Rejection Is A Part Of Life Quotes

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature. To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life. If I’m choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I’m rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn. The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That

You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure.You experienced it today and found peace.That's why I'm telling you:Don't get used to it,because it's very easy to become habituated:it's a very powerful drug.It's in our daily lives,in our hidden sufferings,in the sacrifices we make,blaming love for the destruction of our dreams.Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it's seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or se-denial.Or cowardice.However much we may reject it,we human human beings always find a way of being with pain,of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity. Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed---faith, decency, courage---is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality...

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together. It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

The psyche is built upon avoiding this pain, and as a result, it has fear of pain as its foundation. That is what caused the psyche to be. To understand this, notice that if the feeling of rejection is a major problem for you, you will fear experiences that cause rejection. That fear will become part of your psyche. Even though the actual events causing rejection are infrequent, you will have to deal with the fear of rejection all the time. That is how we create a pain that is always there. If you are doing something to avoid pain, then pain is running your life. All of your thoughts and feelings will be affected by your fears.

Rejection is a part of any man’s life. If you can’t accept and move past rejection, or at least use it as writing material - you’re not a real man. -Master Jiraiya

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

Everyone at some point in life have faced rejection and failure, it is part of the process to self realisation.

Most emotionally mature people can accept that changes and disappointments are a part of life. They accept their feelings and look for alternative ways to find gratification when they’re disappointed. They’re collaborative and open to others’ ideas.

We accept, reject, and discern through symbols. These are as important to our understanding of life, our understanding of existence and what has value, whats worthwhile, as math and science ... it's all part of how we work through things, how we make decisions.

They are also comfortable with self-disclosure, which is a building block in creating close personal relationships. To people with high self-esteem, rejection is part of life, not a reflection on their self-worth.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. To You WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true Soul and Body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago; I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside. There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.

My voice is strong and imposing, and my legs are powerful enough to hold up its weight. I wake up every day assured of my right to not only participate in the world as an equal part of it, but to loudly reject the narrative that keeps trying to tell me to pipe down, fold in, shrivel up, simper, apologise and slink my way through life so as not to offend or upset anyone with the complicated, beautiful mess that is me. I have fought the odds to get here, empowered by the knowledge that every single woman who has come before me has fought her own battle in order to survive. We fight like girls. This is how we prevail. And this is why we're still standing.

But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take. It is indeed a fearful gamble. Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature. To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take. If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation. It takes a lifetime to learn another person. When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

no was a bad word in my hone no was met with the lash erased from our vocabulary beaten out of our backs till we became well-behaved kids who obediently nodded to yes to everything when he climbed on top of me every part of my body wanted to reject it but i couldn't say no to save my life when i tried to scream all that escaped me was silence i heard no pounding her fist on the roof of my mouth begging to let her out but i had not put up the exit sign never built the emergency staircase there was no trapdoor for no to escape from i want to ask all the parents and guardians a question what use was obedience then when there were hands that were not mine inside me - how can i verbalize consent as an adult if i was never taught to as a child

… my century..is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form….

The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked together. No man is an island. But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound life a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well –except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known. In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity. Part of what it means to be is to be you and not me, between us the sea that we can never entirely cross even when we would. “My brethren are wholly estranged from me,” Job cries out. “I have become an alien in their eyes.” The paradox is that part of what binds us closest together as human beings and makes it true that no man is an island is the knowledge that in another way every man is an island. Because to know this is to know that not only deep in you is there a self that longs about all to be known and accepted, but that there is also such a self in me, in everyone else the world over. So when we meet as strangers, when even friends look like strangers, it is good to remember that we need each other greatly you and I, more than much of the time we dare to imagine, more than more of the time we dare to admit. Island calls to island across the silence, and once, in trust, the real words come, a bridge is built and love is done –not sentimental, emotional love, but love that is pontifex, bridge-builder. Love that speak the holy and healing word which is: God be with you, stranger who are no stranger. I wish you well. The islands become an archipelago, a continent, become a kingdom whose name is the Kingdom of God.

I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.

[I]f an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense. The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering

I think about perfect matches. You know how with an organ donation a perfect match isn't really perfect? There's still a chance of rejection, even if all the stars align. Nothing is ever perfect. There's just matches that have a higher chance of working than others. Maybe you guys were like that. It could have worked, but you'd spend your whole life forcing it.

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

[...]alone you stood before God when he called you; alone you had to answer that call; alone you had to struggle and pray; and alone you will die and give an account to God. If you refuse to be alone you are rejecting Christ's call to you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called.

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.

Every temptation proves a crossroad where we must choose between the high road and the low road. On some occasions it is a trial of agonizing frustration. On other occasions, it is a mere annoyance, a nuisance of minor proportions. but in each case there is some element tot uneasiness, anxiety, and spiritual tugging--ultimately a choosing that forces us to take sides. Neutrality is a nonexistent condition in this life. We are always choosing, always taking sides. That is part of the human experience--facing temptations on a daily, almost moment-by-moment basis--facing them not only on the good days but on the days we are down, the days we are tired, rejected, discouraged, or sick. Every day of our lives we battle temptation--and so did the Savior. It is an integral part of the human experience, faced not only by us but also by him. He drank from the same cup.

To keep the blinders off our life-enhancing seventh sense, as with most improvements in the human condition, we must start with our children. A part of healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging it—and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

When God makes a covenant with us, God says: 'I will love you with an everlasting love. I will be faithful to you, even when you run away from me, reject me, or betray me.' In our society we don’t speak much about covenants; we speak about contracts. When we make a contract with a person, we say: 'I will fulfill my part as long as you fulfill yours. When you don’t live up to your promises, I no longer have to live up to mine.' Contracts are often broken because the partners are unwilling or unable to be faithful to their terms. But God didn’t make a contract with us; God made a covenant with us, and God wants our relationships with one another to reflect that covenant. That’s why marriage, friendship, life in community are all ways to give visibility to God’s faithfulness in our lives together.

What if you considered rejection to be a crucial part of your search instead of an obstacle?

People with a realistic view see rejections as a natural part of life and adjust accordingly. It

In life, there are three (3) types of people; those who do and say nothing (lazy), those who do nothing but reject everything else (complainers) and those who are part of something (drivers of change).

The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle...For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from. But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority.

Nobody likes to fail, but there is a difference between a normal aversion to failure and an intense fear of failure. Aversion to failure motivates us to take necessary precautions and to work harder to achieve success. By contrast, intense fear of failure often handicaps us, making us reject failure so vigorously that we cannot take the risks that are necessary for growth. This fear not only compromises our performance but jeopardizes our overall psychological well-being. Failure is an inescapable part of life and a critically important part of any successful life. We learn to walk by falling, to talk by babbling, to shoot a basket by missing, and to color the inside of a square by scribbling outside the box. Those who intensely fear failing end up falling short of their potential. We either learn to fail or we fail to learn.

Q: Most people on a spiritual path believe that the ego impedes spiritual growth and that we’re supposed to shed the ego. Why aren’t you advocating this? A: Because if you deny the ego, it will push back against you harder. The more you reject something, the more it fights back for its own survival. But when you can completely love your ego unconditionally and accept it as part of how you express in this life, you’ll no longer have a problem with it. It won’t impede your growth—on the contrary, it will be an asset.

Solidarity is something much more than mercy: usually when you appease your conscience (donate money to starving children in Africa, to use the usual Starbucks example), you can go on with your daily life as if nothing really happened. However, once you are enacting solidarity you can even abstain from charity or mercy: even if you don’t give a dollar to every beggar, you can’t go on with your daily life as if nothing really happened. Why? Because you carry him in your life; you live with him not like with some “integrated reject” (as we live with immigrants or refugees today), but he is a part and even a presupposition for your very action: he can never be fully integrated, because injustice can’t be integrated in acts of love. This is why solidarity already contains love.

Without their uniforms, they were probably nobodies, rejects. Give a man a uniform. Give him a few sparkly badges, a purpose, a gun ... and suddenly, he was no longer just another kid trying to make it through life without being ridiculed. Suddenly, he was a part of something. Something important. Something powerful. Something greater than he could ever be on his own. It was amazing how empowering the group could be.

You can find friends who are working for something positive, who have a purpose in life that you respect. You can go to college even if only part-time. Make your life full of positive purpose. You are free to do what you feel is right. Do what you want to do, and be yourself.” It felt as if an angel had spoken through my body. The voice was so clear and full of Rightness that I trusted it completely. Had it been my own thought or the advice of a person, I am sure I would have rejected it. But now I knew I could do whatever I set my mind to if I just kept at it positively.

It takes a lot of strength to risk getting rejected by someone new, so we hang onto the one we know and say, “The hell with it,” because we are used to that pain. If we had more strength we would say not, “The hell with it,” but “The hell with all this pain, I’ll find someone else.” Weak people carry a torch for life, they “enjoy” wallowing in their misery. They do so partly in the hope that someone will feel sorry for them and solve their problems

To endure the cross is not a tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ. When it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity. It is not the sort of suffering which is inseparable from this mortal life, but the suffering which is an essential part of the specifically Christian life. It is not suffering per se but suffering-and-rejection, and not rejection for any cause or conviction of our own, but rejection for the sake of Christ.

When he was finished, he set his plate down, looked at me, and raised an eyebrow. I leaned forward and whispered angrily, “I am not going to sit on your lap, so don’t get your hopes up, Mister.” He still waited until I picked up a fork and took a few bites. I speared a bite of macadamia nut crusted ruby snapper and said, “Whew. Time’s up. Isn’t it? The clock is ticking. You must be sweating it, huh? I mean, you could turn any second.” He just took a bite of curried lamb and then some saffron rice and sat there chewing as cool as a cucumber. I watched him closely for a full two minutes and then folded up my napkin. “Okay, I give. Why are you acting so smug and confident? When are you going to tell me what’s going on?” He wiped his mouth carefully and took a sip of water. “What’s going on, my prema, is that the curse has been lifted.” My mouth dropped open. “What? If it was lifted, why were you a tiger for the last two days?” “Well, to be clear, the curse is not completely gone. I seem to have been granted a partial removal of the curse.” “Partial? Partial meaning what, exactly?” “Partial, meaning a certain number of hours per day. Six hours to be exact.” I recited the prophecy in my mind and remembered that there were four sides to the monolith, and four times six was…”Twenty-four.” He paused. “Twenty-four what?” “Well, six hours makes sense because there are four gifts to obtain for Durga and four sides of the monolith. We’ve only completed one of the tasks, so you only get six hours.” He smiled. “I guess I get to keep you around then, at least until the other tasks are finished.” I snorted. “Don’t hold your breath, Tarzan. I might not need to be present for the other tasks. Now that you’re a man part of the time, you and Kishan can resolve this problem yourselves, I’m sure.” He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t underestimate your level of…involvement, Kelsey. Even if you weren’t needed anymore to break the curse, do you think I’d simply let you go? Let you walk out of my life without a backward glance?” I nervously began toying with my food and decided to say nothing. That was exactly what I’d been planning to do. Something had changed. The hurt and confused Ren that made me feel guilty for rejecting him in Kishkindha was gone. He was now supremely confident, almost arrogant, and very sure of himself.

Whenever we reject a part of our being, we are confirming to ourselves our fundamental unworthiness.

There will always be disappointments and rejection in this game but that's part of the writing journey, and everyone's journey is different.

Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.

This is a key task of late life—to recognize early self-concepts and rejected parts, begin to repair them, and cultivate a broader, deeper sense of identity.

The major problem with the invitation now is precisely overfamiliarity. Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt. People think they have heard the invitation. They think they have accepted it—or rejected it. But they have not. The difficulty today is to hear it at all. Genius, it is said, is the ability to scrutinize the obvious. Written everywhere, we may think, how could the invitation be subtle, or deep? It looks like the other graffiti and even shows up in the same places. But that is part of the divine conspiracy.

All prevailing philosophies embody the fiction that human life can be altered at will. Better aim for the impossible, they say, than submit to fate. Invariably, the result is a cult of human self-assertion that soon ends in farce. The line of thinking that is traced in this book runs in an opposite direction—not only in questioning the idea of progress but also, and more fundamentally, in rejecting the idea that it is only through action that life can be meaningful. Politics is only a small part of human existence, and the human animal only a very small part of the world. Science and technology have given us powers we never had before, but not the ability to refashion our existence as we wish. Poetry and religion are more realistic guides to life.

God sends his Son – here lies the only remedy. It is not enough to give man a new philosophy or better religion. A Man comes to men. Every man bears an image. His body and his life become visible. A man is not a bare word, a thought or a will. He is above all and always a man, a form, an image, a brother. And thus he does not create around him just a new way of thought, will and action but he gives us the new image, the new form. Now in Jesus Christ this is just what has happened. The image of God has entered our midst, in the form of our fallen life, in the likeness of sinful flesh. In the teaching and acts of Christ, in his life and death, the image of God is revealed. In him the divine image has been re-created here on earth. The Incarnation, the words and acts of Jesus, his death on the cross, all are indispensable parts of that image. But it is not the same image as Adam bore in the primal glory of paradise. Rather, it is the image of one who enters a world of sin and death, who takes upon himself all the sorrows of humanity, who meekly bears God’s wrath and judgment against sinners, and obeys his will with unswerving devotion in suffering and death, the Man born to poverty, the friend of publicans and sinners, the Man of sorrows, rejected of man and forsaken of God. Here is God made man, here is man in the new image of God.

Stigma takes many forms, comes from all directions, is sometimes blatantly overt, but can also be remarkably subtle. It is the cruel comment, the unkind smirk, the extrusion from the group, the lost job opportunity, the rejected marriage proposal, the ineligibility for life insurance, the inability to adopt a child or pilot a plane. But it is also the reduced expectation, the helping hand when none is needed or wanted, the solicitous sympathy that one cannot really be expected to measure up. And the secondary psychological and practical harms of having a mental disorder come only partly from how others see you. A great deal of the trouble comes from the change in how you see yourself: the sense of being damaged goods, feeling not normal or worthy, not a full fledged member of the group. It is bad enough that stigma is so often associated with having a mental disorder, but the stigma that comes from being mislabeled with a fake diagnosis is a dead loss with absolutely no redeeming features.

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

The drama is this. We came as infants “trailing clouds of glory,” arriving from the farthest reaches of the universe, bringing with us appetites well preserved from our mammal inheritance, spontaneities wonderfully preserved from our 150,000 years of tree life, angers well preserved from our 5,000 years of tribal life—in short, with our 360-degree radiance—and we offered this gift to our parents. They didn’t want it. They wanted a nice girl or a nice boy. That’s the first act of the drama. It doesn’t mean our parents were wicked; they needed us for something. My mother, as a second generation immigrant, needed my brother and me to help the family look more classy. We do the same thing to our children; it’s a part of life on this planet. Our parents rejected who we were before we could talk, so the pain of the rejection is probably stored in some pre-verbal place.

Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green. But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over-and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am.

Honesty is a natural human craving. But part of having honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word "no." In this way, rejection actually makes our relationships better and our emotional lives healthier.

I have walked much of my life in fear, never truly finding a place where I knew I belonged. Rejection, victimization, and divorce has left me like a beggar, seeking desperately to find my blessing somewhere, to find it anywhere. I didn’t know who I was or where I was going. I didn’t know how significant I was or what the meaning of my life was, and the saddest part of this is that I didn’t fully realize that God was holding the blessing for me that I was so desperately seeking.

The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of their own and others’ normal feeling states. Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the self, or in the presence of his closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc., are all as normal a part of life as bread and flowers and streets. Yet, they have become ubiquitously avoided and shameful human experiences. How tragic this is, for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated psyche. One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self-protection. For without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments.

Often, our relationships become an unrealized quest for what is perfect, unfettered, and free of flaws. We expect our partners, spouses, and our friends to avoid missteps and to be magical mind readers. These secret expectations play a sinister part in many of the great tragedies of our lives: failed marriages, dissipated dreams, abandoned careers, outcast family, deserted children, and discarded friendships. We readily forget what we once knew as children: our flaws are not only natural but integral to our beings. They are interwoven into our soul’s DNA and yet we continually reject the crooked, wrinkled, mushy parts of our life rather than embrace them as the very essence of our beings. I once believed that aiming for perfection would land me in the realm of excellence. This, however, may not be the trajectory of how things happen. In fact, the pursuit of perfection may be the biggest obstacle to becoming whole. It seems essential to value hard work and determination and yet recognize that the road to excellence is littered with mistakes and subsequent lessons. Imperfection and excellence are intertwined. There is joy in our pain, strength in weakness, courage in compassion, and power in forgiveness.

