Relational Capacity Quotes

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.

Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

I’d lost whatever capacity I ever had to relate to people in a romantic way.

To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.

I believe there are only two unstoppable forces in the universe. One is love, the other is intelligence. I also believe that a person's capacity to love is directly related to their intelligence level, just as hate corresponds to a person's level of ignorance. The only thing that makes it impossible for the system to destroy you and grind your spirit into nothing is to be more intelligent than it is.

Most people don't need to be babied through business processes. Most often, what they need is a clear understanding of the objective and access to available resources. From there, they'll leverage their own creative capacity and skillets to ensure that the objective is accomplished.

Trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it makes us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.

In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safely with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environinent in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave.

You wouldn't understand my works. You wouldn't have the faintest idea of what they were about. You wouldn't appreciate the points of reference. You're way behind. All of you. There's no point in sending you my works. You'd be lost. It's nothing to do with a question of intelligence. It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things. I mean it's a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two, to balance the two. To see, to be able to see! I'm the one who can see. That's why I can write my critical works. Might do you good...have a look at them...see how certain people can view...things...how certain people can maintain...intellectual equilibrium. Intellectual equilibrium. You're just objects. You just...move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it. You won't get me being...I won't be lost in it.

All the various types of teachings and spiritual paths are related to the different capacities of understanding that different individuals have. There does not exist, from an absolute point of view, any teaching which is more perfect or effective than another. A teaching's value lies solely in the inner awakening which an individual can arrive at through it. If a person benefits from a given teaching, for that person that teaching is the supreme path, because it is suited to his or her nature and capacities. There's no sense in trying to judge it as more or less elevated in relation to other paths to realization.

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others- in this case, the domination of liberal principles of economics, domestic politics, and international relations over other, nonliberal principles. It will last only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it.

At the end of the day, developing goodness comes down to a simple question: Will this emotion, thought or action, increase or decrease my capacity for goodness?

Resilient strength is the opposite of helplessness. The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and ‘unground’ in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding. Aggressiveness is the biological ability to be vigorous and energetic, especially when using instinct and force. In the immobility (traumatized) state, these assertive energies are inaccessible. The restoration of healthy aggression is an essential part in the recovery from trauma. Empowerment is the acceptance of personal authority. It derives from the capacity to choose the direction and execution of one’s own energies. Mastery is the possession of skillful techniques in dealing successfully with threat. Orientation is the process of ascertaining one’s position relative to both circumstance and environment. In these ways the residue of trauma is renegotiated.

If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life – lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was a capacity for feral joy. I could taste it.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.

Complexly traumatized children need to be helped to engage their attention in pursuits that do not remind them of trauma-related triggers and that give them a sense of pleasure and mastery. Safety, predictability, and "fun" are essential for the establishment of the capacity to observe what is going on, put it into a larger context, and initiate physiological and motoric self-regulation.

Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.

If power is a thing to be had, it must be capable of possession. But power is not any discrete size or weight. Power is continuous. Power is parabolic. Say you are given some power, which then increases your capacity to accumulate more power. Your capacity for power increases exponentially in relation to the actual power you have gained. Thus, to gain power is to be increasingly powerless. If the more power one has, the less one has, then is it the thing or are you?

It’s a subtle thing, freedom. It takes effort; it takes attention and focus to not act something like an automaton. Although we do have freedom, we exercise it only when we strive for awareness, when we are conscious not just of the content of the mind but also of the mind itself as a process.’ We may say, then, that in the world of the psyche, freedom is a relative concept: the power to choose exists only when our automatic mechanisms are subject to those brain systems that are able to maintain conscious awareness. A person experiences greater or less freedom from one situation to the next, from one interaction to the next, from one moment to the next. Anyone whose automatic brain mechanisms habitually run in overdrive has diminished capacity for free decision making, especially if the parts of the brain that facilitate conscious choice are impaired or underdeveloped.

Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.

Socialism lost its way largely when it became decoupled from the processes of democracy. My vision of a socially just society is one that is deeply democratic, that allows people’s voices to be heard, where people actually govern. C.L.R James sometimes used the slogan “every cook can govern” to speak to the concept that there should be no hierarchies of power between those who lead and their constituencies. This idea is related to Antonio Gramsci’s argument that the goal of the revolutionary party is for every member to be an intellectual. That is, everyone has the capacity, has the ability to articulate a vision of reality and to fight for the realization of their values and goals in society. Gramsci is pointing toward the development of a strategy that is deeply democratic, one where we don’t have elitist, vanguardist notions of what society should look like, but have humility and the patience to listen to and learn from working class and poor people, who really are at the center of what any society is.

At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity (2) Love for partners and offspring (3) Friendship (4) Social networks (5) Cooperation (6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”) (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism) (8) Social learning and teaching

Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave. Yet both have been hounded, harassed, and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind.

