Resting Mode Quotes

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

Silence has always been my default mode—my best defense against the rest of the world.

Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow, ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days.

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.

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

It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man. Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdrew in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled.

To be a human being means to be lonely.To go on becoming a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness.

words of existential psychotherapist Irwin Yalom: To be human is to be lonely. To become a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness. When we are willing to accept loneliness as a normal, recurring experience of life, we can learn to integrate it more graciously. We do not have to make loneliness or any other “negative” emotion more painful by adding shame, self-abandonment, or self-loathing to it.

I want somebody to share Share the rest of my life Share my innermost thoughts Know my intimate details Someone who'll stand by my side And give me support And in return She'll get my support She will listen to me When I want to speak About the world we live in And life in general Though my views may be wrong They may even be perverted She'll hear me out And won't easily be converted To my way of thinking

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they’re almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn’t stealthily dump core in your shoes.)

I asked the Warden why he never left this valley, why he didn’t get away from the prison and me and the ignorant young guards and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used. He said, “I would only meet more people.” “You don’t like any kind of people?” I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that. “I wish I had been born a bird instead,” he said. “I wish we had all been born birds instead.

You may want your learning to progress more quickly—to somehow command your diffuse mode to assimilate new ideas faster. But compare it to exercise. Constantly lifting weights won’t make your muscles any bigger— your muscles need time to rest and grow before you use them again.

I have to own up and say that, much as I love my PowerBook, which now does about 97.8 percent of what I used to use the lumbering old desktop dinosaurs for, I’ve given up trying to use it on planes. Yes, yes, I know that there are sorts of power-user strategies you can use to extend your battery life—dimming modes, RAM disks, processor-resting, and so on—but the point is that I really can’t be bothered. I’m perfectly capable of just reading the in-flight magazine if I want to be irritated.

Imagination is one of the most powerful modes of resistance that oppressed and exploited folks can do and use. —bell hooks

The painter does not rest with a brush on the canvas. And so it is with Vim. Normal mode is the natural resting state. The clue is in the name, really.

Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this, each of them—as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds—though in discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as every one did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily.

Voici les idées de cette génération qui avait connu dans son enfance les privations de la guerre, qui avait eu vingt ans à la Libération; voici le monde qu'ils souhaitaient léguer à leurs enfants. La femme reste à la maison et tient son ménage (mais elle est très aidée par les appareils électroménagers; elle a beaucoup de temps à consacrer à sa famille). L'homme travaille à l'extérieur (mais la robotisation fait qu'il travaille moins longtemps, et que son travail est moins dur). Les couples sont fidèles et heureux; ils vivent dans des maisons agréables en dehors des villes (les banlieues). Pendant leurs moments de loisir ils s'adonnent à l'artisanat, au jardinage, aux beaux-arts. À moins qu'ils ne préfèrent voyager, découvrir les modes de vie et les cultures d'autres régions, d'autres pays.

(...) The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network. The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze. Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material. These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold. The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing.

Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

It's like any time a white friend suggests Korean barbecue. Or when I see a Food Network special where some tattooed white dude with a nineteenth-century-looking beard-and-mustache combo introduces viewers to this kimchi al pastor bánh mì monstrosity he peddles from a food truck that sends out location tweets. It's like when white people tell me how much they love kimchee and bull-go-ghee, and the words just roll off their tongues as if there exists nothing irreconcilable between the two languages. It's like, don't touch my shit. It's difficult to articulate because I know it's not rational. But as a bilingual immigrant from Korea, as someone who code-switches between Korean and English daily while running errands or going to the supermarket, not to mention the second-nature combination of the languages that I'll speak with my parents and siblings, switching on and switching off these at times unfeasibly different sounds, dialects, grammatical structures? It's fucking irritating. I don't want to be stingy about who gets to enjoy all these fermented wonders -- I'm glad the stigma around our stinky wares is dissolving away. But when my husband brings me a plate of food he made out of guesswork with a list of ingredients I've curated over the years of my burgeoning adulthood with the implicit help of my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's mother who taught me the patience of peeling dozens of garlic cloves in a sitting with bare hands, it puts me in snap-me-pff-a-hickory-switch mode.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some

XIX. Do you retire to these quieter, safer, greater things! Think you that it is just the same whether you are concerned in having corn from oversea poured into the granaries, unhurt either by the dishonesty or the neglect of those who transport it, in seeing that it does not become heated and spoiled by collecting moisture and tallies in weight and measure, or whether you enter upon these sacred and lofty studies with the purpose of discovering what substance, what pleasure, what mode of life, what shape God has; what fate awaits your soul; where Nature lays us to rest When we are freed from the body; what the principle is that upholds all the heaviest matter in the centre of this world, suspends the light on high, carries fire to the topmost part, summons the stars to their proper changes—and ether matters, in turn, full of mighty wonders? You really must leave the ground and turn your mind's eye upon these things! Now while the blood is hot, we must enter with brisk step upon the better course. In this kind of life there awaits much that is good to know—the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, knowledge of living and dying, and a life of deep repose.

The River is a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded people that includes everyone from low-stakes poker pros just trying to grind out a living to crypto kings and venture-capital billionaires. It is a way of thinking and a mode of life. People don’t know very much about the River, but they should. Most Riverians aren’t rich and powerful. But rich and powerful people are disproportionately likely to be Riverians compared to the rest of the population.

Ideologically mindfulness serves very well the neoliberal-capitalist’s construction of reality which softly dictates that one must deny the roots of personal and social issues. We are manipulated into the self-repair mode, but what is actually broken is the system. Therein, the problem we face is our own selves and not a world based on oppressive values which leave us feeling oppressed and powerless. You must be meditation 24/7 for the rest of your life to deny that meditation alone won’t house the homeless, will not end contemporary social and physical apartheid. It will not provide free health care to all in the community and it will end social exclusion. Said that, yes, you might feel that you are feeling less anxious, but only because you are being ‘drugged’ and you are being denied your full humanity. We need to feel more, sympathise more and act moved by our love for humanity – those who are outside of ourselves. Here’s something that you will not find in a self-help book that might help you: the problem is the oppressive system and not you. It is the system that violates us by imposing since birth to us that there is one way to be and feel human. And it involves heavily looking good, competing against others and to compete against your own self – the system says that we must be functional machines to fulfil the system’s need. Our body is controlled and our minds, our being controlled via instruments of normalisation such as self-help books and mindfulness meditation.

Stop being an adrenalin junkie. Yes, I’m talking to you Miss I-can-do-everything-and-I-can-do-it-faster-and-better-than-you. Slow down. Delegate. Your new motto is Rest is Radical. Why? When you survive on adrenalin, you really are surviving, not thriving. Yes, we no longer live in caves, but our bodies haven’t changed, so when your train is late or you have a hectic day at work, your body responds by going into fight or flight mode. It’s the modern-day equivalent of encountering a saber-tooth tiger.

Among the various conflicting modes of writing history, there would seem to be two grand practical distinctions, under which all the rest must subordinately range. By the one mode, all contemporaneous circumstances, facts, and events must be set down contemporaneously; by the other, they are only to be set down as the general stream of the narrative shall dictate; for matters which are kindred in time, may be very irrelative in themselves. I elect neither of these; I am careless of either; both are well enough in their way; I write precisely as I please.

That Archangel, now, " Miriam continued; "how fair he looks, with his unruffled wings, with his unhacked sword, and clad in his bright armor, and that exquisitely fitting sky-blue tunic, cut in the latest Paradisiacal mode! What a dainty air of the first celestial society! With what half-scornful delicacy he sets his prettily sandaled foot on the head of his prostrate foe! But, is it thus that virtue looks the moment after its death struggle with evil? No, no; I could have told Guido better. A full third of the Archangel's feathers should have been torn from his wings; the rest all ruffled, till they looked like Satan's own! His sword should be streaming with blood, and perhaps broken half-way to the hilt; his armor crushed, his robes rent, his breast gory; a bleeding gash on his brow, cutting right across the stern scowl of battle! He should press his foot down upon the old serpent, as if his very soul depended upon it, feeling him squirm mightily, and doubting whether the fight were half over yet, and how the victory might turn! And, with all this fierceness, this grimness, this unutterable horror, there should be something high, tender, and holy in Michael's eyes, and around his mouth.

Progress is man’s mode of existence. The general life of the human race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

Ces dernières décennies, le référendum a souvent été mis en avant comme un moyen efficace de réformer la démocratie. À une époque où la société s’individualise et où la société civile pèse moins lourd qu’autrefois, il a paru utile à beaucoup d’observateurs de demander directement à la population son avis sur des dossiers controversés. Les référendums sur la Constitution européenne aux Pays-Bas, en France et en Irlande ont quelque peu refroidi le zèle en faveur de ce mode de décision. Pourtant, il bénéficie encore d’une grande popularité, comme en témoignent les référendums projetés sur l’autonomie de la Catalogne et de l’Écosse, et sur le retrait du Royaume-Uni de l’Union européenne. Les référendums et la démocratie délibérative sont apparentés dans la mesure où, dans un cas comme dans l’autre, le citoyen ordinaire est consulté, mais les mécanismes sont pour le reste totalement opposés : lors d’un référendum, on demande à tout le monde de voter sur un sujet à propos duquel, le plus souvent, peu de gens sont informés ; lors d’un projet délibératif, on demande à un échantillon représentatif de la population de délibérer sur un sujet à propos duquel il obtient le plus d’informations possible. Lors d’un référendum, les gens réagissent encore très souvent avec leurs tripes ; lors d’une délibération, c’est une opinion publique éclairée qui s’exprime.