The cross always simultaneously means rejection, and that the disgrace of suffering is part of the cross. Being expelled, despised, and abandoned by people in one's suffering is part of the cross. Being expelled, despised, and abandoned by people in one's suffering, as we find in the unending lament of the psalmist, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, yet one no longer comprehensible to a form of Christian life unable to distinguish between bourgeois and Christian existence.

Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable. In my experience—clinical and otherwise—it’s just never been that simple. Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well). In this manner, you strip him or her of all power. It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default

In the inmost recesses of consciousness, The wound opening inwards, The spirit too proud to admit an injury, Incessantly grazed and torn again By the insensitive, the enemy that hates Difference, quality that escapes submission To common complacency, impure hypocrisy- That would annihilate what is uncommon, Challenging their meanness, their lack of standards With something electric and alive, a vibrancy That offers not a new Heaven and a new Earth But life, more life and light- To be rejected. - The Parting

DEAR MAMA, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I’m not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be O.K., if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child. I have friends who think I’m foolish to write this letter. I hope they’re wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I hope especially that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you. I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant. I’m sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief—rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes. No, Mama, I wasn’t “recruited.” No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. But you know what? I wish someone had. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in Orlando had taken me aside and said, “You’re all right, kid. You can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. You’re not crazy or sick or evil. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends—all kinds of friends—who don’t give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it.” But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don’t consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being. These aren’t radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it’s all right for you to like me too. I know what you must be thinking now. You’re asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way? I can’t answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don’t care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it’s the light and the joy of my life. I know I can’t tell you what it is to be gay. But I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity. It’s not fearing your body, or the pleasures that God made for it. It’s not judging your neighbor, except when he’s crass or unkind. Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength. It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. I like it. There’s not much else I can say, except that I’m the same Michael you’ve always known. You just know me better now. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. I never will. Please don’t feel you have to answer this right away. It’s enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth. Mary Ann sends her love. Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane. Your loving son, MICHAEL

But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labor. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place—far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history—to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we must now define in the face of a world that insults it.

An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie. The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand. By embracing the lie of my independent desires, I deceive only myself. But by rejecting the truth, I deny the consequences that my desires have for other people and theirs for me.

But a wall is a wall is a wall - it's an indiscriminate barrier. If you hide behind a wall to protect yourself from the pain of rejection, then you also block out joy. If you never let others see the parts you want to hide, then they'll never see the parts you want them to know.

God shows us what authentic love is in John 3:16, probably the most famous verse in the Bible. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (NKJV). God so loved the world. He loved the whole world; not just the good part of the world, the part that loved him already, or the part that he knew would love him back. We need to expand our hearts, our comfort zones, and our friend zones. He gave his only Son. He was willing to make real sacrifices to build real relationships. Sometimes we need to put aside projects and schedules for the sake of people. Like Jesus, we need to be interruptible. Whoever. He showed unconditional love and acceptance. Love is risky. We might be rejected. We might be crucified by the people we are trying to help. But ultimately, love will prevail.

And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it is criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry. They are the stones by the builder rejected. There is no place for them, in the social fabric while all the forces of society drive them downward till they perish. At the bottom of the Abyss they are feeble, besotted, and imbecile. If they reproduce, the life is so cheap that perforce it perishes of itself. The work of the world goes on above them, and they do not care to take part in it, nor are they able. Moreover, the work of the world does not need them.

Pain, mistakes, failure, heart-stompingness, embarrassment, rejection, frustration, anger, loneliness, and occasionally feeling alienated are all part of the ride and are every bit as important as love, laughter, joy excitement, success, romance, hope, accomplishment, and trust. -Libba Bray

167 It’s one of those days when the monotony of everything oppresses me like being thrown into jail. The monotony of everything is merely the monotony of myself, however. Each face, even if seen just yesterday, is different today, because today isn’t yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there was never another one like it in the world. Only our soul makes the identification – a genuinely felt but erroneous identification – by which everything becomes similar and simplified. The world is a set of distinct things with varied edges, but if we’re near-sighted, it’s a continual and indecipherable fog. I feel like fleeing. Like fleeing from what I know, fleeing from what’s mine, fleeing from what I love. I want to depart, not for impossible Indias or for the great islands south of everything, but for any place at all – village or wilderness – that isn’t this place. I want to stop seeing these unchanging faces, this routine, these days. I want to rest, far removed, from my inveterate feigning. I want to feel sleep come to me as life, not as rest. A cabin on the seashore or even a cave in a rocky mountainside could give me this, but my will, unfortunately, cannot. Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery. Our faint-hearted love of freedom – which, if we had it, we would all reject, unable to get used to it – is proof of how ingrained our slavery is. I myself, having just said that I’d like a cabin or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of everything, which is the monotony of me – would I dare set out for this cabin or cave, knowing from experience that the monotony, since it stems from me, will always be with me? I myself, suffocating from where I am and because I am – where would I breathe easier, if the sickness is in my lungs rather than in the things that surround me? I myself, who long for pure sunlight and open country, for the ocean in plain view and the unbroken horizon – could I get used to my new bed, the food, not having to descend eight flights of stairs to the street, not entering the tobacco shop on the corner, not saying good-morning to the barber standing outside his shop? Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, infiltrating our physical sensations and our feeling of life, and like spittle of the great Spider it subtly binds us to whatever is close, tucking us into a soft bed of slow death which is rocked by the wind. Everything is us, and we are everything, but what good is this, if everything is nothing? A ray of sunlight, a cloud whose shadow tells us it is passing, a breeze that rises, the silence that follows when it ceases, one or another face, a few voices, the incidental laughter of the girls who are talking, and then night with the meaningless, fractured hieroglyphs of the stars.

Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny. They have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which yet remains to be embraced. If, as I believe, no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull, then what most significantly fails to be illuminated here is the paradoxical adjustment which is perpetually made, the Negro being compelled to accept the fact that this dark and dangerous and unloved stranger is part of himself forever. Only this recognition sets him in any wise free and it is this, this necessary ability to contain and even, in the most honorable sense of the word, to exploit the “nigger,” which lends to Negro life its high element of the ironic and which causes the most well-meaning of their American critics to make such exhilarating errors when attempting to understand them.

Darkness seems to have prevailed and has taken the forefront. This country as in the 'cooperation' of The United States of America has never been about the true higher-good of the people. Know and remember this. Cling to your faith. Roll your spiritual sleeves up and get to work. Use your energy wisely. Transmute all anger, panic and fear into light and empowerment. Don't use what fuels them; all lower-energy. Mourn as you need to. Console who you need to—and then go get into the spiritual and energetic arena. There's plenty work for us to do; within and without. Let's each focus on becoming 'The President of Our Own Life. Cultivate your mind. Pursue your purpose. Shine your light. Elevate past—and reject—any culture of low vibrational energy and ratchetness. Don't take fear, defeat or anger—on or in. The system is doing what they've been created to do. Are you? Am I? Are we—collectively? Let's get to work. No more drifting through life without your higher-self in complete control of your mind. Awaken—fully. Activate—now. Put your frustrations or concerns into your work. Don't lose sight. There is still—a higher plan. Let's ride this 4 year energetic-wave like the spiritual gangsters that we are. This will all be the past soon. Let's get to work and stay dedicated, consistent and diligent. Again, this will all be the past soon. We have preparing and work to do. Toxic energy is so not a game. Toxic energy and low vibrations are being collectively acted out on the world stage. Covertly operating through the unconscious weak spots and blind spots in the human psyche; making people oblivious to their own madness, causing and influencing them to act against–their–own–best–interests and higher-good, as if under a spell and unconsciously possessed. This means that they are actually nourishing the lower vibrational energy with their lifestyle, choices, energy and habits, which is unconsciously giving the lower-energy the very power and fuel it needs—for repeating and recreating endless drama, suffering and destruction, in more and more amplified forms on a national and world stage. So what do we do? We take away its autonomy and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves. By recognizing how this energetic/spiritual virus or parasite of the mind—operates through our unawareness is the beginning of the cure. Knowledge is power. Applied knowledge is—freedom. Our shared future will be decided primarily by the changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, starting with each of us— vibrationally. In closing and most importantly, the greatest protection against becoming affected or possessed by this lower-energy is to be in touch with our higher vibrational-self. We have to call our energy and power back. Being in touch with our higher-self and true nature acts as a sacred amulet, shielding and protecting us from the attempted effects. We defeat evil not by fighting against it (in which case, by playing its game, we’ve already lost) but by getting in touch with the part of us that is invulnerable to its effects— our higher vibrational-self. Will this defeat and destroy us? Or will it awaken us more and more? Everything depends upon our recognizing what is being revealed to us and our stepping out of the unconscious influence of low vibrational/negative/toxic/evil/distraction energy (or whatever name you relate to it as) that is and has been seeking power over each of our lives energetically and/or spiritually, and step into our wholeness, our personal power, our higher self and vibrate higher and higher daily. Stay woke my friends—let's get to work.

But life just doesn’t work like that. Not for me. Not for the girl who’s always carried the storm inside her. You see, my mum had failed to understand one important fact: you can’t observe the storm from a safe distance when the storm is already a part of you. We all have our roles to fill. I’d just been avoiding mine for a lot longer.

The darker side of Nietzsche’s ideas was incorporated into the Nazi belief system. Part of the link was straightforward: some things Nietzsche said were pure Nazi doctrine. His comments that ‘The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction’ and that ‘the tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate’ could come from any work on racial hygiene. Nietzsche’s central contribution was not these explicitly Social Darwinist views, but his rejection of the Judeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak. Self-creation required hardness towards oneself: a strong will imposing coherence on conflicting impulses. It also requires hardness on others. Conflicts between the self-creative projects of different people made inevitable the attempt to dominate others. The whole of life was a struggle in which victory went to the brave and to the strong-willed. Noble human qualities, linked with the will to power, were brought out in combat but atrophied in peace. Compassion was weakness, cowardice and self-deception. The Judeo-Christian emphasis on it was poison. In drawing these consequences from his beliefs about the death of God and from Social Darwinism, Nietzsche provided the part of the Nazi belief system which ‘justified’ the cruel steps they took to implement their other beliefs.

The truth springs forth ever anew from the most profound wellsprings of Being. It will keep your soul from withering and dying while you encounter the inevitable tragedy of life. It will help you avoid the terrible desire to seek vengeance for that tragedy—part of the terrible sin of Being, which everything must bear gracefully, just so it can exist. If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.

The Party's all-around intrusion into people's lives was the very point of the process known as 'thought reform." Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for 'thought examination' was held for those 'in the revolution." Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.The meetings tended to be dominated by self-righteous and petty-minded people, who used them to vent their envy and frustration; people of peasant origin used them to attack those from 'bourgeois' backgrounds. The idea was that people should be reformed to be more like peasants, because the Communist revolution was in essence a peasant revolution. This process appealed to the guilt feelings of the educated; they had been living better than the peasants, and self-criticism tapped into this.Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere. The pettiness which dominated them was justified on the grounds that prying into personal details was a way of ensuring thorough soul-cleansing. In fact, pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control. My mother's cell grilled her week after week, month after month, forcing her to produce endless self-criticisms.She had to consent to this agonizing process. Life for a revolutionary was meaningless if they were rejected by the Party. It was like excommunication for a Catholic. Besides, it was standard procedure. My father had gone through it and had accepted it as part of 'joining the revolution." In fact, he was still going through it. The Party had never hidden the fact that it was a painful process. He told my mother her anguish was normal.At the end of all this, my mother's two comrades voted against full Party membership for her. She fell into a deep depression. She had been devoted to the revolution, and could not accept the idea that it did not want her; it was particularly galling to think she might not get in for completely petty and irrelevant reasons, decided by two people whose way of thinking seemed light years away from what she had conceived the Party's ideology to be. She was being kept out of a progressive organization by backward people, and yet the revolution seemed to be telling her that it was she who was in the wrong. At the back of her mind was another, more practical point which she did not even spell out to herself: it was vital to get into the Party, because if she failed she would be stigmatized and ostracized.

Which part ?” For there is so much of Medea’s life she could regret,perhaps all of it.As I stare at my sister,I consider how much she has endured,all that hate,cruelty,manipila, abuse,rejection.... When you fill a person with such ugly things,is it surprising that they would unleash it all back on the world ? Medea chose the path of hate because nobody had ever shown her another route.

Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment. Up to now this identification was never really experienced. Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him. Very often he even took orders, without reacting against them, which were far more conducive to insurrection than the one at which he balks. He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate interests than as yet aware of his own rights. But with loss of patience—with impatience—a reaction begins which can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost always retroactive. The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery. The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing. He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal. What was at first the man's obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself. It becomes for him the supreme good. Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts ("because this is how it must be . . .") an attitude of All or Nothing. With rebellion, awareness is born.

Each of us is a child of parents, perhaps a sibling to someone, a friend to friends, a colleague to coworkers. Following Jesus starts here. It starts with learning to see these people again for the first time, now visible to us anew as we learn to see them as made and loved by God, see their lives whole and seek their flourishing. This typically brings us face-to-face with the challenges of our vocation. We don’t see people this way when they’re annoying to us or clearly self-interested or rejecting us and our faith or failing to do their share of the work. Right there, in the midst of ordinary life, we face the gritty task of following Jesus by learning to love and serve those at our doorstep. This will be true throughout our lives as disciples. We will never be called to do less than this. And sometimes this is the hardest part of all.

Most of us may intuitively agree about right and wrong, but we also, and far more significantly, differ enormously in the ways in which we rank the virtues and the vices. ... To put cruelty first is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God; pride - the rejection of God - must always be the worst one, which gives rise to all the others. However, cruelty - the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear - is a wrong done entirely to another creature. When it is marked as the supreme evil it is judged so in and of itself, and not because it signifies a denial of God or any other higher norm. It is a judgment made from within the world in which cruelty occurs as part of our normal private life and our daily public practices. By putting it unconditionally first, with nothing above us to excuse or to forgive acts of cruelty, one closes off any appeal to any order other than that of actuality. To hate cruelty with utmost intensity is perfectly compatible with Biblical religiosity, but to put it first does place one irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion. For it is a purely human verdict upon human conduct, and so puts religion at a certain distance. The decision to put cruelty first is not, however, prompted merely by religious skepticism. It emerges, rather, from the recognition that the habits of the faithful do not differ from those of the faithless in their brutalities, and that Machiavelli had triumphed before he had ever written a line. To put cruelty first therefore is to be at odds not only with religion but with normal politics as well.

I often think that there is, in every life, some haunted room that you never want to go into, and that you do your best to forget was there at all. You will never break in that door with your mind, or with your will. Only with the gentle coaxing of the imagination will that door be opened to you and will you be given the gift back again of a part of yourself that either you or someone else had forced you to drive away and reject.

There is a long tradition of thinking about the relationship between the economy and society, starting with the founders of the Fabian Society and the LSE, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Beatrice spent years collecting data in the poorest parts of London and seeing the impact of deprivation first hand. As a member of the 1909 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, she authored a dissenting minority report that rejected the harsh system of workhouses and Britain’s piecemeal approach to supporting those in poverty. In it, she argued that a new social contract for the UK would ‘secure a national minimum of civilised life … open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and a modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged’.4 More than one hundred years later, that is still an aspiration in most countries in the world.

1)    The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2)    At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3)    He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4)    He is verbally abusive. 5)    He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6)    He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7)    He has battered in prior relationships. 8)    He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9)    He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10)   His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11)   There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12)   He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13)   He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14)   He refuses to accept rejection. 15)   He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16)   He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17)   He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18)   He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19)   He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 20)   He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner. 21)   He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave. 22)   He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise. 23)   He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in films, news stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified. 24)   He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed. 25)   He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions. 26)   He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge. 27)   Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons. 28)   He uses “male privilege” as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like the “master of the house”). 29)   He experienced or witnessed violence as a child. 30)   His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death (e.g., designating someone to care for children).

William! We got waves.” He called me William only on serious occasions, or as part of a joke. This was a serious occasion. We had run out of food the night before, and had been planning a run to Lahaina, the nearest town, which was twelve miles away, for provisions. That plan was postponed indefinitely. We scavenged for nutrients—gnawing old mango rinds, scraping out soup cans, choking down bread previously rejected as moldy. We grabbed our boards and jogged around the point, screaming

We must be vigilant in a world which has moved so far from that which is spiritual. It is essential that we reject anything that does not conform to our standards, refusing in the process to surrender that which we desire most: eternal life in the kingdom of God. The storms will still beat at our doors from time to time, for they are an inescapable part of our existence in mortality. We, however, will be far better equipped to deal with them, to learn from them, and to overcome them if we have the gospel at our core and the love of the Savior in our hearts.