Most economists are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. In the real world, that’s not how things work at all. Companies aren’t big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup. Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines – habits – that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done.

My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life—all of it-flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.

One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.

I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social system. I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve. Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and, even more so, Kennedy are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past.

Healthy people understand that others have the capacity to choose to end relationships and it serves as motivation for them to learn to relate in healthy and loving ways. However, when we are driven by shame, we don't just fear losing a relationship, but we live in terror that if we let anyone really get to know us, we would never be desired, pursued, or loved. In us, that fear can be worked out in the development of unhealthy denial, workaholism, perfectionism, chameleon-type behavior, and sadly, even revictimization... When we live in denial or present a false self out of fear... we will do anything to be accepted by people... When we begin to tell the truth about what happened to us we also begin the process of turning about from this type of idolatry... When we begin to tear away our layers of illegitimate shame... When our own vision is not distorted by our shame we can discern what was our responsibility and what wasn't.

If so, why has a naturally masculine shape (broad shoulders, no waist, narrow hips, flat belly) become the ideal for the female body? Why is it that those aspects of a woman’s body that are most closely related to her innate female power, the capacity of her belly, hips, and thighs to carry and sustain life, are diminished in our society’s version of a beautiful woman?

Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents--'avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality'--we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.

Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose.

Eating disorders are so profoundly a coping mechanism for failures in human relationships that to get over one it’s essential to strengthen the capacity to relate to another, which is a lot of what happens in therapy. Underneath my desire

A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child subject still to her power but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines—habits—that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done.

In demonstrating this, the Buddha was making an important example for the ages. For almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a much more pronounced way than others, the unpredictable and unstable nature of things makes life inherently traumatic. What the Buddha revealed through his dreams was that, true as this may be, the mind, by its very nature, is capable of holding trauma much the way a mother naturally relates to a baby. One does not have to be helpless and fearful, nor does one have to be hostile and self-referential. The mind knows intuitively how to find a middle path. Its implicit relational capacity is hardwired.

Even death is a power, a capacity. It is not a simple event that will happen to me, an objective and observable fact; here my power to be will cease, here I will no longer be able to be here. But death, insofar as it belongs to me and belongs to me alone, since no one can die my death in my stead or in my place, makes of this non-possibility, this impending future of mine, this relation to myself always open until my end, yet another power. Dying, I can still die, this is our sign as man.

I had a day when I was busy in the world, where the activity created a turmoil on the surface of my consciousness like waves on the surface of the ocean, which made it difficult to see through the waves to the inner silence. It reminded me that we need to develop both the capacity to use the mind when engaged in activity and social relations, and to be able to let go of the activity and to come in contact with the deep inner silence. The relationship between being active in the world and in social relations and the inner silence is like the relationship between the waves on the surface of the ocean and the deep inner silence on the bottom of the ocean.

When the fact that one is a total nonentity who’s done nothing more outstanding than eating, sleeping, and chatting with neighbors becomes a fact worthy of pride, of announcement to the world and of diligent study by millions of readers – the fact that one has built a cathedral becomes unrecordable and unannounceable. A matter of perspectives and relativity. The distance permissible between the extremes of any particular capacity is limited. The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder.

Well-being is the state of having arrived at the full development of reason: reason not in the sense of a merely intellectual judgment, but in that of grasping truth by “letting things be” (to use Heidegger’s term) as they are. Well-being is possible only to the degree to which one has overcome one’s narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty (in the Zen sense). Well-being means to be fully related to man and nature affectively, to overcome separateness and alienation, to arrive at the experience of oneness with all that exists—and yet to experience myself at the same time as the separate entity I am, as the individual. Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is; it means to have the full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in, and to be fully awake. If it is all that, it means also to be creative; that is, to react and to respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists—to react and to respond as the real, total man I am to the reality of everybody and everything as he or it is. In this act of true response lies the area of creativity, of seeing the world as it is and experiencing it as my world, the world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it, so that the world ceases to be a strange world “over there” and becomes my world. Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego, to give up greed, to case chasing after the preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one’s self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.

Many felt a profound malaise at the idea that the sources of benevolence should be just enlightened self-interest, or simply feelings of sympathy. This seemed to neglect altogether the human power of self-transcendence, the capacity to go beyond self-related desire altogether and follow a higher aspiration. This

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

A child's readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity—all related to emotional intelligence:6 1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one's body, behavior, and world; the child's sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful. 2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure. 3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective. 4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one's own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control. 5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others. 6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults. 7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one's own needs with those of others in group activity. Whether or not a child arrives at school on the first day of kindergarten with these capabilities depends greatly on how much her parents—and preschool teachers—have given her the kind of care that amounts to a "Heart Start," the emotional equivalent of the Head Start programs.