The emotion of love is an affective emotion, directly reacting to goodness, rather than an aggressive one, reacting to challenge. Not only our so-called natural ability to grow and propagate exemplify natural love, but every faculty has a built-in affinity for what accords with its nature. By passion we mean some result of being acted on: either a form induced by the agent (like weight) or a movement consequent on the form (like falling to the ground). Whatever we desire acts on us in this way, first arousing an emotional attachment to itself and making itself agreeable, and then drawing us to seek it. The first change the object produces in our appetite is a feeling of its agreeableness: we call this love (weight can be thought of as a sort of natural love); then desire moves us to seek the object and pleasure comes to rest in it. Clearly then, as a change induced in us by an agent, love is a passion: the affective emotion strictly so, the will to love by stretching of the term. Love unites by making what is loved as agreeable to the lover as if it were himself or a part of himself. Though love is not itself a movement of the appetite towards an object, it is a change the appetite undergoes rendering an object agreeable. Favour is a freely chosen and willing love, open only to reasoning creatures; and charity―literally, holding dear―is a perfect form of love in which what is loved is highly prized. To love, as Aristotle says, is to want someone’s good; so its object is twofold: the good we want, loved with a love of desire, and the someone we want it for (ourselves or someone else), loved with a love of friendship. And just as what exist in the primary sense are subjects of existence, and properties exist only in a secondary sense, as modes in which subjects exist; so too what we love in the primary sense is the someone whose good we will, and only in a secondary sense do we love the good so willed. Friendship based on convenience or pleasure is friendship inasmuch as we want our friend’s good; but because this is subordinated to our own profit or pleasure such friendship is subordinated to love of desire and falls short of true friendship.

March 28, 2005 I am so ready to be home I have already gone into autopilot mode. Just counting the days, waiting for that big bird to take me home. I am sorry to hear that you are not feeling good. Hopefully getting off the pill will help. Hopefully when I get home I can help with your emotions. Whatever you need, just tell me. I want to make things easy for you when I am home. At least as easy as possible. I love you so much gorgeous. Glad to hear your dad has busted his ass to help us out so much. We are so lucky with our family, I couldn’t have married into a better one. Not to mention couldn’t have married a better woman, cause there is none better. I also got an email from your niece. It was a PowerPoint slide that was real cute. It had a green background with a frog, and said she missed me. Sweet, huh. If she didn’t forward a copy to you, I can. Oh, about the birth control: You said you wanted ten kids anyway. Change your mind yet? What is Bubba doing that has changed? Is he being a fart or is he just full of energy? I’m sure when I get home you will be ready for a break. How about after I get to see you for a little while, you go to a spa for a weekend to be pampered? I REALLY think you deserve it. You’ve been going and going, kinda like the Energizer Bunny. Just like when I get home for sex, we keep going and going and going and going and, you get the point. Hopefully you at least smiled over that. I always want you to be happy, and want to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Even if it means buying a Holstein cow. Yuk! That’s big time love. Wow. I hope you have a good day, and can find time in the day to rest. I love you more than you will ever know. Smooooooch! -XOXOOXOXOXOXOXOX

I thought about whatever subliminal impulse had put me on the train to Farmingdale. Seeing Reva in full-blown Reva mode both delighted and disgusted me. Her repression, her transparent denial, her futile attempts to tap into the pain with me in the car, it all satisfied me somehow. Reva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine. Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted—my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.

Every idea in this book runs against our natural tendency to want to relax, take it easy, reward ourselves for decades of work and childrearing. Our default mode at midlife is entropy. The default is not destiny, and on this, the research is unequivocal: for every fork in the road, you are almost invariably better off making the harder choice. Harder in the moment, that is, but easier over the years, as your body and mind remain strong. By resisting entropy, but pushing through the inertia the beckons us to rest a little longer, to slow down just a notch, until your life has narrowed to a pinprick – by resisting those forces, you dramatically up the odds that your life will be rich to your final breath, deeply entwined with family and friends, engaged in intellectual pursuits, and infused with a purpose that extends beyond yourself. Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's worth it.

There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our true instincts for darkness, it’s invitation to spend some time in the proximity of our dreams. Our personal winters are so often accompanied by insomnia: perhaps we’re drawn towards that unique space of intimacy and contemplation, darkness and silence, without really knowing what we’re seeking. Perhaps, after all, we are being urged towards our own comfort. Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness – one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days. Yet we are pushing away this innate skill we have for digesting the difficult parts of life.

I have one priority in life and it’s not making millions as it once was. I have all the money I could ever want, too much, India claims. I’m business driven but it’s my girl who is the most important part of my life. My whole life. It’s that very reason I’m reluctant to bring any shift in our happy bubble. We both work hard. We play hard together. That woman is my equal in every aspect of life. She thrills me, and intrigues me. I’ve loved peeling back India’s layers. She’s vulnerable is my mean girl and I love the place we’ve gotten to where she trusts me with all her sad, unsure moments. She will grieve for her brother for the rest of her life. She’ll always worry about her mom becoming manic depressive again. She’ll forever be a woman who puts everyone else before her own needs. But what’s different in India’s life is she now has me who makes sure she’s first. In everything. It’s going to kill me to see the happiness drop from her eyes. She’ll go into fix it mode and when she can’t, she’ll get angry and stressed.

But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize [*realisere*] its existence [*Existents*] and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn first to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σε αυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of the irksome, sinister traveling companion―that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito). Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. Just as no one who has been taught a great deal about swimming is able to keep afloat in a storm, but only the man who is intensely convinced and has experiences that he is actually lighter than water, so a person who lacks this inward point of poise is unable to keep afloat in life's storms.―Only when a man has understood himself in this way is he able to maintain an independent existence and thus avoid surrendering his own I. How often we see (in a period when we extol that Greek historian because he knows how to appropriate an unfamiliar style so delusively like the original author's, instead of censuring him, since the first prize always goes to an author for having his own style―that is, a mode of expression and presentation qualified by his own individuality)―how often we see people who either out of mental-spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from another's table or for more egotistical reasons seek to identify themselves with others, until eventually they believe it all, just like the liar through frequent repetition of his stories.

Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.

You must retire to these pursuits which are quieter, safer and more important. Do you think it is the same thing whether you are overseeing the transfer of corn into granaries, unspoilt by the dishonesty and carelessness of the shippers, and taking care that it does not get damp and then ruined through heat, and that it tallies in measure and weight; or whether you take up these sacred and lofty studies, from which you will learn the substance of god, and his will, his mode of life, his shape; what fate awaits your soul; where nature lays us to rest when released from our bodies; what is the force which supports all the heaviest elements of this world at the centre, suspends the light elements above, carries fire to the highest part, and sets the stars in motion with their proper changes – and learn other things in succession which are full of tremendous marvels? You really should leave the ground and turn your thoughts to these studies. Now while the blood is hot you should make your way with vigour to better things. In this kind of life you will find much that is worth your study: the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, the knowledge of how to live and die, and a life of deep tranquillity.

Years later I saw a film - poignantly sad, and for me unbearably so - about a scientist who had invented a kind of total sense recorder, not just video but audio and smellio and touchio and the rest, which he set to play every afternoon in a given place a given time, for as long as the mechanism lasted. The scene he projected was that of a dozen or so young couples dancing on a terrace in the same holiday house, on the same island, where the recorder itself was kept. Then this young man comes across it while it is playing and at first is convinced he is watching a real occurrence: he sees this beautiful girl, in her slinky 1930s outfit, dancing and laughing and chattering with her friends, and he falls in love with her on the spot. Second day, same time around, he comes to the island at a slightly different time so he sees a slightly different excerpt, and still doesn't twig and falls deeper in love. And so on and so forth for various days until he happens on a duplicate bit and realises something is wrong. But by then, of course, he is irretrievably hooked. So what does he do? He digs out the machine, fiddles with its insides until he has grasped its workings, and then sets it up in recording mode and records himself into the scene in a desperate last-ditch attempt to join the dancers. Which works, and there he stays: trapped there amongst them in a virtual dimension, forever young, forever re-enacting the same little loop of life, over and over.

With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.

Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”). Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus. This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task. A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing. A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.