He says to the king, in the north they have contempt for the king’s peace, they want to administer their own murders. If Norfolk cannot subdue them they will fall into their old savagery, where each eye or limb or life itself is costed out, and all flesh has a price. In our forefathers’ time a nobleman’s life was worth six times that of a man who followed the plough. The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime. We repudiate this, he tells the king: we say a man of violence cannot go free because his cousin is the judge, no more than a wealthy sinner can make up for his sins by founding a monastery. Before God and the law, all men are equal. It takes a generation, he says, to reconcile heads and hearts. Englishmen of every shire are wedded to what their nurses told them. They do not like to think too hard, or disturb the plan of the world that exists inside their heads, and they will not accept change unless it puts them in better ease. But new times are coming. Gregory’s children—and, he adds quickly, your Majesty’s children yet to be born—will never have known their country in thrall to an old fraud in Rome. They will not put their faith in the teeth and bones of the dead, or in holy water, ashes and wax. When they can read the Bible for themselves, they will be closer to God than to their own skin. They will speak His language, and He theirs. They will see that a prince exists not to sit a horse in a plumed helmet, but—as your Majesty always says—to care for his subjects, body and soul. The scriptures enjoin obedience to earthly powers, and so we stick by our prince through thick and thin. We do not reject part of his polity. We take him as a whole, consider him God’s anointed, and suppose God is keeping an eye on him.

Pliny the Elder once said that the Romans, when they couldn’t make a building beautiful, made it big. The practice continues to be popular: If we can’t do it well, we make it larger. We add dollars to our income, rooms to our houses, activities to our schedules, appointments to our calendars. And the quality of life diminishes with each addition. On the other hand, every time that we retrieve a part of our life from the crowd and respond to God’s call to us, we are that much more ourselves, more human. Every time we reject the habits of the crowd and practice the disciplines of faith, we become a little more alive.

her swagger, unfortunately, back in full working order even though she was only dressed in a towel. How she managed to make that look regal, I’d never know. “Doesn’t sound like it to me.” “How the Sol do you think we’re supposed to share you?” Seph demanded. “Such behavior is the exact opposite of—” “Do you always behave? Have you never, not once in your life, rebelled?” she retorted. “Anyway, I already told you, I don’t need you. But, seeing as you picked me for this clusterfuck of a troupe, and all because of what I am, it seems pretty stupid to outright reject something that comes as part and parcel of my powers.

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

The desire to experience new kinds of community led a number of thoughtful and idealistic people to reject the patterns of vocation, family life and religion with which they had grown up. Their attempt to establish new patterns of social bonding in uncontaminated rural retreats can be seen as a secular monasticism, but they often discovered that to abolish the boundaries of authority, family and property created a whole series of problems which they did not have the spiritual and personal resources to solve. At their best, such groups have opened up new horizons of discipleship, but they have often learned some hard lessons about the intractable sinfulness and selfishness of partly-redeemed human nature.

In the United States law, federally designated wilderness is famously defined as 'an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.' One environmental ethics text defines natural like this: 'Something is natural to the extent that it is independent of human design, control, and impacts.' Definitions like this start with a basic assumption that human beings are not part of nature. They assume, in fact, that humans are the opposite of nature, that our influence makes a thing less wild or natural. And I simply reject this premise. After many years, I have come to see the concepts of wilderness and nature as not just unscientific but damaging.

The family’s intent, whether conscious or unconscious, is to make the child feel like an Other, like he cannot be his authentic self and still remain a member of the family, like he is not part of the pack. After all, we are pack animals. Indeed, by adulthood, he feels toxic, broken, and like an outsider in his own family, in his own body, in his own life. This unease carries into adult relationships with partners, colleagues, and bosses. His fear of rejection and unconscious behavior may turn his new friend groups or places of employment into his old family of origin, where the cycle of scapegoating continues. Today, when I meet a teenager who seems obsessed with keeping adults happy, I cringe inside. I want to call 911.

have come to learn is that for those of us who have been abused, whatever path we take and however well we recover our lives, most of us are made to work very hard just to prevent ourselves from becoming the stereotype of the victim of child sexual abuse. The feared social outcasts, rejected and discriminated against because someone else committed a crime upon them. I always wanted a life free from all of that and often found it very hard to find my way. When my childhood abusers took my childhood and stole my innocence, they also condemned me to various multiple life sentences which have stolen parts of my adulthood. To make things worse, most of these life sentences don’t even become apparent until later on in life. One

FRIDAY, APRIL 2, 1943 Dearest Kitty, Oh my, another item has been added to my list of sins. Last night I was lying in bed, waiting for Father to tuck me in and say my prayers with me, when Mother came into the room, sat on my bed and asked very gently, “Anne, Daddy isn’t ready. How about if I listen to your prayers tonight?” “No, Momsy,” I replied. Mother got up, stood beside my bed for a moment and then slowly walked toward the door. Suddenly she turned, her face contorted with pain, and said, “I don’t want to be angry with you. I can’t make you love me!” A few tears slid down her cheeks as she went out the door. I lay still, thinking how mean it was of me to reject her so cruelly, but I also knew that I was incapable of answering her any other way. I can’t be a hypocrite and pray with her when I don’t feel like it. It just doesn’t work that way. I felt sorry for Mother—very, very sorry—because for the first time in my life I noticed she wasn’t indifferent to my coldness. I saw the sorrow in her face when she talked about not being able to make me love her. It’s hard to tell the truth, and yet the truth is that she’s the one who’s rejected me. She’s the one whose tactless comments and cruel jokes about matters I don’t think are funny have made me insensitive to any sign of love on her part. Just as my heart sinks every time I hear her harsh words, that’s how her heart sank when she realized there was no more love between us. She cried half the night and didn’t get any sleep. Father has avoided looking at me, and if his eyes do happen to cross mine, I can read his unspoken words: “How can you be so unkind? How dare you make your mother so sad!” Everyone expects me to apologize, but this is not something I can apologize for, because I told the truth, and sooner or later Mother was bound to find out anyway. I seem to be indifferent to Mother’s tears and Father’s glances, and I am, because both of them are now feeling what I’ve always felt. I can only feel sorry for Mother, who will have to figure out what her attitude should be all by herself. For my part, I will continue to remain silent and aloof, and I don’t intend to shrink from the truth, because the longer it’s postponed, the harder it will be for them to accept it when they do hear it! Yours, Anne

Let’s go deeper and consider four central sets of paradoxical truths: * Time is real. It moves from past to present to future. * There is no time, no past, no future—only the eternal present. * You possess free will and can thus take responsibility for your choices. * Free will is an illusion—your choices are influenced, even predetermined, by all that preceded them. * You are, or possess, a separate inner self existing within a body. * No separation exists—you are a part of the same Consciousness shining through billions of eyes. * Death is an inevitable reality you’ll meet at the end of life. * The death of the inner self is an illusion. Life is eternal. Must you choose one assertion and reject the other? Or is there a way to meaningfully resolve and even reconcile such apparent contradictions?

The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all. The desire to avoid rejection at all costs, to avoid confrontation and conflict, the desire to attempt to accept everything equally and to make everything cohere and harmonize, is a deep and subtle form of entitlement. Entitled people, because they feel as though they deserve to feel great all the time, avoid rejecting anything because doing so might make them or someone else feel bad. And because they refuse to reject anything, they live a valueless, pleasure-driven, and self-absorbed life. All they give a fuck about is sustaining the high a little bit longer, to avoid the inevitable failures of their life, to pretend the suffering away. Rejection is an important and crucial life skill. Nobody wants to be stuck in a relationship that isn’t making them happy. Nobody wants to be stuck in a business doing work they hate and don’t believe in. Nobody wants to feel that they can’t say what they really mean. Yet people choose these things. All the time. Honesty is a natural human craving. But part of having honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word “no.” In this way, rejection actually makes our relationships better and our emotional lives healthier.

Symbolic means sidestep reality; they are part of what is going wrong. Division of labor, for instance, eroded face-to-face interaction and eroded people's direct, intimate relationship with the natural world. The symbolic is complicit; it generates more and more mediations to accompany those created by social practices. Life becomes fragmented; connections to nature are obscured and dissolved. Instead of repairing the rupture, symbolic thought turns people in the wrong direction: toward abstraction. The "thirst for transcendence" is initiated, ignoring the shifting reality that created that desire in the first place. Language plays a key role here, re-ordering and subordinating natural systems that humankind was once attuned to. Symbolic culture demands that we reject our "animal nature" in favor of a symbolically defined "human nature".

It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh us down—the times of rejection, the moments of isolation when we felt cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort and love. It is an ache that resides in the heart, the faint echo calling us back to the times of loss. We are called back, not so much to make things right, but to acknowledge what happened to us. Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in so doing, deepen our capacity for compassion. When grief remains unexpressed, however, it hardens, becomes as solid as a stone. We, in turn, become rigid and stop moving in rhythm with the soul. When we are in touch with all of our emotions, on the other hand, we are more verb than noun, more a movement than a thing. But when our grief stagnates, we become fixed in place, unable to move and dance with the flow of life. Grief is part of the dance.

when you are in pain __ no one can feel this better than you .this is not a shame to be in emotional pain.you love someone or hate __ not in your hand . a part of life to going through pain. pain may cause silent killer of your health . what you must do _ focus on your pain .realizing helps . then you would feel at a point _you have to get out of it. then the moment you focus what can destruct your emotional pain .music ,screaming ,going out,writing, anything ,you may pick up. one last thing __ never lie to self. shoot direct question and answer to self . create hobbies . then focus on yourself. look how brilliant you are . how unique you are . then admit ,no power can hurt you so much that has nothing to do with your well being . now _ reject . start to reject . once you understand your pain, the cause , how to keep self safety , ___you are powerful to reject pain slowly .

We need to tell each other stories of different ways you can live, different ways you can be; predicated not on how close you get to the life you were assumed or expected to have, but on the queer wanderings of a life you live. I would have liked to have known there were other ways of living, of being. I would have liked to have known that women do not have to be in relation to men. Of course, I struggled for this realization: I became a feminist; I found women’s studies; I met women who taught me what I did not have to do; I found women who helped me deviate from an expectation. Queer: the moment you realize what you did not have to be. We can become part of a widening when we refused to be narrowed. And each time we reject or widen the happiness script, we become part of an opening. We have to create room if we are to live a feminist life. When we create room, we create room for others.

And those terrible angels—the angel of annihilation—is a beautiful thing, is the maker, too, of joy, and is partly what Zadie Smith’s talking about when she talks about being in joy. That it’s not a feeling or an accomplishment: it’s an entering and a joining with the terrible (the old German kind), joy is. Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join. And what if the wilderness—perhaps the densest wild in there—thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?)—is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the “intolerable.” It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything—lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?

Normally leaving one's country is a grave step: it involves leaving the society and culture in which we have been raised,, the society and culture whose language we use in speech and thought to express and understand ourselves, our aims, goals and values; the society and culture, customs, and conventions we depend on to find our place in the social world. In large part, we affirm our society and culture, and have an intimate and inexpressible knowledge of it, even though much of it we may question, if not reject. The government’s authority cannot, then be freely accepted in the sense that the bonds of society and culture, of history and social place of origin, begin so early to shape our life and are normally so strong that the right of emigration does not suffice to make accepting its authority free, politically speaking, in the way that liberty of conscience suffices to make accepting ecclesiastical authority free.

In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the many, and, from compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing—the world is rationally organized to do the rest. But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?" Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice? Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy- minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer—"Top! und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way. Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea. The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words: "All is needed and essential—even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one

If there are always forces around which are concerned to depress and discourage, there are always forces above and around us which we can draw upon, - draw into ourselves to restore, to fill up again with strength and faith and joy and the power that perseveres and conquers. It is really a habit that one has to get of opening to these helpful forces and either passively receiving them or actively drawing upon them - for one can do either. It is easier if you have the conception of them above and around you and the faith and the will to receive them - for that brings the experience and concrete sense of them and the capacity to receive at need or at will. It is a question of habituating your consciousness to get into touch and keep in touch with these helpful forces - and for that you must accustom yourself to reject the impressions forced on you by the others, depression, self-distrust, repining and all similar disturbances. ... it is part of the experience of those who have advanced far in Yoga that besides the ordinary forces and activities of the mind and life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can act and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it, and this power is greater than any other and more effective. The invisible Force producing tangible results both inward and outward is the whole meaning of the Yogic consciousness. Your question about Yoga bringing merely a feeling of Power without any result was really very strange. Who would be satisfied with such a meaningless hallucination and call it Power? If we had not had thousands of experiences showing that the Power within could alter the mind, develop its powers, add new ones, bring in new ranges of knowledge, master the vital movements, change the character, influence men and things, control

All of this ‘offering up something personal’ made me feel the old clammy twinge of fear of rejection. Then Nick reminds me that social life is governed by reciprocity. ‘A few years ago, I was driving through a remote part of Ethiopia and I kept passing all these mothers and children outside their mud huts. Everybody I passed stared at me like I was dead: totally blank facial expression. It was the most uncomfortable I’d ever felt in my life. ‘But then it occurred to me, while I was sitting there, I was looking at them in exactly the same way they’re looking at me. So I started smiling and waving as I went by – and it was like I flipped a switch. As soon as I started smiling, waving and looking friendly, they started waving from their windows, grinning at me and running out of their houses to give me high fives. ‘That’s the truth of the world, Jessica,’ he says, casually full-naming me to let me know something big is coming. ‘Nobody waves – but everybody waves back.’ I hear his mic drop all the way from Chicago.

To deny man’s biological determinants or to reduce them by relegating his specific traits to zoology is absurd. The hereditary part of humanity forms only the basis of social and historical life: human instincts are not programmed in their object, i.e., man always has the freedom to make choices, moral as well as political, which naturally are limited only by death. Man is an heir, but he can dispose of his heritage. He can construct himself historically and culturally on the basis of the presuppositions of his biological constitution, which are his human limitations. What lies beyond these limitations may be called God, the cosmos, nothingness, or Being. The question of ‘why’ no longer makes sense, because what is beyond human limitations is by definition unthinkable. Thus, the New Right proposes a vision of a well-balanced individual, taking into account both inborn, personal abilities and the social environment. It rejects ideologies that emphasize only one of these factors, be it biological, economic, or mechanical.

Paradox is any self-contradictory proposition that, when investigated, may prove to be well-founded or true. Once understood, it opens the gateway to higher wisdom. But how can contradictory principles both be true? As the Buddhist Riddle of Five Truths puts it: “It is right. It is wrong. It is both right and wrong. It is neither right nor wrong. All exist simultaneously.” Charles Dickens expressed the paradox of his era, equally true today, when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” going on to describe that time as one of belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair. Two opposing statements can each be true depending on the observer: it’s true that spiders are merciless killers from the viewpoint of tiny insects caught in their webs—but for most humans, nearly all spiders are harmless creatures. A story of the Sufi sage Mullah Nasruddin expresses the nature of paradox when he’s asked to arbitrate between two men with opposing views. Hearing the first man, he remarks, “You’re right.” When he hears the second man, he also says, “You’re right.” When a bystander points out, “They can’t both be right,” the mullah scratches his head and says, “You’re right.” Let’s go deeper and consider four central sets of paradoxical truths: * Time is real. It moves from past to present to future. * There is no time, no past, no future—only the eternal present. * You possess free will and can thus take responsibility for your choices. * Free will is an illusion—your choices are influenced, even predetermined, by all that preceded them. * You are, or possess, a separate inner self existing within a body. * No separation exists—you are a part of the same Consciousness shining through billions of eyes. * Death is an inevitable reality you’ll meet at the end of life. * The death of the inner self is an illusion. Life is eternal. Must you choose one assertion and reject the other? Or is there a way to meaningfully resolve and even reconcile such apparent contradictions?