There are three aspects of the feminine element of being in the Jungian approach. The first one is being grounded within one’s own nature. The second one is the capacity to then be truly related to another person and to other people. And the third aspect, which is another aspect of eros, is how personally related we are to life.

Wonder acts upon a man like a shock, he is "moved" and "shaken", and in the dislocation that succeeds all that he had taken for granted as being natural or self-evident loses its compact solidity and obviousness; he is literally dislocated and no longer knows where he is. If this were only to involve the man of action in all of us, so that a man only lost his sense of certainty of everyday life, it would be relatively harmless; but the ground quakes beneath his feet in a far more dangerous sense, and it is his whole spiritual nature, his capacity to know, that is threatened. It is an extremely curious fact that this is the only aspect of wonder, or almost the only aspect, that comes to evidence in modern philosohpy, and the old view that wonder was the beginning of philosophy takes on a new meaning: doubt is the beginning of philosophy. . . . The innermost meaning of wonder is fulfilled in a deepened sense of mystery. It does not end in doubt, but is the awakening of the knowledge that being, qua being, is mysterious and inconceivable, and that it is a mystery in the full sense of the word: neither a dead end, nor a contradiction, nor even something impenetrable and dark. Rather, mystery means that a reality cannot be comprehended because its light is ever-flowing, unfathomable, and inexhaustible. And that is what the wonderer really experiences. . . . Since the very beginning philosophy has always been characterized by hope. Philosophy never claimed to be a superior form of knowledge but, on the contrary, a form of humility, and restrained, and conscious of this restraint and humility in relation to knowledge. The words philosopher and philosophy were coined, according to legend--and the legend is of great antiquity--by Pythagoras in explicit contrast to the words sophia and sophos: no man is wise, and no man "knows"; God alone is wise and all-knowing. At the very most a man might call himself a lover of wisdom and a seeker after knowledge--a philosopher. --from The Philosophical Act, Chapter III

In the world of animals, pain serves an equivocal role. Parental nips and swipes are common tools in upbringing. And socially, pain is sometimes used to maintain hierarchies of dominance. But this animal use of pain seems somewhat restrained, at least in contrast with the human situation. Here the capacity for pain is often used to systematically exploit and oppress at intensities often far beyond those seen in the behaviour of our nearest primate relatives. At the same time, at least in western culture, pain is rarely used for pleasure. Is it little wonder that all pain is viewed as intrinsically evil? Or that the pain-pleasure of leatherspace has been labelled torture?

Or rather, it made him into two people. He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a great zest for life. He loved good talk and physical activity. He had a deep sense of humour and a great capacity for making friends. But from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother's death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness -- of himself, of his condition, of his society -- for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented. This situation makes the "current-events man" a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more striking, more distressing, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants. Propaganda addresses itself to that man; like him, it can relate only to the most superficial aspect of a spectacular event, which alone can interest man and lead him to make a certain decision or adopt a certain attitude. But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.

What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth? First, never speak falsehood. Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required. Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one’s map from challenge. Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld. Fifth, the assessment of another’s needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another’s needs is the assessment of that person’s capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity. All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way. Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands. By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people. Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people. Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of

Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, “based on individual egoism” rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, “Such a ‘caricature’ has no future and cannot give future to any society”. Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.

Capital increasingly exploits the entire range of our productive capacities, our bodies and our minds, our capacities for communication, our intelligence and creativity, our affective relations with each other, and more. Life itself has been put to work.

Thus, for those of us who make only a brief study of chemistry, the benefits to be expected are of an indirect nature. Increased capacity for enjoyment, a livelier interest in the world in which we live, a more intelligent attitude toward the great questions of the day--these are the by-products of a well-balanced education, including chemistry in its proper relation to other studies.

The personality is seldom, in the beginning, what it will be later on. For this reason the possibility of enlarging it exists, at least during the first half of life. The enlargement may be effected through an accretion from without, by new vital contents finding their way into the personality from outside and being assimilated. In this way a considerable increase of personality may be experienced. We therefore tend to assume that this increase comes only from without, thus justifying the prejudice that one becomes a personality by stuffing into oneself as much as possible from outside. But the more assiduously we follow this recipe, and the more stubbornly we believe that all increase has to come from without, the greater becomes our inner poverty. Therefore, if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to meet it. Richness of mind consists in mental receptivity, not in the accumulation of possessions. What comes to us from outside, and, for that matter, everything that rises up from within, can only be made our own if we are capable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the incoming content. Real increase of personality means consciousness of an enlargement that flows from inner sources. Without psychic depth we can never be adequately related to the magnitude of our object. It has therefore been said quite truly that a man grows with the greatness of his task. But he must have within himself the capacity to grow; otherwise even the most difficult task is of no benefit to him. More likely he will be shattered by it…

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

Sometimes my sadness in reading is that I can’t stay. I fall away from the ability to receive. So that the life-long work of reading is the process of situating and elaborating within myself techniques that might guide or permit the lengthening duration and affective expansion of my receptive capacity. Within reading I desire lastingness in tandem with the falling away.   Writing proposes itself as a possible technique towards lastingness. My body becomes a desk. I lay the book on my chest; the notebook was waiting behind it, propped on the sloping lectern of the top of my thighs.

Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses re-open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before he merged as an “individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; it is also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. Thus it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

The term 'Savage' is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed, when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.

One might be tempted to extol as an advance over Sophocles the radical tendency of Euripides to produce a proper relation between art and the public. But "public," after all, is a mere word. In no sense is it a homogeneous and constant quantity. Why should the artist be bound to accommodate himself to a power whose strength lies solely in numbers? And if, by virtue of his endowments and aspirations, he should feel himself superior to every one of these spectators, how could he feel greater respect for the collective expression of all these subordinate capacities than for the relatively highest-endowed individual spectator?

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion.

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as "intelligence." Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary--in search of something like "completion"--and every book led to another book, a process that, of course, could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and, indeed, it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things--could not resist wanting to read things--and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will?

Many times when I didn’t feel qualified, or like I didn’t have the relational or emotional capacity, let alone the skillset, to speak to different people (it felt way out of my comfort zone), God’s personality and his passion possessed me in a way that made it easy. I am not limited to my resources; I am limited to his, even when reaching outside my comfortable space.

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Quantum physics findings show that consciousness itself created order - or indeed in some way created the world - this suggested much more capacity in the human being than was currently understood. It also suggested some revolutionary notions about humans in relation to their world and the relation between all living things. What they were asking was how far our bodies extended. Did they end with what we always thought of as our own isolated persona, or ‘extend out’ so that the demarcation between us and our world was less clear-cut? Did living consciousness possess some quantum field like properties, enabling it to extend its influence out into the world? If so, was it possible to do more than simply observe? How strong was our influence? It was only a small step in logic to conclude that in our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might also be an influencer, a creator. Did we not only stop the butterfly at a certain point in its flight, but also influence the path it will take - nudging it in a particular direction? This explains action at a distance, what scientists call non locality. The theory that two subatomic particles once in close proximity seemingly communicate over any distance after they are separated.

Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed. That belief is without basis and significance save as it means faith in the potentialities of human nature as that nature is exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth. This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life. To denounce Nazism for intolerance, cruelty and stimulation of hatred amounts to fostering insincerity if, in our personal relations to other persons, if, in our daily walk and conversation, we are moved by racial, color or other class prejudice; indeed, by anything save a generous belief in their possibilities as human beings, a belief which brings with it the need for providing conditions which will enable these capacities to reach fulfillment. The democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has.

The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents’ failure to fulfill their needs for affection, attention and care during their childhood. It was mentioned in the first section that children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deepseated feeling that they are lovable and valuable and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves. Children growing up in an atmosphere in which love and care are lacking or given with gross inconsistency enter adulthood with no such sense of inner security. Rather, they have an inner sense of insecurity, a feeling of “I don’t have enough” and a sense that the world is unpredictable and ungiving, as well as a sense of themselves as being questionably lovable and valuable. It is no wonder, then, that they feel the need to scramble for love, care and attention wherever they can find it, and once having found it, cling to it with a desperation that leads them to unloving, manipulative, Machiavellian behavior that destroys the very relationships they seek to preserve. As also indicated in the previous section, love and discipline go hand in hand, so that unloving, uncaring parents are people lacking in discipline, and when they fail to provide their children with a sense of being loved, they also fail to provide them with the capacity for self-discipline. Thus the excessive dependency of the passive dependent individuals is only the principal manifestation of their personality disorder. Passive dependent people lack self-discipline. They are unwilling or unable to delay gratification of their hunger for attention. In

The same thing applies to the mind. We think and feel and act, but there is not, in addition to thoughts and feelings and actions, a bare entity, the mind or the soul, which does or suffers these occurrences. The mental capacity of a person is a continuity of habit and memory: there was yesterday one person whose feelings I can remember, and that person I regard as myself of yesterday; but, in fact, myself of yesterday was only certain mental occurrences which are now remembered and are regarded as part of the person who now recollects them. All that constitutes a person is a series of experiences connected by memory and by certain similarities of the sort we call habit.

Hardship, in forcing us to exercise greater patience and forbearance in daily life, actually makes us stronger and more robust. From the daily experience of hardship comes a greater capacity to accept difficulties without losing our sense of inner calm. Of course, I do not advocate seeking out hardship as a way of life, but merely wish to suggest that, if you relate to it constructively, it can bring greater inner strength and fortitude.[15] ―The Dalai Lama

But beyond the mind, beyond our thoughts, there is something we call the 'nature of the mind', the mind's true condition, which is beyond all limits. If it is beyond the mind, though, how can we approach an understanding of it? Let's take the example of a mirror. When we look into a mirror we see in it the reflected images of any objects that are in front of it; we don't see the nature of the mirror. But what do we mean by this 'nature of the mirror'? We mean its capacity to reflect, definable as its clarity, its purity, and its limpidity, which are indispensable conditions for the manifestation of reflections. This 'nature of the mirror' is not something visible, and the only way we can conceive of it is through the images reflected in the mirror. In the same way, we only know and have concrete experience of that which is relative to our condition of body, voice, and mind. But this itself is the way to understand their true nature.

