Patterns Don't Lie Quotes

The power behind taking responsibility for your actions lies in putting an end to negative thought patterns. You no longer dwell on what went wrong or focus on whom you are going to blame. You don't waste time building roadblocks to your success. Instead, you are set free and can now focus on succeeding.

Patterns don't lie; and at the centre of every pattern is you

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!

If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." "That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don't want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity." "It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?" "Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!" "Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-" "Don't be propertarian," Takver muttered. "Dear heart, don't cry." "I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears." "I'm cold. The moonlight's cold." "Lie down." A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms. "I'm afraid, Takver," he whispered.

Shame usually follows a pattern—a cycle of self-recrimination and lies that claims life after life. First, we experience an intensely painful event. Second, we believe the lie that our pain and failure is who we are—not just something we’ve done, or had done to us—and we experience shame. And finally, our feelings of shame trap us into thinking that we can never recover—that, in fact, we don’t even deserve to.

Know that...there's plenty of food and of course popcorn on the dining-room table. Just...help yourself. If that runs out just let me know. Don't panic. And there's coffee, both caff and decaf, and soft drinks and juice in the kitchen, and plenty of ice in the freezer so...let me know if you have any questions with that.' And lastly, since I have you all here in one place, I have something to share with you. Along the garden ways just now...I too heard the flowers speak. They told me that our family garden has all but turned to sand. I want you to know I've watered and nurtured this square of earth for nearly twenty years, and waited on my knees each spring for these gentle bulbs to rise, reborn. But want does not bring such breath to life. Only love does. The plain, old-fashioned kind. In our family garden my husband is of the genus Narcissus , which includes daffodils and jonquils and a host of other ornamental flowers. There is, in such a genus of man, a pervasive and well-known pattern of grandiosity and egocentrism that feeds off this very kind of evening, this type of glitzy generosity. People of this ilk are very exciting to be around. I have never met anyone with as many friends as my husband. He made two last night at Carvel. I'm not kidding. Where are you two? Hi. Hi, again. Welcome. My husband is a good man, isn't he? He is. But in keeping with his genus, he is also absurdly preoccupied with his own importance, and in staying loyal to this, he can be boastful and unkind and condescending and has an insatiable hunger to be seen as infallible. Underlying all of the constant campaigning needed to uphold this position is a profound vulnerability that lies at the very core of his psyche. Such is the narcissist who must mask his fears of inadequacy by ensuring that he is perceived to be a unique and brilliant stone. In his offspring he finds the grave limits he cannot admit in himself. And he will stop at nothing to make certain that his child continually tries to correct these flaws. In actuality, the child may be exceedingly intelligent, but has so fully developed feelings of ineptitude that he is incapable of believing in his own possibilities. The child's innate sense of self is in great jeopardy when this level of false labeling is accepted. In the end the narcissist must compensate for this core vulnerability he carries and as a result an overestimation of his own importance arises. So it feeds itself, cyclically. And, when in the course of life they realize that their views are not shared or thier expectations are not met, the most common reaction is to become enraged. The rage covers the fear associated with the vulnerable self, but it is nearly impossible for others to see this, and as a result, the very recognition they so crave is most often out of reach. It's been eighteen years that I've lived in service to this mindset. And it's been devastating for me to realize that my efforts to rise to these standards and demands and preposterous requests for perfection have ultimately done nothing but disappoint my husband. Put a person like this with four developing children and you're gonna need more than love poems and ice sculpture to stay afloat. Trust me. So. So, we're done here.

But when you get down to it, it’s all a lie. You sit here writing and writing, but no one can see it—that’s arrogant, I told you so before. And you aren’t even honest enough to let yourself be what you are—everything’s divided off and split up. So what’s the use of patronising me and saying: You’re in a bad phase. If you’re not in a bad phase, then it’s because you can’t be in a phase, you take care to divide yourself into compartments. If things are a chaos, then that’s what they are. I don’t think there’s a pattern anywhere—you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren’t good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else. All the best people can be good to one other person or their families. But that’s egotism, it isn’t being good. We aren’t any better than the animals, we just pretend to be.

Peeling an Orange Between you and a bowl of oranges I lie nude Reading The World’s Illusion through my tears. You reach across me hungry for global fruit, Your bare arm hard, furry and warm on my belly. Your fingers pry the skin of a naval orange Releasing tiny explosions of spicy oil. You place peeled disks of gold in a bizarre pattern On my white body. Rearranging, you bend and bite The disks to release further their eager scent. I say “Stop, you’re tickling,” my eyes still on the page. Aromas of groves arise. Through green leaves Glow the lofty snows. Through red lips Your white teeth close on a translucent segment. Your face over my face eclipses The World’s Illusion. Pulp and juice pass into my mouth from your mouth. We laugh against each other’s lips. I hold my book Behind your head, still reading, still weeping a little. You say “Read on, I’m just an illusion,” rolling Over upon me soothingly, gently unmoving, Smiling greenly through long lashes. And soon I say “Don’t stop. Don’t disillusion me.” Snows melt. The mountain silvers into many a stream. The oranges are golden worlds in a dark dream.

He issues three key pieces of advice: take your time and don’t force things; don’t fall into predictable patterns; and when you do have to lie, make sure to keep it simple.

three key pieces of advice: take your time and don’t force things; don’t fall into predictable patterns; and when you do have to lie, make sure to keep it simple.

Frankly, the overwhelming majority of academics have ignored the data explosion caused by the digital age. The world’s most famous sex researchers stick with the tried and true. They ask a few hundred subjects about their desires; they don’t ask sites like PornHub for their data. The world’s most famous linguists analyze individual texts; they largely ignore the patterns revealed in billions of books. The methodologies taught to graduate students in psychology, political science, and sociology have been, for the most part, untouched by the digital revolution. The broad, mostly unexplored terrain opened by the data explosion has been left to a small number of forward-thinking professors, rebellious grad students, and hobbyists. That will change.

Perspective - Use It or Lose It. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that. Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, and teachers. Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a false messiah. Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully. The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change. Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts. Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect. Then be sure of one thing: The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have. The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't. A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, it feels an impulsion....this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reason and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons. You are never given a wish without being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages. Every person, all the events of your life, are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you. In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, "I've got responsibilities." The truth you speak has no past and no future. It is, and that's all it needs to be. Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't. Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends. The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution it not generally understood by less advanced lifeforms, and they'll call you crazy. Everything above may be wrong!

