Remodeling Quotes

Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

When we are grappling with misery and our heart is in a knot, we may well do better to snap back to a new reality, make choices, refine and consolidate our self-image; and remodel the mould of our identity. ("Camera obscura of the mind" )

the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.

Is Tyson okay?" I asked. The question seemed to take my dad by surprise. He's fine. Doing much better than I expected. Though "peanut butter" is a strange battle cry. "You let him fight?" Stop changing the subject! You realize what you are asking me to do? My palace will be destroyed. "And Olympus might be saved." Do you have any idea how long I've worked on remodeling this palace? The game room alone took six hundred years. "Dad—" Very well! It shall be as you say. But my son, pray this works. "I am praying. I'm talking to you, right?" Oh . . . yes. Good point.

My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.

There is just so much excess in terms of the market for self-remodeling. I think most women are perfectly gorgeous and beautiful the way they are,

We enter into solitude first of all to meet our Lord and to be with Him and Him alone. Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. Solitude is a place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world.

Anisha tells me, “A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.

Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

Fans don’t mind him doing a little touch-up work, but Jesus wants complete renovation. Fans come to Jesus thinking tune-up, but Jesus is thinking overhaul. Fans think a little makeup is fine, but Jesus is thinking makeover. Fans think a little decorating is required, but Jesus wants a complete remodel. Fans want Jesus to inspire them, but Jesus wants to interfere with their lives.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

My boyfriend likes to fuck my brains out on our kitchen island. Which tile would you recommend for that?

You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.

Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?

As a result, nature has endowed the human brain with a malleability and flexibility that lets it adapt to the demands of the world it finds itself in. The brain is neither immutable nor static but continuously remodeled by the lives we lead.

Speaking of my things, you weren't actually using that darling little study were you?" she asked sweetly. Her mate's eyes narrowed. "Why?" "Because I am commandeering it for my closet." "Closet? My study is over three hundred square feet." His shocked expression was adorable. "Good point. Do you use the library as well?" He stared unblinking. "Yes, actually I do." "Oh well. I'll need to call in a contractor to remodel the study into functional wardrobe.

But over the last decade, neuroscientists have discovered that, like an eager student, the brain is remarkably responsive to experience. Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not only does your brain find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what you ask it to do.

Tyson okay?” I asked. The question seemed to take my dad by surprise. He’s fine. Doing much better than I expected. Though “peanut butter” is a strange battle cry. “You let him fight?” Stop changing the subject! You realize what you are asking me to do? My palace will be destroyed. “And Olympus might be saved.” Do you have any idea how long I’ve worked on remodeling this palace? The game room alone took six hundred years. “Dad—” Very well! It shall be as you say. But my son, pray this works. “I am praying. I’m talking to you, right?

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash. The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare... The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.

The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.

And let’s face it: all of this remodeling made me feel like I was taking control of something in my life.

He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality.

I wonder why the celebrities remodel themselves with plastic and then proclaim in ads to be ourselves! Well hellooo... Nice example

So strong was the preconception of absolute space and time in the scientific mentality of those days, that Lorentz did not realize the grand transcendence of what he had discovered, and contented himself with remodeling the edifice of Physics -- instead of rebuilding it with a new foundation.

Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open, like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel, and these things happen, these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places, and I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable, once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled, but there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart, and it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks, and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks, and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets.

In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

Time was of no consequence and I just hoped that eternity would start now. The person I used to be had suddenly ceased to exist. I was melting and being remodeled into nothing but the hand he was just holding right now.

Rachel read what she chose, reading with the curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like tables or chairs. In this way she came to conclusions, which had to be remodelled according to the adventures of the day, and were indeed recast as liberally as any one could desire, leaving always a small grain of belief behind them.

But I took a deep breath, and she sat there listening to me across my dirty coffee table, and we talked about community and family and authenticity. It’s easy to talk about it, and really, really hard sometimes to practice it. This is why the door stays closed for so many of us, literally and figuratively. One friend promises she’ll start having people over when they finally have money to remodel. Another says she’d be too nervous that people wouldn’t eat the food she made, so she never makes the invitation. But it isn’t about perfection, and it isn’t about performance. You’ll miss the richest moments in life—the sacred moments when we feel God’s grace and presence through the actual faces and hands of the people we love—if you’re too scared or too ashamed to open the door. I know it’s scary, but throw open the door anyway, even though someone might see you in your terribly ugly half-zip.

