly until now! Do not deceive yourself, Martin. You are not the only one who knows the scripture, not the only one who has struggled to convey the true meaning of holy scripture-not after so many holy doctors have worked day and night to explain holy writ! Do not set your judgment over that of so many famous men. Do not imagine you know more than all of them. Do not throw the most sacred orthodox faith into doubt, the faith that Christ the most perfect lawgiver ordained, the faith that the apostles spread over the world, the faith confirmed by miracles, the faith that martyrs strengthened with their red blood ... You wait in vain, Martin, for a disputation over things that you are obligated to believe with certain and professing Von der Ecken's assumption was one of the great medieval myths, a myth taken for granted for so long that only when it was sternly questioned did those who accepted it see how fragile it was. The myth was that history was a positive and progressive force, shaped by divinity, and that revelation became more certain and more detailed with the passage of time. It seems clear from this speech that von der Ecken recognized the fragility of the assumptions that give faith plausibility and how Luther's attack threatened to bring them all down. In a room now filling with darkness, the voice of the imperial orator must have been a cry against a greater darkness that von der Ecken saw creeping over the world. If Luther was right, was anything certain? How could one man set himself against history?

Night Bloom Crystal Williams —For Jade, after Hayden It makes no sense to say things will get better because you will not understand until they are better & they may not get better soon. There is always pain in the world & you have seen so much of it. I do not know how to explain other than to say, I am so sorry your mother has died, Girl, that her mother has turned her back, that your father is a rogue & you are having to do this grown-up work alone. I would like to tell you to be patient but understand that right now you might only know fear. Listen, then. & know this: it is okay to be fearful. If you cannot believe that things will soften, trust that I believe for you. You will not remember all of this pain. But when Darkness insists you attend his party you will know the trapdoors & gloomy corners of that house. & you alone will be able to find the garden where beautiful Cereus is opening her eyes in the pitch black.

I know what it's like to hide what you feel," he said, "I know what it's like to be in pain and not be able to explain why. I know why you're not with James tonight. Because when we are in pain, we are flayed pen, and when we are flayed open, we cannot hide our true selves. And you cannot bear for him to know that you love him.

ALLOW YOUR SUFFERING TO SPEAK Our suffering consists of two components: a mental component and an emotional component. We usually think of these two aspects as separate, but in fact, when we’re in deep states of suffering, we’re usually so overwhelmed by the experience of emotion that we forget and become unconscious of the story in our minds that is creating and maintaining it. So one of the most vital steps in addressing our suffering and moving beyond it is first to summon the courage and willingness to truly experience what we’re feeling and to no longer try to edit what we feel. In order to really allow ourselves to stay with the depth of our emotions, we must cease judging ourselves for whatever comes up. I invite you to set some time aside—perhaps a half an hour—to allow yourself simply to feel whatever is there: to let any sensation, feeling, or emotion come up without trying to avoid or “solve” it. Simply let whatever is there arise. Get in touch with the kinesthetic feeling of it, of what these experiences are like when you’re not trying to push or explain them away. Just experience the raw energy of the emotion or sensation. You might notice it in your heart or your solar plexus, or in your gut. See if you can identify where the tightness is in your body—not only where the emotion is, but what parts of your body feel rigid. It could be your neck or shoulders or it might be your back. Suffering manifests as emotion—often as deep, painful emotion—and also as tension throughout the body. Suffering also manifests as certain patterns of circular thinking. Once you touch a particular emotion, allow yourself to begin to hear the voice of suffering. To do this, you cannot stand outside the suffering, trying to explain or solve it; you must really sink into the pain, even relax into the suffering so that you can allow the suffering to speak. Many of us have a great hesitancy to do this, because when suffering speaks, it often has a very shocking voice. It can be quite vicious. This kind of voice is something that most people do not want to believe they have inside them, and yet to move beyond suffering it’s vital that we allow ourselves to experience the totality of it. It’s important that we open all the emotions and all of the thoughts in order to fully experience what is there.

