Self Reconstruction Quotes

By retracing the emotional fragments lost in the turns and splits of the past, we may learn to reconstruct a shattered self, find a sensible present, and prepare to inhabit a share of the future. ("Camera obscura of the mind" )

Sink, suffer, self-destruct Rise stronger, reconstruct

The pain of the narcissist is that, to him, everything is really a threat. What doesn't surrender in reverence is blasphemous to a high opinion of oneself - the burden of self-importance. The narcissist reconstructs his own law of gravity which states that all things and all creatures must adhere to his personal satisfaction, but when they do not, the pain is far more intense than it is for one who is free from the clamors of 'I'.

The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.

First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction--in short, belief--grows ever "truer." The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to "landscape" the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up--a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows--the actual past--from another such simulacrum--the actual future? One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of "now"likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future.

Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free;

Most often, our water is shut off because of some reconstruction project, either in our village or in the next one over. A hole is dug, a pipe is replaced, and within a few hours things are back to normal. The mystery is that it's so perfectly timed to my schedule. That is to say that the tap dries up at the exact moment I roll out of bed, which is usually between 10:00 and 10:30. For me this is early, but for Hugh and most of our neighbors it's something closer to midday. What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone's guess. I only know that they're incredibly self-righteous about it and talk about the dawn as if it's a personal reward, bestowed on account of their great virtue.

The student of Torah is like the amnesia victim who tries to reconstruct from fragments the beautiful world he once experienced. By learning Torah, man returns to his own self.

It is an absolutely vain endeavor to attempt to reconstruct or even comprehend the nature of a human being by simply knowing the forces which have acted upon him. However deeply we should like to penetrate, however close we seem to be drawing to truth, one unknown quantity eludes us: man's primordial energy, his original self, that personality which was given him with the gift of life itself. On it rests man's true freedom; it alone determines his real character.

Reconstruction ended when Southern whites enacted laws that had the practical effect of banning black citizens from voting. White southerners propagated the myth that this was necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern; in the histories advanced at the time, Reconstruction was represented as a time of unparalleled political corruption, with stability restored only when whites were again given full power.

A genuine apology focuses on the feelings of the other rather than on how the one who is apologizing is going to benefit in the end. It seeks to acknowledge full responsibility for an act, and does not use self-serving language to justify the behavior of the person asking forgiveness. A sincere apology does not seek to erase what was done. No amount of words can undo past wrongs. Nothing can ever reverse injustices committed against others. But an apology pronounced in the context of horrible acts has the potential for transformation. It clears or ‘settles’ the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings.

There are, in fact, no more important communications between one human being and another than those expressed emotionally, and no information more vital for constructing and reconstructing working models of the self and other than information about how each feels towards the other...it is the emotional communication between a patient and his therapist that play the crucial part. John Bowlby

The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it. The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness. With objective consciousness it is possible to see and feel the unity of everything. Attempts to connect these phenomena into some sort of system in a scientific or philosophical way lead to nothing because man cannot reconstruct the idea of the whole starting from separate facts. —George Gurdjieff, The Fourth Way

At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up,” writes Antonio Damasio. “It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.

What is particularly striking about his reconstruction and criticisms of the traditional account of friendship is that he finds it deficient not only by the light of his own Christian viewpoint; he also finds friendship deficient when judged from the perspective of its own self-proclaimed ethical foundations. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes that the reciprocity involved in friendship actually betrays its essential selfishness.

Arms in the hands of the Negro aroused fear both North and South. Not that the Negroes could not and would not fight, for these same blacks, largely under their own officers, had beaten back Louisiana whites at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend. But, it was the silent verdict of all America that Negroes must not be allowed to fight for themselves. They were, therefore, dissuaded from every attempt at self-protection or aggression by their friends as well as their enemies.