And in maintaining such constancy, microbes are crucial. They affect the storage of fat. They help to replenish the linings of the gut and skin, replacing damaged and dying cells with new ones. They ensure the sanctity of the blood-brain barrier-a web of tightly packed cells that lets nutrients and small molecules pass from blood to brain, but bars the way to larger substances and living cells. They even influence the relentless remodeling of skeletons, in which fresh bone is deposited and old stuff is reabsorbed.

I tell my young patients, and my own children, that this is not their life. Not yet. What they are doing now is building a house. It is a house they will have to live in for the rest of their lives, so they’d better get it right. They will be able to remodel, redecorate, and repair. But they can never rebuild. Everything they put into this house, every emotional scar from a bad relationship, every sexual perversion they give in to, every opportunity they secure for themselves, every drug they allow to interrupt the maturing of their growing brains, will be forever in the foundation of that house.

The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.

By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use

...Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballet box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying…

How do you take care of yourself?'' The reality is, for a long time, I didn't. But now I do.

we educators continue to remodel the kitchen, we're continuously surprised that the food does not taste any better.

The girl, indeed, is rare who does not, on getting married, attempt to remodel her husband according to her own ideas.

The past is no man’s clay for remodelling. It is fired the moment it is moulded, alas. I

Sydney was an efficient person, and that extended to showers as well. Me? You could have conducted full demolition and remodeling in the time it took me to shower.

All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them. I

A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.

What a fun way to die—of pure mortification, right in the middle of my sister’s newly remodeled kitchen.

Every day Patti Goss-Simpson brings four fish sticks to school in her Titan Deep Freeze lunch box and every day at 11:52 a.m., because the cafeteria is being remodeled, Patti puts her terrible fish sticks in the terrible microwave at the back of Mr. Bates’s room and presses the terrible beepy buttons and the smell that pours out feels to Seymour like he’s being pressed face-first into a swamp.

The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night's hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell's wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodeled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he know all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances--which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork--were of the right measure.

I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream." "I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge.

And it’s not for personal gain, it’s for the good of the community. You’d be better off letting Ronald Crump turn the lighthouse into one of his towers than letting Hank Wayne so much as remodel a bathroom.

What men always seem to ignore is that until Eve arrived, Adam didn't even have his own apartment. He'd never tasted beer, and there was no place to get a decent hamburger. He slept in the dirt, and was so oblivious he didn't even realize he was naked. Even worse, he didn't seem to notice that Eve was naked, either.

It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but they fell short in teaching me how to trust my instincts, and how to stop thinking with my educated brain and more with my kneecaps and butt cheeks.

The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. The professional steels himself at the start of a project, reminding himself it is the Iditarod, not the sixty-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull in to Nome.

As in Plato, Christian love is love stripped of its essential particularity, its focus on a specific other person. Love is remodeled into a general attitude toward a much larger, even infinite class of objects. Caritas and agape are beautiful, but they are not related to or derived from the kinds of love that people need. Although I would like to live in a world in which everyone radiates benevolence toward everyone else, I would rather live in a world in which there was at least one person who loved me specifically, and whom I loved in return.

Positive growth can also be compared to a remodeling project. The initial result is horrendous. You find yourself surrounded by excruciating noise, suffocating dust, and bedlam. Only when it is well under way do the benefits start to unfold. Similarly, the initial response to a physical or spiritual exercise program is frequently an intense desire to stop. But after persevering for a while, the positive emotions and benefits kick in. Growth and achievement that result from struggle, diligence, and sacrifice feel very good to us and make us feel happy down the road.

Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.

And I don't have a present for you.' 'A present?' said Artemis. 'Of course,' sang his mother, spinning him around. 'Don't you know what day it is?' 'Day?' 'It's Christmas Day, you silly boy. Christmas Day! Presents are traditional, are they not?' Yes, thought Artemis. Traditional. San D'Klass. […] 'Now Arty, I want to know everything. First of all, what happened here?' 'Remodeling,' said Artemis. 'The old doorway was riddled with damp.' Angeline frowned, completely unconvinced. 'I see. And how about school? Have you decided on a career?' While his mouth answered these everyday questions, Artemis's mind was in turmoil. He was a boy again. His life was going to change utterly. His plans would have to be much more devious than usual if they were to escape his mother's attention. But it would be worth it. Angeline Fowl was wrong. She had brought him a Christmas present.