You compose a question and then you just start walking. Concentrate on each step. Don’t think too far ahead and don’t think about where you have been. But consider closely how one step leads to another. Contemplate connections and links. Immerse yourself in the pattern.

He issues three key pieces of advice: take your time and don’t force things; don’t fall into predictable patterns; and when you do have to lie, make sure to keep it simple. (This was, of course, like trying to teach a seagull how to fly, but he made sure of it, just the same.)

Don’t only read the Bible in some formulaic pattern. Instead, ask God, “What does this say to me? How is this related to my identity? What do you want me to know?” You might truth tell and confess that a certain Scripture passage frightens you. Ask the Lord, “Why am I afraid? What am I afraid of?” After

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

Emotionally abusive men don't go on to have amazing relationships after you leave them. They tell the new wife the same lies about other people and exes that they told you. They use the same games and play the victim to get their way. After the honeymoon stage has worn off and there is nothing exciting to learn about his new love he will become bored. This is when he is back to the same pattern of abuse, which includes securing new narcissistic supply. That new wife will start to wonder why they can't have deep conversations. She will start to wonder why he gets so quick to anger. She will not understand why she is being abused. She will start back down the same road you took to reach his heart. It will be an emotional trip she won't understand because she was too stupid to believe that his long line of broken relationships were because of the women before her. Her arrogance will be her undoing because we both know she is in for the worst ride of her life!

He issues 3 key pieces of advice: take your time & don't force things; don't fall into predictable patterns; & when you do have to lie, make sure to keep it simple. [...] Not that things were completely trouble free. Balancing so many simultaneous relationships over that length of time meant there were bound to be problems.

It's a lost and lonely kind of feeling, To wake up wearing a disguise. I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, I don't know who I am There's little that I can Fully recognize.... But I'm taking small steps, 'Cause I don't know where I'm going. I'm taking small steps And I don't know what to say. Small steps, Trying to pull myself together, And maybe I'll discover A clue along the way.... Just to make it through the day and not to get hurt, Seems about the best that I can hope. Like coffee stains splattered on your sweatshirt There isn't any pattern. Everything's uncertain. It's difficult to cope.... But I'm taking small steps, 'Cause I don't know where I'm going. I'm taking small steps, And I've forgotten how to play. Small steps, Trying to pull myself together, And maybe I'll discover, A clue along the way.... And if someday my small steps bring me near you, Please don't rush to tell me all you feel. You don't have to speak for me to hear you. If I softly sigh, Look me in the eye And let me know I'm real.... Then we'll take small steps, 'Cause we won't know where we're going. We'll take small steps, And we'll have too much to say. Small steps, Hand in hand we'll walk together, And maybe we'll discover A clue along the way.... Small steps, 'Cause I don't know where I'm goin'. Small steps, I just take it day to day. Small steps, Somehow get myself together, Then maybe I'll discover Who I am on the way....

The more I know the human being, the more I cling to animal nature. Mention poem 2013 Since its beginnings, the human being has been a complex and enigmatic being, capable of great achievements and feats, and at the same time, of the most cruel and vile acts. There is no doubt that our species is one of the most evolved and sophisticated of the planet, but at what cost? What is behind our apparent superiority? When we observe human behavior, we can see that it hides a mixture of animal instincts and rational thoughts. Although human beings take pride in our ability for critical thinking and reflection, We are also emotional, impulsive and visceral beings. And it is precisely this duality that makes us so different from animals. that cohabit this planet with us. It is often difficult for us to understand the nature of animals, because we cannot access their internal world. However, what we can say is that animals are transparent beings, His actions are always a consequence of his instincts, not from premeditated thoughts or complex emotions. For animals, living is following their instinct, something that allows them to act quickly and effectively in situations of danger or threat. Animals are beings in balance with their environment, They don't feel the need to constantly change, nor to think beyond the here and now. On the other hand, we have human beings, beings capable of conceiving abstract thoughts, create works of art, invent technologies and, at the same time, of destroying the environment, oppressing other human beings and commit acts of extreme cruelty. The human being is a complex, contradictory being, capable of loving and hating, forgiving and punishing, healing and destroying. We are creatures of light and darkness, in a constant search for balance between both parties. But what is behind our duality as human beings? Why are we capable of the worst acts of destruction and cruelty? If we look back at the history of humanity, we can see that our genetic patterns are impregnated of violence, war and resentment. History has been a constant parade of wars and conflicts, each one more brutal than the last. This being the only way in which many cultures they have found to impose their ideas or consolidate power. It is precisely here that the idea is born that the creators of humanity They have intoxicated us with the yoke of evil. Who are these forgers? They are the same societies, cultures, religions, policies, which have used violence, war and resentment as a tool to impose their desires and ideals on others. This is the curse that we have dragged like chains since long ago, that of a genetic pattern that drags us towards violence and war. It is true that, as human beings, we can choose our own paths, our own decisions, and not fall into the trap of cruelty and evil. However, it is also true that we carry within us an ancestral burden that is difficult to overcome. What will the most advanced civilizations in the universe think of us? Will we be violent and hateful beings for them? Or will we be beings like animals, in balance with our environment? The answer is not easy, since it remains an unknown. if we are able to overcome our animal instincts and embrace only the best of our humanity. The key to this lies in becoming aware of our own duality, to recognize that we carry both light and darkness within us, and make a real effort to choose the best of ourselves, instead of letting ourselves be carried away by our internal evil.

I had thought, in going to Oxford, that what I wanted to do was study books, pin their pages to the bulletin board like a butterfly collector and analyze the patterns in their wings. But I realized—that wasn’t it. And while I feel extraordinarily satisfied when I find the right word for the right occasion, I don’t think my future lies in being an author. No. I don’t want to be the creator or the scientist. I want to be the shepherd, the person who knows books so well that he can help make books even better than they were when they came out of the author’s mind.

The starting out so intense, in almost overdrive, and feeling as if everything depends on getting them to drop their defenses and plunge in and love me as totally as I love them, then the freaking-out thing kicks in and reverses thrust. I admit there’s a kind of dread at the idea of having a conscience in this area, as if it seems as if it’s going to take away all room to maneuver, somehow. Which is bizarre, I know, because at the beginning of the pattern I don’t want room to maneuver, the last thing I want is room to maneuver, what I want is to plunge in and get them to plunge in with me and believe in me and be together in it forever. I swear, I really almost every time seem to have believed that’s what I wanted. Which is why it doesn’t quite seem to me as if I was evil or anything, or as if I was actually lying to them or anything—even though at the end, when I seem to have reversed thrust and suddenly pulled totally out of it, they almost always all feel as if I’ve lied to them, as if if I meant what I said there’s no way I could be reversing thrust the way I’m doing now. Which I still, to be honest, don’t quite think I’ve ever done: lied. Unless I’m just rationalizing. Unless I’m some kind of psychopath who can rationalize anything and can’t even see the most obvious kinds of evil he’s perpetrating, or who doesn’t even care but wants to delude himself into believing he cares so that he can continue to see himself as a basically decent guy.