Environmental influences also affect dopamine. From animal studies, we know that social stimulation is necessary for the growth of the nerve endings that release dopamine and for the growth of receptors that dopamine needs to bind to in order to do its work. In four-month-old monkeys, major alterations of dopamine and other neurotransmitter systems were found after only six days of separation from their mothers. “In these experiments,” writes Steven Dubovsky, Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine at the University of Colorado, “loss of an important attachment appears to lead to less of an important neurotransmitter in the brain. Once these circuits stop functioning normally, it becomes more and more difficult to activate the mind.” A neuroscientific study published in 1998 showed that adult rats whose mothers had given them more licking, grooming and other physical-emotional contact during infancy had more efficient brain circuitry for reducing anxiety, as well as more receptors on nerve cells for the brain’s own natural tranquilizing chemicals. In other words, early interactions with the mother shaped the adult rat’s neurophysiological capacity to respond to stress. In another study, newborn animals reared in isolation had reduced dopamine activity in their prefrontal cortex — but not in other areas of the brain. That is, emotional stress particularly affects the chemistry of the prefrontal cortex, the center for selective attention, motivation and self-regulation. Given the relative complexity of human emotional interactions, the influence of the infant-parent relationship on human neurochemistry is bound to be even stronger. In the human infant, the growth of dopamine-rich nerve terminals and the development of dopamine receptors is stimulated by chemicals released in the brain during the experience of joy, the ecstatic joy that comes from the perfectly attuned mother-child mutual gaze interaction. Happy interactions between mother and infant generate motivation and arousal by activating cells in the midbrain that release endorphins, thereby inducing in the infant a joyful, exhilarated state. They also trigger the release of dopamine. Both endorphins and dopamine promote the development of new connections in the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine released from the midbrain also triggers the growth of nerve cells and blood vessels in the right prefrontal cortex and promotes the growth of dopamine receptors. A relative scarcity of such receptors and blood supply is thought to be one of the major physiological dimensions of ADD. The letters ADD may equally well stand for Attunement Deficit Disorder.

the brain is limited, lacks bottomless capacity, and isn’t particularly fast relative to computer technology. The technological advances defined by laws of Moore and Metcalfe got married and long since overtook what our brains can handle. And we know now that their union also presents the challenge of addiction, or, at least, serious compulsion. Even allowing for the fact that we can know these devices challenge our limitations, sometimes they are so compelling we can’t stop using them.

Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale. This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.

As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub- divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and vive la guerre éternelle—till the New Jerusalem, of course!

The rest of the family looked on with a bemusement that, in the case of Rafa’s mother, occasionally gave way to anger. His father, Sebastián, had his misgivings. His uncle Rafael wondered sometimes whether Toni was pushing his nephew too hard. His godfather, his mother’s brother, Juan, went so far as to say that what Toni was doing to the child amounted to “mental cruelty.” But Toni was hard on Rafa because he knew Rafa could take it and would eventually thrive. He would not have applied the same principles, he insists, with a weaker child. The sense that perhaps he might have been right was what stopped the more doubtful members of his family from outright rebellion. One who did not doubt Toni was Miguel Ángel, the professional football player. Another disciple of the endurance principle, in which he believes with almost as much reverence as Toni himself, Miguel Ángel says that success for the elite sportsman rests on the capacity “to suffer,” even to enjoy suffering. “It means learning to accept that if you have to train two hours, you train two hours; if you have to train five, you train five; if you have to repeat an exercise fifty thousand times, you do it. That’s what separates the champions from the merely talented. And it’s all directly related to the winners’ mentality; at the same time as you are demonstrating endurance, your head becomes stronger.

Bryk and Schneider also found that relational trust—between teachers and administrators, teachers and teachers, and teachers and parents—has the power to offset external factors that are normally thought to be the primary determinants of a school’s capacity to serve students well: “Improvements in academic productivity were less likely in schools with high levels of poverty, racial isolation, and student mobility, but [the researchers] say that a strong correlation between [relational] trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for such factors.” 9

Sogol’s aim was to measure the power of thought as an absolute value. “This power,” said Sogol, “is arithmetical. In fact, all thought is a capacity to grasp the divisions of a whole. Now, numbers are nothing but the divisions of the unity, that is, the divisions of absolutely any whole. In myself and others, I began to observe how many numbers a man can really conceive, that is, how many he can represent to himself without breaking them up or jotting them down: how many successive consequences of a principle he can grasp at once, instantaneously; how many inclusions of species as kind; how many relations of cause and effect, of ends to means; and I never found a number higher than four. And yet, this number four corresponded to an exceptional mental effort, which I obtained only rarely. The thought of an idiot stopped at one, and the ordinary thought of most people goes up to two, sometimes three, very rarely to four.

