Progress Is Not Linear Quotes

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff

[T]he nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.

It’s not enough to be good at something to be in your element… We’re being brought up with this idea that life is linear. This is an idea that’s perpetuated when you come to write your CV — that you set out your life in a series of dates and achievements, in a linear way, as if your whole existence has progressed in an ordered, structured way, to bring you to this current interview.

There's no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It's sloppy.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks. Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes

KEEP IN MIND THAT progress is not always linear. It takes constant course correcting and often a lot of zigzagging. Unfortunate things happen, accidents occur, and setbacks are usually painful, but that does not mean we quit.

To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will often come around again. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. In the meantime, we can deal only with what’s in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.

The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.

grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

Progress isn't linear, though. If you plotted it onto a graph, it wouldn't be this straight line up towards happiness. It would wiggle backwards, then forwards, up and down. You might feel worse in a month from now than you did a few weeks after it happened. But that doesn't mean you're not healing. It just means that we all experience emotions at different times.

tiring, but it is not confusing. You are never left wondering if you’ve made the wrong choice, or expended energy in the wrong direction, because there is only the one rung above you. Get good grades. Get better at your sport. Take the SAT. Do volunteer work. Apply to colleges. Choose a college. But then you get to college, and suddenly you’re out of rungs and that ladder has turned into a massive tree with hundreds of sprawling limbs, and progress is no longer a thing you can easily measure, because there are now thousands of paths to millions of destinations. And none are linear.

Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

History fancies itself linear - but yields to a cyclical temptation.

The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant). Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growth becomes explosive.

A Priestess looks within for direction and listens to the whispers, whimpers, and guttural groans of her inner wise woman. A Priestess is an elder. A Priestess is a woman who, regardless of linear age, has done the work and earned the right to say who she is and what she believes. She bows to no one except her own raw soul, and, while she is unquestionably an eternal student, she does not need external approval for her spiritual progress.

Prolific libraries take on an independent existence, and become living things...We may have chosen its themes, and the general pathways along which it will develop, but we can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the room, climbs to the ceiling, annexes the other rooms one by one, expelling anything that gets in the way. It eliminates pictures hanging on the walls, or ornaments that obstruct its advance; it moves on with its necessary but cumbersome acolytes -- stools and ladders -- and forces its owner into constant reorganization since its progress is not linear and calls for ever new kinds of diviion. At the same time, it is undeniably the reflection, the twin image of its master. To anyone with the insight to decode it, the fundamental character of the librarian will emerge as one's eye travels along the bookshelves. indeed no library of any size is like another, none has the same personality. (pp. 30-31)

It had no end and therefore no beginning, yet it progressed. Thus it was timeless, infinitely present and so could be taken to be a representation of time, which cannot be pictured by those who imagine themselves linear subjects to it.

We dream of building a fortress when we should be starting with a cottage. We fool ourselves into procrastinating by exaggerating how much time we really need. We create mental blocks by imagining our work will follow a linear progression.

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.

My mom’s smile is genuine, A lilac beaming In the presence of her Sun. Indentions in the sand prove Time’s linear progression, Her hair yet unblighted, Carrying midnight’s consistency. Clear tracks fading as the Movement slips further In the past. Cheekbones High, soft, In summer’s hue, Hopeful. Each step’s unknown impact, A future looking back. My father’s strength: One whose Life is in his arms. Squinting past the camera, He rests upon a rock Like caramel corn half eaten, Just to the left Of man-made concrete convention Daylight’s eraser Removing color to his right. Dustin sits In my father’s lap, Open mouth of a drooling Big mouth bass; Muscle tone Of a well exercised Jelly fish, He looks at me Half aware; His wheelchair Perched at the edge Of parking lot gravel grafted Like a scar on nature’s beach, Opening to the ironic splendor Of a bitter tasting lake. I took the picture. Age 11. Capturing the pinnacle arc Of a son To my lilac Who Outlived him and weeps, Still. Their sky has staple holes – Maybe that’s how the Light Leaked out.

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.

Were she to decide fully to live here in Black Cove unto death, she believed she would erect towers on the ridge marking the south and north points of the sun's annual swing. It would be a great pleasure year after year to watch with anticipation as the sun drew nigh to the notch and then on a specified day fell into it and then rose out of it and retraced its path. Over time, watching that happen again and again might make the years seem not such an awful linear progress but instead a looping and a return. Keeping track of such a thing would place a person, would be a way of saying, You are here, in this one station, now. It would be an answer to the question, Where am I?

In May 2012, Anna attended one of my four-day progressive workshops held in upstate New York. On the third day, during the last of four meditations, she completely surrendered and finally let go. For the first time since she had started meditating, she found herself floating in an infinite black space, aware that she was aware of herself. She had moved beyond the memory of who she was and became pure consciousness, totally free of her body, of her association to the material world, and of linear time. She felt so free that she no longer cared about her health conditions. She felt so unlimited that she couldn’t identify with her present identity. She felt so elevated that she was no longer connected to her past.

In eternity, there is no 'time' for anything to begin or end, therefore, past, present, future represent a linear progression that goes nowhere.