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Memories are peculiar...You think the past is there, all fixed and stable, but it is really chock full of surprises and endlessly susceptible to change...So maybe it is true that we are constantly rewriting our past; they are not something fixed and unchangeable for all time. There is a basic structure, of course, a canvas stretched across boards, which cannot be remodeled at will, but the surface of that canvas can be shaded, rearranged, touched up, continually worked on to correspond to the needs of the present. In fact, the present moment is largely the focal point from which you shape the direction of your future and juggle the implications of your past.

The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. The

And when I realized that the paint Had camouflaged an ancient door, And that beneath the smooth shellac There lay a trampled hardwood floor, I looked about through angry tears. For that remodeled house was all That I could ever own. And while I gazed around the shadowed hall My mouth curved in a bitter smile: I knew I had lived there before.

RETROSPECTIVE‌ FALSIFICATION «D. H. Rawcliffe coined this term to refer to the process of telling a story that is factual to some extent, but which gets distorted and falsified over time by retelling it with various embellishments. The embellishments may include speculations, conflating events that occurred at different times or in different places, and the incorporation of material without regard for accuracy or plausibility. The overriding force that drives the story is to find or invent details that fit with a desired outcome. …The original story gets remodeled with favorable points being emphasized and unfavorable ones being dropped. The distorted and false version becomes a memory and record of a remarkable tale.»

The hobbies and personal passions we cultivate on our own—whether studying history, creating ink pen doodles, speculating in stocks and shares, playing the piano, or gardening—play a crucial role in shaping meaning in our lives. The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates.

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was she not the young girl that I had seen for the first time at Balbec, with her bold, laughing eyes under her jockey-cap, still unknown to me, thin as a cut-out figure silhouetted on the waves? These effigies, stored intact in the memory, when we return to them, astonish us by their lack of resemblance to the being we know now; we understand then how they are daily, painstakingly remodeled by habit.

Go up along the eastern side of Lake Michigan, steer northeast when the land bends away at Point Betsie, and you come before long to Sleeping Bear Point–an incredible flat-topped sand dune rising five hundred feet above the level of the lake and going north for two miles or more. It looks out over the dark water and the islands that lie just offshore, and in the late afternoon the sunlight strikes it and the golden sand turns white, with a pink overlay when the light is just so, and little cloud shadows slide along its face, blue-gray as evening sets in. Sleeping Bear looks eternal, although it is not; this lake took its present shape no more than two or three thousand years ago, and Sleeping Bear is slowly drifting off to the east as the wind shifts its grains of sand, swirling them up one side and dropping them on the other; in a few centuries it will be very different, if indeed it is there at all. Yet if this is a reminder that this part of the earth is still being remodeled it is also a hint that the spirit back of the remodeling may be worth knowing. In the way this shining dune looks west toward the storms and the sunsets there is a profound serenity, an unworried affirmation that comes from seeing beyond time and mischance. A woman I know says that to look at the Sleeping Bear late in the day is to feel the same emotion that comes when you listen to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and she is entirely right. The message is the same. The only trouble is that you have to compose a planet, or great music, to say it persuasively. Maybe man–some men, anyway–was made in the image of God, after all.

It is natural for a man to desire what he reckons better than that which he has already, and be satisfied with nothing which lacks that special quality which he misses. Thus, if it is for her beauty that he loves his wife, he will cast longing eyes after a fairer woman. If he is clad in a rich garment, he will covet a costlier one; and no matter how rich he may be he will envy a man richer than himself. Do we not see people every day, endowed with vast estates, who keep on joining field to field, dreaming of wider boundaries for their lands? Those who dwell in palaces are ever adding house to house, continually building up and tearing down, remodeling and changing. Men in high places are driven by insatiable ambition to clutch at still greater prizes. And nowhere is there any final satisfaction, because nothing there can be defined as absolutely the best or highest. But it is natural that nothing should content a man's desires but the very best, as he reckons it. Is it not, then, mad folly always to be craving for things which can never quiet our longings, much less satisfy them? No matter how many such things one has, he is always lusting after what he has not; never at peace, he sighs for new possessions.