Are we simply self-conscious animals improbably appearing for a moment in a cosmos without purpose or significance? If so, that has implications for life, which even ordinary people can work out. Or are we rather illusions of individuality destined to dissolve into the ultimately real Absolute? That would make a difference. Are we instead really materially acquisitive hedonists or carnally desiring sensualists who have nothing higher to which to aspire than the gratifications of possessions and physical sensations that we can use our money and relations to consume? Or maybe only bodies with capacities to define by means of the exercise of will and discourse our identities through self-description and re-description? Or perhaps are we children of a personal God, whose perfect love is determined to rescue us from our self-destruction in order to bring us into the perfect happiness of divine knowledge and worship? Or maybe something else? The differences matter for how life ought to be lived, how we ought to live, as individuals and as a society.12 And ultimately we have no choice but to adopt some position, even if by default our culture adopts it for us. I think we ought to want to embrace a position that is deliberately considered and believed for good reasons.

What indeed is the half-life of a mortal consciousness? What is the half-life of a memory of that mortal consciousness? Of course, this is purely an academic question and of no immediate concern to those of us existing in the world of the living, for we possess already a memory, in its stead, which serves as a basis of our perception of the past. Accurate or not, this nature of memory allows us to understand the past according to the positions occupied by the flesh about which we seek to know, but, unfortunately, not in a way relative to the flesh itself—that flesh stripped of identity and circumstance, that flesh which, in its most rudimentary capacity, had once collided, interacted, fought, competed, negotiated, cooperated, and mated with other flesh: there is no history of this kind, thoroughly naked and telling enough, which is accessible to us, for we are composed of the very same substance, the very same flesh, and sadly incapable of stepping outside of it, even momentarily.

Freedom does not consist in any dream of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom.

CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)

The price of freedom is eternal mindfulness. This is a book about restoring connection. It is the experience of being in connection that fulfills the longing we have to feel fully alive. An impaired capacity for connection to self and others, and the ensuing diminished aliveness, are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems. Unfortunately, we are often unaware of the internal roadblocks that keep us from experiencing the connection and aliveness we yearn for. These roadblocks develop in reaction to developmental and shock trauma and the related nervous system dysregulation, disruptions in attachment, and distortions of identity. The goal of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is to work with these dysregulations, disruptions, and distortions while never losing sight of supporting the development of a healthy capacity for connection and aliveness. In this book we address conflicts around the capacity for connection and explore how deeper connection and aliveness can be supported in the process of healing developmental trauma.

reconciling grace, saving grace of Jesus "[In regards to struggles and potential in relationship],..we are sinner with capacity to to do great damage to ourselves and our relationships. We need God's grace to save us from ourselves. But we are also God's children, which means that we have great hope and potential-- not hope that rests on our gifts, experience, or track record, but hope that rests in Christ. Because he is in us and we are in him, it is right to say that our potential IS Christ. We are well aware that we are smack-dab in the middle of God's process of sanctification. And because this is true, we will struggle again. Selfishness, pride, an unforgiving spirit, irritation, and impatience will certainly return. But we are neither afraid nor hopeless. We have experienced what God can do in the middle of the mess. This side of heaven, relationships and ministry are always shaped in the forge of struggle. None of us get to relate to perfect people or avoid the effects of the fall on the work we attempt to do. Yet amid the mess, we find the highest joys of relationship and ministry.

Experts say that the nervous system needs to be reprogrammed to allow for greater happiness, fulfillment, and relational connectedness. The good news is that the nervous system is highly receptive to new programming. In fact, it is somewhat capable of reprogramming itself if we provide support. To create the space and allow the nervous system to develop this new capacity, we encourage leaders to integrate just after they experience a new high. For example, you close the deal you never thought you’d be able to close; you get the promotion you’ve always wanted; you have a great weekend away with your partner and experience a new level of closeness. At these moments, we suggest leaders integrate by doing things that are grounding, ordinary, mindless, soothing, mundane, and/or repetitive. This could be going for a walk, mowing the lawn, sweeping the floor, washing the car, making a meal, flipping through a favorite hobby magazine, or taking a little longer shower. This allows for the gentle raising of old Upper Limits (the reprogramming of the nervous system), without forcefully blowing past them in a way that actually causes a big crash.

Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechanism for elevating the achievements of Muslims to the level of a civilization rivaling that of Europe rendered it all the more irresistible and gained for it universal acceptance throughout the Muslim world.