We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a "valley of disappointment" where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, the work was not wasted, it was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.

Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning, and lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections—all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness—the focused, linear, abstract, and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than with play. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment but for the rise of capitalism, too.

Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes. Time and space are not something entirely exterior to oneself, something that one has, keeps, saves, wastes, or loses.

The life of a sociable insect has nothing to say about us. Our lives take different shapes. We do not work in a linear progression through fixed roles like the honeybee. We are not consistently useful to the world at large. We talk about the complexity of the hive, but human societies are infinitely more complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair. Some of us make highly visible, elaborate contributions to the whole. Some of us are part of the ticking mechanics of the world, the incremental wealth of small gestures. All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us.

There are, broadly speaking, three directly analogous progressions inthe history of art: in Antiquity, from the blockiness of Egyptian art to the loose, painterly handling of Roman landscape frescoes; in the Middle Ages, from the tectonic emphasis of Ottonian art to the flamboyance of late Gothic; and in later times, from early Renaissance linearity to the sparkling web of light spun by the Rococo. The wheel turns full circle, but more rapidly each time.

The same is true of scientific progress. It is easy to depict a discovery, once made, as resulting from a logical, and linear process, but that does not mean that science should progress according to neat, linear and sequential rules.

Deception. What follows digitalization is deception, a period during which exponential growth goes mostly unnoticed. This happens because the doubling of small numbers often produces results so minuscule they are often mistaken for the plodder’s progress of linear growth. Imagine Kodak’s first digital camera with 0.01 megapixels doubling to 0.02, 0.02 to 0.04, 0.04 to 0.08. To the casual observer, these numbers all look like zero. Yet big change is on the horizon. Once these doublings break the whole-number barrier (become 1, 2, 4, 8, etc.), they are only twenty doublings away from a millionfold improvement, and only thirty doublings away from a billionfold improvement. It is at this stage that exponential growth, initially deceptive, starts becoming visibly disruptive.

Activism has its own overcoming myth. You enter some activist space, Tumblr, a campus group, your neighborhood cultural center. You’re expected to make mistakes, but to eventually never mess up anyone’s pronoun, ever, to never accidentally use the wrong vocabulary, regardless of how educated you are, self-educated or formally. You’re expected to be on this linear progression of no longer making mistakes once you are politically conscious, radical, or involved enough. And if you do make a mistake (and things that are actually toxic or oppressive end up being conflated very easily with valid disagreements), it’s evidence there’s something deeply wrong with your character regardless of how you handle it, whether you try to be accountable, or whether you work to not repeat that harm again.

Von Neumann makes two important observations here: acceleration and singularity. The first idea is that human progress is exponential (that is, it expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant) rather than linear (that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant).

It’s about building my toolkit and having practices in place so that I can handle the lows better; it’s about understanding that experiencing those bad days doesn’t mean I’m reverting or losing progress, but simply that I’m human. It’s all a balance. Healing isn’t linear.

Chesky was moving slowly, but at the same time, he was frustrated that his imagined success wasn’t arriving quickly enough. “Every day I was working on it and thinking, Why isn’t it happening faster?” he told me.4 “When you’re starting a company it never goes at the pace you want or the pace you expect. You imagine everything to be linear, ‘I’m going to do this, then this is going to happen and this is going to happen.’ You’re imagining steps and they’re progressive. You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.

The concept of time in the Jewish way of thinking is not one of linear flow. Time is a process, in which past, present, and future are bound to each other, not only by cause and effect but also as a harmonization of two motions: progress forward and a countermotion backward, encircling and returning.

People are fond of describing forward-thinking people as “ahead of their time.” This is a mischaracterization that fuels a false belief in an inherently linear social progress where positive change is inevitable... No one is really ahead of their time. If anything, such people are exactly of their time because they have the capacity to diagnose the maladies of their era and prescribe the remedies. The problem is just how stubbornly resistant to this medicine the rest of us are: it’s not merely that we are behind them, it’s that we all too often resent those bold thinkers for what they tell us about our society and ourselves. And our response is to either ignore or silence them.

I've learned, through history and experience, that not all progress is gradual or linear. Sometimes it simply goes from one plateau to another. Sometimes we fall back tragically. Sometimes we leap forward and achieve things beyond the realm of what we thought possible. I believe that our job is to provide the force propulsion that will get us to a higher plane.

An honest goodbye is one that does not seek excuses or reasons, or explanations of any kind. Ultimately, it is not because of this or that that we part from a lover. Far from being an orderly linear progression, causes and effects form a complex web of interacting forces that together manifest in this or that result, which in its turn becomes part of the web and contributes to whatever comes next. The web itself is as broad and deep as the ocean. Behind every event, no matter how small, is a universe of causative factors stretching back through time as well as space. So let us rather bow to the fact and the mystery of what is before us, whatever it may be, and embrace its reality, regardless of its origins, without trying to control it by explaining it away.

It took me a while to realize ‘getting better’ isn’t about preventing myself from ever encountering negative emotions. It’s about building my toolkit and having practices in place so that I can handle the lows better; it’s about understanding that experiencing those bad days doesn’t mean I’m reverting or losing progress, but simply that I’m human. It’s all a balance. Healing isn’t linear.

