Predict Dream Quotes

HEARTWORK Each day is born with a sunrise and ends in a sunset, the same way we open our eyes to see the light, and close them to hear the dark. You have no control over how your story begins or ends. But by now, you should know that all things have an ending. Every spark returns to darkness. Every sound returns to silence. And every flower returns to sleep with the earth. The journey of the sun and moon is predictable. But yours, is your ultimate ART.

The assumption of time is one of humanity's greatest follies. We tell ourselves that there's always tomorrow, when we can no more predict tomorrow than we can the weather. Procrastination is the thief of dreams.

When we come to face the entangled vagaries on the chessboard of our life, let us not shrink from using the queen’s gambit to disentwine predictable hassles or diffuse incendiary plots if we want to take control of our being and make our dreams come true, transparent, and straightforward. (”Life with a sea view”)

It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.

When people seek to undermine your dreams, predict your doom or criticize you, remember that they are telling you their story, not yours.

And your life,' Katie said to Christy, 'is turning into a rather predictable romance. Girl meets boy. Boy is a dork for four years. Girl blossoms into a gorgeous woman. Boy finds his brain. Girl turns into starry-eyed mush head.

No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.

Intuition comes in several forms: - a sudden flash of insight, visual or auditory - a predictive dream - a spinal shiver of recognition as something is occurring or told to you - a sense of knowing something already - a sense of deja vu - a snapshot image of a future scene or event - knowledge, perspective or understanding divined from tools which respond to the subconscious mind

I couldn't tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.

Positive thinking is powerful thinking. If you want happiness, fulfillment, success and inner peace, start thinking you have the power to achieve those things. Focus on the bright side of life and expect positive results.

Every spark returns to darkness. Every sound returns to silence. Every flower returns to sleep with the earth. The journey of the sun and moon is predictable. But yours, is your ultimate art.

No one can predict the future, Your Grace. Fate favors the strong. God rewards the good. And the stars never abandon those who dream of more.

I had a dream about you last night... You replaced all the people in your life with kittens. It felt more like a prediction of the future.

You see it as me going back. I see it as me staying on track.

His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.

She kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.

What was he thinking? The Internet did not predict the future; only the pink Kindle did that.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den. I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there.

Storytelling--that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive.

I dreamed I read the cards for you," she said. "And?" "And I predicted I would bring heartbreak and trouble into your life," she said. "Too late," he said, staring down at their joined hands. "Heartbreak and trouble got there ahead of you.

You have no control over how your story begins or ends. But by now, you should know that all things have an ending. Every spark returns to darkness. Every sound returns to silence. Every flower returns to sleep with the earth. The journey of the sun and moon is predictable. But yours, is your ultimate art.

Positive thinkers create large pictures of what they want in their minds and can predict the future from the present.

But if all maximizing models are really arguing is that “people will always seek to maximize something,” then they obviously can’t predict anything, which means employing them can hardly be said to make anthropology more scientific. All they really add to analysis is a set of assumptions about human nature. The assumption, most of all, that no one ever does anything primarily out of concern for others; that whatever one does, one is only trying to get something out of it for oneself. In common English, there is a word for this attitude. It’s called “cynicism.” Most of us try to avoid people who take it too much to heart. In economics, apparently, they call it “science.

Flash Floods are about as predictable as a crazy dream after one too many fish tacos - one minutes you're fine, and the next minute a moose is floating past you wearing a fishing hat and ladies' pajamas.

From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea.VIII Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump—also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night—may want to take note.

Getting what you want means making the decisions you need to make to get what you want. Not the decisions those around you think you should make. Making the safe decision is full, predictable and elads nowhere new. The unsafe decision causess you to think and respond in a way you hadn't thought of. And that thought will lead to other thoughts which will help you achieve what you want. Start taking bad decisions and it will take you to a plce where others only dream of being.

My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make.

If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine. What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic. We certainly cannot predict future events exactly if we cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being who, unlike us, could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals. It seems better to employ the principle of economy known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.