When I interviewed with the Chief of Family Medicine at a large medical corporation on the West Coast, he explained that, since he was part of a team of people who arranged for pharmaceutical companies to issue cash grants, he was in a position to offer me a particularly enticing salary. “What are the grants for?” I asked. “We have a quality improvement program that tracks physician prescribing patterns. We call it ‘quality’ but it’s really about money.” And that’s all it’s about. It works like this. In his organization, any patient with LDL cholesterol over 100 is put on a cholesterol-lowering medication. Any person with a blood pressure higher than 140/90 is put on a blood pressure medication. Any person with “low bone density” is put on a bone-remodeling inhibitor. And so on. The doctors who prescribe the most get big bonuses. Those who prescribe the least get fired. With a hint of incredulousness in his voice, he explained, “So far, every time we’ve asked for funding for our program, the drug companies give it to us.” If this is where healthcare is headed, then these hybrid physicians-executives will instinctively turn their gaze to our children and invent more creative methods to bulldoze an entire generation into the bottomless pit of chronic disease.

Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodelled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First is was topple them, now it's install them. And the whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility--it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. In a sense, it's all part of the same machine.

It is a necessary part of a rule of life to cherish our bodies, care for them, and see the beauty in their intricate design. But too often, most of us - men and women both - come to dislike them as the years pass, or at the very least to feel that they need major remodeling... We fight to stave off aging or at least to disguise it. Yet in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds us of the sanctity of the body (1 Cor. 6:19-20)...

Coats of paint don't make this house a home But with every room we paint, we are changing it to our own. Piece by piece, wall by wall, we build A place of peace for us all until The house is a picture of the love we feel.

So, if you suddenly experienced a financial windfall, you would ultimately be much happier if you spent the money on numerous pleasant, mood-boosting things occurring on a day-to-day or weekly basis—a daily lunch of expensive sushi, a weekly massage, a regular delivery of fresh flowers, or Sunday-morning calls to your best friend in Europe—rather than spend it all on a single big-ticket item that you believe you would really love, like a new top-of-the-line Jaguar or the remodeling of a bathroom with hand-painted tile.

One time I was painting a sign / graphics on a temporary wall over a store front being remodeled in a mall. This was in the old days, before digital graphics, when everything was hand painted. A guy watched me for a while and then asked : "Isn't that just a temporary wall?" "Yes", I replied. And he said: "They're paying you, probably a lot of money, to paint that on a temporary wall?" I said: " You know, this whole mall is temporary ... some day this will all be gone." He got sort of a frightened look on his face and walked awa

As adolescence begins, the second genetically programmed growth of synapses is followed by a long decade of brain remodeling that involves the programmed destruction of neurons and their connections that are not being used. The parcellation process in which connections are pruned is thought to be a 'use -it-or-lose-it' neural reshaping that is exacerbated by stress. Such a period of brain change is also marked by vulnerability , as underlying neural deficits, unrealized before adolescence, may becomes exposed during the pruning process.

And she withdraws through the double, ceiling-high doors, which are really the only original feature left in this heavily converted apartment. And isn't the same true of me? All that was once me has been dispersed through the flux of a thousand thousand experiences. The 'I' has been partitioned off, remodelled, resurfaced and re-insulated, so that it cannot even remember what the original dados or mouldings were like. They say ninety per cent of house dust is dead human skin – and that's me. Dust on a windowsill, in a converted apartment, in a foreign city.

the hippocampus is perhaps the central organ in the brain responsible for processing sensory data and acting as a gateway for inflows. As Kisley et al. note: “The cholinergic innervation of the hippocampus, which is crucial for intact sensory gating, exhibits extensive remodeling during pre- and early postnatal development.”4 It displays a great deal of plasticity in response to incoming sensory flows; the more it works with meaning and the more sensory input it is sensitive to, the more it shifts its neural structure as it sensorally interacts with the world.

The nature of this steel is odd. I found that as I increased its weight little by little, the effect was like a pair of scales: the bulk of muscles placed, as it were, on the other pan increased proportionately, as though the steel had a duty to maintain a strict balance between the two. Little by little, moreover, the properties of my muscles came increasingly to resemble those of the steel. This slow development, I found, was remarkably similar to the process of education, which remodels the brain intellectually by feeding it with progressively more difficult matter.

Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral

Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power's comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.