By our very nature, we humans are linear thinkers. We evolved to estimate a distance from the predator or to the prey, and advanced mathematics is only a recent evolutionary addition. This is why it’s so difficult even for a modern man to grasp the power of exponentials. 40 steps in linear progression is just 40 steps away; 40 steps in exponential progression is a cool trillion (with a T) – it will take you 3 times from Earth to the Sun and back to Earth.

In light of these remarks, one is nor surprised to find Rommen associating linear modernity with all types of "perfectionism and progressivism" in political life. By cutting itself off from the "cosmos of ideas," linear thinking divorces itself from the complexity of political reality; it cannot comprehend the "total political problem." And, as a result, all difficulties are easily dissolved: progress towards the perfect society is assured when traveling in a straight line.

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed. This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.

Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind. I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time – linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted – Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time. Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised. When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed – for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you. Why did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later. I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ In fact, they told you nothing.

There are numerous brain rhythms, from approximately 0.02 to 600 cycles per second (Hz), covering more than four order of temporal magnitude. Many of these discrete brain rhythms have been known for decades, but it was only recently recognized that these oscillation bands form a geometric progression on a linear frequency scale or a linear progression on a natural logarithmic scale. leading to a natural separation of at least ten frequency bands. The neighbouring bands have a roughly constant ratio of e = 2,718 - the base for the natural logarithm. Because of this non-integer relationship among the various brain rhythms, the different frequencies can never perfectly entrain each other. Instead, the interference they produce gives rise to metastability, a perpetual fluctuation between unstable and transiently stable states, like waves in the ocean. The constantly interfering network rhythms can never settle to a stable attractor, using the parlance of nonlinear dynamics. This explains the ever-changing landscape of the EEG.

Must we make ourselves acceptable by aping the conventions of organized religion? Do we need to become part of the lie of a linear progression that tells us history is the successive Ages of metals, that is war, and that this, the bloody end of the brief age of oil which can still end in the reign of uranium, is the pinnacle of our achievement as a species? I say, enough. I say that this beckoning twilight is the space witchcraft is gathering within. Our strength is hydra-headed, rising from the blood of the sacrificially slain dove.

Life is not a straight forward plain...no linear pattern, simply A to B, and on to C and inevitably ending us up at Z, where we are the inevitably tossed by angels into heaven or hell. Progression is immaterial, time relative." For Jacob, life ebbed and flowed into complex woven conundrums of interrelatedness, of stops and starts and intervening presents transforming over and into elaborate and repeating futures. He believed that at all times man existed with one foot in heaven, another in hell, and everywhere in between and within lay his soul.

Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home.

Timeline Navigators move beyond the conventional relationship with, and conception of, time. Our task is to dissolve our fundamental assumptions about reality. We reject the limited construct of time as a linear progression from past to present to future. We know reality is far more intricate and interconnected than one unidirectional flow. Time is only constrained by our cognitive processes. The chronological sequence of events is not a given. But, beyond these core realizations, all is unknown. We embrace the unknown, and if we have a creed, it is, never make assumptions. From, 'A Map of Secret Rivers, How to Navigate Timelines' by Pippa Oona (M.Div)

Many aspects of how the Chinese political class manages its economy are antithetical to the Western values of democracy and free markets. But this stance has not put off foreign investors, who are attracted to the government’s willingness to prioritize physical infrastructure, political security, and stability over the health of the population, transparency in decision making, and transparency in the rule of law (if not necessarily the system of governance). In essence, the pursuit of economic growth overrides any views on the political system they invest in. Currently China’s political class has a strategy to evolve from an investment-led exporting economy to one more in line with Western economies, relying on domestic consumption. The transition to this new economic equilibrium will not be linear. China will likely experience significant economic volatility and market gyrations as the structure of its economy shifts. There is also mounting skepticism about China’s ability to manage its debt levels, and the country’s lack of individual political freedoms will continue to hamper its growth prospects. But Chinese policymakers will, no doubt, be focused on continuing to show economic progress in advance of two target dates: 2021—one hundred years after the formation of the Communist Party—and 2049, one hundred years after the formation of the People’s Republic of China.

believe there are infinite ways of telling stories – linear and non-linear, multiple viewpoints and single viewpoints, first and third person, and so forth. An infinity of choice faces you whenever embarking upon a new work. However, I no longer believe, as Johnson believed, for instance, that the novel must be radically reinvented as it progresses or otherwise it will die. If you look at the tradition that he felt himself a part of, it’s odd in a way, because Tristram Shandy in particular so explodes all the notions of traditional fictional writing and all the possibilities of experimental writing right at the infancy of the British novel that Johnson’s view that you can build upon that seems wrong.