Go now, and live. Experience. Dream. Risk. Close your eyes and jump. Enjoy the freefall. Choose exhilaration over comfort. Choose magic over predictability. Choose potential over safety. Wake up to the magic of everyday life. Make friends with your intuition. Trust your gut. Discover the beauty of uncertainty. Know yourself fully before you make promises to another. Make millions of mistakes so that you will know how to choose what you really need. Know when to hold on and when to let go. Love hard and often and without reservation. Seek knowledge. Open yourself to possibility. Keep your heart open, your head high and your spirit free. Embrace your darkness along with your light. Be wrong everyday once in a while, and don't be afraid to admit it. Awaken to the brilliance in ordinary moments. Tell the truth about yourself no matter what the cost. Own your reality without apology. See goodness in the world. Be Bold. Be Fierce. Be Grateful. Be Wild, Crazy and Gloriously Free. Be You. Go now, and live.

I used to dream of finding someone who would love me like a prince in a fairy tale so I could be their princess. But I don't love you like a princess. There isn't anything soft or sweet or easy about us. It's wild and unpredictable. It hurts more than any pain I've ever felt and consumes me more completely than anything I ever could have predicted. You make my heart race with all the best kinds of fear and my gut clench with the angriest butterflies I've ever known. I have hated you more than I even knew I could hate a man and I think if I love you with as much fury then I'll burn up in it.

And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rainstorm we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old—the dream of total control—has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn’t true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.

When you have a child, you start to dream of how this kid will grow up and make you proud. The only thing you can predict with 100% certainty is that the reality will diverge somehow from that dream. Some of our children will disappoint us by not being the scholars we hoped they would be. Some children will disappoint us by not being the athletes we hoped they would be. Some will disappoint us by coming out and telling us they are gay and they won't give us grandchildren...the real question is not, what book can I read, what technique can I use to raise a perfect child? The real question is how will you handle that gap between the child you dreamt of having and the real child growing up in your home...What I have learned is that any religion, if you do it wrong, will leave people feeling condemned and dismissed and unworthy and any religion, if you do it right, will leave people feeling cleansed and firmed. (118) Rabbi Harold Kushner

A friend once told me that what she fears most about growing old is becoming irrelevant, turning into a nostalgic old woman who cannot understand the world around her, or contribute much to it. This is what we fear collectively, as a species, when we hear of superhumans. We sense that in such a world, our identity, our dreams and even our fears will be irrelevant, and we will have nothing more to contribute. Whatever you are today – be it a devout Hindu cricket player or an aspiring lesbian journalist – in an upgraded world you will feel like a Neanderthal hunter in Wall Street. You won’t belong.

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lost the courts and wait for a White House scandal. And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists these days goes like this: The Republican Party has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same approach. ...Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine". It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics.

Damn you," said Arithon. In a shattering change of mood, he was laughing. "You have it. But what's my word against the grandiloquent predictions of a maudlin and drunken prophet?" "Maybe everything," Felirin finished gently. "You're too young to live without dreams.

I can't predict the future but I'm pretty much sure of how I want it to be, how so? Because I have a dream and zero reasons not to achieve it.

We think of clichés as boring and predictable, but they are actually one of the most dangerous things in the world.

Think it. Perceive it. Speak it. Predict it. See it. Dream it. Believe it. Achieve it.

I still love you, Gustavo, but it's a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain.

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace’s dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!

Is there any way to be sure that your whole life has not been a dream? I don't think that there is. Typically we call some experiences "dreams" and others "reality" by contrasting them. Experiences that we call "real" are consistent and predictable. For example, people don't just get up and fly away in "real life" while they sometimes do in dreams. And it is not unusual for the experiences we have in dreams to jump around from one time and place to another, while those events we call "real" do not. But if your whole life has been a dream, then there is nothing to contrast these experiences with. In this case, the "dreams" that you recall each night are just dreams within the dream. And that contrast still holds. Even if your whole life has been a dream you could distinguish your nightly dreams from your "waking experiences" much of the time. But how do you know that you are not in Neo's predicament- that even your waking experiences are simply more dreams- just more predictable ones? Morpheus's suggestion seems correct. If you have never awakened from the dream to see what "real life" is actually like, you would have absolutely no way to discern that you are dreaming.

WHATEVER THE SOUL IS TAUGHT to expect, that it will build. Our heart longings, our soul aspirations, are something more than mere vaporings of the imagination or idle dreams. They are prophecies, predictions, couriers, forerunners of things which can become realities. They are indicators of our possibilities. They measure the height of our aim, the range of our efficiency.

This was her life. Colorful and simple. Comfortable and predictable. She'd woven herself into the fabric of the town, serving and loving the townsfolk and making a life for herself in Penance. ~Aggie

I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.