Une nouvelle génération, donc, subit simplement l'état de choses ; elle ne se pose aucun vrai problème, et de la « libération » dont elle jouit, elle fait un usage à tous points de vue stupide. Quand cette jeunesse prétend qu'elle n'est pas comprise, la seule réponse à lui donner c'est qu'il n'y a justement rien à comprendre en elle, et que, s'il existait un ordre normal, il s'agirait uniquement de la remettre à sa place sans tarder, comme on fait avec les enfants, lorsque sa stupidité devient fatigante, envahissante et impertinente. Le soi-disant anticonformisme de certaines attitudes, abstraction faite de leur banalité, suit du reste une espèce de mode, de nouvelle convention, de sorte qu'il s'agit précisément du contraire d'une manifestation de liberté. Pour différents phénomènes envisagés par nous dans les pages précédentes, tels que par exemple le goût de la vulgarité et certaines formes nouvelles des mœurs, on peut se référer, dans l'ensemble, à cette jeunesse-là ; en font partie les fanatiques des deux sexes pour les braillards, les « chanteurs » épileptiques, au moment où nous écrivons pour les séances collectives de marionnettes représentées par les ye-ye sessions, pour tel ou tel « disque à succès » et ainsi de suite, avec les comportements correspondants. L'absence, chez ceux-là, du sens du ridicule rend impossible d'exercer sur eux une influence quelconque, si bien qu'il faut les laisser à eux-mêmes et à leur stupidité et estimer que si par hasard apparaissent, chez ce type de jeunes, quelques aspects polémiques en ce qui concerne, par exemple, l'émancipation sexuelle des mineurs et le sens de la famille, cela n'a aucun relief. Les années passant, la nécessité, pour la plupart d'entre eux, de faire face aux problèmes matériels et économiques de la vie fera sans doute que cette jeunesse-là, devenue adulte, s'adaptera aux routines professionnelles, productives et sociales d'un monde comme le monde actuel ; ce qui, d'ailleurs, la fera passer simplement d'une forme de nullité à une autre forme de nullité. Aucun problème digne de ce nom ne vient se poser.

Before the twentieth century, ideology - as opposed to religion - did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get. My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities - if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago. Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society's inability or unwillingness to satisfy people's Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people's Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so. Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people's rights, and people's lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it 'a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.' The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin's sociological experiment, saying it would end 'in a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.' Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler's Mein Kampf seriously and literally, 'we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a "preventive" war.' The dangers of a fascist turn were clear. The unlikelihood of success at even slouching toward a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious. Utopian faith is a helluva drug.

YOU FIRST When entering into relationships, we have a tendency to bend. We bend closer to one another, because regardless of what type of relationship it might be — romantic, business, friendship — there’s a reason you’re bringing that other person into your life, and that means the load is easier to carry if you carry it together, both bending toward the center. I picture people in relationships as two trees, leaning toward one another. Over time, as the relationship solidifies, you both become more comfortable bending, and as such bend farther, eventually resting trunk to trunk. You support each other and are stronger because of the shared strength of your root system and entwined branches. Double-tree power! But there’s a flaw in this mode of operation. Once you’ve spent some time leaning on someone else, if they disappear — because of a breakup, a business upset, a death, a move, an argument — you’re all that’s left, and far weaker than when you started. You’re a tree leaning sideways; the second foundation that once supported you is…gone. This is a big part of why the ending of particularly strong relationships can be so disruptive. When your support system presupposes two trunks — two people bearing the load, and divvying up the responsibilities; coping with the strong winds and hailstorms of life — it can be shocking and uncomfortable and incredibly difficult to function as an individual again; to be just a solitary tree, alone in the world, dealing with it all on your own. A lone tree needn’t be lonely, though. It’s most ideal, in fact, to grow tall and strong, straight up, with many branches. The strength of your trunk — your character, your professional life, your health, your sense of self — will help you cope with anything the world can throw at you, while your branches — your myriad interests, relationships, and experiences — will allow you to reach out to other trees who are likewise growing up toward the sky, rather than leaning and becoming co-dependent. Relationships of this sort, between two equally strong, independent people, tend to outlast even the most intertwined co-dependencies. Why? Because neither person worries that their world will collapse if the other disappears. It’s a relationship based on the connections between two people, not co-dependence. Being a strong individual first alleviates a great deal of jealousy, suspicion, and our innate desire to capture or cage someone else for our own benefit. Rather than worrying that our lives will end if that other person disappears, we know that they’re in our lives because they want to be; their lives won’t end if we’re not there, either. Two trees growing tall and strong, their branches intertwined, is a far sturdier image than two trees bent and twisted, tying themselves into uncomfortable knots to wrap around one another, desperately trying to prevent the other from leaving. You can choose which type of tree to be, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with either model; we all have different wants, needs, and priorities. But if you’re aiming for sturdier, more resilient relationships, it’s a safe bet that you’ll have better options and less drama if you focus on yourself and your own growth, first. Then reach out and connect with others who are doing the same.

When you run for 30 minutes, for example, your perceived time slows down. In a busy day, a whole afternoon can go by in a flash. You need a way to control your psychological time, especially to distance yourself from normal distractions and preoccupations. When we engage in an even longer exercise like jogging, our brain gets to take a rest from its default mode or inward-focused state—known as a self-referencing in neuroscience—and be more attuned to the outer environment. By shifting in and out of these two states of mind—reference to ourselves versus our environment—we get a new frame reference to our lives that empowers us to look at things in a different light.

Generally I am using mobile phone/device and computer as my focused desk of the writing career the then rest of the elements are different news media, social media, social & global experience, reading different books, professional job experiences to work with different national & international and government & private bodies around the world with whom often I have to work together as consultative or advisory status but I’m feel free to express myself as freelance in all the necessary mode.

On the basis of correct reasoning, beginners must achieve certainty that phenomena are without intrinsic being, and that “absence of real existence” and “dependent arising” are actually the same thing. It is of the highest importance simply to generate an extraordinary conviction that appearance and emptiness are inseparably united—just as with the moon reflected on the water. By relying on this and growing used to it, you will gain an understanding that will indeed correspond to the fundamental mode of being of things. Be that as it may, whatever is apprehended conceptually cannot go beyond the figurative ultimate. You should never say that this and this alone constitutes the meaning of the prajñāpāramitā and that there is no higher ultimate than this. If you do this, you will be taking as definitive what is but a semblance of prajñāpāramitā, the mere object of an ordinary consciousness. The result will be that you will not enter that wisdom that is utterly nonconceptual and is the authentic meaning of prajñāpāramitā, and you will be turning your back on the unmistaken way of penetrating it, namely, an uncontrived resting meditation in which nothing is removed and nothing is added. As long as you fail to relinquish your attachment to the supremacy of your view, actual primordial wisdom beyond all conceptual constructs will not take birth in your mind-stream.

That brings us back to the default mode. “When your mind is at rest, what it is really doing is bouncing thoughts back and forth,” Andreasen says. “Your association cortices are always running in the background, but when you are not focused on some task—for example, when you are doing something mindless, like driving—that’s when your mind is most free to roam. That’s why that is when you most actively create new ideas.

It's like any time a white friend suggests Korean barbecue. Or when I see a Food Network special where some tattooed white dude with a nineteenth-century-looking beard-and-mustache combo introduces viewers to this kimchi al pastor bánh mì monstrosity he peddles from a food truck that sends out location tweets. It's like when white people tell me how much they love kimchee and bull-go-ghee, and the words just roll off their tongues as if there exists nothing irreconcilable between the two languages. It's like, don't touch my shit. It's difficult to articulate because I know it's not rational. But as a bilingual immigrant from Korea, as someone who code-switches between Korean and English daily while running errands or going to the supermarket, not to mention the second-nature combination of the languages that I'll speak with my parents and siblings, switching on and switching off these at times unfeasibly different sounds, dialects, grammatical structures? It's fucking irritating. I don't want to be stingy about who gets to enjoy all these fermented wonders -- I'm glad the stigma around our stinky wares is dissolving away. But when my husband brings me a plate of food he made out of guesswork with a list of ingredients I've curated over the years of my burgeoning adulthood with the implicit help of my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's mother who taught me the patience of peeling dozens of garlic cloves in a sitting with bare hands, it puts me in snap-me-off-a-hickory-switch mode.

The Present Vocabulary certain obligations blocks my perception another dimension a vision without alteration without wall of illusion blocking my perception forget the presentations no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions no intention to tell you about my mistakes pass I represent the present vocabulary be indulgent learn from your mistakes of your misfortune and obliterate your fear be indulgent to guard what is being dissipated is impossible if you do not want to sink you must learn to swim and take strength because his world and become far too fierce I have no intention of being for you a recreation attention to any division of concentration as a vision of illusion the exclusion of all perceptions of emotions without any understanding of good and bad intentions concentration mode, watch out for reverberation, bad reaction, a pawn you want action, go back do your preparation without any interaction no need for explanation no need for presentations no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions all these voices a place of disarray in the middle of all these voices the fights are without faith or law in the middle of all these voices no odds to escape and auctanperer you can forget my mind and there to create prisoner never I'm here to show you with the thinking of passing moments and the vocabulary of the present moment for a decent future absent not writing insistent on days much more clement for my present and the mind filled with writing he is not stupid by technology Develop my thoughts often full of words store no time to rest I will not give up no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions enclose between two dimensions no need for presentation or tell you about my intentions errors are passed and now I represent the vocabulary present.