Seeing the possibilities: It would be much easier to let go of outcomes if every choice turned out well. And why shouldn’t it? In the one reality there are no wrong turns, only new turns. But the ego personality likes things to be connected. Coming in second today is better than coming in third yesterday, and tomorrow I want to come in first. This kind of linear thinking reflects a crude conception of progress. Real growth happens in many dimensions. What happens to you can affect how you think, feel, relate to others, behave in a given situation, fit into your surroundings, perceive the future, or perceive yourself. All these dimensions must evolve in order for you to evolve. Try to see the possibilities in whatever happens.

THE 1920’S, IT IS SAID, WERE A TIME OF “DISILLUSIONMENT.” Progressivism had failed. The war for democracy had ended in the debacle of Versailles; idealism gave way to “normalcy.” Defeated, intellectuals turned away from reform. Following H. L. Mencken, they now ridiculed “the people,” whom they had once idolized. Many of them fled to Europe. Others cultivated the personal life, transferring their search for salvation from society to the individual. Still others turned to Communism. In the general confusion, only one thing was certain: the old ideals, the old standards, were dead, and liberal democracy was part of the wreckage. Such is the standard picture of the twenties; but it is a gross distortion, a caricature, of the period. It has the unfortunate effect, moreover, of isolating the twenties from the rest of American history, of making them seem a mere interval between two periods of reform, and thus of obscuring the continuity between the twenties and the “progressive era” on the one hand and the period of the New Deal on the other. The idea of historical “periods” is misleading in itself. It exercises a subtle tyranny over the historical imagination. Essentially a verbal and pedagogical convenience, it tends to become a principle of historical interpretation as well; and as such it leads people to think of history not as the development of social organisms far too complicated to be depicted in simple linear terms but as a succession of neatly defined epochs, happily corresponding, moreover, to the divisions of the calendar, each century, each decade even, having its own distinctive “spirit of the age.” Thus the Zeitgeist of the twenties, it is assumed, must have been “disillusionment,” just as that of the thirties was reform. The

The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one generation to the next, making an ever-wider net of connections. Titles, on the other hand, passed from one man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers, nephews, cousins, who came close enough to fall within the span of the almanac’s illumination. The men who might have been lord or baronet. And, though it was not said, the men who still might, if the right string of tragedies were to occur. But after a certain number of branchings in the family tree, the names fell out of the margins and into the ether. No combination of shipwreck, plague and earthquake would be powerful enough to restore these third cousins to prominence. The almanac had its limits.

The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.

There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning though a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial. While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism.

The actions that accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation. This trajectory is no linear sequence of "stages" through which we "progress." We do not leave behind an earlier stage in order to advance to the next rung of some hierarchy. All four activities are part of a single continuum of action. Dharma practice cannot be reduced to any one of them; it is configured from them all. As soon as understanding is isolated from letting go, it degrades into mere intellectuality. As soon as letting go is isolated from understanding, it declines into spiritual posturing. The fabric of dharma practice is woven from the threads of these interrelated activities, each of which is defined through its relation to the others.

An alive society is a society that is active with arguments of different opinions at different level; noisy; edgy; aggressive; non-linear and colored with wide range of expressions; a society that permits the progression of thoughts by allowing questions, not only for them to arise but also to be discussed; a society that sees questions as a sign of prosperous health, not a virus that should be treated or a threat that should be corrected or an enemy to be eliminated; a society that is not scared of the word 'subversive' for subversiveness was and still the only catalyst that leads to experiments in discovering new findings of any sort; be it scientific, philosophical, artistic, economic, political and so on; a society that celebrates the capability if its inhabitants being alive; a society that is not only curios but also anxious enough to embark on the journey out of their boxes; a society that sees a resistance as an important message that there is something wrong with its system that needs to be tended to immediately, cleverly; a society that believes that cleverness is a skill that can only be achieved by practicing a lot of 'trial and error'.

Base your understanding of the world on data, rather than journalism. Journalism is a highly non random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period. It is an availability machine, in the sense of Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic; namely - our sense of risk, danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes, images and narratives that are available in memory. A lot of good things are either things that "don't happen" (like a country at peace, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news), or things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year, and then compound (like the decline of extreme poverty). We can be unaware, out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many (although not all) things have gone better (not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general a lot better... and that paradoxically, as I've cheekily put it, progressives hate progress), but also that the best possible case for progress - that is, for striving for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive - is not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past; and that means: why should it stop now?

Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an underlying truth. The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar—“is absolutely essential to national security.” It was also, he added, crucial for America’s economic security. “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.” By the end of his report, Bush had reached poetic heights in extolling the practical payoffs of basic scientific research: “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9 Based on this report, Congress established the National Science Foundation.

Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes---lays on flat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey---and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans. To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it's happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will one day be past history. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. But one things is certain: we will simply have new things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again. In the meantime, we can deal only with what's in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.

scholarly publications still continue to suggest a linear progression for the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, despite the fact that it is not accurate to simply state that a drought caused famine, which eventually caused the Sea Peoples to start moving and creating havoc, which caused the Collapse.115 The progression wasn’t that linear; the reality was much more messy. There probably was not a single driving force or trigger, but rather a number of different stressors, each of which forced the people to react in different ways to accommodate the changing situation(s). Complexity theory, especially in terms of visualizing a nonlinear progression and a series of stressors rather than a single driver, is therefore advantageous both in explaining the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age and in providing a way forward for continuing to study this catastrophe.

authorship, authenticity, and chronologically defined linear progression, all

But human evolution is not a linear progression. Rather, there evolved and existed for literally millions of years—much longer than we have existed—a handful of species of viable, big-brained, upright, tool-wielding, hunting, social primates, each successful in its own niche and place. Yet modern Homo sapiens appear on the scene only fifty thousand or so years ago, after 90 percent of hominid evolutionary time has already passed, and suddenly we become a breakout species. Suddenly, all of those other perfectly viable hominid species are extinct, every single one. We are the only remaining species in the genus Homo.

One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end. The Jews believe in historical progress, and that progress is in this world.

today we live in a world that is global and exponential. The problem is that our brains—and thus our perceptual capabilities—were never designed to process at either this scale or this speed. Our linear mind literally cannot grok exponential progression.

You go to an auto show and see some glamorous and wildly innovative concept car on display and you think, “I’d buy that in a second.” And then five years later, the car finally comes to market and it’s been whittled down from a Ferrari to a Pinto—all the truly breakthrough features have been toned down or eliminated altogether, and what’s left looks mostly like last year’s model. The same sorry fate could have befallen the iPod as well: Ive and Jobs could have sketched out a brilliant, revolutionary music player and then two years later released a dud. What kept the spark alive? The answer is that Apple’s development cycle looks more like a coffeehouse than an assembly line. The traditional way to build a product like the iPod is to follow a linear chain of expertise. The designers come up with a basic look and feature set and then pass it on to the engineers, who figure out how to actually make it work. And then it gets passed along to the manufacturing folks, who figure out how to build it in large numbers—after which it gets sent to the marketing and sales people, who figure out how to persuade people to buy it. This model is so ubiquitous because it performs well in situations where efficiency is key, but it tends to have disastrous effects on creativity, because the original idea gets chipped away at each step in the chain. The engineering team takes a look at the original design and says, “Well, we can’t really do that—but we can do 80 percent of what you want.” And then the manufacturing team says, “Sure, we can do some of that.” In the end, the original design has been watered down beyond recognition. Apple’s approach, by contrast, is messier and more chaotic at the beginning, but it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain. Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups—design, manufacturing, engineering, sales—meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles—and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.

Lehman and Belady have studied the history of successive releases in a large operating system.[6] They find that the total number of modules increases linearly with release number, but that the number of modules affected increases exponentially with release number. All repairs tend to destroy the structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of the system. Less and less effort is spent on fixing original design flaws; more and more is spent on fixing flaws introduced by earlier fixes. As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing ceases to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress. Furthermore, machines change, configurations change, and user requirements change, so the system is not in fact usable forever. A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary.

And Mendeleev’s guesses showed that induction is a more subtle process in the hands of a scientist than Bacon and other philosophers supposed. In science we do not simply march along a linear progression of known instances to unknown ones. Rather, we work as in a crossword puzzle, scanning two separate progressions for the points at which they intersect: that is where the unknown instances should be in hiding. Mendeleev scanned the progression of atomic weights in the columns, and the family likenesses in the rows, to pinpoint the missing elements at their intersections. By doing so, he made practical predictions, and he also made manifest (what is still poorly understood) how scientists actually carry out the process of induction. Very

Blanqui is an important, if neglected, nineteenth-century theorist, for unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, he dismissed the naive belief, central to Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is the lie perpetrated by oppressors: “All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature. . . . But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.”32 He also foresaw that scientific and technological advancement, rather than a harbinger of progress, could be “a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.”33

Hi Tim, Patience. Far too soon to expect strength improvements. Strength improvements [for a movement like this] take a minimum of 6 weeks. Any perceived improvements prior to that are simply the result of improved synaptic facilitation. In plain English, the central nervous system simply became more efficient at that particular movement with practice. This is, however, not to be confused with actual strength gains. Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best. Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes. If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

The prophet is not diverted by illusions of past, present and future. The fixity of language determines such linear distinctions. Prophets hold a key to the lock in a language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them. This is not a mechanical universe. The linear progression of events is imposed by the observer. Cause and effect? That's not it at all. The prophet utters fateful words. You glimpse a thing "destined to occur." But the prophetic instant releases something of infinite portent and power. The universe undergoes a ghostly shift. Thus, the wise prophet conceals actuality behind shimmering labels. The uninitiated then believe the prophetic language is ambiguous. The listener distrusts the prophetic messenger. Instinct tells you how the utterance blunts the power of such words. The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself.

Aninialcentric anthropomorphism must be sharply distinguished from anthropocentric anthropomorphism (see diagram). The first takes the animal's perspective, the second takes ours. It is a bit like people we all know, who buy us presents that they think we like versus people who buy us presents that they like. The latter have not yet reached a mature form of empathy, and perhaps never will." The Catholic Church, on the other hand, saw the universe as vertically arranged between heaven and earth. From this perspective, it made sense to speak of "higher" and "lower" forms of life, with humans being closest to the deity. Via philosophy, this way of thinking permeated all of the social sciences and humanities, where it still lingers even though biology has made it absolutely clear that the idea of a linear progression among life forms is mistaken. Every organism fits on the phylogenetic tree without being above or below anything else. Biologists make distinctions between organisms that do well or are extinct, that are specialized or generalized, or that multiply slowly or rapidly, but they never look at one organism as a model that others strive for or that is inherently superior.