It was the ultimate sacrilege that Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was rejected and even put to death. And it continues. In many parts of the world today we see a growing rejection of the Son of God. His divinity is questioned. His gospel is deemed irrelevant. In day-to-day life, His teachings are ignored. Those who legitimately speak in His name find little respect in secular society. If we ignore the Lord and His servants, we may just as well be atheists—the end result is practically the same. It is what Mormon described as typical after extended periods of peace and prosperity: “Then is the time that they do harden their hearts, and do forget the Lord their God, and do trample under their feet the Holy One” (Helaman 12:2). And so we should ask ourselves, do we reverence the Holy One and those He has sent? Some years before he was called as an Apostle himself, Elder Robert D. Hales recounted an experience that demonstrated his father’s sense of that holy calling. Elder Hales said: "Some years ago Father, then over eighty years of age, was expecting a visit from a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on a snowy winter day. Father, an artist, had painted a picture of the home of the Apostle. Rather than have the painting delivered to him, this sweet Apostle wanted to go personally to pick the painting up and thank my father for it. Knowing that Father would be concerned that everything was in readiness for the forthcoming visit, I dropped by his home. Because of the depth of the snow, snowplows had caused a snowbank in front of the walkway to the front door. Father had shoveled the walks and then labored to remove the snowbank. He returned to the house exhausted and in pain. When I arrived, he was experiencing heart pain from overexertion and stressful anxiety. My first concern was to warn him of his unwise physical efforts. Didn’t he know what the result of his labor would be? "'Robert,' he said through interrupted short breaths, 'do you realize an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ is coming to my home? The walks must be clean. He should not have to come through a snowdrift.' He raised his hand, saying, 'Oh, Robert, don’t ever forget or take for granted the privilege it is to know and to serve with Apostles of the Lord.'" [In CR, April 1992, 89; or “Gratitude for the Goodness of God,” Ensign, May 1992, 64] I think it is more than coincidence that such a father would be blessed to have a son serve as an Apostle. You might ask yourself, “Do I see the calling of the prophets and apostles as sacred? Do I treat their counsel seriously, or is it a light thing with me?” President Gordon B. Hinckley, for instance, has counseled us to pursue education and vocational training; to avoid pornography as a plague; to respect women; to eliminate consumer debt; to be grateful, smart, clean, true, humble, and prayerful; and to do our best, our very best. Do your actions show that you want to know and do what he teaches? Do you actively study his words and the statements of the Brethren? Is this something you hunger and thirst for? If so, you have a sense of the sacredness of the calling of prophets as the witnesses and messengers of the Son of God.

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable...When people begin to take such an attitude, they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a place of resentment, victimization, or bitterness. From such people, I have learned a new definition of the word 'joy.' I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to love despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing. The willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position, we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life, or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than happiness. The strength that I notice developing in many of my patients and in myself after all these years could almost be called a form of curiosity. What one of my colleagues calls fearlessness. At one level, of course, I fear outcome as much as anyone. But more and more I am able to move in and out of that and to experience a place beyond preference for outcome, a life beyond life and death. It is a place of freedom, even anticipation. Decisions made from this perspective are life-affirming and not fear-driven. It is a grace.

Now air consists principally of twenty-one parts of oxygen and seventy-nine of nitrogen. The lungs absorb the oxygen, which is indispensable for the support of life, and reject the nitrogen. The air expired loses nearly five per cent. of the former and contains nearly an equal volume of carbonic acid, produced by the combustion of the elements of the blood. In an air-tight enclosure, then, after a certain time, all the oxygen of the air will be replaced by the carbonic acid— a gas fatal to life. There were two things to be done then— first, to replace the absorbed oxygen; secondly, to destroy the expired carbonic acid; both easy enough to do, by means of chlorate of potassium and caustic potash. The former is a salt which appears under the form of white crystals; when raised to a temperature of 400 degrees it is transformed into chlorure of potassium, and the oxygen which it contains is entirely liberated. Now twenty-eight pounds of chlorate of potassium produces seven pounds of oxygen, or 2,400 liters— the quantity necessary for the travelers during twenty-four hours.

Anne Sexton, who died forty-two years ago today, did her best to respond to the legions of fans who wrote to her. The letter below, from August 1965, finds her dispensing unvarnished advice to an aspiring poet from Amherst. Read more of her correspondence in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Your letter was very interesting, hard to define, making it hard on me somehow to set limits for you, advise or help in any real way. First of all let me tell you that I find your poems fascinating, terribly uneven … precious perhaps, flashes of brilliance … but the terrible lack of control, a bad use of rhyme and faults that I feel sure you will learn not to make in time. I am not a prophet but I think you will make it if you learn to revise, if you take your time, if you work your guts out on one poem for four months instead of just letting the miracle (as you must feel it) flow from the pen and then just leave it with the excuse that you are undisciplined. Hell! I’m undisciplined too, in everything but my work … Everyone in the world seems to be writing poems … but only a few climb into the sky. What you sent shows you COULD climb there if you pounded it into your head that you must work and rework these uncut diamonds of yours. If this is impossible for you my guess is that you will never really make it … As for madness … hell! Most poets are mad. It doesn’t qualify us for anything. Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing. Even though I’m often crazy, and I am and I know it, still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak … nothing grows from it and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail. Advice … Stop writing letters to the top poets in America. It is a terrible presumption on your part. I never in my life would have the gall (sp?) to write Randall Jarrell out of the blue that way and all my life I have wanted to do so. It’s out of line … it isn’t done. I mean they get dozens of fan letters a day that they have no time to respond to and I’m sure dozens of poems. Meanwhile, these poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way—not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems, usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole … make contact with others such as you. They are just as lonely, just as ready, and will help you far more than the distant Big Name Poet … I’m not being rejecting, Jon, I’m being realistic.

Most people, who choose or are coerced into only identifying with “positive” feelings, usually wind up in an emotionally lifeless middle ground – bland, deadened, and dissociated in an unemotional “no-man’s-land.” Moreover, when a person tries to hold onto a preferred feeling for longer than its actual tenure, she often appears as unnatural and phony as ersatz grass or plastic flowers. If instead, she learns to surrender willingly to the normal human experience that good feelings always ebb and flow, she will eventually be graced with a growing ability to renew herself in the vital waters of emotional flexibility. The repression of the so-called negative polarities of emotion causes much unnecessary pain, as well as the loss of many essential aspects of the feeling nature. In fact, much of the plethora of loneliness, alienation, and addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of their own and others’ normal feeling states. Nowhere, not in the deepest recesses of the self, or in the presence of his closest friends, is the average person allowed to have and explore any number of normal emotional states. Anger, depression, envy, sadness, fear, distrust, etc., are all as normal a part of life as bread and flowers and streets. Yet, they have become ubiquitously avoided and shameful human experiences. How tragic this is, for all of these emotions have enormously important and healthy functions in a wholly integrated psyche. One dimension where this is most true is in the arena of healthy self-protection. For without access to our uncomfortable or painful feelings, we are deprived of the most fundamental part of our ability to notice when something is unfair, abusive, or neglectful in our environments. Those who cannot feel their sadness often do not know when they are being unfairly excluded, and those who cannot feel their normal angry or fearful responses to abuse, are often in danger of putting up with it without protest. Perhaps never before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states, as it is in the twenty-first century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished. The disease of emotional emaciation is epidemic. Its effects on health are often euphemistically labeled as stress, and like the emotions, stress is often treated like some unwanted waste that must be removed.

Perhaps the extent of divinely sanctioned cruelty made it impossible to think of human cruelty as a distinct and unmitigated evil. Certainly those Christians who came to doubt the literal accounts of physical torment in hell also worried about the cruelty and vindictiveness ascribed to God. By the eighteenth century these were very common concerns, especially in England, where secular humanitarianism had begun its extraordinary career. It was never to be without its enemies. Religious rigor, the theory of the survival of the fittest, revolutionary radicalism, military atavism, masculine athleticism, and other causes hostile to humanitarianism never abated. Nevertheless, taking cruelty seriously became and remained an important part of Europe's accepted morality, even in the midst of unlimited massacres. Putting cruelty first is, however, a matter very different from mere humanness. To hate cruelty more than any other evil involves a radical rejection of both religious and political conventions. It dooms one to a life of skepticism, indecision, disgust, and often misanthropy. Putting cruelty first has therefore been tried only rarely, and it is not often discussed. It is too deep a threat to reason for most philosophers to contemplate it at all.

LEADING LESSONS Rejection is an illusion. It’s all in your head. It was never about Rachael; it was always about me. So maybe I didn’t fit her picture of the perfect dance partner. We were no longer a match--so what? At the time, the rejection hurt like hell and I threw myself a big ol’ pity party. But here’s the thing: No one can reject you. No one can dump you. It’s just a decision, and maybe you don’t like it. I was the one believing I was a victim instead of realizing how blessed my life was. If you’re feeling rejected, you’re looking at things all wrong. Just because someone says no, just because someone chooses another person over you, doesn’t mean you’re not good enough. There isn’t one successful person out there who hasn’t racked up his or her share of rejection. That said, no one likes hearing no. But what are you going to do with that no? Are you going to let it destroy your self-esteem? Or are you going to keep pushing forward, following your passion? Dancers deal with a lot of rejection--I know this now, and I see the rejections as part of my journey. Keep doing what you’re doing and do it well--don’t worry about pleasing anyone but yourself. Sometimes that no can be a wake-up call, a chance for you to reassess, refocus, reboot. I’m grateful Rachael and her family gave me my walking papers. That rejection opened me up to so much more.

The undercurrent of despair in our society is epitomized in a German word that first appeared in English in 1963, and is now incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary. It is torschlusspanik, (pronounced tor­shluss­panic), defined as "panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life's opportunities has shut." The doors that were once opened through initiation rites are still crucial thresholds in the human psyche, and when those doors do not open, or when they are not recognized for what they are, life shrinks into a series of rejections fraught with torschlusspanik. Torschlusspanik is now a part of our culture because there are so few rites to which individuals will submit in order to transcend their own selfish drives. Without the broader perspective, they see no meaning in the rejection. The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned. If, instead, they could temper themselves to a point of total concentration, a bursting point where they could either pass over or fall back as in a rite of passage, then they could test who they are. Their passion would be spent in an all­-out positive effort, instead of deteriorating into disillusionment and despair. The terror behind that word torschlusspanik is what drives many people into analysis—the last door has shut, the last rejection has taken place. No door will ever open again. Nothing means anything.

Beginning in the fall of 2001, the U.S. military dropped flyers over Afghanistan offering bounties of between $5,000 and $25,000 for the names of men with ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban. “This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe, for the rest of your life,” one flyer read. (The average annual income in Afghanistan at the time was less than $300.) The flyers fell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “like snowflakes in December in Chicago.” (Unlike many in Bush’s inner circle, Rumsfeld was a veteran; he served as a navy pilot in the 1950s.)82 As hundreds of men were rounded up abroad, the Bush administration considered where to put them. Taking over the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, and reopening Alcatraz, closed since 1963, were both considered but rejected because, from Kansas or California, suspected terrorists would be able to appeal to American courts and under U.S. state and federal law. Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, was rejected because it happened to be a British territory, and therefore subject to British law. In the end, the administration chose Guantánamo, a U.S. naval base on the southeastern end of Cuba. No part of either the United States or of Cuba, Guantánamo was one of the known world’s last no-man’s-lands. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo called it the “legal equivalent of outer space.

Echad is first mentioned in the garden. It says a man and a woman, when they join together, become echad, or “one.” But that word echad is more explosive with meaning than just one flesh. It can literally mean to fuse together at the deepest part of our beings. Two becoming one, completely glued together, completely meshing. I still remember one of the hardest conversations I have had with Alyssa. We were just starting to date again, and were sitting in the car after a wonderful date night. We knew marriage was a possibility on the horizon, and I felt like I finally had to share things in my past that would affect her if we got married. I was incredibly nervous, as well as terrified of rejection or hurt, but I realized that if intimacy were to grow, I had to get vulnerable. For marriage to be what it truly is—two people becoming one in mind, body, soul, and spirit—I had to be honest. I remember sharing with her many things, but specifically some details of my sexual past. My teenage years were littered with me almost worshiping sexual fulfillment in pornography, partying, and girls. And I say worship, because that was where I got my worth, value, and purpose as well as what I most lived for (which is what the definition of worship is). I had to apologize and ask forgiveness from Alyssa for things I had done before I even knew her because of echad—one form of complete and utter intimacy. Because of that beauty, mystery, and power, God created it to function best in a man and a woman coming together for life and constantly echading or fusing together. I needed forgiveness because I had betrayed echad. I had betrayed oneness. I had betrayed intimacy. And if I wasn’t honest about it, it’d be a little part of my life or heart that Alyssa didn’t know—thus blocking echad. But something really peculiar happened in that moment. With the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, Alyssa forgave me. She heard all that I was and am, and still wanted to walk this journey with me. I still remember the tenderness in her voice as she spoke truth and forgiveness over me. In that moment I was exposed and known, and yet because of Alyssa’s grace, I was at the same time loved. And that is where intimacy is found—to be fully loved and to be fully known. To be fully loved, but not fully known will always allow us to buy the lie that “if they only knew the real me, they wouldn’t want me anymore.” And to be fully known but not fully loved feels sharp, painful, at a level of rejection that hurts so bad. But to be fully known and at the same time fully loved, now that is intimacy. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Intimacy is certainly romantic in some aspects, but at its deepest level, it’s much more than that. It can be experienced with friends and family, not just spouses and loved ones.

The most important thing you can do to increase your self-control is to identify the misbeliefs in the words you tell yourself. Then argue against those misbeliefs. Never let yourself get away with misbelief talk. Use determination and energy in arguing and refusing each misbelief with the truth. You can be self-controlled in every area of your life. People who exercise self-control have discovered a major key to living fulfilled lives. Laziness, apathy and lethargy, avoiding responsibility, are not inroads to happiness and the fulfilled life. It is not surprising that when a person complains of lack of self-control the accompanying complaints are discontent, guilt, deep dissatisfaction with life, and a lack of self-confidence. Self-control, a fruit of the Spirit, will become a part of your life as you diligently cultivate it, as you reject discouragement, and as you teach yourself to reward yourself for your successes. “Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not,” Paul tells us in Galatians 6:9. Allow the Holy Spirit to help you. With God, nothing is impossible. Sometimes things may seem difficult, but with the Lord as your helper, strength and guide, it’s not impossible. You can shout to the whole world, “‘Greater is he [the Holy Spirit] that is in me than he [the devil who tempts me to sin] that is in the world.’ Therefore, I can be and am a self-controlled person!

...everyone has a Mr. Hyde, another version of the self. A direction not taken, perhaps. A road we didn't know existed, or had no name for, We each of us carry our choices about, don't we...? And every choice is a rejection, when you think. But there is, too, a kind of shadowland where the Other always lives. Or at least, never dies. Just goes on. Hard to stumble into happiness if you don't leave your shadowland behind....Theatre people don't, as a rule. Goes with the job. Everything is so precarious, almost all of the time. Makes it hard to settle. One gets fidgety. And when you're someone else, every night, and twice on a Saturday, you can forget what it's like being you. I always felt, you know, two hands are needed here. One to wave farewell, the other to close the heart....[E]asier said than done. I don't know that anyone succeeds. Questionings. Dawn-thoughts. Mind ticking like a watch. Four in the morning but you're staring out a window. What if I had married that other person? Or remained unmarried? What if I had accepted that job, or emigrated or stayed, or lived my life in a different way, a way that was truer to me, perhaps, but I was afraid of what people might think or say? You see, part of you DID do those things. To imagine is to do. And there are moments when you feel a murderous envy of that part. The self that escaped. The self that chose freedom. So, out comes the rage. But already too late. It's the only thing one's learned. We're in shadowland. [Ellen Terry]

The failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases when prophecy fails, the faith never faltered. Indeed, an alternative version had long been maturing, though cast into the shadows for a time by enthusiasm for the quick fix of revolution. It had, however, been maturing for at least a century and already had a notable repertoire of institutions available. We may call it Olympianism, because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement. And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy--the universities. We may define Olympianism as a vision of human betterment to be achieved on a global scale by forging the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights. Olympianism is the cast of mind dedicated to this end, which is believed to correspond to the triumph of reason and community over superstition and hatred. It is a politico-moral package in which the modern distinction between morals and politics disappears into the aspiration for a shared mode of life in which the communal transcends individual life. To be a moral agent is in these terms to affirm a faith in a multicultural humanity whose social and economic conditions will be free from the causes of current misery. Olympianism is thus a complex long-term vision, and contemporary Western Olympians partake of different fragments of it. To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self-ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them. Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice. The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olympianism.

In order to grasp the meaning of this liberal program we need to imagine a world order in which liberalism is supreme. Either all the states in it are liberal, or enough are so that when united they are able to repulse an attack of militarist aggressors. In this liberal world, or liberal part of the world, there is private property in the means of production. The working of the market is not hampered by government interference. There are no trade barriers; men can live and work where they want. Frontiers are drawn on the maps but they do not hinder the migrations of men and shipping of commodities. Natives do not enjoy rights that are denied to aliens. Governments and their servants restrict their activities to the protection of life, health, and property against fraudulent or violent aggression. They do not discriminate against foreigners. The courts are independent and effectively protect everybody against the encroachments of officialdom. Everyone is permitted to say, to write, and to print what he likes. Education is not subject to government interference. Governments are like night-watchmen whom the citizens have entrusted with the task of handling the police power. The men in office are regarded as mortal men, not as superhuman beings or as paternal authorities who have the right and duty to hold the people in tutelage. Governments do not have the power to dictate to the citizens what language they must use in their daily speech or in what language they must bring up and educate their children. Administrative organs and tribunals are bound to use each man’s language in dealing with him, provided this language is spoken in the district by a reasonable number of residents. In such a world it makes no difference where the frontiers of a country are drawn. Nobody has a special material interest in enlarging the territory of the state in which he lives; nobody suffers loss if a part of this area is separated from the state. It is also immaterial whether all parts of the state’s territory are in direct geographical connection, or whether they are separated by a piece of land belonging to another state. It is of no economic importance whether the country has a frontage on the ocean or not. In such a world the people of every village or district could decide by plebiscite to which state they wanted to belong. There would be no more wars because there would be no incentive for aggression. War would not pay. Armies and navies would be superfluous. Policemen would suffice for the fight against crime. In such a world the state is not a metaphysical entity but simply the producer of security and peace. It is the night-watchman, as Lassalle contemptuously dubbed it. But it fulfills this task in a satisfactory way. The citizen’s sleep is not disturbed, bombs do not destroy his home, and if somebody knocks at his door late at night it is certainly neither the Gestapo nor the O.G.P.U. The reality in which we have to live differs very much from this perfect world of ideal liberalism. But this is due only to the fact that men have rejected liberalism for etatism.

Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.

Enjoyment requires discernment. It can be a gift to wrap up in a blanket and lose myself in a TV show but we can also amuse ourselves to death. My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but it can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment we need to learn the craft of discernment: How to enjoy rightly, to have, to read pleasure well. There is a symbiotic relationship, cross-training, if you will, between the pleasures we find in gathered worship and those in my tea cup, or in a warm blanket, or the smell of bread baking. Lewis reminds us that one must walk before one can run. We will not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable but we shall not have found Him so. These tiny moments of beauty in our day train us in the habits of adoration and discernment, and the pleasure and sensuousness of our gathered worship teach us to look for and receive these small moments in our days, together they train us in the art of noticing and reveling in our God’s goodness and artistry. A few weeks ago I was walking to work, standing on the corner of tire and auto parts store, waiting to cross the street when I suddenly heard church bells begin to ring, loud and long. I froze, riveted. They were beautiful. A moment of transcendence right in the middle of the grimy street, glory next to the discount tire and auto parts. Liturgical worship has been referred to sometimes derisively as smells and bells because of the sensuous ways Christians have historically worshipped: Smells, the sweet and pungent smell of incense, and bells, like the one I heard in neighborhood which rang out from a catholic church. At my church we ring bells during the practice of our eucharist. The acolyte, the person often a child, assisting the priest, rings chimes when our pastor prepares the communion meal. There is nothing magic about these chimes, nothing superstitious, they’re just bells. We ring them in the eucharist liturgy as a way of saying, “pay attention.” They’re an alarm to rouse the congregation to jostle us to attention, telling us to take note, sit up, and lean forward, and notice Christ in our midst. We need this kind of embodied beauty, smells and bells, in our gathered worship, and we need it in our ordinary day to remind us to take notice of Christ right where we are. Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will save the world.” This might strike us as mere hyperbole but as our culture increasingly rejects the idea and language of truth, the churches role as the harbinger of beauty is a powerful witness to the God of all beauty. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his poem, “One more day,” “Though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.” And when people cease to believe there is good and evil, only beauty will call to them and save them so that they still know how to say, “this is true and that is false.” Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore and intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful. These moments of loveliness, good tea, bare trees, and soft shadows, or church bells, in my dimness, they jolt me to attention and remind me that Christ is in our midst. His song of truth, sung by His people all over the world, echos down my ordinary street, spilling even into my living room.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states". A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives". These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In rather case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease. Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power. But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses. As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome). The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common. Don't you see. . . it's not an accident that's drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, it's a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, there's something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I don't know what the modern world's like, but that's obviously untrue. Anyone who's spent a week in London knows just what it's like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. I've read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don't think they're dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated." Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, "I don't think we're discussing modern literature." Reade had an impulse to call the debater's trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, "We're discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And I'm trying to explain why I don't think that murders and wars prove your point. I'm writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that somehow takes account of us. I don't believe that modern man is a stranded fragment of life in an empty universe. I've an instinct that tells me that there's a purpose, and that I can understand that purpose more deeply by trusting my instinct. I can't believe the world is meaningless. I don't expect life to explode in my face at any moment. When I walk back to my cottage, I don't feel like a meaningless fragment of life walking over a lot of dead hills. I feel a part of the landscape, as if it's somehow aware of me, and friendly.

My mum once told me that the bravest sailors weren’t the ones who sailed through the storm, but the ones who remained in port whilst it raged out at sea. I never really understood what she meant by that, until now. For seventeen years I succeeded in standing back and watching that storm wreak havoc, never once venturing into the expanse of the ocean like a large proportion of kids on my estate had done. Unlike me, they were drawn into the glamour and the notoriety of joining a gang. Some did it for the promise of a family unit that they didn’t have at home. Some did it because they were too weak or too vulnerable to say no, while others did it because they were bored. And some, like Eastern, joined out of sheer desperation. I chose to stay away. It’s true, I might’ve been the delinquent kid that everyone saw when they looked at me. I might’ve gotten into trouble with the law, but I refused to set sail into a storm that wasn’t of my own making. I refused to join a gang. The way I saw it, whatever trouble I got into was on my terms and not for some self-proclaimed gang leader with a skewed view of the world and their own set of rules. I never wanted to be beholden to anyone but myself, and above all else, I always wanted more out of life than the hand I’ve been dealt. Maybe it was my mother’s fault for filling my head with far-fetched stories, but I wanted what was on the other side of the storm. I wanted what lay far, far beyond the horizon. Deep down I’d craved the life my mum used to tell me about in her stories. It gave me something to focus on, to dream about, even if it wasn’t real. Ironic then, that I’m now a part of the life I worked so hard to avoid, trying to protect the people I love from falling victim to it. And all because my love for a makeshift family meant I couldn’t stand back and watch the storm anymore. I must set sail right into the heart of it because I love Eastern, Tracy and Braydon enough to do something about their situation. They might not be my blood, but they are my family and I won’t abandon them in a time of need. Pity the same couldn’t be said for my own parents.

Although a youth culture was in evidence by the 1950s, the first obvious and dramatic manifestation of a culture generated by peer-orientation was the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan called it “the new tribalism of the Electric Age.” Hair and dress and music played a significant part in shaping this culture, but what defined it more than anything was its glorification of the peer attachment that gave rise to it. Friends took precedence over family. Physical contact and connection with peers were pursued; the brotherhood of the pop tribe was declared, as in the generation-based “Woodstock nation.” The peer group was the true home. “Don't trust anyone over thirty” became the byword of youth who went far beyond a healthy critique of their elders to a militant rejection of tradition. The degeneration of that culture into alienation and drug use, on the one hand, and its co-optation for commercial purposes by the very mainstream institutions it was rebelling against were almost predictable. The wisdom of well-seasoned cultures has accumulated over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Healthy cultures also contain rituals and customs and ways of doing things that protect us from ourselves and safeguard values important to human life, even when we are not conscious of what such values are. An evolved culture needs to have some art and music that one can grow into, symbols that convey deeper meanings to existence and models that inspire greatness. Most important of all, a culture must protect its essence and its ability to reproduce itself — the attachment of children to their parents. The culture generated by peer orientation contains no wisdom, does not protect its members from themselves, creates only fleeting fads, and worships idols hollow of value or meaning. It symbolizes only the undeveloped ego of callow youth and destroys child-parent attachments. We may observe the cheapening of cultural values with each new peer-oriented generation. For all its self-delusion and smug isolation from the adult world, the Woodstock “tribe” still embraced universal values of peace, freedom, and brotherhood. Today's mass musical gatherings are about little more than style, ego, tribal exuberance, and dollars.

During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

— He said don't call police. I promised I wouldn't. — It would make us in more trouble. — He left. We heard car. I remember this part, too. I told Sara he was right; we shouldn't call the police. Somehow, even then, I felt him as a victim. I told her that they would put him in prison, that prison would not reform him: It would make him worse. Was this a kind of Stockholm syndrome? Does it happen that fast, in the space of an hour? Sara was more afraid than I, but also more alive. She picked up the phone. No dial tone. He had cut the wires. How would a rapist have time to cut the phone wires or know where to find them in the dark, dank basement? How long had he been in the house? How long had he been plotting this crime? 'He kept saying he wouldn't hurt us. He kept saying to listen, to be quiet.' I was quiet. I listened. I'm still listening now. I hear a rush, in my mind's inner ear, of insistence. A kind of aural premonition, but a kind of premonition that goes both backward and forward, the soundless protest of all the raped, shamed, and silenced women from the beginning to the end of time. 'He hurt you, he altered you forever,' the chorus soundlessly insists, grating on my inner ear — the ear that wishes not to be reminded of feeling. I respond to that chorus: 'Hurt' is not the right word for what that man did to me. I feel a void. Something got cut out of me in that hour — my capacity for pain and fear were removed. There is no more tender flesh. It's quite liberating to have feeling removed, the fear and pain of life now dulled. Nabokov once said, 'Life is pain.' Buddhists, too, believe that to live is to crave and to crave is to feel pain. Had I not been catapulted, in that one hour, halfway to death, and therefore closer to enlightenment? Later, of course, I would come to reject this understanding of what happened to me that day. Yes, I was partly released from the pain of being alive. But my spirit had traveled, not toward the infinite divinity of enlightenment, but toward the infinite nothingness of indifference. Instead of fear, I felt numb. Instead of sadness, I experienced a complete absence of hope. Indifference is a dangerous disease. 'He kept saying to listen, to be quiet.' I have listened, and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak.

With the mistaken premise that my stay-at-home work and his accomplished career required equal emotional energy, I couldn’t understand where he got the vigor to worry about his ego being rejected or his sex drive being ignored. For me, it was all hands on deck, between our kids and our house and our work. Sex, passion, romance, I thought, could certainly wait. And maybe some part of me reasoned that when I had suffered a loss, he had been too busy to support me. So what could he possibly ask of me now? But now, in the fresh mental air of my momspringa, I start to understand the kind of neglect John must have felt when I fell asleep in one of the kids’ beds every night or stopped kissing him hello and instead threw a preschooler into his arms the minute he walked in the door. At the moment I’m walking in his shoes: my children are cared for by someone else, my days are spent in rich mental exercise, I get plenty of sleep, and I go to the gym every day. In other words, I have the emotional energy to think about desire and how good it feels to be wanted. Yes, John had clean pressed shirts without having to ask, and yes, we had family dinners together that looked perfect and tasted as good, and yes, he never had to be on call when Joe started getting bullied for the first time or when Cori’s tampon leaked at a diving tournament. Yet while I was bending over backward to meet his children’s every need, his own were going ignored. And was it the chicken or the egg that started that ball rolling? If he had, only once, driven the carpool in my place, would I have suddenly wanted to greet him at the door in Saran Wrap? Or was I so incredibly consumed with the worry-work of motherhood that no contribution from him would have made me look up from my kids? I don’t know. I only know that in this month, when I have gotten time with friends, time for myself, positive attention from men, and yep, a couple of nice new bras, parts of me that were asleep for far too long are starting to wake up. I am seeing my children with a new, longer lens and seeing how grown up they are, how capable. I am seeing John as the lonely, troubled man he was when he walked out on us and understanding, for the first time, what part I played in that. I am seeing Talia’s lifestyle choices—singlehood, careerism, passionate pursuits—as less outrageous and more reasonable than ever before. And most startling of all, I am seeing myself looking down the barrel of another six years of single parenting, martyrdom, and self-neglect and feeling very, very conflicted.

All those statistics - the ones about decline - point toward massive theological discontent. People still believe in God. They just do not believe in the God proclaimed and worshipped by conventional religious organizations. Some of the discontented - and there are many of them - do not know what to call themselves. So they check the “unaffiliated” box on religion surveys. They have become secular humanists, agnostics, posttheists, and atheists and have rejected the conventional God. Others say they are spiritual but not religious. They still believe in God but have abandoned conventional forms of congregating. Still others declare themselves “done” with religion. They slink away from religious communities, traditions that once gave them life, and go hiking on Sunday morning. Some still go to church, but are hanging on for dear life, hoping against hope that something in their churches will change. They pray prayers about heaven that no longer make sense and sing hymns about an eternal life they do not believe in. They want to be in the world, because they know they are made of the same stuff as the world and that the world is what really matters, but some nonsense someone taught them once about the world being bad or warning of hell still echoes in their heads. They are afraid to say what they really think or feel for fear that no one will listen or care or even understand. They think they might be crazy. All these people are turning toward the world because they intuit that is where they will find meaning and awe, that which those who are still theists call God. They are not crazy. They are part of this spiritual revolution - people discovering God in the world and a world that is holy, a reality that enfolds what we used to call heaven and earth into one. These people are not secular, even though their main concern is the world; they are not particularly religious (in the old-fashioned understanding of the term), even though they are deeply aware of God. They are fashioning a way of faith between conventional theism and any kind of secularism devoid of the divine. In our time, people are turning toward the numinous presence that animates the world, what theologian Rudolf Otto called “the Holy.” They are those who are discovering a deeply worldly faith. Decades ago Catholic theologian Karl Rahner made a prediction about devout people of the future. He said they would either be “mystics,” those who have “experienced something ,” or “cease to be anything at all”; and if they are mystical believers, they will be those whose faith “is profoundly present and committed to the world.” The future of faith would be an earthy spirituality , a brilliant awareness of the spirit that vivifies the world.

The power behind words and voices is substantial to life! I dedicated this book to all of you readers before you even read it, to understand- the book of misunderstandings for the misunderstood. To have a voice, when you were made not have one or told not to have one. Maybe if you are like me, trying to get your voice back this is the story you need. Nonetheless, let us not fail to remember all the voices, which will never speak again, for being rejected and misunderstood.' 'Yes, be that voice with this book, this book is for you, to speak up, and be heard.' 'Why?' 'So, there are no more lost and forgotten voices of life. This book is a stepping stone to abolish bullying altogether, along with your help; we can take that step forward, and forget about the past!' 'At this time, I would like you all to take a moment of silence, to remember someone, that is no longer with us. So, they are not forgotten.' Preface: 'To understand, you must read between the lines of a story just like mine. My wronging if you do not read this book, is you'll find out fast that life is going to suck, and then you make the discovery, that you are going to die alone, and the hex- I have will now be on you.' 'At least that is what I thought; I thought I read, my story before it was written, and this note was the last thing that I was going to write. However, I never realized that there was so much more to life, which I did not appreciate. I came near a stone's throw away from the end. Yet I got additional unplanned lifespans. Yet, was the second chance what I needed?' 'Nevertheless, there were things that I concerned my mind with, which was not substantial to my existence.' 'If anything- learn from me. Try to do the virtuous things I did and not the mistakes I made. Though it is up to you to decide what was good or bad, it is what you feel and believe is morally right in your mind.' 'Yeah- I never really put any thought into what was going to happen to me someday, and the others that are part of my surroundings.' 'However, life goes on, and the existence of what was stands for nothing but- a memory of what you can and cannot have. If you are someone like me, but all I ever wanted was someone that appreciates me. They say life is free or is it. Do I want it- No- not really!' 'The existence of life…!' 'Is what I do not want to have anymore. There must be a way out of all this misery that I live in today? 'They say dying is easy, as well as lasting, and living is difficult and uncertain.' While- I am going to find out!' 'I guess life is all about what you want, need, and love.' 'Likewise, existing in life comes down to what you cannot have in it.' 'All I have to say is don't let anyone or anything pin you down, and make you less than whom you are. Always be whom you were meant to be, regardless of what they say… because who in the hell are they!' 'My story- is somewhat graphic at times, just like looking into a black and white photo of the past in a scrapbook. All the color in it washes away over time, one way or another. Besides all that is left is still frames that keep on fading, and distorting.' 'On the morning I was scheduled to die, I saw my life as if I had lived it to its whole. Oh, the captivating angel beamed lovingly as she roamed forward help me hang myself, a part of me felt death, and other parts of my mind, body, and soul felt as if it would never dye.