One of the study’s major findings was that in the successful relationships, positive attention outweighed negative on a daily basis by a factor of five to one. This positive attention wasn’t about dramatic actions like throwing over-the-top birthday parties or purchasing a dream home. It took the form of small gestures, such as: using a pleased tone of voice when receiving a phone call from the partner, as opposed to an exasperated tone or a rushed pace that implied the partner’s call was interrupting important tasks inquiring about dentist appointments or other details of the other person’s day putting down the remote control, newspaper, or telephone when the other partner walked through the door arriving home at the promised time—or at least calling if there was a delay These small moments turned out to be more predictive of a loving, trusting relationship than were the more innovative steps of romantic vacations and expensive presents. Possibly, that’s because small moments provide consistent tending and nurturing.

In its purity this life [in the home circle] is the highest, the most exalted that can be thought or dreamed of for the education of our race. It is unconditionally true: where love and the ability to love are found in the home circle there one can confidently predict that the education it affords almost never fails.

If human beings vanished, and so did our consciousness of the world—our inventories of plants and insects and endangered birds, our ability to predict weather patterns and measure whole populations—would the planet still know itself? Or would it be better off without our predictions and the ways we made them come true?

The mitochondria in our cells, that power our metabolism, were formerly free living bacteria, as are the chloroplasts that power those of plants. All complex life-forms are generated through just this kind of cooperative joining, over long evolutionary time, with information built upon information, complexity always increasing in order to more fully stabilize the system. And all such symbiogenic joinings produce life-forms that are not only more complex but whose capacities cannot be predicted from a study of the parts that joined together.

A certain kind of courage is required to follow what truly calls to us; why else would so many choose to live within false certainties and pretensions of security? If genuine treasures were easy to find this world would be a different place. If the path of dreams were easy to walk or predictable to follow many more would go that route. The truth is that most prefer the safer paths in life even if they know that their souls are called another way.

Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton’s physics. As one physicist put it: “Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace’s dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it.

Are there Laws of Humanics as there are Laws of Robotics? How many Laws of Humanics might there be and how can they be expressed mathematically? I don’t know. “Perhaps, though, there may come a day when someone will work out the Laws of Humanics and then be able to predict the broad strokes of the future, and know what might be in store for humanity, instead of merely guessing as I do, and know what to do to make things better, instead of merely speculating. I dream sometimes of founding a mathematical science which I think of as ‘psychohistory,’ but I know I can’t and I fear no one ever will.

The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next. How can he send his daughter out into a world like that? But even an infant’s brain can predict the rough path of a falling object in flight. And so, maybe, in a way, Ben can see what’s coming: His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body. And her heart—now thrumming strong and steady, against her father’s chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life—that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.

It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their uncanny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight and read your mind

Against this vision of hope, I find my faithful certainty—that everything will be beautiful, in the end. That God has a plan for the days to come. That love will triumph in all things, and my dreams are born with purpose. These moments unfold like a never-ending collection of poetry, written by the hands of the divine. The days are my own. Each one is made for me. With every twist and turn and tumble, I learn to step back and smile. For when we think we’ve got it made, when the days to come seem so predictable, that is when He shows us the substance of which this life is made.

But Alden never knew how to measure the weight of a sigh. He could not predict the moment when the petal of a spent rose would release and descend. Alden could not tell me when a screech owl would cry out from a darkened pine bough outside my bedroom window and insinuate itself into my dreams. I

As surely as the town of Rochelle is Protestant I can see you now becoming impatient. The covers of my book are between your relentless palms. A single hint of insolence on this page, the faintest shine of gloating over all these delays, and you will slam the volume shut - don't claim I can't predict it!

[J]ust as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant to safely pronounce anything impossible, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp. Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition as he, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city-here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame. Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o'war.

but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness]

Musicians are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, they face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get real jobs, and their own fear that they’ll never work again. Every day, they have to ignore the possibility that the vision they have dedicated their lives to is a pipe dream. With every note, they stretch themselves, emotionally and physically, risking criticism and judgement. With every passing year, many of them watch as the other people their age achieve the predictable milestones of normal life – the car, the family, the house, the nest egg. Why? Because musicians are willing to give their entire lives to a moment – to that melody, that lyric, that chord, or that interpretation that will stir the audience’s soul. Musicians are beings who have tasted life’s nectar in that crystal moment when they poured out their creative spirit and touched another’s heart. In that instant, they were as close to magic, God, and perfection as anyone could ever be. And in their own hearts, they know that to dedicate oneself to that moment is worth a thousand lifetimes.