All love is bittersweet. Love is inexplicable; it is part poetry and part masochism. Part of love is the loss of self-control because one must openly surrender their sense of an exclusive self to the manic powers of love. The personal act of surrender to a lover leaves one vulnerable to entanglement in a maze of emotions. When we fall in love, our lover’s happiness and well-being assumes the primary role in our mind, they become copilots of our souls. When we are in love for the first time, we feel what it means to become a complete person; we identify who we are by seeing our reflection in our lover’s eye; and we sense what we might become when infused with love. When our lover leaves us, we feel vexed and vacant because we recognize that they took up such a large part of what made us feel intoxicated with life. When our lover abandons us, we lose our sense of self; we temporarily cease to exist as a whole person, and we must reconstruct the shattered remnants of oneself in the wake of a love lost.

The process of falling apart (the Coyolxauhqui process), of being wounded, is a sort of shamanic initiatory dismemberment that gives suffering a spiritual and soulful value. The shaman’s initiatory ordeal includes some type of death or dismemberment during the ecstatic trance journey. Torn apart into basic elements and then reconstructed, the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to help the community. To be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart. The healing occurs in disintegration, in the demotion of the ego as the self’s only authority.20 By connecting with our wounding, the imaginal journey makes it worthwhile. Healing images bring back the pieces, heal las rajaduras. As Hillman notes, healing is a deep change of attitude that involves an adjustment and abandonment of “ego-heroics.” It requires that we shift our perspective. La

The basis for building a Christian society is evangelism and missions that lead to a widespread Christian revival, so that the great mass of earth's inhabitants will place themselves under Christ's protection, and then voluntarily use his covenantal laws for self-government. Christian reconstruction begins with personal conversion to Christ and self-government under God's law; then it spreads to others through revival; and only later does it bring comprehensive changes in civil law, when the vast majority of voters voluntarily agree to live under biblical blueprints.

How long, Klara wondered now, how long after the mortar set did the joy remain? When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction. The features of an absent loved one's face are erased one by one, the timbre of the voice drowned by the noise of the world. Fondly recalled landscapes are savagely altered; we lose them tree by tree. Even the chestnut tree outside Klara's window would die a slow, rotting death until it would fall one night in a summer storm when everything in Klara wanted it to remain standing, blossoming in spring, leafy in summer, the only access, she secretly believed, to the window of her former self.

If originality is a “sense of novelty and freshness” then, in the act of constructing ourselves, originality is not the goal. We construct a self-portrait, relying on existing objects – books, quotes from authors and artists, images, art – that we are more than happy to show off to others for them to use as masturbation material or for the material by which they align themselves. This is the new action painting – the curational archive. The referential self portrait. The portrait of any other artist could be readily used to explain yourself, just reblog it and caption it with “same.” The past consistently becomes the present, not through linear time, but through the constant reconstruction and relabeling of it.

A person whom is dissatisfied with the existing constitution of the self might wish to eradicate the self. A spiritual death can take the form of either physical death or a metaphorical death in the form of a premeditated ego death. An intentional ego death entails consciously deconstructing oneself in an effort to reconstruct a new personage. An ego death must precede the birthing of a robust personality that is equally comfortable with the knuckle busting effort that a life well lived entails.

But even though catastrophic oppression brought about a process of objectification and dehumanization, the absolute negation of humanity was not possible because a damaged human spirit seeks to resurrect and reconstruct itself; it also seeks self-consciousness.

Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can’t reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life. And the greatest of these, of course, was sex. I don’t remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society’s evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy. Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folks as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.

Provocative. Striking. Rachel Resnick is a virtuoso on the page. Her fearless examination of the desperate thirst to find love is guaranteed to break your heart. Yet her cool-eyed analysis of the roots of this addiction inspires hope that through committed self-understanding, maybe each of us can change toxic patterns, whatever they may be.

Newton is a postmodern Prometheus who deliberates anxiously on the boundaries between knowledge/perception, self/other, man/woman, human/alien. Like Prometheus, Newton falls from the heavens bearing new science and provoking enmity with the authorities. Each is the creator of man—Newton materialising as one—and is therefore placed in bondage, suffering eternal blooding and reconstruction.