Speak to me about power. What is it?” I do believe I’m being out-Cambridged. “You want me to discuss power? Right here and now?” Her shapely head tilts. “No time except the present.” “Okay.” Only for a ten. “Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn’t, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would.” Immaculée Constantin is unreadable. “How?” “By coercion and reward. Carrots and sticks, though in bad light one looks much like the other. Coercion is predicated upon the fear of violence or suffering. ‘Obey, or you’ll regret it.’ Tenth-century Danes exacted tribute by it; the cohesion of the Warsaw Pact rested upon it; and playground bullies rule by it. Law and order relies upon it. That’s why we bang up criminals and why even democracies seek to monopolize force.” Immaculée Constantin watches my face as I talk; it’s thrilling and distracting. “Reward works by promising ‘Obey and benefit.’ This dynamic is at work in, let’s say, the positioning of NATO bases in nonmember states, dog training, and putting up with a shitty job for your working life. How am I doing?” Security Goblin’s sneeze booms through the chapel. “You scratch the surface,” says Immaculée Constantin. I feel lust and annoyance. “Scratch deeper, then.” She brushes a tuft of fluff off her glove and appears to address her hand: “Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ That thought sickens me, Hugo Lamb, like nothing else. Doesn’t it sicken you?

Seen this way, the ´origins of farming´ start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can´t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it´s abundantly clear that womenś work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What´s more, it was all carried out in way that made radical inequality and extremely unlikely outcome.

To summarize all of this, we have the following: (1) Archaeologists discovered 7 pits for boats around the Great Pyramid. (2) The longest of which is 44 meters; it is called the solar barque. (3) That boat (hypothetically speaking) needs [230/44]*4 steps to complete one single rotation (which looks like a square around the pyramid). (4) It therefore covers a distance which equals to the pyramid's height if it completes seven full rotations around the pyramid's base. (5) This mimics the application of Kaaba; even though the Kaaba has no dimensional merit for its structure (according to pure orthodox Islamic tradition) but the number seven is dominant and serves as an evidence that Egypt tried to plagiarize Adam's heritage and remodeled its theology accordingly.

Just spending time together is not enough, he said. The sorts of activities you engage in are vital. Graham concluded you are driven to grow, to expand, to add to your abilities and knowledge. When you satisfy this motivation for self-expansion by incorporating aspects of your romantic partner or friend into your own skills, philosophies and self, it does more to strengthen your bond than any other act of love. This opens the door to one of the best things about misattribution of emotion. If, like those in the study, you persevere through a challenge - be it remodeling a kitchen yourself or learning how to dance the Dougie - that glowing feeling of becoming wiser, that buoyant sense of self-expansion, will be partially misattributed to the presence of the other person.

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter desperation of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter desperation of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

The recent report that Fosamax causes jawbone deterioration is evidence that this drug, and likely all bisphosphonates, cause brittle bones. Fosamax destroys osteoclasts, the cells that remodel bone (sculpt the bone as new bone forms). Fosamax is therefore supposed to prevent bone breakdown—but the drug companies did not reckon with the bone-remodeling function of the osteoclast. X-rays of bones under the influence of Fosamax may look like they have more calcium but without the remodeling capacity the bones’ internal structure is in disarray, and bones are more brittle, and may actually break more easily. When you read the scientific literature, there is ample evidence that many nutrients, especially magnesium, play a crucial role in bone development. Much animal research, for example, proves that magnesium depletion alters bone and mineral metabolism, which results in bone loss and osteoporosis.

she’d done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. It happens every time: a forty-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel becomes a seventy-five-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel (because everyone comes to believe that small differences make big differences), becomes a new exit to the garden (to bring more light into the enhanced kitchen), becomes a new bathroom (if you’re already sealing off the floor for work…), becomes stupidly rewiring the house to be smart (so you can control the music in the kitchen with your phone), becomes passive-aggression over whether the new bookshelves should be on legs (to reveal the inlaid floor borders), becomes aggressive-aggression whose origin can no longer be remembered. One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

she’d done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. It happens every time: a forty-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel becomes a seventy-five-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel (because everyone comes to believe that small differences make big differences), becomes a new exit to the garden (to bring more light into the enhanced kitchen), becomes a new bathroom (if you’re already sealing off the floor for work …), becomes stupidly rewiring the house to be smart (so you can control the music in the kitchen with your phone), becomes passive-aggression over whether the new bookshelves should be on legs (to reveal the inlaid floor borders), becomes aggressive-aggression whose origin can no longer be remembered. One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

All around [the Centre Pompidou and Beauborg Museum], the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone—remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design—but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory—a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger). The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission, political deterrence.

If too little glucose is available in your blood, which is what happens when you follow a low - carbohydrate diet, then your liver hoards glucose so that your brain, which needs glucose to function, doesn't starve. While your body will start to break down fat to use as fuel, your brain can't run that way for long, and it will send out the Bat-Signal for more calories. That's the reason why when you skip a meal or go too long between meals, you find yourself running to the nearest donut or bag of chips.

Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat, and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.” Immaculée Constantin now looks up at me. “Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ That thought sickens me, Hugo Lamb, like nothing else. Doesn’t it sicken you?

We are under the sway of a surgical compulsion that seeks to excise negative characteristics and remodel things synthetically into ideal forms. Cosmetic surgery: a face's chance configuration, its beauty or ugliness, its distinctive traits, its negative traits - all these have to be corrected, so as to produce something more beautiful than beautiful: an ideal face, a surgical face. [...] Even the sex to which we belong - that small portion of destiny still remaining to us, that minimum of fatality and otherness -will be changeable at will. Not to mention cosmetic surgery as applied to green spaces, to nature in general, to genes, to events, to history (e.g. the French Revolution revised and corrected - given a facelift under the banner of human rights). Everything has to become postsynchable according to criteria of optimal convenience and compatibility. This inhuman formalization of face, speech, sex, body, will and public opinion is a tendency everywhere in evidence. Every last glimmer of fate and negativity has to be expunged in favour of something resembling the smile of a corpse in a funeral home...

Bernadette flew up to look at houses. She called to say she had found the perfect place, the Straight Gate School for Girls, in Queen Anne. To anyone else, a crumbling reform school might seem an odd place to call home. But this was Bernadette, and she was enthusiastic. Bernadette and her enthusiasm were like a hippo and water: get between them and you’ll be trampled to death. We moved to Seattle. I was swallowed whole by Microsoft. Bernadette became pregnant and had the first of a series of miscarriages. After three years, she passed the first term. At the beginning of her second term, she was put on bed rest. The house, which was a blank canvas on which Bernadette was to work her magic, understandably languished. There were leaks, strange drafts, and the occasional weed pushing up through a floorboard. My concern was for Bernadette’s health—she didn’t need the stress of a remodel, she needed to stay put—so we wore parkas inside, rotated spaghetti pots when it rained, and kept a pair of pruning shears in a vase in the living room. It felt romantic. Our daughter, Bee, was born prematurely. She came out blue. She was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome.

His home was a part of him, an externalized expression of his will, for upon his inherited Dutch Manor house he had superimposed the Gothic magnificence which he desired. He had been attracted by the formulations of Andrew Downing, the young landscape architect who lived on the river at Newburgh and whose directions for building "romantic and picturesque villas" were changing the countryside; but it was not in Nicholas to accept another's ideas, and when five years ago he had remodeled the old Van Ryn homestead, he had used Downing simply as a guide. To the original ten rooms he had added twenty more, the gables and turrets, and the one high tower. The result, though reminiscent of a German Schloss on the Rhine, crossed with Tudor English and interwoven with pure fantasy, was nevertheless Hudson River American and not unsuited to its setting. The Dragonwyck gardens were as much as an expression of Nicholas' personality as was the mansion, for here, he had subdued Nature to a stylized ornateness. Between the untouched grove of hemlocks to the south and the slope of a rocky hill half a mile to the north he had created along the river an artificial and exotic beauty. To Miranda it was overpowering, and she felt dazed as they mounted marble steps from the landing. She was but vaguely conscious of the rose gardens and their pervasive scent, of small Greek temples set beneath weeping willows, of rock pavilions, violet-bordered fountains, and waterfalls.

Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46. At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie[1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, "the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler," whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, "creating an SS vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."   "In

Easing Your Worries I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? —MATTHEW 6:25     I don’t know how things are in your world, but I can tell you that in Southern California we live in an age of anxiety. My neighbors and I have it much easier than our parents, but we certainly are much uneasier than our parents were. We seem to be anxious about temporal things, more so than past generations. They never worried about whether they were eating at the new vogue eatery, vacationing at the best island hotel with the largest pool, wearing the most prestigious label, or keeping their abs in shape. I watched the previous generation closely; they wanted a home for their families, a car that ran efficiently, and a job that provided for their basic needs. It seems our main concerns and drives today are physical and earth possessed. A large number of people actually believe that if they have the best food, clothing, education, house, and trainer, they have arrived. What else could one want for a perfect life? Our culture actually places more importance on the body and what we do with it than ever before in modern history. Thus we have created a mind set that causes us as women to be more concerned with life’s accommodations along life’s journey than with our final destination. Many women are going through their lives with a vast vacuum on the inside. In fact, the woman that you might sometimes envy because of her finely dressed family and newly remodeled kitchen is probably spending most of her day anxious and unsatisfied. Maybe that woman is you? This thing called life is more important than food, and the body is more important than what we wear. All the tangible distractions don’t satisfy the soul; they have become cheap substitutes for our spiritual wholeness and well-being. Let Christ help you overcome the anxieties of life. • Stop chasing the temporal things of life. Seek the kingdom of God as it is revealed in Jesus. Cast all your cares on Him. • Take your eyes off yourself and focus them on God first. Much of our anxieties are rooted in our self-centeredness. • Spend most of your prayer time praying for others.