But as the daylight began to come through the curtains, I knew I was facing something for which I had not been prepared. It was a curious sensation, like suddenly feeling cold water round your feet, then feeling it slowly rising up your legs. It took me some time to realize that they were attacking from some part of my mind of whose existence I was unaware. I had been strong because I was fighting them out of knowledge, but I should have known that my knowledge of mind was pitifully small. I was like an astronomer who knows the solar system, and thinks he knows the universe. What the parasites were doing was to attack me from below my knowledge of myself. It is true that I had given some small thought to the matter; but I had—rightly—postponed it as a study for a more advanced period. I had reflected often enough that our human life is based completely on ‘premises’ that we take for granted. A child takes its parents and its home for granted; later, it comes to take its country and its society for granted. We need these supports to begin with. A child without parents and a regular home grows up feeling insecure. A child that has had a good home may later learn to criticize its parents, or even reject them altogether (although this is unlikely); but it only does so when it is strong enough to stand alone. All original thinkers develop by kicking away these ‘supports’ one by one. They may continue to love their parents and their country, but they love from a position of strength—a strength that began in rejection. In fact, though, human beings never really learn to stand alone. They are lazy, and prefer supports. A man may be a fearlessly original mathematician, and yet be slavishly dependent on his wife. He may be a powerful free thinker, yet derive a great deal more comfort than he would admit from the admiration of a few friends and disciples. In short, human beings never question all their supports; they question a few, and continue to take the rest for granted. Now I had been so absorbed in the adventure of entering new mental continents, rejecting my old personality and its assumptions, that I had been quite unaware that I was still leaning heavily on dozens of ordinary assumptions. For example, although I felt my identity had changed, I still had a strong feeling of identity. And our most fundamental sense of identity comes from an anchor that lies at the bottom of a very deep sea. I still looked upon myself as a member of the human race. I still looked upon myself as an inhabitant of the solar system and the universe in space and time. I took space and time for granted. I did not ask where I had been before my birth or after my death. I did not even recognize the problem of my own death; it was something I left ‘to be explored later’. What the parasites now did was to go to these deep moorings of my identity, and proceed to shake them. I cannot express it more clearly than this. They did not actually, so to speak, pull up the anchors. That was beyond their powers. But they shook the chains, so that I suddenly became aware of an insecurity on a level I had taken completely for granted. I found myself asking: Who am I? In the deepest sense. Just as a bold thinker dismisses patriotism and religion, so I dismissed all the usual things that gave me an ‘identity’: the accident of my time and place of birth, the accident of my being a human being rather than a dog or a fish, the accident of my powerful instinct to cling to life. Having thrown off all these accidental ‘trappings’, I stood naked as pure consciousness confronting the universe. But here I became aware that this so-called ‘pure consciousness’ was as arbitrary as my name. It could not confront the universe without sticking labels on it. How could it be ‘pure consciousness’ when I saw that object as a book, that one as a table? It was still my tiny human identity looking out of my eyes. And if I tried to get beyond it, everything went blank.

Honesty is a natural human craving. But part of having honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word “no.” In this way, rejection actually makes our relationships better and our emotional lives healthier.

Those afflicted with BPD suffer from emotional instability—in Katherine’s case, almost always caused by feelings of rejection or abandonment. They suffer from cognitive distortions, where they see the world in black and white, with anyone who isn’t actively ‘with them’ being considered an enemy. They are also prone to catastrophising, where they make logical leaps from minor impediments in their plans to assumptions of absolute ruin. BPD is often characterised by extremely intense but unstable relationships, as the sufferer gives everything that they can to a relationship in their attempts to ensure their partner never leaves but instead end up burning themselves out and blaming that same partner for the emotional toll that it takes on them. The final trait of BPD is impulsive behaviour, often characterised as self-destructive behaviour. In Katherine’s case, this almost always manifested itself in her hair-trigger temper. When she was enraged, it was like she lost all rational control over her actions, seeing everyone else as her enemies. This manifested itself in the ridiculous bullying she conducted at school, in her lashing out when she failed her test and in the vengeance that she took on her sexual abusers. It is likely that she inherited this disorder from her mother, who showed many of the same symptoms, and that they were exacerbated by her chaotic home life and the lack of healthy relationships in the adults around her that she might have modelled herself after. With Katherine, it was like a Jekyll and Hyde switch took place when her temper was raised. The charming, eager-to-please girl who usually occupied her body was replaced with a furious, foul-mouthed hellion bent on exacting her revenge no matter what the cost. In itself, this could have been an excellent excuse for almost everything that she did wrong in her life, up to and including the crimes that she would later be accused of. Unfortunately, this sort of ‘flipped switch’ argument doesn’t hold up when you consider that her choice to arm herself with a lethal weapon was premeditated. Part of this may certainly have been the cognitive distortion that Katherine experienced, telling her that everyone else was out to get her and that she had to defend herself, but ultimately, she was choosing to give a weapon to a person who would use it to end lives, if she had the opportunity. Assuming that this division of personalities actually existed, then ‘good’ Katherine was an accomplice to ‘bad’ Katherine, giving her the material support and planning that she needed to commit her vicious attacks.

For me it was humor. I learned that even though I didn’t belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing. I’d drop in, pass out the snacks, tell a few jokes. I’d perform for them. I’d catch a bit of their conversation, learn more about their group, and then leave. I never overstayed my welcome. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself. I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.

Page 78 The family sucks the juice out of everything around it, leaving other institutions stunted and distorted. Page 75 Deep-seated differences between the sexes do tend to be reproduced from generation to generation by the fact that children are reared by a pair of differentiated parents and the parameters of their sexual orientation are set in the context of their early relations with those parents. But our unbalanced pattern of sexuality is also an integral part of a thriving marriage system that still enshrines male power and female dependence. Until that form of family disappears, sexual enjoyment will continue to be a male privilege and it will continue to take the form of sexual possession. Clearly, then, it remains necessary, as the early socialists recognized, to separate sex love from these economic ties and allow it to flourish in its own right. Page 52-53 The Oneida community, founded in New York State in 1848, consciously rejected the family and marriage as being inimical to a full communal life. The biblical text, ‘In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage’, was taken as justification for ‘complex marriage’ in which all the men and women of the community were joined. Heterosexual relations between any of them were encouraged; long-term pairing was discouraged. Children were cared for in a children’s house soon after they were weaned, visiting their own parents only once or twice a week. Their founder John Humphrey Noyes saw a very clear contradiction between intense family feelings and community feeling. He believed that ‘the great problem of socialism now is, whether the existence of the marital family is compatible with that of the universal family, which the term “community” signifies.

They often settle for emotional loneliness in their relationships because it feels normal to them, like their early home life. Why the Past Repeats Itself If the lack of emotional connection with emotionally immature parents is so painful, why do so many people end up in similarly frustrating relationships in adulthood? The most primitive parts of our brain tell us that safety lies in familiarity

They often settle for emotional loneliness in their relationships because it feels normal to them, like their early home life. Why the Past Repeats Itself If the lack of emotional connection with emotionally immature parents is so painful, why do so many people end up in similarly frustrating relationships in adulthood? The most primitive parts of our brain tell us that safety lies in familiarity (Bowlby 1979). We gravitate to situations we have had experience with because we know how to deal with them.

The preaching of Peter and Paul and all the witnesses of the risen Jesus says that two basic things are demanded of us. First: we must acknowledge our own share in what the cross is and represents; we must learn to see ourselves as caught up in a world where the innocent are scapegoated and killed and where we are all unwilling, to a greater or lesser degree, to face unwelcome truths about ourselves. We must learn to see that we cannot by our own wisdom and strength cut ourselves loose from the tangle of injustice, resentment, fear and prejudice that traps the human family in conflict and misery. And second: we must learn to trust that love and justice are not defeated by our failure; that God has provided from his own strength and resourcefulness a way to freedom, once we have become able to recognize in the face of the suffering Jesus his own divine promise of mercy and life. The resurrection is the manifesting to the world of the triumph of a love that uses no coercion or manipulation but is simply itself – an indestructible love. The challenge of Easter is to believe that God is not defeated by the most extreme rejection imaginable. Good news? Emphatically yes. But not easy news. To recognize God in the crucified Jesus alters so much: it alters what we think about God, and it alters where we look for God in the human world. It suggests uncomfortably that God is likeliest to be found among those we have, like the religious and political establishment of Jesus’ day, dismissed or shut out; it suggests that our models of success and failure have to be turned upside down; it suggests that our eternal future is bound up with whether we are able to turn to those we have hurt and seek forgiveness. And so much else. Put like that, it is not surprising that the gospel and the cross could provoke fear and an unwillingness to allow such thoughts to become part of the current of public discussion. And perhaps it is not surprising either that we who call ourselves Christians may secretly be happier treating the cross just as a ‘religious symbol’ than letting ourselves be shaken and unmade and remade by it.

The bad attitudes are displayed outwardly in the form of our words or actions, such a criticalness, rebellion, impatience, self pride, ego, uncooperative, discouragement, independence, presumption, arrogance, self-centeredness, rudeness , groaning,murmering disrespectful tone of voice, rolled eyes, sarcasm, stomping feet ,angry look , hitting the things etc .These are examples of bad attitudes which Christians should reject. We are the representative of God, and our behavior is part of demonstrating our relationship with God . We need to witness Christ and other people by being the imitators of God through our words, attitude, and actions. We have spent a life time developing patterns of sinful attitudes by rebelling against God in our thinking and behaviors. With commitment, true repentance & proper discipline we can replace these sinful bad attitudes with Godly behaviour.

to find connection, and to avoid rejection. If you dig deep enough into the emotional problems of almost anyone, you can trace their issues back to a lack of fulfilment of those two needs. It's really that simple because that truth is so powerful and part of its strength is its simplicity.

DBT posits that borderline patients possess a genetic/biological vulnerability to emotional overreactivity. This view hypothesizes that the limbic system, the part of the brain most closely associated with emotional responses, is hyperactive in BPD. The second contributing factor, according to DBT practitioners, is an invalidating environment: that is, others dismiss, contradict, or reject the developing individual’s emotions. Confronted with such interactions, the individual is unable to trust others or her own reactions. Emotions are uncontrolled and volatile. To calm these erratic emotions, DBT emphasizes mindfulness, the process of paying attention to what is happening at the moment, without extreme emotional reactivity, judgment, or invalidation. In the initial stages of treatment, DBT focuses on a hierarchical system of targets, confronting first the most serious and then later the easier behaviors to change. The highest priority addressed immediately is the threat of suicide and self-injuring behaviors. The second-highest target is to eliminate behaviors that interfere with therapy, such as missed appointments or not completing homework assignments. The third priority is to address behaviors that interfere with a healthy quality of life, such as disruptive compulsions, promiscuity, or criminal conduct; among these, easier changes are targeted first. The fourth priority is to focus on increasing behavioral skills.

Remember that risk taking and rejection are part of life, and being overly sensitive about how others react to you is counterproductive. Anyway, what’s so bad about being rejected by someone you don’t even know?

Try to work on being okay with being a total reject, a freak, a wobbly little weirdo, a loser, a fine-ass hottie, and an ordinary everyday girl with all kinds of struggles. It’s okay. Try to remind yourself, every single day, that it’s you who decides if you’re happy or not, the real you, the current you, not the past you. And your happiness should definitely not be up to everybody else in this goddamn shitty, fucked-up world. Remember that things are always changing. Remember that love, even if it goes bad in the end, was still a good thing, because it came from you, out of who you are as a person. Remember that the good times, when they happen, are worth all the trouble. Remember that sadness and heartbreak, frustration and loss, even bitter, hopeless fucking tragedy, they’re all part of what makes a beautiful story. Just like flaws, freakiness, fuck-ups, and all your fallible character defects are all part of what makes a fantastic fucking you. Remember that making mistakes doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a human being, somebody who’s just trying to get through this fucked up life, just like everybody else, and doesn’t know everything. Sometimes you screw up. Sometimes a fuck up ruins lives. But you’re only a bad person if you don’t learn anything from your mistakes, if you just keep going, like a bull in a China shop, hurting people over and over forever, never changing. Remember that you can still love yourself, even if you’ve made horrible, terrible mistakes, even if you’ve ruined people’s lives. You can still love who you are. You have to, or you won’t survive. Remember that the awful things people did to you do not define who you are. Your choices define who you are, and you never chose any of that shit. Remember that you’re not all alone in being a freak. Remember that you fucking rock.

I was now in possession of the last and most important bequest left to me by my parents—lies—which they had transmitted to me like a disease. Truly, the example of their disastrous lives, so troubling when I was a child, should have worked to immunize me from this hereditary ailment. They had, in fact, shown me the inhuman, solitary fate reserved for those who refused to accept the role assigned to them in this life, inventing instead a script full of lies, choosing to believe pretense was real life. Those who succumb to make-believe are like madmen who go to the theater and are terrified by the tragedy they see onstage. They scream when they see the leading lady tormented and want to rush on stage to kill the tyrant causing her distress. But at least the poor madman has the excuse of not being aware of the fiction that is theater, and he certainly had nothing to do with staging the lie. But others, like my parents, fully believe the disguises they don are genuine, and they worship them, thereby rejecting their own lives on earth and, indeed, in heaven, since the only way to get there is to take part in real life.

Truth will not come in the guise of opinions shared by others, as the truth is neither a collection of slogans nor an ideology. It will instead be personal. Your truth is something only you can tell, based as it is on the unique circumstances of your life. Apprehend your personal truth. Communicate it carefully, in an articulate manner, to yourself and others. This will ensure your security and your life more abundantly now, while you inhabit the structure of your current beliefs. This will ensure the benevolence of the future, diverging as it might from the certainties of the past. The truth springs forth ever anew from the most profound wellsprings of Being. It will keep your soul from withering and dying while you encounter the inevitable tragedy of life. It will help you avoid the terrible desire to seek vengeance for that tragedy—part of the terrible sin of Being, which everything must bear gracefully, just so it can exist. If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.

We go away from him, but he does not go away from us. He waits for our return, he longs for our return; he cries over our misery and our betrayal of him and of ourselves, and the moment we appear in the distance, he is there waiting for us, rushing towards us to greet us, so that, when we come, we do not come as mendicants, we do not come as beggars, we do not have to come kneeling down before him who would stand there as a judge condemning us by his own righteousness. He rushes towards us, so that we can know that we are longed for, we are loved in our misery and in our sinfulness, not approved in our sinfulness, but loved with a love that never falters, never diminishes, that burns bright, that is perhaps more tragically deep than the quiet and peaceful love which a father can have for his son when there is nothing wrong in his life. This is, I believe, the best image of confession as an encounter with God, and there is nothing else in confession that matters. We, like the Prodigal Son, come in order to meet God from whom we have parted, whom we have rejected, whom we have discarded, and are met by a Father with open arms. This we must remember, because he is not meeting us as Judge but as Saviour.

Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over—and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that’s why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don’t know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am.

I believe the desire to create is in us all, the desire to leave our mark on the world and bring something into it that would not exist if we did not exist, to have a little piece of reality that we created, and to leave it as something that might live on and matter beyond us. In regards to artistic creations to make something that might matter is to create something that is honest and unique, something that is at least slightly different from anything anyone else has ever done, to say something that no one else would ever quite say in a way that no one else could ever quite say it, to tie the creation around the artist’s personal thoughts and sense of life. In order to do this, an artist must be willing to face him or herself with complete candor. They must be willing to face any personal demons that they would otherwise prefer to pretend don’t exist, to travel into the depths of their mind, and to retrieve a part of themselves that is potentially scary or sad, something that might be convoluted or hard to explain, something that is perhaps counter to cultural norms and is vulnerable or strange and then in spite of all of this they must still share it. In this act, the artist risks something we all dread: rejection, worse yet rejection on a very deep and personal level and this is often where a problem with self-doubt can arise in the creative process caused by the fear of rejection.

I’m not interested” I say. He laughs. It’s part sexy rumble and part genuine surprise. He’s clearly not accustomed to rejection and when I look up at him I can see why. His shirt is crumpled, and his sleeves are rolled up to the elbows and stretched over impressive biceps. Bad news. This is what bad news looks like. This guy has ‘mistake’ written all over him.

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

They Are Flexible and Compromise Well Emotionally mature people are usually flexible and try to be fair and objective. An important trait to keep an eye on is how others respond if you have to change your plans. Can they distinguish between personal rejection and something unexpected coming up? Are they able to let you know they’re disappointed without holding it against you? If you unavoidably have to let them down, emotionally mature people generally will give you the benefit of the doubt—especially if you’re empathetic and suggest trade-offs or compromises to ease their disappointment. Most emotionally mature people can accept that changes and disappointments are a part of life. They accept their feelings and look for alternative ways to find gratification when they’re disappointed. They’re collaborative and open to others’ ideas. When you forge a compromise with an emotionally mature person, you won’t feel like you’re giving anything up; instead, both of you will feel satisfied. Because collaborative, mature people don’t have an agenda to win at all costs, you won’t feel like you’re being taken advantage of. Compromise doesn’t mean mutual sacrifice; it means a mutual balancing of desires. In a good compromise, both people feel that they got enough of what they wanted.