These men suffer. Their anguish and despair has no limits or boundaries. They suffer in a society that does not want men �� to change, that does not want men to reconstruct masculinity so that the basis for the social formation of male identity is not rooted in an ethic of dom- ination. Rather than acknowledge the intensity of their suffering, they dissim- ulate. They pretend. They act as though they have power and privilege when they feel powerless. Inability to acknowledge the depths of male pain makes it difficult for males to challenge and change patriarchal masculinity. Broken emotional bonds with mothers and fathers, the traumas of emo- tional neglect and abandonment that so many males have experienced and been unable to name, have damaged and wounded the spirits of men. Many men are unable to speak their suffering. Like women, those who suffer the most cling to the very agents of their suffering, refusing to resist sexism or sexist oppression. Their refusal is rooted in the fear that their weakness will be exposed. They fear acknowledging the depths of their pain. As their pain intensifies, so does their need to do violence, to coercively dominate and abuse others. Barbara Deming explains: “I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they’re acting a lie, and so they’re furious. You can’t be happy living a lie, and so they’re furious at being caught in the lie. But they don’t know how to break out of it, so they just go further into it.” For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released. When feminist women insist that all men are powerful op- pressors who victimize from the location of power, they obscure the reality that many victimize from the location of victimization. The violence they do to others is usually a mirroring of the violence enacted upon and within the self.

Stafford's Hypothesis on The Transference of Existence: Even if you self-isolated, stood still, and held your breath after traveling into the past, you would still be a pebble diverting the flow of time in some way. The very transference of existence via wormholes, not interaction with past actors or events, creates paradoxes. Time Transference has three stages: 1. The distance traversed between the origin or starting point of the wormhole and the rip in the Chronosphere (space-time continuum). 2. The transference of biological material through the rip in the Chronosphere without damage to or mutation of the genetic code of the chrono-commuter. 3. Arrival at the endpoint of the time transference - the reconstruction of the chrono-commuter's genetic material and the sealing of the rip in the Chronosphere.

All self-expression is the product of the imagination, so how can we speak of an objective reflection of the real in words? Or an accurate rendering of the past—speak, memory—as if our memories are the thing in itself and can be reconstructed in words. Fiction or fact? How can you spot the difference, how can you really be sure, when the game seems to be hiding the truth by telling you 'this is the truth'?

Next, I spent three hours a day, morning, noon, and evening, in self-hypnosis and meditation. I visualized, with the joy of being totally healed, that my spine was fully repaired. I mentally reconstructed my spine, building each segment. I stared at hundreds of pictures of spines to help me perfect my mental imagery. My focused thoughts would help direct the greater intelligence already at work to heal me. When

-Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction--in short, belief--grows ever 'truer.' The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. -The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to 'landscape' the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) -Symmetry demands an actual + virtualfuture, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up--a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. -Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows--the actual past--from another such simulacrum--the actual future? -One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. -Proposition: I am in love with Luisa Ray.

We are by the river bank. The river is very, very low. Almost dry. But mostly is wet stones. Grey on the outside. We walk on the stones for awhile. You pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that it is a particular form of play with its own rules. Rather the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play. Our activity has no rules, though it is certainly intentional activity and we both understand what we are doing. The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular ‘world.’ We are there creatively. We are not passive. Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight. So, positively, the playful attitude involves openness to surprise, openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruction and to construction or reconstruction of the ‘worlds’ we inhabit playfully. Negatively, playfulness is characterized by uncertainty, lack of self-importance, absence of rules or a not taking rules as scared, a no worrying about competence and a lack of abandonment to a particular construction of oneself, others and one’s relation to them. In attempting to take a hold of oneself and one’s relation to others in a particular ‘world,’ one may study, examine and come to understand oneself. One may then see what the possibilities for play are for being one is in that ‘world.’ One may even decide to inhabit that self fully in order to understand it better and find its creative possibilities. All of this is just self-reflection, and is quite different from residing or abandoning oneself to the particular construction of oneself that one is attempting to take a hold of.