Viriconium, the Pastel City; a little cryptic, a little proud, a little mad. Its histories, as forgotten as his own, made of the air a sort of amber, an entrapment; the geometry of its avenues was a wry message from one survivor to another: and its present, like his own, was but an implication of its past - a dream, a prediction, a brief possibility to be endured.

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

What I’m about to tell you,” Elliott told me, “ninety-nine percent of people in the world will never understand.” For the first time all week, it was just the two of us. Elliott had told Austin he wanted to talk to me one-on-one. We were standing on a rooftop lounge during sunset, looking out at the Manhattan skyline. “You see, most people live a linear life,” he continued. “They go to college, get an internship, graduate, land a job, get a promotion, save up for a vacation each year, work toward their next promotion, and they just do that their whole lives. Their lives move step by step, slowly and predictably. “But successful people don’t buy into that model. They opt into an exponential life. Rather than going step by step, they skip steps. People say that you first need to ‘pay your dues’ and get years of experience before you can go out on your own and get what you truly want. Society feeds us this lie that you need to do x, y, and z before you can achieve your dream. It’s bullshit. The only person whose permission you need to live an exponential life is your own. “Sometimes an exponential life lands in your lap, like with a child prodigy. But most of the time, for people like you and me, we have to seize it for ourselves. If you actually want to make a difference in the world, if you want to live a life of inspiration, adventure, and wild success—you need to grab on to that exponential life—and hold on to it with all you’ve got.

Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day. C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit.

We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they're rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage around like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘A sense of humor.’ Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such - what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man which brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs. ‘We’re hunting for jokes.’ Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. ‘Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.’ ‘Discover what?’ ‘The face of God. What else would we be looking for?

Sometimes people are very predictable: they want a kitten in June, for example, and come the first of September they want someone to drown their cat. So someone does. But other times, people have dreams and things they want they can keep. Eriksson was the man who fulfilled these dreams. No one knew exactly what he found for himself along the way - probably a lot less than people thought. But he went on doing it anyway, perhaps for the sake of the search.

Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines.

However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you.

The young activist who recycles Robert F. Kennedy’s line “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” has no idea he’s a walking, talking cliché, a non-conformist in theory while a predictable conformist in fact. But he also has no idea he’s tapping into his inner utopian.... RFK didn’t coin the phrase (JFK didn’t either, but he did use it first). The line actually comes from one of the worst people of the 20th century, George Bernard Shaw (admittedly he’s on the B-list of worst people since he never killed anybody; he just celebrated people who did). That much a lot of people know. But the funny part is the line comes from Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah. Specifically, it’s what the Serpent says to Eve in order to sell her on eating the apple and gaining a kind of immortality through sex (or something like that). Of course, Shaw’s Serpent differs from the biblical serpent, because Shaw — a great rationalizer of evil — is naturally sympathetic to the serpent. Still, it’s kind of hilarious that legions of Kennedy worshippers invoke this line as a pithy summation of the idealistic impulse, putting it nearly on par with Kennedy’s nationalistic “Ask Not” riff, without realizing they’re stealing lines from . . . the Devil. ​I don’t think this means you can march into the local high school, kick open the door to the student government offices with a crucifix extended, shouting “the power of Christ compels you!” while splashing holy water on every kid who uses that “RFK” quote on his Facebook page. But it is interesting.

All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.

As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring. As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.

Give yourself permission to walk away from those who belittle your ambitions and dreams, predict your doom, and constantly criticise you. Their projective reaction is nothing but a mere egoic reflection of their own emotions, perceptions, and experiences — which often occurs on the subconscious level, without them noticing. Reckon that it’s their story they are mirroring, not yours.

The NSA’s conventional wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there was no way to predict when exactly that would be. This rationalization was fuel for the agency’s ultimate dream, which is permanency—to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.

I suppose a part of me wished when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I'd be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I'd cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they'd grow wide and glisten with awe. I'd drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate—an odd prediction, maybe, of when I'm ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed.