For a long time I took a purely theological standpoint on the issue, which is actually so fundamental that it can be used as a springboard for any debate – if environment is the operative factor, for example, if man at the outset is both equal and shapeable and the good man can be shaped by engineering his surroundings, hence my parents’ generation’s belief in the state, the education system and politics, hence their desire to reject everything that had been and hence their new truth, which is not found within man’s inner being, in his detached uniqueness, but on the contrary in areas external to his intrinsic self, in the universal and collective, perhaps expressed in its clearest form by Dag Solstad, who has always been the chronicler of his age, in a text from 1969 containing his famous statement “We won’t give the coffee pot wings”: out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with the new materialism, but it never struck them that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and parking lots, which naturally the intellectual Left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper, and this gives rise to the fascinating phenomena whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identical way while those who ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their own handiwork, which they believed the enemy created, but like all simple reasoning this is not wholly true either, life is not a mathematical quantity, it has no theory, only practice, and though it is tempting to understand a generation’s radical rethink of society as being based on its view of the relationship between heredity and environment, this temptation is literary and consists more in the pleasure of speculating, that is, of weaving one’s thoughts through the most disparate areas of human activity, than in the pleasure of proclaiming the truth.

Reject the boxes you’re offered and people will keep trying to shove you into them. They’ll put their labels on you and demand you adhere to them, and then if you don’t, it becomes your own damn fault that life is difficult.

A Prayer --- O God, they do not know me, and I do not know them; show me the right way to decide; show them the proper way to reach me. O God, give me wisdom, courage, and fairness to accept or reject wrong ones. O God, let me disappear from their sight if they are just making me a fool and enjoying that. O God, keep me away from hurting others' feelings if they are fair and honest and want to be a part of my life honestly. O God, help me not to make mistakes again; keep away from them; if they are bogus in my way, if they are sincere, give and show them the right way.

When we are talking about the world (for instance, whether God exists and influences the course of affairs), we must assume that there is one truth of the matter, not one truth in science and another truth for my life. But Peirce’s is a realism that insists that true beliefs cannot be a mirror of reality. As I have hinted, and as we shall see more fully in the next section, he argues that as soon as we form a belief about what is real, we form an interpretation. Those realisms that employ a metaphor in which parts of a sentence hook onto parts of reality are rejected by Peirce. For any attempt to unpack that metaphor results in absurdities about what kinds of things are in the world and what kinds of entities represent them.

In logic, there is no escape from a Strange Loop. In pragmatic life, there is an easy escape — reject one part of the system. Sombunall can be very helpful there. A disturbed patient is beginning to recover, for instance, when the last Strange Loop is modified to: A. I must obey sombunall of my parents' Game Rules. B. I must obey sombunall of society's Game Rules.

Alongside the wisdom of true conservatism is the danger that the status quo might become corrupt and its corruption self-servingly exploited. Alongside the brilliance of creative endeavor is the false heroism of the resentful ideologue, who wears the clothes of the original rebel while undeservedly claiming the upper moral hand and rejecting all genuine responsibility. Intelligent and cautious conservatism and careful and incisive change keep the world in order. But each has its dark aspect, and it is crucial, once this has been realized, to pose the question to yourself: Are you the real thing, or its opposite? And the answer is, inevitably, that you are some of both—and perhaps far more of what is shadowy than you might like to realize. That is all part of understanding the complexity we each carry within us.

Thus the shortened life span is due to the necessity for removing an entity from the intensity of experience which ensues when wisdom and love are, having been rejected, reflected back into the consciousness of the Creator without being accepted as part of the self, this then causing the entity to have the need for healing and for much evaluation of the incarnation.

Competition is part of life, and with competition comes the constant reality that one might be rejected or defeated.

This kind of self-rejection is the birth of self-hate and the deep loneliness that we feel is the result of those missing rejected or disowned parts of our self. The soul wants one thing and that is to make us whole again. We will be provided with every single opportunity to become whole again as we proceed through life. But in order to become whole again, we need to see and accept the aspects of ourselves that we disowned, denied and rejected. This is painful.

The most difficult battles we face in life are those we wage within. Self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, and fear of rejection: This is the trifecta of demons that holds us back from reaching our full potential. We’re not born with these demons; for proof of this, one need only look at how free and uncensored young kids are. By the time most of us reach adulthood, however, we’ve devolved into a tangle of insecurities and negative experiences. From what I’ve seen and from what I’ve suffered, I’d wager that perfectionism hits artists the hardest. Artists—whose very calling is based on the expression of feeling—tend to be more introspective than your average human being and spend much more time living internally. Releasing a creative project out into the world requires ceding a part of yourself to the world and exposing it to the slings and arrows of external criticism. So, it’s only natural that the artist, aware of the vulnerability and invitation for judgment inherent in the act of creating publicly, would take painstaking care to ensure that whatever is released into the world is as close as possible to “perfect.” If left unchecked, this tendency to obsess and strive for perfection can lead the artist to devote months, if not years, to producing a single flawless creation. The truth of the matter, though, is that our actual creations will never be so perfect as we’ve dreamt them to be; they can only be perfected in the sense that, when released, they exist. Sometimes, it takes losing control to gain control over this obsession with perfection.

All [things in the world, good and bad] arise from [Source, from] one indivisible field, one Wholeness. Nothing is left out. [...] When you flow with what life puts in your path [and resist nothing], you take in every bit of [life, and of Source], bumps and all. In allowing the entirety of what presents itself, fullness replaces the emptiness. Disappointments, failure, rejections - all are part of a tapestry that no longer has holes in it. [...] When you [make peace with and accept life in its fullness, good and bad], you find what you've unwittingly been looking for all along: wholeness.

Krishna accepts the duality, the dialectics of life altogether and therefore transcends duality. What we call transcendence is not possible so long as you are in conflict, so long as you choose one part and reject the other. Transcendence is only possible when you choicelessly accept both parts together, when you accept the whole.

You know what I think about? I think about perfect matches. You know how with an organ donation a perfect match isn’t really perfect? There’s still a chance of rejection, even if all the stars align like they did for you and Benny. Nothing is ever perfect. There’s just matches that have a higher chance of working than others. Maybe you guys were like that. It could have worked, but you’d spend your whole life forcing it.

part of having honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word “no.” In this way, rejection actually makes our relationships better and our emotional lives healthier.

some of the similarities people describe: •​A sense that all things are one. “We become aware that, say, a tree and a river—or you and I—are only different in the way two waves of the sea appear to be separate and distinct. In reality they—and we—are part of the same ocean of being.” •​An awareness that not only are we connected to everything in the world, but we also tap into a “much more stable, deep-rooted, and expansive self, which can’t be damaged by rejection and doesn’t constantly hanker for attention and is free of the anxieties that oppress the ego.” •​Compassion and love for the people around us, but also for “the whole human race, and for the whole world.” •​A new sense of clarity and wisdom that includes the calming sense that everything is okay. “We have the beginning sense that all is well, that in some strange way the world, far from being the coldly indifferent place that science tells us it is … is a benign place. No matter what problems fill our life and how full of violence and injustice the world is … everything is good, that the world is perfect.” •​A vibrating energy that runs through our body and is accompanied by a feeling of intense joy. “This isn’t a joy because of something … it’s just there, a natural condition of being.” •​A diminished fear of death and the knowledge that death is merely a transition.12

There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense. The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened.

Pharisees angrily labeled Jesus a “blasphemer” for claiming He was no garden-variety prophet, but the very Son of God, they were not telling the truth, but their experience of His words was “accurate” within their frame of reference. In the same way, it’s accurate for us to label how God sometimes behaves as “brutal,” but it’s not true. Five years or so ago I was slowly realizing that I’d compartmentalized God for most of my life—I did not (could not?) understand the stories about Him, or His dealings with me, in an integrated way. No one had been more tender or kind to me in my life—there’s a greatness to God’s love for me that is palpable and … fundamental. There are tears I need to cry that release only when I’m alone in His presence. There are raw places in my heart that only He knows how to access and nurture. There are secrets about my soul that only He can speak to. But He has a fearsome and nearly inexplicable side—revealed in Joshua 10 and 11 and everywhere else in the Bible—that I didn’t know what to do with. It’s as if I was offered a five-course meal of God and told the waiter to take the beet-and-brussels-sprout salad back to the kitchen; I’d rejected the parts of God that made me feel sick to my stomach. And here’s something that served only to deepen my dissonance: I’d experienced a deeper love than I’ve ever known from Him during times of great brutality in my life.

So, the whole reason you feel “condemned” all the time could simply be your failure to accept and embrace what is written in the Scriptures. On the other hand, there could be a very different reason for the uncomfortable feelings you are experiencing. It could be that the Spirit is dealing with you because of unconfessed, unforsaken sin in your life, but you are mistaking conviction for condemnation. This confusion can be fatal, since conviction is something we must have if we become insensitive to sin. Conviction is good, not bad, something sent from heaven, not manufactured in hell.               If we can continue in sin without conviction, that is a real danger sign. Either our hearts have become so hard that we no longer sense the prodding and reproving of the Spirit, or, worse than that, the Spirit has simply left us alone–an absolutely dreadful prospect. You should thank God when His conviction breaks your heart, fully yielding to the Spirit, since heeding His rebuke always brings life.               Maybe there’s something wrong in your life and you know it. That’s why there is that gnawing pain deep within. Unfortunately, many believers who confuse conviction with condemnation are driven away from the Lord, always feeling rejected and therefore dejected. Other believers, also mistaking conviction for condemnation, react in the opposite way, saying, “That feeling is not from God. I rebuke you, Satan![64] That’s just legalism at its worst.” And so, rather than repent, they run. And this means that neither group responds correctly to the conviction of the Spirit!               What then is the difference between conviction and condemnation? Conviction is like the work of the prosecuting attorney, proving his case against the defendant and exposing his crime.[65] Condemnation is like the judge’s gavel coming down with a final, irreversible verdict of “Guilty!”[66] Conviction says, “You have sinned. Come back to Me!” Condemnation says, “You are guilty. Get away from Me!”               When God convicts the unsaved, He does it to bring them to conversion. As long as they are being convicted, they are not yet hopelessly condemned. When God convicts the saved, He does it to bring His straying saints back to Himself. Conviction for us means that we are still part of the family, since, “If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons” (Heb. 12:9). When we are convicted and even chastised by our Father, that is the time to come to Him and confess our sins, finding mercy through the blood of Jesus and receiving grace to turn from sin. But condemnation is an entirely different story. There is no mercy there! It is a place where judgment rules and damnation reigns. It has nothing to do with us!

You dismiss the idea that the death of Jesus—the “torture and death of a single individual in a backward part of the Middle East” — could possibly be the solution to the sorrows of our brutish existence. When I said that Jesus is good for the world because he is the life of the world, you just tossed this away. You said, “You cannot possibly ‘know’ this. Nor can you present any evidence for it.” Actually, I believe I can present evidence for what I know. But evidence comes to us like food, and that is why we say grace over it. And we are supposed to eat it, not push it around on the plate—and if we don’t give thanks, it never tastes right. But here is some evidence for you, in no particular order. The engineering that went into ankles. The taste of beer. That Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, just like he said. A woman’s neck. Bees fooling around in the flower bed. The ability of acorns to manufacture enormous oaks out of stuff they find in the air and dirt. Forgiveness of sin. Storms out of the North, the kind with lightning. Joyous laughter (diaphragm spasms to the atheistic materialist). The ocean at night with a full moon. Delta blues. The peacock that lives in my yard. Sunrise, in color. Baptizing babies. The pleasure of sneezing. Eye contact. Having your feet removed from the miry clay, and established forever on the rock. You may say none of this tastes right to you. But suppose you were to bow your head and say grace over all of it. Try it that way. You say that you cannot believe that Christ’s death on the Cross was salvation for the world because the idea is absurd. I have shown in various ways that absurdity has not been a disqualifier for any number of your current beliefs. You praise reason to the heights, yet will not give reasons for your strident and inflexible moral judgments, or why you have arbitrarily dubbed certain chemical processes “rational argument.” That’s absurd right now, and yet there you are, holding it. So for you to refuse to accept Christ because it is absurd is like a man at one end of the pool refusing to move to the other end because he might get wet. Given your premises, you will have to come up with a different reason for rejecting Christ as you do. But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.

UNDERSTANDING MIRRORS You are the creator of your life, and you must accept responsibility for all of your creations. All that you create for yourself is you loving you, even when you have created a difficult situation. Your creation is for the purpose of greater awareness, understanding, healing, energetic balance, and soul advancement. If you are in denial of the crappy stuff in your life, you are rejecting your creatorship and have chosen to be powerless. God gave you free will, and you have the power to change. In order to change your reality, you must first accept it as part of your own creation. Each of us must accept responsibility and realize that the only problems in our lives stem from our own unconscious behaviors and freewill choices. God does not create suffering; humans create suffering! Through attention, self-examination, setting appropriate boundaries, inner reflection, conscious awareness of our core beliefs, emotions, and feelings we will be able to heal and release the majority of our life problems. Everything always goes back to the self and what we are allowing to continue in our lives. Fortunately, the universe is on our side, providing us with a mirror so we can see ourselves and the things we need to work on. If we see something in someone else we don’t like, and it has triggered an emotional reaction in our being then that is an alarm for us to pay attention to.

I mean, he asked for the keys to the truck last night and brought them back earlier this morning.  Truck’s fixed.  I checked myself.  So, I’m wondering what you said to him.” My mouth popped open.  I couldn’t believe he’d actually listened to me.  A silly smile tugged at my mouth.  Did this really mean he’d let me go?  My barely formed smile faded.  Or would I just wake up back in this apartment tomorrow morning if I tried to leave? Sam continued to remake the bed with the clean sheets from the hidden compartment in the matching sofa ottoman. There had to be a catch.  Sam had told me a tied pair didn’t part until completing the Claim.  When Clay had scented me, and I’d recognized him openly, the Elders saw us as a pair.  They, in turn, announced it to everyone over their mental link.  Every werewolf, whether in a pack or Forlorn, recognized our tie.  If my words truly changed Clay’s mind, great—but Sam’s question caused me to begin to doubt that possibility, and I struggled to come up with what I’d overlooked. “The truth,” I said answering Sam’s question.  “Let’s say he is my Mate.  He’s an uneducated man from the backwoods.  How are we going to live?  I can’t turn on the fur like you guys can and live as a wolf like he’s done for most of his life.  Where does that leave us?  I just pointed out that I had to go to school to get the education I needed to land a good job to support myself because he can’t.” Sam had stopped remaking the bed and looked at me in disbelief. “Well, I said it nicer than that.” He gave me a disappointed look. “You don’t know anything about him, Gabby.  He may have lived most of his life in his fur, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t intelligent or that he’s more wolf than man.  You may have caused yourself more trouble than you intended.” I shifted against the door.  “Hold on, I didn’t say either of those things to him.”  Granted, I did tell him he needed to bathe.  “And what do you mean ‘more trouble’?” “He said that you suggested he live with you so you could get to know each other better.” I froze in disbelief.  That is not what I said. “Wait.  Did he actually talk to you?” “Well, I had to put on my fur to understand him since he was in his, but yes.” Sam’s kind communicated in several ways when in their fur—typically, through body language or howls.  Claimed and Mated pairs shared a special bond using an intuitive, mental link.  Once establishing a Claim, the pair could sense strong emotions as well as each other’s location.  Mated pairs had the same ability to communicate with each other as the Elders had with everyone in the pack. I closed my eyes and thought back to my exact wording. “I didn’t say we should live together, but that he should come back with me to get an education.”  Fine, I hadn’t worded it well, but how did he get “hey, we should live together” out of that? “Like I said, you’ve got trouble.”  He gave me another disappointed look, folded the bed back into the sofa, then picked up his bag from the floor.  He strode to the bathroom and closed the door on any further conversation. Crap.  I needed to talk to Clay again and find out what he intended.  I’d been counting on his feral upbringing and his need for freedom to cause him to reject my suggestion—a suggestion that hadn’t included him living with me.  I’d meant he should find a place nearby so we could go through the motions of human dating, which was the extent of my willingness to compromise.  I hadn’t thought he’d take any of it seriously but that, instead, he would just let me go. I

Unfortunately for Henry, Pope Clement VII was at the time imprisoned and under the direct control of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was Queen Catherine’s nephew and unsurprisingly was ardently opposed to Henry’s attempt to dissolve the marriage with his aunt. Henry was now compelled to ask Wolsey to effectuate a solution, and Wolsey obliged by convening an ecclesiastical court to resolve the annulment question. It remains unlikely that the papal legate ever was empowered by the Vatican to grant the annulment. The Pope rejected the authority of such a court to grant Henry his annulment and ruled that a decision would be given only in Rome, where Henry’s hand-picked jury could not pre-ordain a result in his favor. But before the Pope issued such a decision, Queen Catherine’s polite, respectful, formidable and defiant plea before the court secured for itself a place in the legends.  She played deftly the part of a woman wronged and scorned by a philandering, lying husband. It also earned Catherine permanent isolation from the King and her daughter Mary. Henry VIII’s means of extortion were that only if Catherine would accept that her marriage to the King was invalid, she might regain her access to Mary and vice versa. Both refused. Catherine died in 1536, probably of cancer.