From the true self, I asked the shameful part what it wanted. I jumped up, pacing as I explained myself. “I relate the shameful part to being like a child who had done something wrong—sent to his room— waiting for his father to come home and punish him.” I stopped in front of Keith’s desk, bending toward him. “It’s frustrating.” I rested both hands on the desktop, shaking my head. “I can’t latch onto one good deed or intention to convince myself that there is decency within.” At this point, I became physically exhausted. I plopped into the love seat and spread my arms across the back of the chair. Keith made a minor adjustment to his spectacles with a forefinger pushing its bridge, then let the finger make its way down his nose as he thought, looking down. He looked up, fixed his eyes directly on me. "The anxiety part jumped in to prevent you from having to relive and experience the pain that the shameful part was carrying." "And,” I said, leaning forward, “if I connect with the anxiety and ask it from the true self what it wants, the answer is rest, peace of mind for body and soul.” Keith slowly nodded his head as I continued. “It wants to live without stressing over everything and anything in an attempt to achieve perfection. The anxiety put me in a survival mode, pumping me up with adrenalin, putting me on guard, alerting me that there was danger ahead. I understand how the anxiety feels. It doesn’t have to worry anymore. There is no more danger ahead. The true self is now running things. We are now going to be able to take a deep breath, relax, and be at peace with ourselves. I’m so thankful that I now won’t be burdened with the nonstop torturous uproar of emotions.

As young girls, my friends and I often played “school” or “house,” cooperative role-playing games in which we acted out scenarios like math class or making dinner. As long as I got to be the teacher or the mother, I loved these games. They played into my need for control and my love of organizing. If I didn’t get to be the teacher or the mother, the game usually ended in a nasty fight between me and the girl who got that role. Other kids’ rules made no sense to me. They felt all wrong. I had to be in charge or I wasn’t playing. Dr. Tony Attwood describes this as “god mode”—the way that autistic kids need to control every aspect of a social situation to make it safe for them to interact. For whatever reason, a few friends tolerated my god mode and hung around, though not all the time. I remember sometimes daily shouting matches that left me without a playmate for the rest of the day. Unlike boys’ games, where there tend to be winners and losers, girls’ games are often based on how well a girl cooperates with the group to create an enjoyable role-playing scenario. Boys

Alpha: At this milestone, key gameplay functionality is implemented, assets are 40–50% final (the rest are placeholders), the game runs on the correct hardware platform in debug mode, and there is enough working to provide the team with a feel for the game. Features might undergo major adjustments at this point, based on play-testing results and other feedback. Alpha occurs 8 to 10 months before code release.

By late January 2014, Tesla had completed the construction of a cross-country Supercharger corridor that would allow Model S drivers to get from Los Angeles to New York without having to spend a penny on energy. The electric highway took a northern route through Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois, before approaching New York from Delaware. The path it cut was similar to a trip taken by Musk and his brother, Kimbal, in a beat-up 1970s BMW 320i in 1994. Within days of the route’s completion, Tesla staged a cross-country rally to show that the Model S could easily handle long-distance driving, even in the dead of winter. Two hot-pepper-red Model S’s, driven by members of the Supercharging team, left Tesla’s Los Angeles–based design studio just after midnight on Thursday, January 30. Tesla planned to finish the trip at New York’s City Hall on the night of February 1, the day before Super Bowl XLVIII, which would take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the state line. Along the way, the cars would drive through some of the snowiest and most frigid places in the country, in one of the coldest weeks of the year. The trip took a little longer than expected. The rally encountered a wild snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains that temporarily closed the road over Vail Pass and then provided an icy entrance to Wyoming. Somewhere in South Dakota, one of the rally’s diesel support vans broke down, forcing its occupants to catch a flight from Sioux Falls to rejoin the rest of the crew in Chicago. And in Ohio, the cars powered through torrential rains as the fatigued crew pressed on for the final stretch. It was 7:30 A.M. on Sunday, February 2, when the Teslas rolled up to New York’s City Hall on a bright, mild morning. The 3,427-mile journey had taken 76 hours and 5 minutes—just over three days. The cars had spent a total of 15 hours and 57 seconds charging along the way,

And you say you want a new job, but something keeps you holding on to the old one, justifying why he’ll get better this year,” Mina added, holding her iced almond-milk latte in one hand as she swiped through a dating app with the other. “And he’s so clingy and expects you to be there for him twenty-four seven,” Ellen added. “And when you do finally get another offer, you get cold feet because you can’t even remember who you were without Mr. Wall Street in your life.” “You’ve got to get out,” Mina said, tilting her head to evaluate a digital suitor on her phone. “It’s time,” Ellen agreed. “Sarah agrees with us.” Rae felt the panicked sensation of a door that had closed before she’d managed to reach it, but she avoided interpreting their words as truth. She just went into defensive mode, disliking how the rest of the Scramblettes had apparently started a separate group chat to stage an intervention. “Things have been getting better,” Rae said. “I think I’ll be able to present my market size analysis to a client at a pitch meeting next week.” “You’re doing that thing,” Ellen said, “where the shitty boyfriend does one mediocre thing, but relative to everything else he’s done it’s amazing, and so you think this means he’s really changed.” The glare from Ellen’s engagement ring felt very bright, and Rae didn’t like the sight of it.

Here we see the unequaled role that the prohibition of enjoyment plays in the construction of a social order. It provides the foundation on which all the structures of society necessarily rest. Prohibition performs this function because it eliminates the threat that unrestrained enjoyment poses to society as a whole. Without prohibition, enjoyment would constantly threaten the stability and security of the social order. The antisocial danger represented by enjoyment finds perhaps its most poetic expression in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in the figure of Hannibal Lecter. The film demonstrates, quite clearly, that Lecter derives his enjoyment from eating people: he doesn’t eat people because he bears them ill-will, but simply because he enjoys it. Rather than facilitating harmonious intersubjective contact, as the example of Lecter indicates, enjoyment threatens the big Other, insofar as it disregards the desire of the Other altogether. Though Lecter’s mode of procuring enjoyment is undoubtedly extreme, it is nonetheless exemplary, because all enjoyment involves seeing the Other as nothing more than a tool and not showing “consideration” for the Other. As Serge André points out, to enjoy something “is to be able to use it to the point of abusing it—the abuse being precisely that which the law seeks to delimit.” In the act of barring this unrestrained enjoyment from the social order, prohibition produces habitable space in which we can coexist without directly confronting the horror of the Other’s enjoyment, which is why Lévi-Strauss sees prohibition at the root of everything social.

To enter open mode, Cleese says we must create “boundaries in space and boundaries in time,” taking ourselves away from people and obligations for a specific period. His advice is to simply noodle until you get a payoff. “If you keep resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your subconscious. Maybe in the shower later or maybe at breakfast, but a new thought will suddenly appear—if you’ve put in the pondering time first.

Well, Doctor Dillamond seemed to think they were in questionable taste, given the Banns on Animals Mobility." "Doctor Dillamond, alas," said Madame Morrible, "is a doctor. He is not a poet. He is also a God, and I might ask you girls if we have ever had a great Goat sonneteer or balladeer? Alas, dear Miss Elphaba, Doctor Dillamond doesn't understand the poetic convention of irony. Would you like to define irony for the class, please?" "I don't believe I can, Madame." "Irony, some say, is the art of juxtaposing incongruous parts. One needs a knowing distance. Irony presupposes detachment, which, alas, in the case of Animal Rights, we may forgive Doctor Dillamond for being without." "So that phrase that he objected to - Animals should be seen and not heard - that was ironic?" continued Elphaba, studying her papers and not looking at Madame Morrible. Galinda and her classmates were enthralled, for it was clear that each of the females at opposite ends of the room would have enjoyed seeing the other crumble in a sudden attack of the spleen. "One could consider it in an ironic mode if one chose," said Madame Morrible. "How do you choose?" said Elphaba. "How impertinent!" said Madame Morrible. "Well, but I don't mean impertinence. I'm trying to learn. If you - if anyone - thought that statement was true, then it isn't in conflict with the boring bossy bit that preceded it. It's just argument and conclusion, and I don't see the irony." "You don't see much, Miss Elphaba," said Madame Morrible. "You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. To be stuck in ignorance, to be circumscribed by the walls of one's own modest acumen, well, it is very sad in one so young and bright." She spit out the last word, and it seemed to Galinda, somehow, a low comment on Elphaba's skin color, which today was indeed lustrous with the effort of public speaking. "But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond," said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up. "In the case of poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may indeed be true. Animal should not be heard," snapped Madame Morrible. "Do you mean that ironically?" said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face and did not look up again for the rest of the session.

Vince saw the potential when he left Depeche Mode: he was like a technology hoover; he realised that with the technology at his fingers he could do everything, without being in a band. The synth duo was the thing. Vince was just like, ‘Whoa!’ I don’t think he liked the band dynamic, just because it’s too much discussion and too many egos – ‘All I need is a good singer and I can do the rest myself.’ And so the synth-pop duo was born – the Eurythmics, Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo

The problem with the world is that most people are living slightly ahead of reality, in a kind of confused panic mode. If they only could slow down their minds and arrive in the present moment of reality. Then, I am sure the world would be improved.