From my childhood I had heard read, and read the Bible myself. Morning and evening the sacred volume was opened and prayers were said. The Bible was my first history, the Jews were the first people, and the events narrated by Moses and the other inspired writers, and those predicted by prophets were the all important things. In other books were found the thoughts and dreams of men, but in the Bible were the sacred truths of God. Yet in spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God. He was so saving of mercy, so extravagant in murder, so anxious to kill, so ready to assassinate, that I hated him with all my heart. At his command, babes were butchered, women violated, and the white hair of trembling age stained with blood. This God visited the people with pestilence -- filled the houses and covered the streets with the dying and the dead -- saw babes starving on the empty breasts of pallid mothers, heard the sobs, saw the tears, the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes, the new made graves, and remained as pitiless as the pestilence. This God withheld the rain -- caused the famine, saw the fierce eyes of hunger -- the wasted forms, the white lips, saw mothers eating babes, and remained ferocious as famine.

I wish I could do to you what you did to me, he wished. But it can’t be done to an android because they don’t care. If I had killed you last night, my goat would be alive now. There’s where I made the wrong decision. Yes, he thought; it can all be traced back to that and to my going to bed with you. Anyhow, you were correct about one thing; it did change me. But not in the way you predicted. A much worse way, he decided. And yet I don’t really care. Not any longer. Not, he thought, after what happened to me up there, toward the top of the hill. I wonder what would have come next, if I had gone on climbing and reached the top. Because that’s where Mercer appears to die. That’s where Mercer’s triumph manifests itself, there at the end of the great sidereal cycle. But if I’m Mercer, he thought, I can never die, not in ten thousand years. Mercer is immortal.

They could be like young witches sometimes, his daughters, with their black hair and sharp eyes. It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind. He’d had moments, in his marriage, when he’d almost feared Eileen and had envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts.

Sometimes life can shake you up & break you down & challenge you in ways you never could have predicted. It can make you question who you are and where you are going. This is just one chapter in your story, a moment of writers block. You are stronger than you think. There are places you haven’t been and dreams to chase. So close this chapter take your pen & start afresh. Don’t forget, you are the author. You may have your scene set but you get to decide the path of your hero(ine).

Nagging at her was the idea that a deep-seated motive kept her from passing the bar exam. That submerged part of her didn’t want to practice law, and she kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams. Her goals had been the goals of radical women a century ago: to become a lawyer … to compete toe-to-toe with men. But like any second-hand goal, it felt like a burden. It had already been fulfilled ten million times over by other women.

Your father’s death was an accident,” Kate said. “An accident. A terrible, horrible twist of fate that no one could have predicted.” Anthony shrugged fatalistically. “I’ll probably go the same way.” “Oh, for the love of—” Kate managed to bite her tongue a split second before she blasphemed. “Anthony, I could die tomorrow as well. I could have died today when that carriage rolled on top of me.” He paled. “Don’t ever remind me of that.” “My mother died when she was my age,” Kate reminded him harshly. “Did you ever think of that? By your laws, I should be dead by my next birthday.” “Don’t be—” “Silly?” she finished for him. Silence reigned for a full minute. Finally, Anthony said, his voice barely above a whisper, “I don’t know if I can get past this.” “You don’t have to get past it,” Kate said. She caught her lower lip, which had begun to tremble, between her teeth, and then laid her hand on an empty spot on the bed. “Could you come over here so I can hold your hand?” Anthony responded instantly; the warmth of her touch flooded him, seeping through his body until it caressed his very soul. And in that moment he realized that this was about more than love. This woman made him a better person. He’d been good and strong and kind before, but with her at his side, he was something more. And together they could do anything. It almost made him think that forty might not be such an impossible dream. “You don’t have to get past it,” she said again, her words blowing softly between them. “To be honest, I don’t see how you could get completely past it until you turn thirty-nine. But what you can do”— she gave his hand a squeeze, and Anthony somehow felt even stronger than he had just moments before—“ is refuse to allow it to rule your life.” “I realized that this morning,” he whispered, “when I knew I had to tell you I loved you. But somehow now— now I know it.” She nodded, and he saw that her eyes were filling with tears. “You have to live each hour as if it’s your last,” she said, “and each day as if you were immortal." -Kate & Anthony

Here are the radical words I have been alluding to: "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10). I must admit that I don't always greet God's kingdom with delight. There are things that I want in my life, and I not only want them, but I know how, when, and where I want them! I want my life to be comfortable. I want my schedule to be unobstructed and predictable. I want the people around me to esteem and appreciate me. I want control over the situations and relationships in my life. I want people to affirm my opinions and follow my lead. I want the pleasures that I find entertaining to be available to me. I want the ministry initiatives I direct to be well received and successful. I want my children to appreciate that they have been blessed with me as their father. I want my wife to be a joyful and committed supporter of my dreams. I don't want to suffer. I don't want to live without. I don't want to have to deal with personal defeat or ministry failure. What I am saying is that I want my kingdom to come and my will to be done.