Anyway, this part of the discussion isn’t up for discussion.” “Maybe it should be,” Cordero offers. “Maybe you should consider that she might’ve shown up to see you and left because she wasn’t ready.” Marcus crosses his arms. “She could’ve seen your prosthetic.” “You mean this?” I raise my robohand. It’s capable of fifty distinct gestures, but the bird’s one of my top-used ones. Marcus is already smiling. He knew it was coming. “It might have taken even less,” Jode adds. “One look at you could’ve sent her running.” An image flashes through my mind. Daryn seeing me, then doing an about-face and hauling ass like she’s in a B horror film. I have to laugh. It’s just so sad. “How is this relevant to anything?” I’m sweating and I can’t sit any longer. I stand and brace my hands on the back of the chair. “Hey, Ben,” I call into the warehouse. “How’s your personal life? You got any rejections you want to dissect with our psychologist-boss?” Ben jumps up and rounds his desk. “Definitely. I’m the king of rejection.” “Dude, then I’m your co-monarch.” “Blake,” Cordero warns. “We’ll talk later, Ben. Keep after it. You’re doing great.

For the most part, food plays a very functional role in American culture. We eat to work. If Aini was visiting in my home, I'd tell her, “Don't eat anything you don't like. We don't care.” And we really wouldn't for the most part. But in many parts of the world, food is deeply rooted in the life of people. Sometimes I've had Indian hosts prepare meals for me that used spices grown on their homestead for hundreds of years. The best Indian meals take days to prepare. So to pass on eating dishes prepared for you in that context could be far more insulting than passing on a dish you just don't care for. It can be seen as an all-out rejection. And as for eating with utensils versus eating with our hands, one of my Indian friends puts it this way: “Eating with utensils is like making love through an interpreter!” That says it all when it comes to the affection most Indians have for their cuisine. To reject the food of an Indian colleague can be extremely disrespectful and can erode any possibility of a business partnership. Who would have thought food could play such a strong role in successful global performance? Edwin,

The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life. If I’m choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I’m rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn. The

Sometimes my mind goes dark, and every single part of my life goes dark with it. Any happiness I thought I knew gets replaced by a sadness so big it must be for the whole world. I convince myself that I have nothing to offer, and that nobody has anything to offer me, either. I commit to hopelessness. In these dark moments I remind myself, ( because I’d be too lost without the reminder) that what I'm feeling isn't the full truth of the world, not by miles, and that though I can't see it, nothing is as dire as the nightmare my mind conjures, and that i, and the world, will be okay. In time, with hope. Slowly I come out of the darkness again. I reject my mind's devotion to misery and fear, and reroute myself on a path of acceptance and love. I focus on the beauty in our world, and in myself, and I remember that we are family, all of us, and we each matter. We each shine. Certainly.

Yet I can’t bring myself to derail from her nor can I reject what I feel in the most primitive parts of me: hope. Because that’s what I feel with her, hope that the world can get better. Hope that a normal life can exist someday.

list could be much longer. It is unpleasant to have to ask these questions. It is not easy to think about the current state of conservatism. But it is a conservative’s responsibility to do so. I certainly could never presume to answer those questions for Senator Goldwater, but for myself, I will resoundingly say no in answer to each. Emphatically: No. It was to advance and defend conservative principles that I first decided to stand for election and get involved in public life. At that time, our national political duopoly was well established, and I had a pretty clear notion of who my political allies would be in this endeavor and, conversely, who my political opponents would be. And for the most part that dichotomy has held—until now. It is political unwindings such as we are now experiencing that scramble alliances and undo parties. But if I find myself here having to defend conservative principles against threats to those principles from people on my own side, well, it won’t be the first time that that has happened.

The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all.

We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life. Here’s one way to think about the distinction between the two concepts. Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making, every second of every day. You are choosing to read this. You are choosing to think about the concepts. You are choosing to accept or reject the concepts. It may be my fault that you think my ideas are lame, but you are responsible for coming to your own conclusions. It’s not your fault that I chose to write this sentence, but you are still responsible for choosing to read it (or not). There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.

Hitler continued living in Vienna until 1913. He managed to make a living selling paintings after he and his business partner, Hanisch, parted ways. In 1913, he returned to Munich to avoid serving in the military, but he was found by authorities and returned to Austria for conscription into the armed forces. He was rejected for service in the Austrian armed forces,

The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all. (p.171)

The Roman Catholic view of prayer also must be opposed. Prayers to saints and to Mary amount to (1) a rejection of the accessibility of God in Christ (the only Mediator12) and (2) an ascription of attributes to glorified human beings that belong to God alone (omniscience, omnipresence, and sometimes omnipotence). Mary is called the “refuge of sinners,” the one who is to be asked to “guide” and “teach” us, who is “never implored in vain,” to whom “fervent prayers are to be addressed,” and the one whose “name alone comforts” (The Catholic Church the Teacher of Mankind). She solves the problems of rain and drought, famine and plague according to this book designed to instruct “the Catholic child at the mother’s knee” (Title page. The book was published in New York by the Office of Catholic Publications and bears the imprimatur of Archbishop Johannes W. Farley). On page 643 we read: Unfortunately, you are still mastered by many faults which prevent your becoming the pious and dutiful child God wishes you to be. To be able to cure yourselves of them you must implore the Blessed Virgin. Words almost fail in replying to such unrestrained idolatry. This concept of prayer puts Mary in God’s place. In fact it seems that according to this doctrine of prayer, God has delegated the answering of prayer to Mary. The response to make must be this: (1) Nowhere in all of the Scriptures can any such ideas be found. One will search in vain to find anyone at any time praying to Mary; nor is there any injunction to do so. Indeed, the Scriptures tell us to pray exclusively to God in Christ’s name (see vss. supra). And there is no model of prayer to Mary, any other human being, or to angels. The biblical picture differs considerably from the Roman Catholic one represented in these words: “…in his shortcomings, at each instant of his life, and in the hour of his death, the Christian turns to Mary. Her name alone comforts him, and gives him confidence” (ibid., p. 642). (2) When we pray to someone, we thereby ascribe to that one all of God’s attributes. For example, we must assume that the one to whom prayer is directed is omnipresent even to be able to hear the millions of prayers that are directed to him from all parts of the earth. But omnipresence is an attribute of God alone. Omnipotence likewise is required of the one to whom we pray; he must be able to answer all requests. Omniscience cannot be divorced from prayer either, since the answer must be given with reference to all other matters of all time (past, present and future). Does Mary have such attributes? Some think so (“Mary is all powerful, for she is the mother of God,” ibid., p. 642), others have not carefully thought through the issues involved.

You are asking me, “Why am I scared to accept myself the way I am?” Because you have not been accepted by anyone the way you are. They have created the fear and the apprehension that if you accept yourself you will be rejected by everybody. This is an absolute condition of every society and every culture that has existed up to now, that either you accept yourself and be rejected by all, or you reject yourself and gain the respect and honor of your whole society and culture. The choice is really very difficult. Obviously the majority is going to choose respectability, but with respectability comes all kinds of anxieties, anguishes, a meaninglessness, a desertlike life where nothing grows, where nothing is green, where no flower ever blossoms, where you will walk and walk and walk and you will never find even an oasis.

Jan was born in a small town outside of Kiev, Ukraine. He was an only child. His mother was a housewife, his father a construction manager. When Koum was sixteen, he and his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, mainly to escape the anti-semitic environment of their homeland. Unfortunately, Jan’s father never made the trip. He got stuck in the Ukraine, where he eventually died years later. His mother swept the floors of a grocery store to make ends meet, but she was soon diagnosed with cancer. They barely survived off her disability insurance. It certainly wasn’t the most glamorous childhood, but he made it through. After college, Jan applied to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. He spent nine years building his skills at Yahoo, and then applied to work at Facebook. Unfortunately, he was rejected. In 2009, Jan bought an iPhone and realized there was an opportunity to build something on top of Apple’s burgeoning mobile platform. He began building an app that could send status updates between devices. It didn’t do very well at first, but then Apple released push notifications. All of the sudden, people started getting pinged when statuses were updated. And then people began pinging back and forth. Jan realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service. The app continued to grow, but Jan kept quiet. He didn’t care about headlines or marketing buzz. He just wanted to build something valuable, and do it well. By early 2011, his app had reached the top twenty in the U.S. app store. Two years later, in 2013, the app had 200 million users. And then it happened: In 2014, Jan’s company, WhatsApp, was acquired by Facebook―the company who had rejected him years earlier―for $19 billion. I’m not telling this story to insinuate that you should go build a billion-dollar company. The remarkable part of the story isn’t the payday, but the relentless hustle Jan demonstrated throughout his entire life. After surviving a tumultuous childhood, he practiced his craft and built iteratively. When had had a product that was working, he stayed quiet, which takes extreme discipline. More often than not, hustling isn’t fast or showy. Most of the time it’s slow and unglamorous―until it’s not. 

Anxiety and the Social Process Generally, in life, we only make progress when we are willing to take risks. If you don’t take risks in your life, it’s probably because you are held back by anxiety. Because you fear that interaction will result in rejection, embarrassment, and scrutiny, you feel anxiety about it. After all, you tell yourself, why risk experiencing failure? But as we have discussed, rejection is not devastating; it is merely disappointing, and, with your anxiety under control, disappointment is entirely bearable. In time, and with practice and eventual success, your fear of disappointment will diminish. Some people, far from shying away from social contact, actually look forward to meeting new people. Meeting new people does not in itself cause anxiety. The beliefs you hold cause anxiety. If you believe rejection will be devastating to you, and that rejection is highly likely to happen, you will feel quite justified in making sure that you never meet any new people at all. But avoidance does not alleviate anxiety. It simply makes the problem worse next time the situation arises. You need to tap into your positive mental attitude. Tell yourself: “Meeting new people is healthy, and by doing it, I stand a good chance of having a positive experience.” To summarize, here are some tips for interactive success. Try to integrate them into your being—make them part of your overall attitude toward interacting. 1. Anticipate success. 2. Be willing to risk. 3. Think positive thoughts about yourself to boost your self-esteem. 4. Think positive thoughts about others as well. 5. Be yourself. This last point leads into a discussion of mental focus. It is typical of a socially anxious person to focus on himself or herself, to forget to read the nonverbal signals of others. Before you attempt to meet someone, it’s a good idea to focus your attention in the right direction, not on yourself, but on the other person. Use your new skills of self-awareness and relaxation to enhance your focusing abilities. Think of your attention as a finite resource. Is it really best spent on thoughts about yourself? (“Do I look okay?” “Can he tell I’m sweating?” “Can she tell I’m blushing?” “I hope I don’t say anything dumb,” and so on.) With so much attention directed inward, there is very little left to spend on the other person. One of my clients has so much trouble focusing on others in conversation that she developed a habit of pinching herself to stay on track. Do all you can to stop your inward thinking, because paying attention to the other person will provide you with the basis of an interesting and successful conversation. If you have trouble averting the focus from your own anxiety, try using relaxation techniques to bring your symptoms under control. Diaphragmatic breathing, for example, can bring immediate relief.

Exuberance, Cheng makes clear, is an indispensable part of his scientific life. "It keeps me alive. I like to have fun, I don't like boredom. Exuberance is necessary, you have to have enthusiasm. Any kind of work involves a lot of tedium, menial tasks, boring tasks. Exuberance allows you to see beyond, to see the goal. You need that kind of emotional makeup to push through the work, to pursue really difficult things. Exuberance stops you from getting discouraged, or not starting in the first place. Science is working out ideas. The majority of ideas don't work out, there are a lot of dead ends. You need to have an exuberant makeup to prevent getting discouraged. Exuberance reduces stress levels." Exuberance also allows you to handle rejection, Cheng points out. "For example, if you put in a big proposal to NASA and it gets rejected, you need resiliency to pick yourself up after that. I have a natural tendency toward exuberance, I am naturally inclined to plunge into things. But rough times always come." Work, he emphasizes, is inherently stressful. "Stepping back, relaxing, enjoying, not getting all wound up or spinning your wheels, this keeps you from wearing yourself out.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

Derangement - reasoned derangement: that was the key. To break the mould, the chains, the bars that held the flesh and the spirit; to throw off the blinds, the slings, the splints and trusses with which life binds us; to derange and twist and destroy the whole fabric of the prison, and to emerge whole and free. He was not afraid to be free - nor to find his own way to freedom. He was not afraid of "queerness" and "different," of apartness and aloneness, of ranging beyond the bounds which men set for themselves - into a fantasy and hallucination, rapture, and ecstasy. As a voyou (for this was part of it - the seen, the outward) he must pledge himself to the rejection of all forms, all rules and customs, all mindless conformity and acquiescence. And as a voyant he must push on for ever outward, for ever expanding his experience and consciousness; seeing clearly, with fresh eyes; seeing beyond the veils, beyond the shams and effigies, beyond illusion and lie, to the truth. "Yea, verily, verily, I say unto you -" (sayeth God) "- ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.

The world we live in is a house of pain, and we cannot live in it without it touching us. You will never be smart enough to escape its grasp. From the violence of childbirth to cut fingers and scraped knees, from sibling mockery and peer rejection to familial brokenness, suffering is part of every phase of human existence. We enter life through suffering’s door and we exit life through suffering’s door.

The divine meaning of the Scriptures has to be gleaned from the letter of it and beyond the letter, through contemplation guided by the Spirit. In the Fathers we do not find any fundamentalism, but Scripture opened by the Spirit to its very heart, namely the mystery of the Trinity, the source of love, and Christ's victory over death and hell, the triumph of love. If you try to reduce the divine meaning to the purely external signification of the words, the Word will have no reason to come down to you. It will return to its secret dwelling, which is contemplation that is worthy of it. For it has wings, this divine meaning, given to it by the Holy Spirit who is its guide ... But to be unwilling ever to rise above the letter, never to give up feeding on the literal sense, is the mark of a life of falsehood. Origen Commentary on Proverbs, 2.3 (PG 17, 2.2.1-4) Origen, whose Brilliant thought fertilized all Christian spirituality, especially, but not only, in the East, compares Scripture to an almond. He himself is an inspired interpreter of Scripture, and if his thought has had to be corrected on other points, it remains fully and directly nourishing in this field. The bitter rind is the letter that kills and that has to be rejected. The protecting shell is the ethical teaching, that, as a necessary part of the process of going into greater depth, requires a course of careful purification. Then the spiritual kernel is reached, which is all that matters, which feeds the soul on the mysteries of divine wisdom.

The Bible talks about the two becoming one. Of a man loving his wife as he loves himself. And of a woman submitting to her husband. People like to look at each of those things individually when, in fact, they all tie together. Some people don't like the submitting part and want to reject that, but in a truly God-honoring marriage, all of the pieces must be put in place. The best way to make sure that happens is to give God first place in your life and then make each other a priority. A relationship cannot grow and flourish when you don't make it a priority and that's true of your relationship with God and your relationship with your spouse.

Taking risks is part of life, but to take risks invites the possibilty of failure and rejection, but also the possibility of true happines.

Yes, religion was a many-splendored thing; surely it should be part of life and not used to separate people. Couldn’t people from different religions love one another? Oh, dearest Father, she thought, is religion worth sacrificing your daughter? Is it worth rejecting your son-in-law, just because he prays in a synagogue?

• I will no longer bring my problems to anyone who wants to leave me alone. It’s not good for them or me. They don’t want to help, so I will not ask them to. • I will share my problems with those who want to help me. I will not reject genuine offers of assistance out of pride, insecurity, or doubt. I will ask these people to join me in my healing and make them a bigger part of my life. • I will put a distance between myself and those who want to hurt me. I do not have to confront them, guilt-trip them, or make them the cause of my self-pity. But I cannot afford to absorb their toxic effect on me, and if that means keeping my distance, I will.

Search, offer, reject, negotiate, and accept are all parts of the process of almost everything in life.        •

Some secrets just need accepting. They are part of this person’s makeup and history. And though unpleasant, these issues always require a gentle touch. In either case, you alone wield the power either to reject your spouse because of what you know or to welcome them in—warts and all. They will either know they’re in a refuge of safety where they are free to make mistakes, or they will recoil into themselves and be lost to you, perhaps forever. Loving them well should be your life’s work.

Decurion exposes and overturns the assumption that work is public and the personal is private, and so the personal should not be part of work. In the same way, Decurion rejects the idea of work-life balance as a simple goal or mantra. After all, if your life is everything outside the workplace, then that leaves a bleak notion of what work is—something that we’re forced to trade off against joyful living.

startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.