We will all cling to reasons and answers and worldviews only to have them smashed to pieces time and time again, whether we know it or admit it to ourselves or not. We will all not only be wrong often, but right rarely, even in the meta, subjective sense. And so, perhaps if we wish to be ok with consciousness, we must learn how to be ok with this. Perhaps we must learn how to fundamentally be ok with being wrong, or we will loathe ourselves until the end. Perhaps we must love and accept the hypocrisy that runs through the very veins of the human condition, or we will hate all of humankind. Perhaps we must learn how to dial back our expectations and the degree to which we dread the inevitable failure of everything we believe, and the beliefs of others just the same. This is not to make light of the immense challenge of such an arduous endeavor. It is an endless, upward climb of surpassing one’s default mode and understanding of the world. But perhaps if we can, at least some of the time, succeed in doing so, we can feel a little less embarrassed, disgusted, miserable, ashamed, bitter, angry, and all the rest. And perhaps we can be a little less wrong a little more often.

With increasing stress or threat, the dissociative response takes a person deeper and deeper into a protective mode. Whereas the physiology of the arousal response is to optimize fight or flight, the physiology of dissociation is to help us rest, replenish, survive injury, and tolerate pain. Where arousal increases heart rate, dissociation decreases it. Where arousal sends blood to the muscles, dissociation keeps blood in the trunk, to minimize blood loss in case of injury. Arousal releases adrenaline; dissociation releases the body’s own pain killers, enkephalins and endorphins. And dissociation was the only adaptive option available to four-year-old Jesse in abusive moments—the ability to emotionally flee to his inner world.

La civilisation islamique est en effet, parmi les civilisations orientales, celle qui est la plus proche de l’Occident, et l’on pourrait même dire que, par ses caractères comme par sa situation géographique, elle est, à divers égards, intermédiaire entre l’Orient et l’Occident ; aussi la tradition nous apparaît-elle comme pouvant être envisagée sous deux modes profondément distincts, dont l’un est purement oriental, mais dont l’autre, qui est le mode proprement religieux, lui est commun avec la civilisation occidentale. Du reste, Judaïsme, Christianisme et Islamisme se présentent comme les trois éléments d’un même ensemble, en dehors duquel, disons-le dès maintenant, il est le plus souvent difficile d’appliquer proprement le terme même de « religion », pour peu qu’on tienne à lui conserver un sens précis et nettement défini ; mais, dans l’Islamisme, ce côté strictement religieux n’est en réalité que l’aspect le plus extérieur (…) Cette sorte de double polarisation, extérieure et intérieure, à laquelle nous avons fait allusion à propos de la tradition musulmane, n’existe pas dans l’Inde, où l’on ne peut pas, par suite, faire avec l’Occident les rapprochements que permettait encore tout au moins le côté extérieur de l’Islam ; il n’y a plus ici absolument rien qui soit analogue à ce que sont les religions occidentales.

the preparation and resolution of a dis-c(5rd ; the transition from a point of rest to one of unrest, and thence to a new point of rest, which is one of the great underlying prmciples of musical art. Concords, and discords, and the sys-tematisation of tones into scales, are all inextricably mixed up together, and Debussy's departure from what has hitherto been the ordered procedure in relation to chords has involved a proportionate departure, or nearly so, as regards scales. This, again, it is possible to consider as an addition to, rather than a destruction of the proved resources of music. The universal employment of the major and minor modes exclusively, was born of expedience. They made for elasticity and security ; but at the same time the door was thereby closed upon the old Church modes, and with them, upon a range of effects which belonged to these old-world modes alone. Many of these effects Debussy has revived, but in this only treading more continuously in a path which has been adventured upon by various composers, from Beethoven to Weingartner. Not the construction of music, however, but its effect, is the main subject of consideration so far as the non-professional public is concerned. In this connection there are a few points which it will be worth while to consider with some little attention, for upon this consideration will it depend very much whether one takes a reasonable view, or the reverse, of Debussy's music. and the reverse, it should be mentioned, may equally well be laudatory or hostile ; adulation or detraction alike insufficiently informed. In the first place it is to be borne in mind that Debussy's music overrides a good many established theories, or rather the limitations within which the operation of these theories has hitherto been confined.

Improve your sleep routine. It is vital to improving one’s sleeping habits to experience better rest and quality sleep at night. The room must be totally dark without other distractions like television. You can help put yourself in a resting mode hours before going to sleep by reading a book, soaking in a warm bath, and steering clear of alcohol or caffeinated drinks.

I am SAM, and this is my latest mission. This one’s like a cross between a house of cards and a hand grenade with a missing pin. One wrong move, and—BOOM! The whole thing comes down. I’ve got to be in a dozen different places at just the right time, and in just the right order. Not only that, but this high-tech fortress disguised as a middle school is crawling with guards in the middle of the day. The trick is to act natural when anyone’s looking, and then move like the wind when they’re not. So I walk casually up the corridor, like I belong here. Deputy Marshal Stonecase passes me by and I give her a friendly (but not too friendly) nod. She has no idea I’m working undercover. That’s what the street clothes and prosthetics are for. As soon as I find myself alone, I swing into action. First I check my scanners, perfectly camouflaged inside an ordinary-looking backpack. Once they give me the all clear, I continue to the gymnasium. My first stop is the so-called equipment room. I know it’s a flimsy cover for Sergeant Stricker’s missile silo, but I can’t worry about that now. I work fast. I work carefully. I try not to think about the pair of fully armed heat-seeking missiles just under the floor. And the millisecond my package is delivered, I move on. This next maneuver is what you call a speed round. I cruise through the building like a ninja-tornado, dropping tiny subpackages of coded instructions in every empty corner I can locate. Once the inmates start finding them—and they will find them—they’ll know what to do. That’s it. Within twenty minutes, my mission is complete. The rest of this operation is out of my hands. So I go back to undercover mode and continue my day like none of this ever happened. In fact, none of it did. (You’ve got my back, right?) SAM out!

One seemingly inconsequential but prevalent linguistic figure is the machine-based designation of 'sleep-mode'. The notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep into simply a deferred or diminished condition of operationality and access. It supersedes an on/off logic, so that nothing is ever fundamentally 'off' and there is never an actual state of rest.

After parking in the west lot, far from a certain gang member with a reputation that could scare off even the toughest Fairfield football players, Sierra and I walk up the front steps of Fairfield High. Unfortunately, Alex Fuentes and the rest of his gang friends are hanging by the front doors. “Walk right past them,” Sierra mutters. “Whatever you do, don’t look in their eyes.” It’s pretty hard not to when Alex Fuentes steps right in front of me and blocks my path. What’s that prayer you’re supposed to say right before you know you’re going to die? “You’re a lousy driver,” Alex says with his slight Latino accent and full-blown-I-AM-THE-MAN stance. The guy might look like an Abercrombie mode with his ripped bod and flawless face, but his picture is more likely to be taken for a mug shot. The kids from the north side don’t really mix with kids from the south side. It’s not that we think we’re better than them, we’re just different. We’ve grown up in the same town, but on totally opposite sides. We live in big houses on Lake Michigan and they live next to the train tracks. We look, talk, act, and dress different. I’m not saying it’s good or bad; it’s just the way it is in Fairfield. And, to be honest, most of the south side girls treat me like Carmen Sanchez does…they hate me because of who I am. Or, rather, who they think I am. Alex’s gaze slowly moves down my body, traveling the length of me before moving back up. It’s not the first time a guy has checked me out, it’s just that I never had a guy like Alex do it so blatantly…and so up-close. I can feel my face getting hot. “Next time, watch where you’re goin’,” he says, his voice cool and controlled. He’s trying to bully me. He’s a pro at this. I won’t let him get to me and win his little game of intimidation, even if my stomach feels like I’m doing one hundred cartwheels in a row. I square my shoulders and sneer at him, the same sneer I use to push people away. “Thanks for the tip.” “If you ever need a real man to teach you how to drive, I can give you lessons.” Catcalls and whistles from his buddies set my blood boiling. “If you were a real man, you’d open the door for me instead of blocking my way,” I say, admiring my own comeback even as my knees threaten to buckle. Alex steps back, pulls the door open, and bows like he’s my butler. He’s totally mocking me, he knows it and I know it. Everyone knows it. I catch a glimpse of Sierra, still desperately searching for nothing in her purse. She’s clueless. “Get a life,” I tell him. “Like yours? Cabróna, let me tell you somethin’,” Alex says harshly. “Your life isn’t reality, it’s fake. Just like you.” “It’s better than living my life as a loser,” I lash out, hoping my words sting as much as his words did. “Just like you.” Grabbing Sierra’s arm, I pull her toward the open door. Catcalls and comments follow us as we walk into the school. I finally let out the breath I must have been holding, then turn to Sierra. My best friend is staring at me, all bug-eyed. “Holy shit, Brit! You got a death wish or something?” “What gives Alex Fuentes the right to bully everyone in his path?” “Uh, maybe the gun he has hidden in his pants or the gang colors he wears,” Sierra says, sarcasm dripping from every word. “He’s not stupid enough to carry a gun to school,” I reason. “And I refuse to be bullied, by him or anyone else.