You were burning in the middle of the worst solar storm our records can remember. (...) Everyone else fled. All your companions and crew left you alone to wrestle with the storm. “You did not blame them. In a moment of crystal insight, you realized that they were cowards beyond mere cowardice: their dependence on their immortality circuits had made it so that they could not even imagine risking their lives. They were all alike in this respect. They did not know they were not brave; they could not even think of dying as possible; how could they think of facing it, unflinching? “You did not flinch. You knew you were going to die; you knew it when the Sophotechs, who are immune to pain and fear, all screamed and failed and vanished. “And you knew, in that moment of approaching death, with all your life laid out like a single image for you to examine in a frozen moment of time, that no one was immortal, not ultimately, not really. The day may be far away, it may be further away than the dying of the sun, or the extinction of the stars, but the day will come when all our noumenal systems fail, our brilliant machines all pass away, and our records of ourselves and memories shall be lost. “If all life is finite, only the grace and virtue with which it is lived matters, not the length. So you decided to stay another moment, and erect magnetic shields, one by one; to discharge interruption masses into the current, to break up the reinforcement patterns in the storm. Not life but honor mattered to you, Helion: so you stayed a moment after that moment, and then another. (...) “You saw the plasma erupting through shield after shield (...) Chaos was attempting to destroy your life’s work, and major sections of the Solar Array were evaporated. Chaos was attempting to destroy your son’s lifework, and since he was aboard that ship, outside the range of any noumenal circuit, it would have destroyed your son as well. “The Array was safe, but you stayed another moment, to try to deflect the stream of particles and shield your son; circuit after circuit failed, and still you stayed, playing the emergency like a raging orchestra. “When the peak of the storm was passed, it was too late for you: you had stayed too long; the flames were coming. But the radio-static cleared long enough for you to have last words with your son, whom you discovered, to your surprise, you loved better than life itself. In your mind, he was the living image of the best thing in you, the ideal you always wanted to achieve. “ ‘Chaos has killed me, son,’ you said. ‘But the victory of unpredictability is hollow. Men imagine, in their pride, that they can predict life’s each event, and govern nature and govern each other with rules of unyielding iron. Not so. There will always be men like you, my son, who will do the things no one else predicts or can control. I tried to tame the sun and failed; no one knows what is at its fiery heart; but you will tame a thousand suns, and spread mankind so wide in space that no one single chance, no flux of chaos, no unexpected misfortune, will ever have power enough to harm us all. For men to be civilized, they must be unlike each other, so that when chaos comes to claim them, no two will use what strategy the other does, and thus, even in the middle of blind chaos, some men, by sheer blind chance, if nothing else, will conquer. “ ‘The way to conquer the chaos which underlies all the illusionary stable things in life, is to be so free, and tolerant, and so much in love with liberty, that chaos itself becomes our ally; we shall become what no one can foresee; and courage and inventiveness will be the names we call our fearless unpredictability…’ “And you vowed to support Phaethon’s effort, and you died in order that his dream might live.

The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory. The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round. But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production. Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts). However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality. Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.) The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment. Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.

Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer—a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously—you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That’s been a cherished scientific belief since Newton.” “And?” “Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting—about half a billion dollars in the last few decades—is money wasted. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way. We’ve tried the impossible—and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable.

Having read this short history of the lawn, when you now come to plan your dream house you might think twice about having a lawn in the front yard. You are of course still free to do it. But you are also free to shake off the cultural cargo bequeathed to you by European dukes, capitalist moguls and the Simpsons – and imagine for yourself a Japanese rock garden, or some altogether new creation. This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Renaissance continued, and I began to see the full scope of the Second Insight. The power of the church to define reality was diminishing, and Europeans were feeling as though they were awakening to look at life anew. Through the courage of countless individuals, all inspired by their intuitive memories, the scientific method was embraced as a democratic process of exploring and coming to understand the world in which humans found themselves. This method—exploring some aspect of the natural world, drawing conclusions, then offering this view to others—was thought of as the consensus-building process through which we would be able, finally, to understand mankind’s real situation on this planet, including our spiritual nature. But those in the church, entrenched in Fear, sought to squelch this new science. As political forces lined up on both sides, a compromise was reached. Science would be free to explore the outer, material world, but must leave spiritual phenomena to the dictates of the still-influential churchmen. The entire inner world of experience—our higher perceptual states of beauty and love, intuitions, coincidences, interpersonal phenomena, even dreams—all were, at first, off limits to the new science. Despite these restrictions, science began to map out and describe the operation of the physical world, providing information rich in ways to increase trade and utilize natural resources. Human economic security increased, and slowly we began to lose our sense of mystery and our heartfelt questions about the purpose of life. We decided it was purposeful enough just to survive and build a better, more secure world for ourselves and our children. Gradually we entered the consensus trance that denied the reality of death and created the illusion that the world was explained and ordinary and devoid of mystery. In spite of our rhetoric, our once-strong intuition of a spiritual source was being pushed farther into the background. In this growing materialism, God could only be viewed as a distant Deist’s God, a God who merely pushed the universe into being and then stood back to let it run in a mechanical sense, like a predictable machine, with every effect having a cause, and unconnected events happening only at random, by chance alone.