Since McDougall contrasts the behaviour of a highly organised group with what has just been described, we shall be particularly interested to learn in what this organisation consists, and by what factors it is produced. The author enumerates five principal conditions ' for raising collective mental life to a higher level. The first and fundamental condition is that there should be some degree of continuity of existence in the group. This may be either material or formal: the former, if the same individuals persist in the group for some time; and the latter, if there is developed within the group a system of fixed positions which are occupied by a succession of individuals. The second condition is that in the individual member of the group some definite idea should be formed of the nature, composition, functions and capacities of the group, so that from this he may develop an emotional relation to the group as a whole. The third is that the group should be brought into interaction (perhaps in the form of rivalry) with other groups similar to it but differing from it in many respects. The fourth is that the group should possess traditions, customs and habits, and especially such as determine the relations of its members to one another. The fifth is that the group should have a definite structure, expressed in the specialisation and differentiation of the functions of its constituents. According to McDougall, if these conditions are fulfilled, the psychological disadvantages of the group formation are removed. The collective lowering of intellectual ability is avoided by withdrawing the performance of intellectual tasks from the group and reserving them for individual members of it.

You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.

This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man’s age-old dream—the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote-harvesting time they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a “greater government activity in the affairs of the people.

In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance. Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot--the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.

One of the biggest shifts in the last decade of anthropology, one of the discoveries in the field that has changed everything, is the realization that we evolved as cooperative breeders. Bringing up kids in a nuclear family is a novelty, a blip on the screen of human family life. We never did child rearing alone, isolated and shut off from others, or with just one other person, the child’s father. It is arduous and anomalous and it’s not the way it “should” be. Indeed, for as long as we have been, we have relied on other females—kin and the kindly disposed—to help us raise our offspring. Mostly we lived as Nisa did—in rangy, multifamily bands that looked out for one another, took care of one another, and raised one another’s children. You still see it in parts of the Caribbean today, where any adult in a small town can tell any kid to toe the line, and does, and the kids listen. Or in Hawaii, where kids and parents alike depend on hanai relationships—aunties and uncles, indispensible honorary relations who take a real interest in an unrelated child’s well-being and education. No, it wasn’t fire or hunting or the heterosexual dyad that gave us a leg up, anthropologists now largely concur; it was our female Homo ancestors holding and handling and caring for and even nursing the babies of other females. That is in large part why Homo sapiens flourished and flourish still, while other early hominins and prehominins bit the dust. This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on one another for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever. The loss of your child weighs heavily on me in this web of connectedness, because he or she is a little bit my own.

We can't leave the past in the past because, the past is who we are. It's like saying I wish I could forget English. So, there is no leaving the past in the past. It doesn't mean the past has to define and dominate everything in the future. The fact that I had a temper in my teens doesn't mean I have to be an angry person for the rest of my life. It just means that I had allot to be angry about but, didn't have the language and the understanding to know what it was and how big it was. I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment which is what is called having a bad temper but, it just means that I underestimated the environment and my anger was telling me how wide and deep child abuse is in society but, I didn't understand that consciously so I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment but, it wasn't. There is almost no amount of anger that's proportionate to the degree of child abuse in the world. The fantasy that you can not be somebody that lived through what you lived through is damaging to yourself and to your capacity to relate to others. People who care about you, people who are going to grow to love you need to know who you are and that you were shaped by what you've experienced for better and for worse. There is a great deal of challenge in talking about these issues. Lots of people in this world have been hurt as children. Most people have been hurt in this world as children and when you talk honestly and openly it's very difficult for people. This is why it continues and continues.If you can get to the truth of what happened if you can understand why people made the decisions they've made even if you dont agree with the reason for those decisions knowing the reasons for those decisions is enormously important in my opinion. The more we know the truth of history the more confidently we can face the future without self blame.

... as Herman (1992b) cogently noted two decades ago, these personality disorders can be iatrogenic, causing harm to individuals as an inadvertent result of the social stigma they carry and the widespread (but not entirely accurate) belief among professionals and insurers that those with Cluster B personality disorders (especially borderline personality disorder[BPD]) cannot be treated successfully, cannot recover, and are a headache to practitioners. For example, the BPD diagnosis continues to be applied predominantly to women often, but not always, in a negative way, usually signifying that they are irrational and beyond help. Describing posttraumatic symptoms as a personality disorder not only can be demoralizing for the client due to its connotation that something is defective with his or her core self (i.e., personality) but also may misdirect the therapist by implying that the patient's core personality should be the focus of treatment rather than trauma-related adaptations that affect but are distinct from the core self. In this way, both therapists and their clients may overlook personality strengths and capacities that are healthy and sources of resilience that can be a basis for building on and enhancing (rather than "fixing" or remaking) the patient's core self and personality.