the bourgeoisie wanted to insert something more than just the negative law of “this is not yours” between the worker and the production apparatus he had in his hands. A supplementary code was needed that complements this law and gets it to work: the worker himself had to be moralized. When he is told: “You are only your labor-power and I have paid the market price for it,”‡ and when so much wealth is put in his hands, it is necessary to inject into the relationship between the worker and what he is working on a whole series of obligations and constraints that overlay the law of wages, which is apparently the simple law of the market.§ The wage contract must be accompanied by a coercion that is like its validity clause: the working class must be “regenerated,” “moralized.” Thus the transfer of the penitentiary takes place with one social class applying it to another: it is in this class relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that the condensed and remodeled penitentiary system begins to function; it will be a political instrument of the control and maintenance of relations of production. Fourth, something more is needed for this supplementary code to function effectively and for the delinquent actually to appear as a social enemy: the actual separation of delinquents from non-delinquents within those lower strata practicing illegalism. The great continuous mass of economico-political illegalism, going from common law crime to political revolt, must be broken up and the purely delinquent must be placed on one side, and those free of delinquency, who may be called non-delinquent, on the other. Thus, the bourgeoisie has no great wish to suppress delinquency.18 The main objective of the penal system is breaking this continuum of lower-class illegalism and the organization of a world of delinquency. There are two instruments for this. On the one hand, an ideological instrument: the theory of the delinquent as social enemy. This is no longer someone who struggles against the law, who wishes to evade power, but someone who is at war with every member of society. And the suddenly monstrous face the criminal assumes at the end of the eighteenth century, in literature and in penal theorists, corresponds to this need to break lower-class illegalism

For centuries, Eastern religions have been telling us that it’s our egos that trap us in suffering. In the 5th century, Indian adept Vasubandu wrote, “So long as you grasp at the self, you stay bound to the world of suffering.” These spiritual traditions emphasize meditation, contemplation, altruistic service, and compassion as ways to escape the ego. Our emotions and thoughts become less “sticky” and “I, me, mine” “lose their self-hypnotic power.” That’s how we stop selfing. Once we drop our identification with the ego-self enshrined in the prefrontal cortex and enter Bliss Brain, we make the subject-object shift. We can ask ourselves, “If I’m not my thoughts, and I’m the one thinking those thoughts, then who might I be?” This perspective takes us out of selfing and into the present moment. In the meditative present, we can connect with the great nonlocal field of consciousness. Different traditions have different names for it: the Tao, the Anima Mundi, the Universal Mind, God, the All That Is. We then see our local self as the object. With this view from the mountaintop, we’re able to perceive new possibilities of what we might become, this time from the perspective of oneness with the universe. Free of the drag of the ego, uncoupled from the chatter of the demon, the conditioned personalities we inherited from our history and past experiences no longer confine our sense of self.