Apart from a few explanations that are not the subject of this essay, the strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror. In actual fact, the Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century do not merit the title of revolution. They lacked the ambition of universality. Mussolini and Hitler, of course, tried to build an empire, and the National Socialist ideologists were bent, explicitly, on world domination. But the difference between them and the classic revolutionary movement is that, of the nihilist inheritance, they chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone, instead of deifying reason. In this way they renounced their claim to universality. And yet Mussolini makes use of Hegel, and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology. In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism. They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force. The consequences were not long in appearing.

Appendix 1 Seven Points and Fifty-Nine Slogans for Generating Compassion and Resilience POINT ONE Resolve to Begin 1. Train in the preliminaries. POINT TWO Train in Empathy and Compassion: Absolute Compassion 2. See everything as a dream. 3. Examine the nature of awareness. 4. Don’t get stuck on peace. 5. Rest in the openness of mind. 6. In Postmeditation be a child of illusion. POINT TWO Train in Empathy and Compassion: Relative Compassion 7. Practice sending and receiving alternately on the breath. 8. Begin sending and receiving practice with yourself. 9. Turn things around (Three objects, three poisons, three virtues). 10. Always train with the slogans. POINT THREE Transform Bad Circumstances into the Path 11. Turn all mishaps into the path. 12. Drive all blames into one. 13. Be grateful to everyone. 14. See confusion as Buddha and practice emptiness. 15. Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, pray for help. 16. Whatever you meet is the path. POINT FOUR Make Practice Your Whole Life 17. Cultivate a serious attitude (Practice the five strengths). 18. Practice for death as well as for life. POINT FIVE Assess and Extend 19. There’s only one point. 20. Trust your own eyes. 21. Maintain joy (and don’t lose your sense of humor). 22. Practice when you’re distracted. POINT SIX The Discipline of Relationship 23. Come back to basics. 24. Don’t be a phony. 25. Don’t talk about faults. 26. Don’t figure others out. 27. Work with your biggest problems first. 28. Abandon hope. 29. Don’t poison yourself. 30. Don’t be so predictable. 31. Don’t malign others. 32. Don’t wait in ambush. 33. Don’t make everything so painful. 34. Don’t unload on everyone. 35. Don’t go so fast. 36. Don’t be tricky. 37. Don’t make gods into demons. 38. Don’t rejoice at others’ pain. POINT SEVEN Living with Ease in a Crazy World 39. Keep a single intention. 40. Correct all wrongs with one intention. 41. Begin at the beginning, end at the end. 42. Be patient either way. 43. Observe, even if it costs you everything. 44. Train in three difficulties. 45. Take on the three causes. 46. Don’t lose track. 47. Keep the three inseparable. 48. Train wholeheartedly, openly, and constantly. 49. Stay close to your resentment. 50. Don’t be swayed by circumstances. 51. This time get it right! 52. Don’t misinterpret. 53. Don’t vacillate. 54. Be wholehearted. 55. Examine and analyze. 56. Don’t wallow. 57. Don’t be jealous. 58. Don’t be frivolous. 59. Don’t expect applause.

It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought theory of everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times, but “strings”—tiny strands of energy. By vibrating in different ways, these strings produce the essential phenomena of nature, the way violin strings produce musical notes. String theory isn’t just powerful; it’s also mathematically beautiful. All that remains to be done is to write down the actual equations. This is taking a little longer than expected. But, with almost the entire theoretical-physics community working on the problem—presided over by a sage in Princeton, New Jersey—the millennia-old dream of a final theory is sure to be realized before long. It is the worst of times in physics. For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.’s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made; not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a theory of nothing. Yet the physics establishment promotes string theory with irrational fervor, ruthlessly weeding dissenting physicists from the profession. Meanwhile, physics is stuck in a paradigm doomed to barrenness.