The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion), outside the world of the common, is “idiotic” by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age. This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter—as it is to the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related. The

Coopersmith’s study with adolescent boys indicates that children develop self-trust, adventuresomeness and the ability to deal with adversity if they are treated with respect and are provided with well-defined standards of values, demands for competence and guidance toward solutions of problems. The development of individual self-reliance is fostered by a well-structured, demanding environment, rather than by largely unlimited permissiveness and freedom to explore in an unfocused way. The research of both Stanley Coopersmith and Morris Rosenberg has led them to believe that pupils with high self-esteem perceive themselves as successful. They are relatively free of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms, and can realistically assess their abilities. They are confident that their efforts will meet with success, while being fully aware of their limitations. Persons with high self-esteem are outgoing and socially successful and expect to be well received. They accept others and others tend to accept them. On the other hand, according to Coopersmith and Rosenberg, pupils with low self-esteem are easily discouraged and sometimes depressed. They feel isolated, unloved and unlovable. They seem incapable of expressing themselves or defending their inadequacies. They are so preoccupied with their self-consciousness and anxiety that their capacity for self-fulfillment can be easily destroyed.4

How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm: Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure. Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. ... Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.

In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.

Low inhibition and anxiety “There was no fear, no worry, no sense of reputation and competition, no envy, none of these things which in varying degrees have always been present in my work.” “A lowered sense of personal danger; I don’t feel threatened anymore, and there is no feeling of my reputation being at stake.” “Although doing well on these problems would be fine, failure to get ahead on them would have been threatening. However, as it turned out, on this afternoon the normal blocks in the way of progress seemed to be absent.” 2. Capacity to restructure problem in a larger context “Looking at the same problem with [psychedelic] materials, I was able to consider it in a much more basic way, because I could form and keep in mind a much broader picture.” “I could handle two or three different ideas at the same time and keep track of each.” “Normally I would overlook many more trivial points for the sake of expediency, but under the drug, time seemed unimportant. I faced every possible questionable issue square in the face.” “Ability to start from the broadest general basis in the beginning.” “I returned to the original problem…. I tried, I think consciously, to think of the problem in its totality, rather than through the devices I had used before.” 3. Enhanced fluency and flexibility of ideation “I began to work fast, almost feverishly, to keep up with the flow of ideas.” “I began to draw …my senses could not keep up with my images …my hand was not fast enough …my eyes were not keen enough…. I was impatient to record the picture (it has not faded one particle). I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of.” “I was very impressed with the ease with which ideas appeared (it was virtually as if the world is made of ideas, and so it is only necessary to examine any part of the world to get an idea). I also got the feeling that creativity is an active process in which you limit yourself and have an objective, so there is a focus about which ideas can cluster and relate.” “I dismissed the original idea entirely, and started to approach the graphic problem in a radically different way. That was when things started to happen. All kinds of different possibilities came to mind….” “And the feeling during this period of profuse production was one of joy and exuberance…. It was the pure fun of doing, inventing, creating, and playing.

There can be a mismatch of attachment expectations. As mentioned earlier, not all relationships have to be attachment-based, but ideally all parties involved in the relationship need to agree about this. Very painful and confusing situations can arise when one person wants a certain relationship to meet their attachment needs, but the other person does not want the same level of involvement, or if a person wants an attachment-based relationship in theory but is practically or situationally unable to provide at that level. When I see clients struggling with attachment anxiety because a partner gives mixed signals or is inconsistent in their responsiveness, support, or availability, it is important to explore whether or not they are expecting this partner to be an attachment figure for them. If they are, then it is paramount for them to dialogue with their partner about whether or not that partner wants to be in the role of an attachment figure for them, as well as honestly assessing if the partner has enough time, capacity and/or space in their life and other relationships to show up to the degree required for being polysecure together. Some people prefer not to define their relationships, preferring to explore and experience them without labels or traditional expectations. As long as this level of ambiguity or relationship fluidity is a match for everyone involved, it can be a very liberating and satisfying way to relate with others. But when someone casts a partner in the role of attachment figure, but that person is unable or unwilling to play the part, much pain, frustration, disappointment, heartache and attachment anxiety ensues.

Chapter I. Ignorance is Strength.   Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.   ‘Julia, are you awake?’ said Winston. ‘Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It’s marvellous.’ He continued reading:   The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her "mysterious and exotic darkness" inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this "dark" side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over "marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth." The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality. Connecting to this archetypal image may result in dreams of a huge serpent, mysterious, cold­blooded, inaccessible to human feeling. Seen as an appendage of the negative mother, it is the phallus stolen from the father and used to guard inviolate purity. Yet this same snake, when seen in relation to the moon, symbolizes the dark, impersonal side of femininity and at the same time its capacity to renew itself. The daughter who can come out from under the skin of the negative mother will not perpetuate her but redeem her. The Black Madonna is the patron saint of abandoned daughters who rejoice in their outcast state and can use it to renew the world.