La monnaie est souvent mythifiée, conçue comme magique et obscure. Son ambivalence fondamentale favorise l'émergence dans les esprits du sentiment d'un mystère : le dieu monnaie est, par ses modes de création et de gestion, à la fois public et privé. Banques commerciales et banques centrales contribuent à son apparition, à son mouvement, à sa destruction. Face à cette ambivalence qui ne peut être éliminée, parce qu'elle exprime dans ce domaine technique la nécessaire dualité individu-collectivité, la théorie politique classique, libérale ou autoritaire, ne peut proposer que des représentations partielles. Le libéralisme anglo-saxon n'arrivera jamais à masquer complètement l'action de l'État, définisseur et garant des règles, acteur majeur de la gestion monétaire au jour le jour. Il ne peut que tenter d'oublier l'expérience innommable d'un dollar échappant entre 1980 et 1985 à toute pesanteur économique par la grâce de l'État. Il est frappé de cécité devant une évidence majeure : les marchés financiers, lieu d'agitation des libres individus, n'en finissent pas de spéculer sur les obligations d'État, dont la rentabilité est assurée par l'existence de l'impôt, c'est-à-dire la capacité d'un État à extraire de sa société la richesse par un mécanisme non marchand de contrainte. La théorie allemande de la monnaie ne pourra quant à elle jamais imposer la réalité d'une monnaie fixant a priori un ordre social et échappant complètement aux acteurs décentralisés de la vie économique. Les banques créent de la monnaie par le crédit. Reste qu'au-delà de cette ambivalence, indépassable, chacune des deux traditions idéologiques, libérale ou autoritaire, adore l'un des deux visages du Janus monétaire. Au moment même où les États-Unis définissaient une conception pragmatique monétaire, selon laquelle un équilibre des pouvoirs doit assurer l'émergence d'une monnaie accompagnant les évolutions et rythmes naturels de la société, l'Europe occidentale accouchait, par étapes, d'une conception radicalement opposée, dominatrice, castratrice, de plus en plus souvent désignée dans le monde anglo-saxon, par l'expression sado-monétarisme. L'euro doit réformer la société, mieux, créer un nouveau monde européen. Chacune des sociétés réellement existantes, chaque nation, doit s'adapter, transfomer ses structures et ses rythmes naturels en fonction d'impératifs monétaires décidées d'en-haut, a priori. Tel est le sens idéologique des critères rigides de Maastricht et des punitions de Dublin qui fixent des règles monétaires et budgétaires auxquelles les individus devront se soumettre dans l'éternité. Cette monnaie autoritaire est le reflet d'un autre système de culture, fondé par d'autres structures anthropologiques. La conception anglo-saxonne de la monnaie reflète les valeurs libérales de la famille nucléaire absolue ; la conception autoritaire du continent européen les valeurs autoritaires de la famille souche. Face à la monnaie, l'individu est comme face à toute institution, libre ou soumis. L'émergence de conceptions opposées de la monnaie n'est que le dernier avatar d'une opposition pluriséculaire entre libéralisme anglo-saxon et autoritarisme continental. Mais comment la France, lieu de naissance de l'une des deux grandes traditions libérales, décontractée dans sa gestion monétaire jusqu'au début des années 80, a-t-elle bien pu changer de camp, abandonner l'individualisme du monde atlantique pour suivre les disciplines de l'Europe centrale ?

The great Third Hermetic Principle — the Principle of Vibration — embodies the truth that Motion is manifest in everything in the Universe — that nothing is at rest — that everything moves, vibrates, and circles. This Hermetic Principle was recognized by some of the early Greek philosophers who embodied it in their systems. But, then, for centuries it was lost sight of by the thinkers outside of the Hermetic ranks. But in the Nineteenth Century physical science re-discovered the truth and the Twentieth Century scientific discoveries have added additional proof of the correctness and truth of this centuries-old Hermetic doctrine. The Hermetic Teachings are that not only is everything in constant movement and vibration, but that the "differences" between the various manifestations of the universal power are due entirely to the varying rate and mode of vibrations. Not only this, but that even THE ALL, in itself, manifests a constant vibration of such an infinite degree of intensity and rapid motion that it may be practically considered as at rest, the teachers directing the attention of the students to the fact that even on the physical plane a rapidly moving object (such as a revolving wheel) seems to be at rest. The Teachings are to the effect that Spirit is at one end of the Pole of Vibration, the other Pole being certain extremely gross forms of Matter. Between these two poles are millions upon millions of different rates and modes of vibration.

With all such control phenomena, a critical issue is robustness: how well can a system withstand small jolts. Equally critical in biological systems is flexibility: how well can a system function over a range of frequencies. A locking-in to a single mode can be enslavement, preventing a system from adapting to change. Organisms must respond to circumstances that vary rapidly and unpredictably; no heartbeat or respiratory rhythm can be locked into the strict periodicities of the simplest physical models, and the same is true of the subtler rhythms of the rest of the body. Some researchers, among them Ary Goldberger of Harvard Medical School, proposed that healthy dynamics were marked by fractal physical structures, like the branching networks of bronchial tubes in the lung and conducting fibers in the heart, that allow a whole range of rhythms. Thinking of Robert Shaw's arguments, Goldberger noted: "Fractal processes associated with scaled, broadband spectra are 'information-rich.' Periodic states, in contrast, reflect narrow-band spectra ad are defined by monotonous, repetitive sequences, depleted of information content." Treating such disorders, he and other physiologists suggested, may depend on broadening a system's spectral reserve, its ability to range over many different frequencies without falling into a locked periodic channel.

In this [turn toward mathematics Al-Kindi] was clearly influenced by Proclus’s Elements of Theology, a partial translation of which he commissioned. Proclus thus appears to be the link that connects al-Kind¯ı’s mathematical (indeed, geometrical) epistemology with philosophy. Proclus’s work, with its geometrical mode of argumentation, was living proof for al-Kind¯ı that abstract problems, such as those debated by the theologians of his time – Muslims and non-Muslims alike – could be resolved through philosophical discourse which transcends religious sectarianism and proceeds on the basis of a geometrical methodology acceptable to all, just like the rest of the sciences.

To get to the root of the matter, let it be recalled that political relations are never "decreed": in the last analysis they are always the form assumed by fundamental social relations at the level of production. As Marx wrote in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "each mode of production produces its specific legal relations, political forms, etc." This determination of political forms by modes of production enables us to understand how it was that the limited extent to which changes were effected at the level of production relations (particularly in the division of labor in the factories, the division of labor between town and country, and class divisions in the rural areas), tended in the final analysis to offset the achievements of the October Revolution. Viewed over a period of several decades, this determining relation also explains why, in the absence of a renewed revolutionary offensive attacking production relations in depth, and of a political line permitting such an offensive to develop successfully, the dictatorship of the proletariat itself has ended by being annihilated, and why we are seeing in the Russia of today, under new conditions, a resurgence of internal political relations and of political relations with the rest of the world which look like a "reproduction" of bourgeois political relations, and even of those of the tsarist period.

To get to the root of the matter, let it be recalled that political relations are never "decreed": in the last analysis they are always the form assumed by fundamental social relations at the level of production. As Marx wrote in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "each mode of production produces its specific legal relations, political forms, etc."[1] This determination of political forms by modes of production enables us to understand how it was that the limited extent to which changes were effected at the level of production relations (particularly in the division of labor in the factories, the division of labor between town and country, and class divisions in the rural areas), tended in the final analysis to offset the achievements of the October Revolution. Viewed over a period of several decades, this determining relation also explains why, in the absence of a renewed revolutionary offensive attacking production relations in depth, and of a political line permitting such an offensive to develop successfully, the dictatorship of the proletariat itself has ended by being annihilated, and why we are seeing in the Russia of today, under new conditions, a resurgence of internal political relations and of political relations with the rest of the world which look like a "reproduction" of bourgeois political relations, and even of those of the tsarist period.

It’s much more powerful and exciting to be grounded in the present moment. Then life is like flowing down a river at the same velocity as the current. We become the flow surrounded by everything we need, and all we have to do is to choose to use what is provided, or choose not to. Life becomes effortless and we expend minimal energy achieving things. When we start thinking or trying to control things, it’s like swimming against the current. And the more we think, or try to control things, the more isolated we become from reality. Living in the thinking mode requires so much more energy than resting in this present moment.

I don’t care if you have a big mansion with all the comforts! I am Mom, and I know what is best! You can have her back when she is all better! I know that you miss her and you want nothing more than to hover over her…but that is my job. You just settle yourself, mister, and do what you do best and I will do what I do best! I have done a good job of it for thirty-two years!” I sat up, biting my lip when she grew silent, obviously listening to him. I wished I could hear the rough and lovely voice on the other end. “And she loves you too, Liam…she is safe here…and I will tell her you called. If she is up to it I will even let her call you,” she teased. “If you will behave yourself and not get her worked up! She’s in healing mode now. No…I am not bringing her there! You want to see her…you bring your little tush here. Oh, you don’t like that idea? Well then, you will just have to be patient! The doctor said she needs to rest for a few days. The wound is fine…but after the shock she went through she doesn’t need added stress…so stop your pushing!” I covered my mouth to stifle my laugh. My mom had never been afraid of anyone…not even powerful billionaires! She laughed at something he said now. “I really like you, you know that? I’m glad she has you!” She was silent for another moment. “I will make sure she is awake in an hour to receive the package Stewart brings over,” she promised. ”Take care!