Was it the arc of the universe? The natural result of centuries, millenia of wrong headed politics? Was she trained to find you, or were you trained to be found? Was it the fact that you'd already been tenderized like a pork chop by: never having been properly in love, being told you should be grateful for anything you get as a fat woman, getting weird messages that relationships are about fighting and being at odds with each other? The fact that your heart had been broken that one time and you desperately wanted to feel it unbreak? That you felt complete with someone loving you? That you just straight-up loved being desired, desiring someone, coming all the time? That you got addicted to her smell, her voice, her body? That you figured this was what you deserved? The super predictable result of a religion that pathologized sex but never talked about relationships? Terrible sex ed? Bad timing? You feel as if there is a box you can open to find the answer, but with the lid closed, the answer is all of these things, all at once.

The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’71 One lesson he did learn was that blacks could make excellent soldiers, and in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers, made up of men from Egypt and the Caribbean under a black battalion commander, Joseph ‘Hercules’ Domingue, to whom he gave a special award of 3,000 francs. By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’72 The defeat in Saint-Domingue ended for ever Napoleon’s dreams of a French empire in the West.

A dead world is never really dead. Even when the stars vanish in a great exodus, leaving an inky night that swallows the sky. Even when the sound of silence is a terrible thing to listen to in a city that once groaned with noise. But it’s not quite silence, is it? There are the birds that soar over bare roof rafters, egrets and jackdaws and scruffy brown scraps that go by a multitude of names calling joyfully to each other. There are the nocturnal animals who claw and scrape over cobblestones, lifting their gazes to the two pale moons impressed against a violet sky. There are the trees that stretch upwards, overgrown and languorous, from leaf-strewn courtyards, extending gracefully through balconies and walkways. And below them, the ferns that unfurl in dark, damp corners that might still bear cracked tiles in parched colours, or spongey wooden skates engraved with toothy chisel marks. Life, persistent and predictably stubborn, goes on. Close your eyes and the stars might not sing in this hushed city of dust and dreams, but there’s still singing nonetheless. Even if there’s just one voice left.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

I have a friend—she is the kind of friend that all of us have—who is a true believer in astrology and psychic phenomenon, a devotee of reiki, a collector of crystals, a woman who occasionally sends me emails with cryptic titles and a single line of text asking, for example, the time of day that I was born or whether I have any mental associations with moths. None that come immediately to mind, I write back. But then of course moths are suddenly everywhere: on watercolor prints in the windows of art shops, in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, on the pages of the illustrated children’s book I read to my nieces. This woman, whom I have known since I was very young, also experiences strange echoes and patterns, but for her they are not the result of confirmation bias or the brain’s inclination toward narrative. She believes that the patterns are part of the very fabric of reality, that they refer to universal archetypes that express themselves in our individual minds. Transcendent truths, she has told me many times, cannot be articulated intellectually because higher thought is limited by the confines of language. These larger messages from the universe speak through our intuitions, and we modern people have become so completely dominated by reason that we have lost this connection to instinct. She claims to receive many of these messages through images and dreams. In a few cases she has predicted major global events simply by heeding some inchoate sensation—an aching knee, the throbbing of an old wound, a general feeling of unease. This woman is a poet, and I tend to grant her theories some measure of poetic license. It seems to me that beneath all the New Agey jargon, she is speaking of the power of the unconscious mind, a realm that is no doubt elusive enough to be considered a mystical force in its own right. I have felt its power most often in my writing, where I’ve learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference. This was especially true when I wrote fiction. I would often put an image in a story purely by instinct, not knowing why it was there, and then the image would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for some conflict that emerged between the characters—again, something that was not planned deliberately—as though my subconscious were making the connections a step or two ahead of my rational mind. But these experiences always took place within the context of language, and I couldn’t understand what it would mean to perceive knowledge outside that context. I’ve said to my friend many times that I believe in the connection between language and reason, that I don’t believe thought is possible without it. But like many faith systems, her beliefs are completely self-contained and defensible by their own logic. Once, when I made this point, she smiled and said, “Of course, you’re an Aquarius.