Animalcentric anthropomorphism must be sharply distinguished from anthropocentric anthropomorphism (see diagram). The first takes the animal's perspective, the second takes ours. It is a bit like people we all know, who buy us presents that they think we like versus people who buy us presents that they like. The latter have not yet reached a mature form of empathy, and perhaps never will." The Catholic Church, on the other hand, saw the universe as vertically arranged between heaven and earth. From this perspective, it made sense to speak of "higher" and "lower" forms of life, with humans being closest to the deity. Via philosophy, this way of thinking permeated all of the social sciences and humanities, where it still lingers even though biology has made it absolutely clear that the idea of a linear progression among life forms is mistaken. Every organism fits on the phylogenetic tree without being above or below anything else. Biologists make distinctions between organisms that do well or are extinct, that are specialized or generalized, or that multiply slowly or rapidly, but they never look at one organism as a model that others strive for or that is inherently superior.

We're storytelling creatures. Give us a bunch of seemingly random images and we will try to organize them into a linear progression: tree, apple, head, bruise, gravity . . . a man sat under a tree, an apple fell on his head because of gravity, a bruise appeared, the end. We just won't be able to help ourselves.

The waves of liberation movements from the 1960s have disenchanted us vis à vis ‘old-fashioned’ restrictive values but have also forced upon us new codes of thought and behaviour, summarised in the clumsy phrase ‘political correctness’ and the morality of uncritical respect for difference and diversity. (I lazily say ‘us’ and, of course, this is not true for everyone.) We have learned from psychoanalysis that whatever is repressed will emerge projectively later or elsewhere, often in even more virulent forms. Hence, in recent years we have seen waves of paedophile scandals, celebrated cannibal cases, serial murders, school shootings and mass murders committed by terrorists. The naivety of the nice peaceful Left runs parallel to the converse unbridled greed of bankers, internet criminals, drug dealers and pornographers. These trends might scotch any illusions of linear and easy progress but they do not. If Dostoevsky’s over-quoted ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’ is true, nihilism steps into the vacuum, and subsequently moralistic alarm steps in to call for a return to traditional values. But Pandora’s box will not close, every demon is now loose.

IDEATION: thinking about ending one’s life ATTEMPT: an attempted suicide resulting in survival[*][23] PASSIVELY SUICIDAL: thinking about suicide without actively taking steps to end one’s life. (Passive suicidality may be expressed indirectly, as an indifference towards death—for example, someone who is passively suicidal might say something like, “I wouldn’t care if I got hit by a bus.” ACTIVELY THINKING: developing a plan and working on the details THINKING AND DOING: McDowell says there are two types of thinking and doing—planned and impulsive. The impulsive type is “a flash of a thought and a rush of feeling that makes sense at the time. Frequently, this occurs with teens and young adults.” CHRONICALLY SUICIDAL: chronically thinking about suicide, threatening to carry it out, or making multiple attempts SLOW SUICIDE: McDowell describes this as being “evidenced by a lifetime of self-harm that chronically erodes a person’s health, well-being, mental stability, emotional resilience, and vital energy.” A major misunderstanding about suicide is that it unfolds in a linear progression.

an essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,” by Edward Tufte, a Yale professor who is an authority on the visualization of information.1 Tufte identified in one sentence the problem we’d been experiencing: “As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense,” he writes, “the more damaging the bullet list becomes.” That description fit our discussions at the S-Team meetings: complex, interconnected, requiring plenty of information to explore, with greater and greater consequences connected to decisions. Such analysis is not well served by a linear progression of slides that makes it difficult to refer one idea to another, sparsely worded bits of text that don’t fully express an idea, and visual effects that are more distracting than enlightening. Rather than making things clear and simple, PowerPoint can strip the discussion of important nuance. In our meetings, even when a presenter included supporting information in the notes or accompanying audio, the PowerPoint presentation was never enough.

Most couples wait too long to go (to marriage counseling). There's an average six-year delay between the first cracks in a marriage and actually getting help... When entropy decays the happiness of a marriage over time, it's not just a linear downward progression for everyone. Often, there's a phase change (like water to ice)... In marriage this goes by the appropriately intimidating term negative sentiment override. Idealization hasn't faded-- it has flipped. If love is positive delusion, NSO is utter disillusionment. You are biased against, not toward, your partner. The facts haven't necessarily changed, just your interpretation of them. Rather than attributing problems to context, attributions now lie in someone's poor character traits.