We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight countries around the world, 63 percent of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was “gaze aversion.” We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes. This is—to put it mildly—nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look.

There is a window over my tub and when I was younger, I'd lie down in the tub instead of my bed. My mother would wake me and make me move back to my bed but finally she gave up and let me sleep there. I liked it in the tub because from the window I could see stars and the ocean and sometimes, if it was calm, I could see the stars in the ocean. I liked the tub because if I slept with my ear against the drainpipe I could hear my parents' conversations all night long, metallic talking that made its way up through the plumbing. Through the pipe, one night just before my father disappeared, I heard him tell my mother, 'I remember how the moon shines into the ocean and the pattern it makes on the sea floor.' She didn't say anything. 'I want to go back there,' he said, and the reason I remember that conversation is because my mother started crying when he said that and I had never heard her cry before. He meant we were from the ocean. 'You're a mermaid,' he told me at the breakfast table. 'Don't forget it.' A corner of toast scraped the roof of my mouth when he said it. The cut it made helped me to remember. So I don't think he's dead. I think he is in the sea swimming and that is kinder than imagining his boots filling up with water, and then his lungs.

The cosmetics, the clothes, the hair, the shaved and lotioned skin, the anointing oils, the posture, the dazzling bright colors and pleasing patterns: these were all the lampshades we settle over our light hoping to cast a hue and color others will find acceptable. We hope we'll find it acceptable, too. But others don't even see that color, for they view us through their own lenses, filtering our already-filtered light in ways we can only guess. Nor do we see ourselves true, for we wear our own lenses, and sometimes the eye itself is dark, and how great the darkness! Kip had been so certain for so long that there was nothing he could do to make himself acceptable that he'd hidden his light altogether. The mirror had been an enemy who, overwhelming in his might, had simply needed to be avoided. But the mirror is ever a liar: when you yourself cut out half the light by which you see, how can the mirror be anything but? 'Let me see my skin, but with no pink tones.'...'Oh, how awfully pale and ugly I am.' We see others not as they are but as we see. We see ourselves not as we are but as we see-and as we are seen, for we each cast our light on each other, too. Surrounded by those who cast only brutal light, we see some truth, and sometimes necessary truth, but a lie if we think it all the truth. Kip had been shedding filters and lampshades for the last few years now. Being stripped of drafting was different, though. It not only changed his sight, but it changed the very light he cast into the world. It certainly was changing how people saw him.

Even as the feminine principle was venerated for its fertile, life-giving properties, there are also many examples of Goddesses who embodied the entire life process: birth, life, death, and regeneration. This is important because it can be tempting to romanticise the Goddess as a sort of angelic Fairy Godmother or abundant Good Mother. The feminine principle is more complex and more powerful than that. There are many stories from mythology that tell of the different faces of the Goddess. One such myth tells of the ancient Sumerian goddess who “outweighed, overshadowed, and outlasted them all . . .Inanna, Queen of Heaven.”[xxvi] This story originated in ancient Mesopotamia, five or six thousand years ago. In the myth, Inanna, who rules as queen over the upper world (birth and life), decides to visit Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld (death and transformation). As Inanna descends into her sister’s realm, she is stripped of all the symbols of her upper world sovereignty, so that she comes before Ereshkigal naked and bowed low. Her enforced stay in the Underworld and the return after three days predates the Christian story by thousands of years. It is one of the first stories of ritual descent from the realm of life to the realm of death and the return to life after a time of incubation in the Underworld. This is also the theme of most ancient initiation rituals like the Orphic mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, and of much of the Egyptian sacred teachings. At the time when the story of Inanna’s journey first appeared, the increasingly male dominated Sumerian culture was separating from earlier matrilineal forms. Before the descent myth, another story tells how Inanna, in order to rule, had to take power from the God, Enki, assuming his symbols of sovereignty as her own. Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld, represents the archaic feminine, the dark mysteries of the older religion which had been sent underground. The descent story can, therefore, be understood as Inanna balancing her heroic victories in the upper (masculine) world by reconnecting with the rhythms and cycles of the under (feminine) world. Based on clinical experience, one analyst called this a “pattern of a woman’s passage from cultural adaptation to an encounter with her essential nature”.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

In physical terms, we know that every human action can be reduced to a series of impersonal events: Genes are transcribed, neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibers contract, and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun. But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them. Consequently, some scientists and philosophers hope that chance or quantum uncertainty can make room for free will. For instance, the biologist Martin Heisenberg has observed that certain processes in the brain, such as the opening and closing of ion channels and the release of synaptic vesicles, occur at random, and cannot therefore be determined by environmental stimuli. Thus, much of our behavior can be considered truly “self-generated”—and therein, he imagines, lies a basis for human freedom. But how do events of this kind justify the feeling of free will? “Self-generated” in this sense means only that certain events originate in the brain. If my decision to have a second cup of coffee this morning was due to a random release of neurotransmitters, how could the indeterminacy of the initiating event count as the free exercise of my will? Chance occurrences are by definition ones for which I can claim no responsibility. And if certain of my behaviors are truly the result of chance, they should be surprising even to me. How would neurological ambushes of this kind make me free? Imagine what your life would be like if all your actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires were randomly “self-generated” in this way. You would scarcely seem to have a mind at all. You would live as one blown about by an internal wind. Actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires can exist only in a system that is significantly constrained by patterns of behavior and the laws of stimulus-response. The possibility of reasoning with other human beings—or, indeed, of finding their behaviors and utterances comprehensible at all—depends on the assumption that their thoughts and actions will obediently ride the rails of a shared reality. This is true as well when attempting to understand one’s own behavior. In the limit, Heisenberg’s “self-generated” mental events would preclude the existence of any mind at all. The indeterminacy specific to quantum mechanics offers no foothold: If my brain is a quantum computer, the brain of a fly is likely to be a quantum computer, too. Do flies enjoy free will? Quantum effects are unlikely to be biologically salient in any case. They play a role in evolution because cosmic rays and other high-energy particles cause point mutations in DNA (and the behavior of such particles passing through the nucleus of a cell is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics). Evolution, therefore, seems unpredictable in principle.13 But few neuroscientists view the brain as a quantum computer. And even if it were, quantum indeterminacy does nothing to make the concept of free will scientifically intelligible. In the face of any real independence from prior events, every thought and action would seem to merit the statement “I don’t know what came over me.” If determinism is true, the future is set—and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behavior. And to the extent that the law of cause and effect is subject to indeterminism—quantum or otherwise—we can take no credit for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible with the popular notion of free will.

Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it. Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least thirty minutes on most days but not later than two to three hours before your bedtime. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as eight hours to wear off fully. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it hard for you to fall asleep at night. Nicotine is also a stimulant, often causing smokers to sleep only very lightly. In addition, smokers often wake up too early in the morning because of nicotine withdrawal. Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off. Avoid large meals and beverages late at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion, which interferes with sleep. Drinking too many fluids at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate. If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep. Some commonly prescribed heart, blood pressure, or asthma medications, as well as some over-the-counter and herbal remedies for coughs, colds, or allergies, can disrupt sleep patterns. If you have trouble sleeping, talk to your health care provider or pharmacist to see whether any drugs you’re taking might be contributing to your insomnia and ask whether they can be taken at other times during the day or early in the evening. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night. Relax before bed. Don’t overschedule your day so that no time is left for unwinding. A relaxing activity, such as reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual. Take a hot bath before bed. The drop in body temperature after getting out of the bath may help you feel sleepy, and the bath can help you relax and slow down so you’re more ready to sleep. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. Get rid of anything in your bedroom that might distract you from sleep, such as noises, bright lights, an uncomfortable bed, or warm temperatures. You sleep better if the temperature in the room is kept on the cool side. A TV, cell phone, or computer in the bedroom can be a distraction and deprive you of needed sleep. Having a comfortable mattress and pillow can help promote a good night’s sleep. Individuals who have insomnia often watch the clock. Turn the clock’s face out of view so you don’t worry about the time while trying to fall asleep. Have the right sunlight exposure. Daylight is key to regulating daily sleep patterns. Try to get outside in natural sunlight for at least thirty minutes each day. If possible, wake up with the sun or use very bright lights in the morning. Sleep experts recommend that, if you have problems falling asleep, you should get an hour of exposure to morning sunlight and turn down the lights before bedtime. Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy.

If your husband’s self-image needs a makeover, be patient. The answers don’t come overnight when a long-held pattern of thinking has to be broken. But you can appropriate the power of God to fight the enemy that feeds him familiar lies, so your husband can be free to hear His truth. Remember that God will reveal glimpses of the key to breaking any of your husband’s bad habits. As you pray for your husband’s self-image, He will show you how to pray.

Meditation Sit or lie down, relax, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths. As you exhale, imagine that you are letting go of everything that you don’t want or need. Easily, without effort, let any frustrations, tiredness, or worries melt away. This is a time to release an old way of life that no longer works for you. Imagine that your old ways, your old patterns, and all the obstacles to achieving what you truly want are gently dissolved and leaving your body with each breath. Every time you exhale, and release a little of your old limitations, you create more space inside of you for something new.

Can I have your sperm?” “Umm, no,” says my very handsome friend. He’s standing in the doorway of his stunning Upper East Side townhouse, wearing a completely bewildered expression. Who can blame him? It’s 10 p.m. and I’m in my pajamas, my bunned-up hair hanging askew off my head. “Before you say no, hear me out––” “No,” he repeats as if I haven’t just given him instructions. He eyeballs my pjs with the pigs with wings pattern on them. A joke gift Delia bought me when she told me she sleeps naked and I said I would do that when pigs fly. They’re very comfy. “Are you in your pajamas?” “Yes.” I push past him to get inside. “I’m prepared to assume all cost,” I rush to say, my voice high and marked with desperation. “You know my financial situation. You know I don’t need help in that regard. And you can participate as little or as much as you want in raising our child––” “Slow down, Stella––” “Jeff said no...” I walk directly into his living room and come to an abrupt stop. Stacks of cardboard boxes are everywhere. “Are you moving?” “Yes.” Ethan brushes a hand over his gorgeous face. “Where’s this coming from?” “I want a baby and the gays said I was too structured. And we’re friends, right? We respect each other, right?” “Wait? What gays?” “The architect, and the professor of economics at Columbia. Keep up, will you.” Ethan chuckles and I glare back. This wasn’t supposed to be this hard. And it’s poking at all my sore spots. “I really liked the professor. He’s the one that said I was too structured. The architect said he found a more geographically suitable candidate, but I’m pretty sure he was lying because I would’ve moved uptown if that was the only issue.” “Okay––” he says, taking a deep breath, his hands on his hips. “You want a baby.” “Yes.” “So go to a sperm bank.” “Too anonymous.” “I’m not giving you my sperm, Stella. I’m moving to Los Angeles in less than two weeks and I’m getting married. I don’t think she’d be too keen on me handing over my sperm.” Stunned, I rock back on my heels. “What?! To who?” “To a woman I’m in love with.” He smiles then, the sweetest of smiles, and I know he’s serious. “Camilla’s friend.” At my blank response he continues, “The actress––we haven’t talked in months.” “I called.” “To tell me my investments are up thirteen percent.” “You’re up fourteen for the year now. And you said you were too busy for a drink.” “You canceled the last time.” Totally dejected, I slump down on the armrest of his couch. “You were the last name on my list.” I can’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. I’m so bummed I may start to cry and I am not a crier. Ethan chuckles softly. “Wow, thanks.” “You know what I mean.” “Why not a sperm bank?” “I want my kid to know his or her father. I don’t want to tell them I bought their father.