It is natural for a man to desire what he reckons better than that which he has already, and be satisfied with nothing which lacks that special quality which he misses. Thus, if it is for her beauty that he loves his wife, he will cast longing eyes after a fairer woman. If he is clad in a rich garment, he will covet a costlier one; and no matter how rich he may be he will envy a man richer than himself. Do we not see people every day, endowed with vast estates, who keep on joining field to field, dreaming of wider boundaries for their lands? Those who dwell in palaces are ever adding house to house, continually building up and tearing down, remodeling and changing. Men in high places are driven by insatiable ambition to clutch at still greater prizes. And nowhere is there any final satisfaction, because nothing there can be defined as absolutely the best or highest. But it is natural that nothing should content a man's desires but the very best, as he reckons it. Is it not, then, mad folly always to be craving for things which can never quiet our longings, much less satisfy them? No matter how many such things one has, he is always lusting after what he has not; never at peace, he sighs for new possessions. Discontented, he spends himself in fruitless toil, and finds only weariness in the evanescent and unreal pleasures of the world. In his greediness, he counts all that he has clutched as nothing in comparison with what is beyond his grasp, and loses all pleasure in his actual possessions by longing after what he has not, yet covets. No man can ever hope to own all things. Even the little one does possess is got only with toil and is held in fear; since each is certain to lose what he hath when God's day, appointed though unrevealed. shall come. But the perverted will struggles towards the ultimate good by devious ways, yearning after satisfaction, yet led astray by vanity and deceived by wickedness. Ah, if you wish to attain to the consummation of all desire, so that nothing unfulfilled will be left, why weary yourself with fruitless efforts, running hither and thither, only to die long before the goal is reached? It is so that these impious ones wander in a circle, longing after something to gratify their yearnings, yet madly rejecting that which alone can bring them to their desired end, not by exhaustion but by attainment. They wear themselves out in vain travail, without reaching their blessed consummation, because they delight in creatures, not in the Creator. They want to traverse creation, trying all things one by one, rather than think of coming to him who is Lord of all. And if their utmost longing were realized, so that they should have all the world for their own, yet without possessing him who is the Author of all being, then the same law of their desires would make them contemn what they had and restlessly seek him whom they still lacked, that is, God himself.

posttraumatic growth. Many people who suffer shattering experiences are scarred for life, with little hope of recovery. But for others, shattering experiences prompt them to face their fears, transcend the horrors of the past, and become resilient. PTSD is not a life sentence. POSTTRAUMATIC GROWTH While PTSD grabs the headlines, news stories about posttraumatic growth are rare. Up to two thirds of those who experience traumatic events do not develop PTSD. This estimate is based on studies of the mental health of people who have undergone similar experiences. Studies of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan show this two-thirds to one-third split. What’s the difference between the two groups? Research reveals a correlation between negative childhood events and the development of adult PTSD. Yet some people emerge from miserable childhoods stronger and more resilient than their peers. Adversity can sometimes make us even stronger than we might have been had we not suffered it. Research shows that people who experience a traumatic event but are then able to process and integrate the experience are more resilient than those who don’t experience such an event. Such people are even better prepared for future adversity. When you’re exposed to a stressor and successfully regulate your brain’s fight-or-flight response, you increase the neural connections associated with handling trauma, as we saw in Chapter 6. Neural plasticity works in your favor. You increase the size of the signaling pathways in your nervous system that handle recovery from stress. These larger and improved signaling pathways equip you to handle future stress better, making you more resilient in the face of life’s upsets and problems.

The rats that Marian Diamond studied had either an enriched or an impoverished environment. That changed their brain state. If you’re surrounded by a nurturing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual environment, you’re in one brain state. If you’re surrounded by danger, uncertainty, and hostility, you’re in a quite different brain state. Brain states, along with mental, emotional, and spiritual states, run the gamut. When the brain’s Enlightenment Circuit is turned on, you’re in a happy and positive state. When the Default Mode Network (DMN) of Chapter 2 predominates, you’re in a negative and stressed state. State Progression Cognitive psychologist Michael Hall has been fascinated by human potential for over 40 years. He has studied the most advanced methods, authored more than 30 books on the topic, and mapped the stages by which people change. Unpleasant experiences are what usually motivate us to change. These involve mental, emotional, or spiritual states. Examples of such states are despair, stagnation, anger, or resentment. Hall calls these “unresourceful” states. We can cultivate resourceful states, such as joy, empowerment, mastery, and contentment. To describe the movement of a person from an unresourceful to a resourceful state, Hall uses the term “state progression.” Hall’s “state progression” model has several steps: Identify the unresourceful state. Identify the desired state. Countercondition dysfunctional behavioral patterns that maintain the unresourceful state. Activate change toward the desired state. Experience the target state. Repeat the experience of the desired state. Condition new behaviors that reinforce the desired state. That’s the promise of directing your attention consciously rather than defaulting to the brain’s negativity bias. Attention sustained over time produces state progression and triggers neural plasticity. If you focus on positive beliefs and thoughts repeatedly, bringing your mind and focus back to the good, you then use attention in the service of positive neural plasticity. When we have practiced sufficiently to be able to maintain this focus, we achieve a condition that Hall calls positive state stability. Our minds become stable in that new state. Their default setting is no longer to focus on the negative. The brain’s negativity bias is no longer hijacking our attention and directing it toward the negative things that are happening, either in our own lives or in the world. We have moved through the stages of state progression to positive state stability.