Jeff and I often discussed ways to improve the S-Team meetings. Shortly after a particularly difficult presentation in early 2004, we had some downtime on a business flight (no Wi-Fi yet on planes), so we read and discussed an essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,” by Edward Tufte, a Yale professor who is an authority on the visualization of information.1 Tufte identified in one sentence the problem we’d been experiencing: “As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense,” he writes, “the more damaging the bullet list becomes.” That description fit our discussions at the S-Team meetings: complex, interconnected, requiring plenty of information to explore, with greater and greater consequences connected to decisions. Such analysis is not well served by a linear progression of slides that makes it difficult to refer one idea to another, sparsely worded bits of text that don’t fully express an idea, and visual effects that are more distracting than enlightening. Rather than making things clear and simple, PowerPoint can strip the discussion of important nuance. In our meetings, even when a presenter included supporting information in the notes or accompanying audio, the PowerPoint presentation was never enough. Besides, the Amazon audience of tightly scheduled, experienced executives was eager to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. They would pepper the presenter with questions and push to get to the punch line, regardless of the flow of slides. Sometimes the questions did not serve to clarify a point or move the presentation along but would instead lead the entire group away from the main argument. Or some questions might be premature and would be answered in a later slide, thus forcing the presenter to go over the same ground twice.

The Palestinian Nakba is neither a distant occurrence nor a completed history, and treating it as such only reproduces the Israeli contention that Palestine and Palestinians are romanticized representations of the past. The Nakba is not situated fully in the past, nor is it fully in the present: it transcends the notion of linear, progressive, and positivist history. It is a continuous and complex struggle against occupation, against apartheid, against erasure. It is the daily physical and abstract dispossession of land, identity, culture, and history. It has not ended.

Point, shape, kick” begins with the meaning of the play – that honing and refining of what the author wants to say through the expression of the ten-minute play. What is the point of this and how can we maximize it in rehearsal? And because we work hands-on with our playwrights, the playwright’s own thinking is part of the revision/refining process. Shape implies that there is some action that defines the progress of the play. It may be linear, circular, a jazz motif, anything the playwright creates. Defining the shape of the play and supporting it is a strong part of our process. And the kick is something that carries the play: a theatrical value, like, surprise or humor that can carry the audience’s attention and evolves into satisfaction.

Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn’t it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly—an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the timeteller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.

the nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.

The Scheffe test is the most conservative, the Tukey test is best when many comparisons are made (when there are many groups), and the Bonferroni test is preferred when few comparisons are made. However, these post-hoc tests often support the same conclusions.3 To illustrate, let’s say the independent variable has three categories. Then, a post-hoc test will examine hypotheses for whether . In addition, these tests will also examine which categories have means that are not significantly different from each other, hence, providing homogeneous subsets. An example of this approach is given later in this chapter. Knowing such subsets can be useful when the independent variable has many categories (for example, classes of employees). Figure 13.1 ANOVA: Significant and Insignificant Differences Eta-squared (η2) is a measure of association for mixed nominal-interval variables and is appropriate for ANOVA. Its values range from zero to one, and it is interpreted as the percentage of variation explained. It is a directional measure, and computer programs produce two statistics, alternating specification of the dependent variable. Finally, ANOVA can be used for testing interval-ordinal relationships. We can ask whether the change in means follows a linear pattern that is either increasing or decreasing. For example, assume we want to know whether incomes increase according to the political orientation of respondents, when measured on a seven-point Likert scale that ranges from very liberal to very conservative. If a linear pattern of increase exists, then a linear relationship is said to exist between these variables. Most statistical software packages can test for a variety of progressive relationships. ANOVA Assumptions ANOVA assumptions are essentially the same as those of the t-test: (1) the dependent variable is continuous, and the independent variable is ordinal or nominal, (2) the groups have equal variances, (3) observations are independent, and (4) the variable is normally distributed in each of the groups. The assumptions are tested in a similar manner. Relative to the t-test, ANOVA requires a little more concern regarding the assumptions of normality and homogeneity. First, like the t-test, ANOVA is not robust for the presence of outliers, and analysts examine the presence of outliers for each group. Also, ANOVA appears to be less robust than the t-test for deviations from normality. Second, regarding groups having equal variances, our main concern with homogeneity is that there are no substantial differences in the amount of variance across the groups; the test of homogeneity is a strict test, testing for any departure from equal variances, and in practice, groups may have neither equal variances nor substantial differences in the amount of variances. In these instances, a visual finding of no substantial differences suffices. Other strategies for dealing with heterogeneity are variable transformations and the removal of outliers, which increase variance, especially in small groups. Such outliers are detected by examining boxplots for each group separately. Also, some statistical software packages (such as SPSS), now offer post-hoc tests when equal variances are not assumed.4 A Working Example The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measured the percentage of wetland loss in watersheds between 1982 and 1992, the most recent period for which data are available (government statistics are sometimes a little old).5 An analyst wants to know whether watersheds with large surrounding populations have

Historically, techniques to attain altered states of consciousness, usually called meditation, or sometimes prayer, actually involve various forms of concentration, the first level of this kind of internal work. The linear scale of progression is Concentration, then Meditation, and finally Contemplation. Virtually all categories of meditation are, in actuality, forms of concentration. What makes them so are the innate “goals” or ambitions attached to them: to achieve a state or to acquire something, like relaxation, insight or “advancement.” This then constructs a dichotomy, or dualism, between the pursuer and the thing pursued. That is, you are conscious of or believe in something “better,” you are separate from it, and there is effort to attain it.