Who are you?” she managed to ask. “And why are you here?” “I am Iain Donovan, the Earl of Ashton,” he answered. “At your service.” He bowed, and in his grin, she detected a teasing air. An Irishman, she was certain, given his speech patterns. But an earl? Exactly how empty headed did he think she was? Rose

Over the last generation, journalism has slowly been swallowed. The ascendant media companies of our era don’t think of themselves as heirs to a great ink-stained tradition. Some prefer to call themselves technology firms. This redefinition isn’t just a bit of fashionable branding. Silicon Valley has infiltrated the profession, from both within and without. Over the past decade, journalism has come to depend unhealthily on Facebook and Google. The big tech companies supply journalism with an enormous percentage of its audience—and therefore a big chunk of revenue. This gives Silicon Valley influence over the entire profession, and it has made the most of its power. Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media to ink terrible deals, which look like self-preserving necessities, but really just allow Facebook and Google to hold them even tighter. Media will grant Facebook the right to sell advertising or give Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. They like to shift quickly in a radically different direction, which is great for their bottom line, but terrible for all the media companies dependent on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or that its users prefer ideologically pleasing propaganda to hard news. When Facebook shifts direction like this or when Google tweaks its algorithm, they instantly crash Web traffic flowing to media, with all the rippling revenue ramifications that follow. Media know they should flee the grasp of Facebook, but dependence also breeds cowardice. The prisoner lies on the cot dreaming of escape plans that will never hatch. Dependence on the big tech companies is increasingly the plight of the worker and the entrepreneur. Drivers maintain erratic patterns of sleep because of Uber’s shifting whims. Companies that manufacture tchotchkes sold on Amazon watch their businesses collapse when Amazon’s algorithms detect the profitability of their item, leading the giant to manufacture the goods itself at a lower price. The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability. It’s the way in which the tech companies dictate the patterns of work, the way in which their influence can shift the ethos of an entire profession to suit their needs—lowering standards of quality, eroding ethical protections. I saw this up close during my time at the New Republic. I watched how dependence on the tech companies undermined the very integrity of journalism. At the very beginning of that chapter in my career, I never imagined that we would go down that path.

Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and retrograde journeys. Come back here, to the points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back there. He is wearing a white hood. His shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man. He is the pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or "Der Lied-Stadt," that's what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem about the Lied-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. But we will not read it, because WE are going to Happyville. The pointsman has made sure we'll go there. He hardly has to work at all. The lever is very smooth, and easy to push. Even you could push it, Skippy. If you knew where it was. But look what a lot of work he has done, with just one little push. He has sent us all the way to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. That is because he knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the only kind of man who puts in very little work and makes big things happen, all over the world. He could have sent you on the right trip back there, Skippy. You can have YOUR fantasy if you want, you probably don't deserve anything better, but Mister Information tonight is in a kind mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by reminding you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that dacoit-faced auto still on the roads? You said "the War," just as you rattled over the points onto the wrong track. The War WAS the set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the War is keeping things alive. THINGS. The Ford is only one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even KNOW they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn't it, Skippy?

Fortunes of all major nations have followed specific trajectories of rise and retreat, but perhaps the greatest difference in their paths has been the time they spent at the top of their performance: some had a relatively prolonged plateau followed by steady decline (both the British empire and the 20th-century United States fit this pattern); others had a swift rise to a brief peak, followed by a more or less rapid decline. Japan is clearly in the latter category.

keep your ears open, Pattern. I suspect this day is going to only get more interesting.” She walked back toward the tent. “But, I don’t have ears,” he said. “Ah yes. A metaphor? Such delicious lies. I will remember that idiom.

Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it. I preferred it to stay tucked away in the back of my mind. But I do think about Thailand sometimes. Usually late at night, when I've been awake long enough to see the curtain patterns through the darkness and the shapes of the books on my shelves. At those times I make an effort to remember sitting in the glade with the shadow of the clock-hand branch lying across the ferns, smoking my cigarette. I choose this moment because it was the last time I could pinpoint that I was me being myself. Being normal, with nothing much going through my head apart from how pretty the island was, and how quiet. It isn't that from then on every second in Thailand was bad. Good things happened. Loads of good things. And mundane things, too: washing my face in the morning, swimming, fixing some food, whatever. But in retrospect, all those instances are colored by what was going on around them. Sometimes it feels to me that I walked into the glade and lit the cigarette, and someone else came along and finished it. Finished it, stubbed it out, flicked it into the bushes, then went to find Etienne and Françoise. It's a cop-out, because it's another thing that distances me from what happened, but that's how it feels. This other person did things I wouldn't do. It wasn't just our morals that were at odds, there were little character differences, too. The cigarette butt - the other guy flicked it into the bushes. I'd have done something else. Buried it maybe. I hate littering, let alone littering in a protected Marine park. It's hard to explain. I don't believe in possession or the supernatural. I know that in real terms it was me who flicked the cigarette butt. Fuck it. I've been relying on an idea that these things would become clear to me as I wrote them down, but it isn't turning out that way.

I am a child of Western medicine. I am a cynic, a skeptic, which is the attitude underlying so much of Western medicine. I don't believe in inherent goodness. I don't believe that nature will never lead you astray. I believe there are more than one hundred billion cells in the body and if, at any moment, one of them is not becoming cancerous, it's only your good luck, the whimsy of your god that has spared you. Natural childbirth proudly announces, "All pain has a purpose," which is a wonderful view, an utterly romantic view, straight out of the mind of Shelley or Byron; those thoughts are not mine. I live in a world of random events, unseen collisions, and sudden swerves. The beauty, for me, lies not in knowing there is an underlying purposeful pattern but in facing, with some sort of grace, the impenetrable vista.

Let your imagination change what you know. Suddenly a gray rock becomes ashen or clouded with dream. A ring round a rock is luck. To find a red rock is to discover earthblood. Blue rocks make you believe in them. Patterns and flecks on rocks are bits of different countries and terrains, speckled questions. Conglomerates are the movement of land in the freedom of water, smoothed into a small thing you can hold in your hand, rub against your face. Sandstone is soothing and lucid. Shale, of course, is rational. Find pleasure in these ordinary palm worlds. Help yourself prepare for a life. Recognize when there are no words for the pain, when there are no words for the joy, there are rocks. Fill all the clear drinking glasses in your house with rocks, no matter what your husband or lover thinks. Gather rocks in small piles on the counters, the tables, the windowsills. Divide rocks by color, texture, size, shape. Collect some larger stones, place them along the floor of your living room, never mind what the guests think, build an intricate labyrinth of inanimates. Move around your rocks like a curl of water. Begin to detect smells and sounds to different varieties of rock. Give names to some, not geological, but of your own making. Memorize their presence, know if one is missing or out of place. Bathe them in water once each week. Carry a different one in your pocket every day. Move away from normal but don’t notice it. Move towards excess but don’t care. Own more rocks than clothing, than dishes, than books. Lie down next to them on the floor, put the smaller ones in your mouth occasionally. Sometimes, feel lithic, or petrified, or rupestral instead of tired, irritable, depressed. At night, alone, naked, place one green, one red, one ashen on different parts of your body. Tell no one.