The two principal wings of our soul are the understanding and the will given to it, so that it may seek the repose found in the solitude of the heart provided by the hand of God with all that is needed to satisfy our desire, and made ready by his action, for our own would not suffice. These wings, John declares, are those of the eagle, whose flight and conversation are in heaven, for those who practice this mode of prayer are rather heavenly than of this world, and Paul's words: “Our conversation is in heaven”,[680] apply to them. Yet there are people who expect and strive to attain to this repose of contemplation by using the left wing of the understanding alone, like a man rowing with one oar to reach the port of rest, or swimming with one arm to gain the shore. Our Letter of the Alphabet tells such persons that not with the understanding, which means by using the left wing, but by tasting, which is the right wing, may they hope to reach the longed-for repose. [681]

In these ways, the racial distribution of groups in the prison population becomes a dramatic stage on which the rest of society works out, in various modes, its calculus of white supremacy. The racism within the prisons provides a platform by which the larger society continually sharpens up its racial calculus.

Aujourd'hui, en France, on considère comme métis les enfants des couples composés d'une personne blanche et d'un autre non-blanche, ces couples étant couramment désignés comme "mixtes", étrange terminologie supposant une essence différente. Cette mixité, qui ne repose en réalité que sur une appréciation visuelle, sous-tend l'idée qu'il y a entre les "Blancs" et le reste de l'humanité une différence génétique si indépassable que le fruit de leur union est un être à part, un "métis" et ce, indépendamment de la nationalité des deux parents.

Scientists made a number of breakthroughs that forever changed the economics of farming. Chemists figured out how to turn petrochemicals into nitrogen fertilizers that made soil more fertile. New pesticides wiped out insects that for centuries had made it impossible to grow thousands of acres of the same crop at one time. Farmers weren’t so much dependent on the rain or sun as they were on their relationship with their local chemical dealers. Buddy Wray was the face of this new mode of farming. He helped farmers do the two things necessary for modernization: get big and get specialized. They raised huge volumes of one crop—in this case chicken—and they did it with increasingly high costs and sophisticated equipment. Getting big and getting specialized made farmers more dependent on outside corporations like Tyson. In 1940 farmers bought only about 34 percent of the inputs like fuel and feed that they needed to run their farm. They produced the rest themselves. By the time Buddy Wray was knocking on doors and visiting farmers in the early 1960s, farmers bought about 63 percent of their inputs. As farms became more dependent on the outside economy, they also became more productive. Aggregate farm output rose by 54 percent between 1940 and 1962, even as farm inputs rose by just 4 percent.

Healing will take time. But I must move forward toward it if I ever hope to get there. And forgiveness is a good step in the right direction. Not just good, but necessary. When we don’t move forward, when we get stuck in our hurt, unable to escape the grip of that threatening pain, trauma takes root. When we keep reliving what happened in our mind over and over, we keep experiencing the trauma as if it’s happening in the present time. Time comes to a screeching halt, our hearts race with wildly unpredictable and terrifyingly uncontrollable pulses, and our brains keep sounding internal alarms that we are no longer safe. This is helpful for a time, as we need to get ourselves out of immediate danger, but remaining in this mode long term is definitely not healthy. We need to eventually move toward a state of healing, of rest. We need to eventually get to the place where we stop replaying over and over what hurt us. “Brain and body are programmed to run for home, where safety can be restored and stress hormones can come to rest.”1

To be freely resting like a mountain is a measure of view; To be freely resting like an ocean is a measure of meditation; To be freely resting in appearances is a measure of conduct; To be freely resting in pure presence is a measure of fruition. The being that knows these four modes in full measure Knows the definitive meaning of the Great Perfection.

BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001 Phone Number +91 8884400919 With the Bali Tour Package From Bangalore offered by Surfnxt, a leading tour operator known for creating exceptional travel experiences, embark on an unforgettable journey. Bali is the ideal setting for a rejuvenating getaway because of its stunning beaches, vibrant culture, and breathtaking landscapes. This article delves into the enticing aspects of the Surfnxt Bali Tour Package, providing information on the itinerary's specifics, lodging options, activities, dining experiences, and important advice for making your trip to this Indonesian paradise one to remember. Introduction to the Bali Tour Package From Bangalore If you're looking for a tropical escape with stunning beaches, vibrant culture, and exciting adventures, Bali is the place to go. Additionally, Surfnxt's Bali tour package, which guarantees an unforgettable experience from beginning to end, caters to Bangalore-based travelers. An Overview of Bali as a Tourist Destination Bali, also known as the Island of the Gods, is a unique paradise. Bali offers a perfect combination of natural beauty and cultural diversity, with everything from ancient temples to lush rice terraces. Bali has something for everyone who wants to travel with its warm hospitality, mouthwatering cuisine, and plethora of activities. An Overview of Surfnxt as a Travel Agency Surfnxt is not your typical travel agency. Surfnxt is proud to curate tours that go above and beyond the norm because they have a passion for creating one-of-a-kind and individualized experiences. Their Bali tour package from Bangalore aims to highlight Bali's best attractions and ensure a hassle-free vacation. Highlights of the Surfnxt Bali Tour Package Beach Resorts and Luxury Accommodations Prepare to relax and enjoy luxury at resorts on the beach that will make you feel like a king or queen. The accommodations included in Surfnxt's Bali tour package are sure to impress even the most discerning travelers thanks to their world-class amenities and stunning ocean views. Adventure Activities and Cultural Experiences Surfnxt has arranged a variety of activities and cultural experiences that will leave you wanting more for thrill-seekers and culture enthusiasts. This tour package has everything, from surfing in crystal-clear waters to touring ancient temples to taking in traditional Balinese dances. The Bali tour package from Surfnxt includes a meticulously planned itinerary that covers all of Bali's must-see attractions and hidden gems. Itinerary Details for Bali Tour from Bangalore Day-by-Day Breakdown of the Tour Program Every day is filled with exciting adventures and unforgettable experiences, including going to famous landmarks and eating local cuisine. Accommodation and transportation options, as well as information about the facilities, are all part of the Surfnxt Bali tour package. Your comfort is our top concern. The accommodations are carefully chosen for their quality and convenience after a day of fun and exploration, ensuring a restful stay. Modes of Transportation and Features Included: Surfnxt will handle all of your transportation needs while you're on your Bali tour. While their knowledgeable staff takes care of all the details, whether you need airport transfers, sightseeing tours, or intercity travel, you can relax and enjoy the journey. Activities and Attractions Included in the Package Water Sports and Outdoor Adventures Get ready to experience the exhilarating water sports included in this package and dive into the clear waters of Bali. Surfing the waves or snorkeling among the colorful marine life are examples of these activities. For adrenaline junkies, options like whitewater rafting and jungle trekking are certain to get your heart pumping.

Locke’s distinction between primary qualities of the thing, which he described as solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number, are not primary qualities of the essence of the Ultimate Being as it is but, at best, can only be, conditionally speaking, primary qualities of the manifestation of the Being in things, in plurality. As such, the distinction between the primary and secondary qualities is not between the essence and appearance (reality and appearance) but between the different modes (levels, properties) of appearances.

Was there a moment you realized you could control how you interpreted things? I think one problem people have is not recognizing they can control how they interpret and respond to a situation. I think everyone knows it’s possible. There’s a great Osho lecture, titled “The Attraction for Drugs Is Spiritual.” He talks about why do people do drugs (everything from alcohol to psychedelics to cannabis). They’re doing it to control their mental state. They’re doing it to control how they react. Some people drink because it helps them not care as much, or they’re potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics to feel very present or connected to nature. The attraction of drugs is spiritual. All of society does this to some extent. People chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasms—any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads. They’re trying to get away from the voice in their heads—the overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would. [4] The first thing to realize is you can observe your mental state. Meditation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control madperson. You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?” Awareness alone calms you down. [4] Insight meditation lets you run your brain in debug mode until you realize you’re just a subroutine in a larger program. I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn’t always work. In the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in “debugging mode” as much as possible. When I’m talking to someone, or when I’m engaged in a group activity, it’s almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle. If I’m by myself, like just this morning, I’m brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to a podcast. I started going through this little fantasy where I imagined Shane asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy- answering them. Then, I caught myself. I put my brain in debug mode and just watched every little instruction go by. I said, “Why am I fantasy-future planning? Why can’t I just stand here and brush my teeth?” It’s the awareness my brain was running off in the future and planning some fantasy scenario out of ego. I was like, “Well, do I really care if I embarrass myself? Who cares? I’m going to die anyway. This is all going to go to zero, and I won’t remember anything, so this is pointless.” Then, I shut down, and I went back to brushing my teeth. I was noticing how good the toothbrush was and how good it felt. Then the next moment, I’m off to thinking something else. I have to look at my brain again and say, “Do I really need to solve this problem right now?” Ninety-five percent of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle in that exact moment. If the brain is like a muscle, I’ll be better off resting it, being at peace. When a particular problem arises, I’ll immerse myself in it. Right now as we’re talking, I’d rather dedicate myself to being completely lost in the conversation and to being 100 percent focused on this as opposed to thinking about “Oh, when I brushed my teeth, did I do it the right way?

Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time. Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from experience that this is true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves.

However, in giving up the idea of transcendence, Foucault also gives up the hope of ever uncovering the roots of power. This is why Joan Copjec sees Foucault’s refusal of transcendence as the fundamental stumbling block within his thought. Foucault aims at conceiving how power arises, but his studies consistently stop short of arriving at this. Copjec claims, “despite the fact that [Foucault] realizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power’s institution, he cannot avail himself of the means of doing so and thus, by default, ends up limiting that regime to the relations that obtain within it.” This limitation stems from his refusal of any notion of transcendence, “his disallowance of any reference to a principle or a subject that ‘transcends’ the regime of power he analyzes.” Without the moment of transcendence, one cannot grasp the regime of power in its incipience, and hence Foucault necessarily posits the regime of power as always already existing, which makes any attempt to counter it fundamentally impossible. The result of this rejection of transcendence is Foucault’s historicism—a mode of analysis that eschews the search for truth in favor of uncovering the presuppositions of regimes of truth, in favor of “pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.” This type of uncovering of historical presuppositions is one of Foucault’s chief legacies today, and it indicates the extent to which any idea of transcendence has become an anathema. In the wake of Foucault, contemporary cultural criticism has largely taken up this contextualizing mode. Today, the predominant response to any articulation of truth claims is a demand for the historicization of these claims: one must reveal the cultural context out of which they emerge. This has become the fundamental operation of contemporary cultural studies. In The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Zizek describes this intellectual situation: “the basic feature of cultural studies is that they are no longer able or ready to confront religious, scientific or philosophical works in terms of their own inherent Truth, but reduce them to a product of historical circumstances, to an object of anthropologico-psychoanalytic interpretation.” This reduction of every truth claim to the circumstances of its enunciation represents the ultimate rejection of transcendence: nothing escapes the immanence of history itself. According to this prevailing historicism, no truth claim ever touches the Real; instead, the very pretension to truth is itself imaginary. The popularity of this kind of historicism today indicates the extent to which transcendence has become theoretically untenable. It also highlights the link between contemporary theory and the command to enjoy: the operations of both work to reduce what appears as transcendence to conditions of immanence.

I think the big lie in life is that there is this coasting period ahead, that sometime in the future we can turn on pilot mode. We think once a particular hurdle is jumped or once we finally check off all of life's problematic to dos, then it will be smooth sailing. The reality of life is that this point doesn’t exist. We have to learn that what we are actually seeking is the high we get while we are running, not the rest or reward afterwards.

You can't do things with purpose and care if you have to speed through them. When you start the morning with high pressure and high stress, your programming your body to operate in that mode for the rest of the day, through conversations, meetings, appointments.

Whether you enter upon these sacred studies with the purpose of discovering what substance, what pleasure, what mode of life, what shape God has; what fate awaits your soul; where nature lays us to rest, when we are freed from the body; what the principle is that upholds all the heaviest matter in the center of this world, suspends the light, carries fire to the top, summons the stars – the universe is full of mighty wonders.

The problem with the world is that most people are living slightly ahead of reality, in a kind of confused panic mode, constantly manifesting and projecting their own futures. If they could only slow down their minds and arrive in the present moment of reality, then, I am sure their world and the overall world would be improved.

Inspired by Newton, I took a similar, if perhaps less extreme, approach to writing this book. I blocked off eight hours a day to write: from 5:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., five days a week. The basic rule was no e-mail, no calls, no appointments, and no interruptions until after 1:00 P.M. I didn’t always achieve it, but the discipline made a big difference. I set my e-mail bounceback to explain that I was in “monk mode” until after the book was complete. It is difficult to overstate how much freedom I found in this approach. By creating space to explore, think, and write, I not only got my book done faster but gained control over how I spent the rest of my time.

The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.

CHAPTER 4 THE ONE PERCENT The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.

The Emory researchers who identified the four phases of meditation found that when meditators slip out of the focused attention of the TPN and into Mind Wandering, the DMN activates. The wandering mind of the DMN has a “me” orientation, focusing on the self. It may flit from what’s going on at the moment (“Is that a mosquito buzzing?”) to future worries (“I’m nervous about next week’s exam”) to the past (“I’m so mad at my brother Jim for calling me a sissy at my fifth birthday party”). The precuneus contributes to both self-referential focus and episodic memory. Disturbing memories are played and replayed. The idle brain defaults to what is bothering us, both recent and long-past events. These egocentric musings of the wandering mind form the fabric of our sense of self. When you quiet your TPN in meditation, you open up a big empty space in consciousness. For a few moments, the brain is quiet, and you feel inner peace. Then the engine starts revving. The DMN kicks in, bringing with it a cascade of worries and random thoughts. You’re doing 2,000 RPM in Park, but going nowhere. And it gets worse. The DMN has a rich neural network connecting it with other brain regions. Through this, it busily starts recruiting other brain regions to go along with its whining self-absorption. It commandeers the brain’s CEO, the prefrontal cortex. This impairs executive functions like memory, attention, flexibility, inhibition, planning, and problem-solving. 2.5. Nerves from the Default Mode Network reach out to communicate with many other parts of the brain. The DMN also recruits the insula, a region that integrates information from other parts of the brain. It has special neurons triggered by emotions that we feel toward other people, such as resentment, embarrassment, lust, and contempt. We don’t just think negative thoughts; we feel them emotionally too. At this stage, the meditator isn’t just wallowing in a whirlwind of self-centered thoughts. The DMN has taken the brain’s CEO hostage, while through the insula it starts replaying all the slights, insults, and disappointments we’ve experienced in our relationships. The quiet meditative space we experienced just a few moments before has been destroyed. This drives meditators absolutely nuts. No sooner do they achieve nirvana, the still, quiet place of Bliss Brain, than the DMN serves up a smorgasbord of self-absorbed fantasies. It pulls us into negative emotional states—then drags the rest of the brain along behind it. The DMN. Hmm . . . that acronym reminds me of something: “the DeMoN.” The DMN is the demon that robs me of the inner peace I’m seeking through meditation

Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more. The 11 hours and 6 minutes of attention we’re handing over to digital media isn’t free. It’s all spent in focused mode. Think of this focused state like lifting a weight, and the unfocused state like resting

The decline of proletarian humanism is not a crucial experience which invalidates the whole of Marxism. It is still valid as a critique of the present world and alternative humanisms. In this respect, at least, it cannot be surpassed. Even if it is incapable of shaping world history, it remains powerful enough to discredit other solutions. On close consideration, Marxism is not just any hypothesis that might be replaced tomorrow by some other. It is the simple statement of those conditions without which there would be neither any humanism, in the sense of a mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in history. In this sense Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams or adventures... History has a meaning only if there is a logic of human coexistence which does not make any event impossible, butat least through a kind of natural selection eliminates in the long run those events which diverge from the permanent needs of men. Thus any philosophy of history will postulate something like what is called historical materialism—namely, the idea that morals, concepts of law and reality, modes of production and work, are internally related and clarify each other. In a genuine philosophy of history all human activities form a system in which at any moment no problem is separable from the rest, in which economic and other problems are part of a larger problem, where, finally, the productive forces of the economy are of cultural significance just as, inversely, ideologies are of economic significance... It is possible to deny that the proletariat will ever be in a position to fulfill its historical mission, or that the condition of the proletariat as described by Marx is sufficient to set a proletarian revolution on the path to a concrete humanism. One may doubt that all history's violence stems from the capitalist system. But it is difficult to deny that as long as the proletariat remains a proletariat, humanity, or the recognition of man by man, remains a dream or a mystification. Marxism perhaps does not have the power to convince us that one day, and in the way it expects, man will be the supreme being for man, but it still makes us understand that humanity is humanity only in name as long as most of mankind lives by selling itself, while some are masters and others slaves.

Marriage is not gonna feel good all the time. You have to have it together for your husband when he doesn’t have it together for himself. As his wife you’re called to help, to heal and to provide peace in ways he can’t get on his own. That’s what your rib represents. R.I.B. Rest in the brokenness. Give that man his rib. Can you give him rest in his brokenness? Own your place as the rib. Play

We make the critical choices. If there were a red pill and a blue pill, we would tell you, “Take the red pill. It will be good for you.” We might tell you about the blue pill; but then again, we might not. We tell you only what we believe you need to know. It is the priestly, doctor-knows-best model, and although often denounced it remains a common mode, especially with vulnerable patients—the frail, the poor, the elderly, and anyone else who tends to do what they’re told. The second type of relationship the authors termed “informative.” It’s the opposite of the paternalistic relationship. We tell you the facts and figures. The rest is up to you. “Here’s what the red pill does, and here’s what the blue pill does,” we would say. “Which one do you want?” It’s a retail relationship. The doctor is the technical expert. The patient is the consumer. The job of doctors is to supply up-to-date knowledge and skills. The job of patients is to supply the decisions.