The other great obstacle to abandoning oneself to Divine Providence is the presence of suffering, in our own lives as in the world around us. Even for those who abandon themselves to Him, God permits suffering; He leaves them wanting of certain things, in a manner sometimes painful. Think of the poverty in which the family of young Bernadette of Lourdes lived. Isn’t this a contradiction of the words of the Gospel? No, because the Lord can leave us wanting relative to certain things (sometimes judged indispensable in the eyes of the world), but He never leaves us deprived of what is essential: His presence, His peace and all that is necessary for the complete fulfillment of our lives, according to His plans for us. If He permits suffering, then it is our strength to believe, as Thérèse of Lisieux says, that “God does not permit unnecessary suffering.” In the domain of our personal lives, as in that of the history of the world, we must be convinced, if we want to go to the limits of our Christian faith, that God is sufficiently good and powerful to use whatever evil there may be, as well as any suffering however absurd and unnecessary it may appear to be, in our favor. We cannot have any mathematical or philosophical certitude of this; it can only be an act of faith. But it is precisely to this act of faith that we are invited by the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus, understood and received as the definitive victory of God over evil. Evil is a mystery, a scandal and it will always be so. It is necessary to do what one can to eliminate it, to relieve suffering, but it always remains present in our personal lives, as well as in the world. Its place in the economy of redemption reveals the wisdom of God, which is not the wisdom of man; it always retains something incomprehensible. …for My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are My ways above your ways and My thoughts above your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). At certain moments in life, a Christian is necessarily invited to believe in the contradiction of appearances and to hope against all hope (Romans 4:18). There are inevitably circumstances where we cannot understand the “why” of God’s activity because it is no longer the wisdom of man, a wisdom within our capacity to understand and explain by human intelligence. Rather it is divine Wisdom, mysterious and incomprehensible, that thus intervenes.

Teccam explains that there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart. Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. These secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free. Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become. Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them. Modern philosophers scorn Teccam, but they are vultures picking at the bones of a giant. Quibble all you like, Teccam understood the shape of the world.

John’s adolescence was marked by loss. When he was thirteen his father died, swiftly followed by his two sisters. Shortly after he turned seventeen his eldest brother, James, whose progress through his chosen medics, career had taken him to London, became unable to work due to ill health and returned to the farm, lying for days on one of the beds that pulled out from the walls of the two-roomed cottage like drawers, coughing himself to death at least while John watched or was nearby; and I find it hard to imagine, now, when death is largely hedged about with treatment plans, when it does not often come senseless out of nowhere, but can be postposted, or if not, then at least explained, what grief must have been like when that boundary was a curtain you could put your hand through. It is easy to think that when death could be so quickly turned to, a matter of mistral and all families counted lost children in their numbers, that loss must have been a blunter thing- that having so much practice, they must have been better at it, or inoculated, that it cannot have been for them such devastation, this laying waste- as the birth of a tenth child might be of less account in a busy week than the loss of a pair of, so that the date of it was not looked for until later, when it was found to have been forgotten. It is easy to think that in an age without anaesthetics, when legs might be hacked off on kitchen tables, teeth pulled sigh pliers taking gobbets of jaw and gun away with the , that pain must have been somehow a less precise, less devastating thing, the alternative being unthinkable- that it was just the same but persisting, could only be endured, to universal to allow concession; and so John Hunter watched the bodies of those he loved carried out of the tiny farmhouse one by one, making their last journey to the church, and afterwards he went about the business of his day, he went to school or to the fields, and then at last, summoned by William, the sole surviving brother he barely remembered, he went to London and, did not return.

By the wedding ring of faith, He shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are His bride's," Martin Luther wrote as his very first image to explain the good news of the gospel. "As a matter of fact, [Christ] makes [our sins] His own," he wrote, his pen on fire: "Here this rich and divine bridegroom Christ marries this poor, wicked harlot, redeems her from all her evil, and adorns her with all His goodness. Her sins cannot now destroy her, since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up by Him." Who has ever loved you to death like this?

I’m so tired,” he says. “Me too,” I say, perhaps too quickly. “We’re all tired.” He brings his knees to his chest. “No, I’m really tired,” he says. He rolls onto his side, his back to me. He wants to be encouraged. I put my hand on his shoulder. I can’t believe he’s going to make me give him the speech. I am livid that he’s going to make me give him the speech. I do it, piecing it together from times I’ve seen it done on TV and in movies. I tell him that there are many people who love him and would be crushed if he were to kill himself, while wondering, distantly, if that is the truth. I tell him that he has so much potential, that he has so many things to do, while most of me believes that he will never put his body and brain to much use at all. I tell him that we all have dark periods, while becoming ever more angry at him, the theatrics, the self-pity, all this, when he has everything. He has a complete sort of freedom, with no parents and no dependents, with money and no immediate threats of pain or calamity. He is the 99.9th percentile, as I am. He has no real obligations, can go anywhere at any moment, sleep anywhere, move at will, and still he is wasting everyone’s time with this. But I hold that back—I will save that for later—and instead say nothing but the most rapturous and positive things. And though I do not believe much of it, he does. I make myself sick saying it all, everything so obvious, the reasons to live not at all explainable in a few minutes on the edge of a psychiatric ward bed, but still he is roused, making me wonder even more about him, why a fudge-laden pep talk can convince him to live, why he insists on bringing us both down here, to this pedestrian level, how he cannot see how silly we both look, and when, exactly, it was that his head got so soft, when I lost track of him, how it is that I know and care about such a soft and pliant person, where was it again that I parked my car.