The answer to our problems doesn't lie in improving the quality of the contents of our mind, although that's not a bad thing to do and that would be useful in making us more helpful for other people. There are many things about the world I don't know. For instance, I don't know anything about car engines, so if your car breaks down I can't help you. If I knew about car engines it would make me more helpful as a person in certain situations. Whatever we learn, whether it's sewing, dancing, singing or knitting, these can be useful in certain areas, but they are all relative. The key thing is for us to learn about ourselves. This doesn't mean developing a narcissistic orientation, but to see how I am? What is the ground of my being, and what is the patterning of my becoming? Following the instruction of the teacher means to turn your gaze toward yourself. To become calm and clear. To be honest in the seeing of limiting patterns. To allow them to be there, neither pushing them away nor merging into them. In that way we learn for ourselves the self-liberating nature of the mind.

Chapter 13 - 1 Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

One thing leads to another in this world, Flamen, and we human beings get dragged along like—like dead leaves spinning in the wake of a skimmer. Diablo was saying a while back how you fine down your principles so that a machine can handle them, and pretty soon the person using the machine comes to imagine that this is how it’s always been— there never was a subtler way of thinking. That’s some of where it’s at, but it’s not all by any means. Take the fine expensive home you live in, with its automatic defenses and its mines sown under the lawn like daffodil-bulbs. You shut yourself up behind armor-plate, you shut your mind too. You advertise Guardian traps on your show, don’t you—those steel bands spiked like an Iron Maiden? What’s the mentality of someone who’s prepared to come home from visiting neighbors and find a corpse hung up in the doorway? I say he’s already insane when he commits himself to that course of action, and you don’t have to wait for him to lose his marbles under an overdose of Ladromide before he stops thinking as a responsible mature person ought to! And what’s the reason that’s advanced for acting this way?” He rounded on Reedeth. “You know! You probably have it dinned into you a dozen times a day at your work! ‘Be an individual!’” Conroy contrived to make the slogan sound obscene. “And what’s this been twisted into? The biggest Big Lie in history! It’s no use making your life so private you refuse to learn from other people’s experience—you just get stuck in a groove of mistakes you need never have made. We have more knowledge available at the turn of a switch than ever before, we can bring any part of the world into our own homes, and what do we do with it? Half the time we advertise goods people can’t afford, and anyhow they’ve got the color and hold controls adrift because the pretty patterns are fun to look at when you’ve bolted and barred your mind with drugs. Split! Divide! Separate! Shut your eyes and maybe it’ll go away! “We mine our gardens, we close our frontiers, we barricade our cities with Macnamara lines to shut off black from white, we divide, divide, divide!” A stamp emphasized each repetition of the word. “It gets into our families, goddamn it, it gets into our very love-making! Christ, do you know I had a girl student last year who thought she was having an affair with a boy back home and all they’d ever done was sit in front of the comweb and masturbate at each other? Twenty miles apart! They’d never even kissed! We’re going insane, our whole blasted species—we’re heading for screaming ochlophobia! Another couple of generations and husbands will be afraid to be alone in the same room with their wives, mothers will be afraid of their babies, if there are any babies!

This is exactly what I did when God began to ask me to surrender and to change my inner dialogue to confront my thoughts of disappointment with Him. Whenever I started to have mean, discouraging thoughts or lies that I didn’t want to have in my head, I began saying out loud, “I love you.” The lie I believed: “You are a burden.” The truth I replaced it with: “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17, emphasis added). “I love you, Ash.” The lie I believed: “God must be punishing me.” The truth I replaced it with: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18, emphasis added). “I love you, Ash.” Saying these truths out loud was a thought pattern interrupter. I was telling my brain, “Don’t think that,” by putting up a roadblock that kept my thoughts from continuing down that dark path. And I felt like every time I said, “I love you, Ash,” out loud, it was God’s reminder that He loved me, He was fighting for me, and together we were going to get through this.

Going to therapy and talking about healing may just be the go-to flex of our time. It is supposedly an indicator of how profoundly self-aware, enlightened, emotionally mature, or “evolved” an individual is. Social media is obsessed and saturated with pop psychology and psychiatry content related to “healing”, trauma, embodiment, neurodiversity, psychiatric diagnoses, treatments alongside productivity hacks, self-care tips and advice on how to love yourself without depending on anyone else, cut people out of your life, manifest your goals to be successful, etc. Therapy isn’t a universal indicator of morality or enlightenment. Therapy isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that everyone must pursue. There are many complex political and cultural reasons why some people don’t go to therapy, and some may actually have more sustainable support or care practices rooted in the community. This is similar to other messaging, like “You have to learn to love yourself first before someone else can love you”. It all feeds into the lie that we are alone and that happiness comes from total independence. Mainstream therapy blames you for your problems or blames other people, and often it oscillates between both extremes. If we point fingers at ourselves or each other, we are too distracted to notice the exploitative systems making us all sick and sad. Oftentimes, people come out of therapy feeling fully affirmed and unconditionally validated, and this ego-caressing can feel rewarding in the moment even if it doesn’t help ignite any growth or transformation. People are convinced that they can do no wrong, are infallible, incapable of causing harm, and that other people are the problem. Treatment then focuses on inflating self-confidence, self-worth, self-acceptance, and self-love to chase one’s self-centered dreams, ambitions, and aspirations without taking any accountability for one’s own actions. This sort of individualistic therapeutic approach encourages isolation and a general mistrust of others who are framed as threats to our inner peace or extractors of energy, and it further breeds a superiority complex. People are encouraged to see relationships as accessories and means to a greater selfish end. The focus is on what someone can do for you and not on how to give, care for, or show up for other people. People are not pushed to examine how oppressive conditioning under these systems shows up in their relationships because that level of introspection and growth is simply too invalidating. “You don’t owe anyone anything. No one is entitled to your time and energy. If anyone invalidates you and disturbs your peace, they are toxic; cut them out of your life. You don’t need that negativity. You don’t need anyone else; you alone are enough. Put yourself first. You are perfect just the way you are.” In reality, we all have work to do. We are all socialized within these systems, and real support requires accountability. Our liberation is contingent on us being aware of our bullshit, understanding the values of the empire that we may have internalized as our own, and working on changing these patterns. Therapized people may fixate on dissecting, healing, improving, and optimizing themselves in isolation, guided by a therapist, without necessarily practicing vulnerability and accountability in relationships, or they may simply chase validation while rejecting the discomfort that comes from accountability. Healing in any form requires growth and a willingness to practice in relationships; it is not solely validating or invalidating; it is complex; it is not a goal to achieve but a lifelong process that no one is above; it is both liberating and difficult; it is about acceptance and a willingness to change or transform into something new; and ultimately, it is going to require many invalidating ego deaths so we can let go of the fixation of the “self” to ease into interdependence and community care.