The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity. Think of capacity as the fuel that makes it possible to bring your skill and talent fully to life. Most of us take our capacity for granted, because for most of our lives we’ve had enough. What’s changed is that between digital technology and rising complexity, there’s more information and more requests coming at us, faster and more relentlessly than ever. Unlike computers, however, human beings aren’t meant to operate continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time. Rather, we’re designed to move rhythmically between spending and renewing our energy. Our brains wave between high and low electrical frequencies. Our hearts beat at varying intervals. Our lungs expand and contract depending on demand. It’s not sufficient to be good at inhaling. Indeed, the more deeply you exhale, the calmer and more capable you become. Instead, we live linear lives, progressively burning down our energy reservoirs throughout the day. It’s the equivalent of withdrawing funds from a bank account without ever making a deposit. At some point, you go bankrupt. The good news is that we can influence the way we manage our energy. By doing so skillfully, you can get more done in less time, at a higher level of quality, in a more sustainable way. A couple of key scientific findings point the way. The first is that sleep is more important than food. You can go a week without eating and the only thing you’ll lose is weight. Give up sleep for even a couple of days and you’ll become completely dysfunctional. Even so, we’re all too willing to trade away an hour of sleep in the false belief that it will give us one more hour of productivity. In fact, even very small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our cognitive capacity. The notion that some of us can perform adequately with very little sleep is largely a myth. Less than 2.5 percent of the population—that’s one in forty people—feels fully rested with less than seven to eight hours of sleep a night. The second key finding is that our bodies follow what are known as ultradian

counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

Lift one hand in front of you now and inscribe a circle in the air with your finger, taking one second to complete it. As you're completing this process, the earth that you're sitting on is spinning on its axis and progressing radially with the rest of the solar system through space at the same time. Our earth travels through the solar system at 18.5 miles per second, and the entire solar system is barreling through space at 155 miles per second. So by the time your finger comes back to the starting place of your air circle, you will have arced more than 155 miles through space. Your circle looks like an expanded, uncoiling spring that is more than 155 miles long. In the same way, a brick falling from a tall building seems to travel in a straight line, but in the seconds that it takes to hit the ground, it has actually traced a long spiral relative to the universe. This applies to linear accelerators or anything traveling in what seems to be a totally straight or planar line. Incidentally, if a person is lost in a featureless desert, it has been found that he or she doesn't actually walk in circles as popularly thought. In reality, the meanderings follow spirals.

A man’s life, Choje taught his monks, did not move in a linear progression, with each day an equal chit on the calendar of existence. Rather it moved from defining moment to defining moment, marked by the decisions that roiled the soul.

Yet there is nothing new in language learning. People learn languages much the same as they always have: only the contexts have changed. As Kelly (1969: 396) long ago demonstrated, the history of methods might more accurately be characterized, not as a linear progression, but as cyclical: ‘Old approaches return, but as their social and intellectual context are changed, they seem entirely new.

Preparing for collective wisdom’s emergence requires us as individuals and in groups to use both our logical and symbol-making minds. “Symbols,” Underwood told us, “are in effect a door through which you can walk to the greater understanding.” We need to make room in groups for this kind of more sophisticated understanding, incorporating sequential logic and spontaneous insights, linear progressions and intuitive leaps, bullet points and poetry. Collective wisdom is more likely to arise when sound judgment is based on the entirety of our multiple intelligences.

PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER: SEVEN STEPS FOR DISCERNING A DECISION How does one go about making a decision by means of discernment? I propose that discerned decision making proceeds in seven interwoven steps, which represent the components of a decision made by way of discernment. The steps represent a logical progression from the beginning to the end of a decision arrived at through discernment. Events in real life, however, can be less of a straight line and more of a circle; with discernment, you may expect to find that the progression of these steps is less linear than I suggest here. More importantly, some steps must be repeated regularly (1, 4, 6, 7), and some can change midstream (2, 3). Nonetheless, as you’ll discover, these seven steps will always be part of your discernment: 1. Seek spiritual freedom, the inner disposition upon which discernment rests and which creates the climate for discernment. Indeed, without this basic intention of seeking spiritual freedom, discernment collapses into self-assessment, self-improvement, or decision-making techniques—all of which can be good and helpful, but they are not discernment. The

Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise.

Stories, Vishnu, are like snarled threads, each connected with the other, and it’s very tempting to want to tell them all at once. But time, linear, progressive, maddening time, won’t let me.

In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day – communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism – Zweig saw the same pernicious attempt to rewrite the principles of social order in terms of a linear progression from past to future. The cult of the leader, of the ‘vanguard party’, of the ‘avant-garde’ – all supposed that society has a direction, in the way that businesses have a purpose and armies have a goal. And all licensed the increasing conscription of the citizen, and the steady absorption of the functions of society into the machinery of the state.

In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day – communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism – Zweig saw the same pernicious attempt to rewrite the principles of social order in terms of a linear progression from past to future. The