Here’s the information: To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method, start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly. Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order. At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural conclusion, leaving about a quarter of the air left in the lungs, then hold that breath for as long as possible. Once you’ve reached your breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath of air around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again. Repeat the whole pattern three or four rounds and add in some cold exposure (cold shower, ice bath, naked snow angels) a few times a week. This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken.

General Tips for Better-than-Average Lie-Detecting Sit back and let the other person volunteer information, rather than pulling it out of them. Don’t let on what you know too early—or at all. Stay relaxed and causal. What you are observing is not the person themselves, but the person as they are in a quasi-interrogational situation with you. So don’t make it seem like an inquisition, otherwise you may simply be watching them feel distressed about the situation itself. Don’t worry about individual signs and clues like touching the nose, looking up to the right or stuttering. Rather, look at how the person responds in general to shifts in the conversation, especially at junctures where you believe they may be having to concoct a story on the fly. Listen for stories that seem unusually long or detailed—liars use more words, and they may even talk more quickly. Take your time. It may be a while before you uncover a deception. But the longer the other person talks, the more chance they have of slipping up or getting their story tangled. Watch primarily for inconsistencies—details of the story that don’t add up, emotional expressions that don’t fit the story, or abrupt shifts in the way the story is told. Being chatty and then all of a sudden getting quiet and serious when you ask a particular question is certainly telling. Always interpret your conversation in light of what you already know, the context, and other details you’ve observed in your interactions with this person. It’s all about looking at patterns, and then trying to determine if any disruptions in that pattern point to something interesting. Don’t be afraid to trust your gut instinct! Your unconscious mind may have picked up some data your conscious mind hasn’t become aware of. Don’t make decisions on intuition alone, but don’t dismiss it too quickly, either. Takeaways Casual observation of body language, voice and verbal cues can help with understanding honest people, but we need more sophisticated techniques to help us detect liars. Most people are not as good at spotting deception as they think they are. Bias, expectation and the belief that we can’t or shouldn’t be lied to can get in the way of realizing we’re being deceived. Good lie detection is a dynamic process that focuses on the conversation. Use open ended questions to get people to surrender information voluntarily, and observe. Look out for overly wordy stories that are presented all at once, inconsistencies in the story or emotional affect, delays or avoidance in answering questions, or inability to answer unexpected questions. Liars are easier to spot when lying is spontaneous—try not to allow the liar any time to prepare or rehearse a script, or else ask unexpected questions or plant a lie yourself to watch their response and gain a baseline against which to compare the possible lie. Increasing cognitive load can cause a liar to fumble their story or lose track of details, revealing themselves in a lie. Keep drilling for detail and be suspicious if details don’t add up, if emotion doesn’t match content, or if the person is deliberately stalling for time. Look out for specific signs that a person is cognitively overloaded. One example is that the liar will display less emotions while speaking than they or an average person normally would in their situation. These emotions will instead leak through in their body language. Most commonly, this manifests in more frequent blinking, pupil dilation, speech disturbances, and slips of tongue. Spotting liars is notoriously difficult, but we improve our chances when we focus on strategic and targeted conversations designed to make the liar trip up on his own story, rather than trying to guess hidden intentions from body language alone.

We often see people who do things that look a bit crazy. We see somebody all the time not succeeding at things they could succeed at, or they are pulling out of relationships that looked promising, or they are putting up a wall when anyone tries to love them, or they’re sabotaging their chances, or whatever. And we think “Why does that person do it, it’s completely crazy, there’s no logic to it?” Here’s a very important point, there is always a point. Those behaviors once upon a time made great sense. I want to go further, not only did they make great sense, they were very often the difference between life and death, between managing to continue with life and giving up on life. We needed those patterns. Imagine someone growing up with a parent who is suicidal, they are threatening suicide, how on Earth does a child survive that experience? One of the ways they might learn to survive that experience is to shut down completely, right? They will never ever let anyone in because to let someone in is to risk their own annihilation. That when you’re 5 years old, to work that out, that is near genius, to work out that in order to survive you need to shut the drawbridge very tight. Fast forward 25, 35, 45, family situation resolved itself in whatever way, and you’ve moved on and you’re trying to have relationships or whatever, but in a horrible way that defense mechanism is still active, and now it’s trouble because now it means that when somebody comes along and says “Oh we could have a relationship”, “Umm, no not possible” because the drawbridge is still shut so a lot of the behavior that is suboptimal in adult life, once had a logic which we don’t understand, and we’re not sympathetic to it, we don’t even see it, but if we can learn to see that logic we can largely then come to unpick it. Or imagine somebody who, let’s say, we all know these people, who can’t stop joking around, somebody who is completely optimistic and sunny and even when something’s sad they’re at a funeral, they make a joke around the casket, and you go “Why are you not able to get in touch with your sadness?” Again imagine that former child has come through a journey where once upon a time it was absolutely essential that they be the clown and cheer up maybe a depressive mother or a father who was very angry and couldn’t find anything optimistic. That child needed to become a clown to get to the next stage of life, but now that precise behavior starts to be extremely negative. Another thing that children constantly do, is when children are brought up in suboptimal surroundings with parents who maybe are not that nice to them, it would be devastating to the child to have to see that the fault lies with their parent. Right? To imagine when you’re a four-year-old that your father or mother is really not a very nice person and maybe really quite disturbed and kind of awful, this is an unbearable thought. This was the pioneering work of the Scottish Psychoanalyst Ronald Faban. He was working with very deprived people in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 1930s and he arrived at a fascinating conclusion. He talked to children from the most deprived most violent abusive families and he discovered that those children spoke very highly of their parents, they would say “My father is a great man”, this is the guy who was hitting the child, “My mother, she’s amazing”, mother you know left the kid unclean and unfed for days. In Faben’s view, it’s better to think that you are the problem than that you’ve been born into a problematic situation, so what happens when you’re in a suboptimal parental situation, is you start to hate yourself, and blame yourself and feel bad about yourself because it is preferable to the other bit of really bad news which is to think that you’ve been born into such an inadequate family, that you may not survive it.

I think about all my patients who've died. Older people, most of them. But not all. Looking back, I try to remember if the young ones were marked somehow. Whether they might have done something to bring their fates down on themselves. But they didn't, Danny. One day God or Fate just said, 'I will not let you be happy. I will not give you children. I will not let you breathe another day. I will take away your ability to move."'" "Warren-" "No, listen. This is important. I've tried to believe, all my life. To have faith that there was justice in life, some larger plan or meaning. But I can't do it any more. I've watched some of the best people I ever met get crippled or taken before they reached thirty, forty, whatever. Babies, too. I've watched babies die of leuke mia. I've watched infants die from infections, bleeding from their eyes and ears. Terrible birth defects...I look for a reason, a pattern, anything that might justify all that. But nothing does. Nothing does. Until I got sick myself, I played the same game of denial that all doctors do. But, Danny, my cancer ripped the scales from my eyes. I go to these funerals and listen to smug preachers telling grieving people that God has a plan. Well, that's a lie. All my life I've followed the rules. I've toed the line, given to the less fortunate, followed the Commandments . . . and it hasn't mattered one bit. And don't tell me about Job, okay? If you tell me God is testing me by killing me... that's like saying we had to destroy a village in order to save it. It's a cruel joke that we play on ourselves. And don't tell me it's all made right in the afterlife, because you know what? The agony of one infant dying senselessly mocks all the golden trumpets of heaven. I don't want to sit at the right hand of a God who can torture children, or even one who sits by and allows them to be tortured. Free will, my ass. I made no choice to die at thirty seven. This one's on God's account, Major. We look for meaning where there is none, because we're too afraid to accept randomness. Well, I've accepted it. Embraced it, even. And once you do that, the world just doesn't look the same anymore.

A bias, put simply, is a systematic pattern of deviation from the norm in judgment. This deviation causes people to make inferences about other people and situations in a highly illogical fashion. People create their own “reality” from selective input.

People say I have a wild imagination. I don't. You see, what I do consists in analyzing the patterns of peculiar stupidity that emerge from their head, the same patterns that make their life boring and dramatic, full of problems and stress, and then recombining that into a beautiful multicolored ball that I throw back at them in the form of a joke or a lie that makes them laugh. But I didn't really create it; I merely gave use to their own nonsense.

Everyone who has lost weight knows this, but we keep forgetting it when we gain weight so that we can once again look forward to an imaginary happy future. Also, participating in the cycle of judging and shaming ourselves followed by feeling accomplished and elated gives us something to do and talk about, a way to pass the time. There’s nothing wrong with this pattern; it’s how our minds work. We intuitively understand that we want something we cannot see or touch, but we don’t know how to name or access it. And so we fall back into believing that being thinner will right everything that is wrong. The only problem is that it’s based on a lie.

What’s Kafkaesque? Frederick R. Karl defined the term this way: "What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.

People say I have a wild imagination. I actually don't. You see, what I do consists in analyzing the patterns of a peculiar form of stupidity that emerges from the head of most I interact with, especially when dealing with groups; the same patterns that make their life boring and dramatic, full of problems and stress. And then, I merge and recombine that into a beautiful multicolored ball that I throw back at them in the form of a joke or a lie that makes them laugh. But I didn't really create it; I merely gave a positive use to their own nonsense. And they love it. And yet, they always think I am the crazy one, the one with the wild imagination. But I am just an artist. I can only be creative by using the colors and forms given to me through observation. If I am good at everything I do with art, as with jokes, is because I am a good artist.

Here’s the information: To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method, start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly. Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order. At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural conclusion, leaving about a quarter of the air left in the lungs, then hold that breath for as long as possible. Once you’ve reached your breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath of air around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again. Repeat the whole pattern three or four rounds and add in some cold exposure (cold shower, ice bath, naked snow angels) a few times a week. This flip-flopping—breathing all-out, then not at all, getting really cold and then hot again—is the key to Tummo’s magic. It forces the body into high stress one minute, a state of extreme relaxation the next. Carbon dioxide levels in the blood crash, then they build back up. Tissues become oxygen deficient and then flooded again. The body becomes more adaptable and flexible and learns that all these physiological responses can come under our control. Conscious heavy breathing, McGee told me, allows us to bend so that we don’t get broken. •

Is it enough to live in a universe whose laws spontaneously create life? Or do you prefer ... God?” She paused, looking embarrassed. “Sorry, after all we’ve been through tonight, I know that’s a strange question.” “Well,” Langdon said with a laugh, “I think my answer would benefit from a decent night’s sleep. But no, it’s not strange. People ask me all the time if I believe in God.” “And how do you reply?” “I reply with the truth,” he said. “I tell them that, for me, the question of God lies in understanding the difference between codes and patterns.” Ambra glanced over. “I’m not sure I follow you.” “Codes and patterns are very different from each other,” Langdon said. “And a lot of people confuse the two. In my field, it’s crucial to understand their fundamental difference.” “That being?” Langdon stopped walking and turned to her. “A pattern is any distinctly organized sequence. Patterns occur everywhere in nature—the spiraling seeds of a sunflower, the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb, the circular ripples on a pond when a fish jumps, et cetera.” “Okay. And codes?” “Codes are special,” Langdon said, his tone rising. “Codes, by definition, must carry information. They must do more than simply form a pattern—codes must transmit data and convey meaning. Examples of codes include written language, musical notation, mathematical equations, computer language, and even simple symbols like the crucifix. All of these examples can transmit meaning or information in a way that spiraling sunflowers cannot.” Ambra grasped the concept, but not how it related to God. “The other difference between codes and patterns,” Langdon continued, “is that codes do not occur naturally in the world. Musical notation does not sprout from trees, and symbols do not draw themselves in the sand. Codes are the deliberate inventions of intelligent consciousnesses.” Ambra nodded. “So codes always have an intention or awareness behind them.” “Exactly. Codes don’t appear organically; they must be created.” Ambra studied him a long moment. “What about DNA?” A professorial smile appeared on Langdon’s lips. “Bingo,” he said. “The genetic code. That’s the paradox.” Ambra felt a rush of excitement. The genetic code obviously carried data — specific instructions on how to build organisms. By Langdon’s logic, that could mean only one thing. “You think DNA was created by an intelligence!” Langdon held up a hand in mock self-defense. “Easy, tiger!” he said, laughing. “You’re treading on dangerous ground. Let me just say this. Ever since I was a child, I’ve had the gut sense that there’s a consciousness behind the universe. When I witness the precision of mathematics, the reliability of physics, and the symmetries of the cosmos, I don’t feel like I’m observing cold science; I feel as if I’m seeing a living footprint ... the shadow of some greater force that is just beyond our grasp.