There is a principle to be learned by studying the biological origins of moral reasoning. It is that outside the clearest ethical precepts, such as the condemnation of slavery, child abuse, and genocide, which all will agree should be opposed everywhere without exception, there is a larger gray domain inherently difficult to navigate. The declaration of ethical precepts and judgments made from them requires a full understanding of why we care about the matter one way or the other, and that includes the biological history of the emotions engaged. This inquiry has not been done. In fact, it is seldom even imagined. With deepened self-understanding, how will we feel about morality and honor? I have no doubt that in many cases, perhaps the great majority, the precepts shared by most societies today will stand the test of biology-based realism. Others, such as the ban on artificial conception, condemnation of homosexual preference and forced marriages of adolescent girls, will not. Whatever the outcome, it seems clear that ethical philosophy will benefit from a reconstruction of its precepts based on both science and culture. If such greater understanding amounts to the “moral relativism” so fervently despised by the doctrinally righteous, so be it.

Two o’clock in the morning. On the outskirts of Sacramento. An abandoned shopping mall. Reconstruction would eventually transform the site into upscale apartments with numerous amenities. A chain-link fence encircled the large property, emblazoned with red-lettered signs warning of hazards and against trespassing. Although nothing remained in the mall worth stealing, a guard was usually stationed in a car inside the only gate in the fence, less to deter thieves than to dissuade adventurous urban explorers—those self-described concrete spelunkers—who engaged in explorations of everything from abandoned hotels to the maze of service tunnels underlying major cities. Such exploring was illegal, but if some catacomber or amateur city archeologist were injured in one of their adventures, there was every reason to be concerned that a jury of the ignorant and a judge with issues would award millions to the trespasser. On

Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies, this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition of black freedmen before courts of law, and founded the free common school in the South. On the other hand, it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen, to guard its work wholly from paternalistic methods which discouraged self-reliance, and to carry out to any considerable extent its implied promises to furnish the freedmen with land. Its successes were the result of hard work, supplemented by the aid of philanthropists and the eager striving of black men. Its failures were the result of bad local agents, the inherent difficulties of the work, and national neglect.

These men suffer. Their anguish and despair has no limits or boundaries. They suffer in a society that does not want men to change, that does not want men to reconstruct masculinity so that the basis for the social formation of male identity is not rooted in an ethic of domination. Rather than acknowledge the intensity of their suffering, they dissimulate. They pretend. They act as though they have power and privilege when they feel powerless. Inability to acknowledge the depths of male pain makes it difficult for males to challenge and change patriarchal masculinity. Broken emotional bonds with mothers and fathers, the traumas of emotional neglect and abandonment that so many males have experienced and been unable to name, have damaged and wounded the spirits of men. Many men are unable to speak their suffering. Like women, those who suffer the most cling to the very agents of their suffering, refusing to resist sexism or sexist oppression. Their refusal is rooted in the fear that their weakness will be exposed. They fear acknowledging the depths of their pain. As their pain intensifies, so does their need to do violence, to coercively dominate and abuse others. Barbara Deming explains: “I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they’re acting a lie, and so they’re furious. You can’t be happy living a lie, and so they’re furious at being caught in the lie. But they don’t know how to break out of it, so they just go further into it.” For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released. When feminist women insist that all men are powerful oppressors who victimize from the location of power, they obscure the reality that many victimize from the location of victimization. The violence they do to others is usually a mirroring of the violence enacted upon and within the self.

Whether they are committed deliberately or not, embezzlement, waste, and bureaucracy are allied with colonialism and feudalism because they hamper our war of resistance and our national reconstruction... There are people who are enthusiastic and faithful in struggle; they fear neither dangers, hardships, nor the enemy, thus they have served the revolution well; but as soon as they hold some authority, they grow arrogant and luxurious, indulge in embezzlement, waste, and unconscious bureaucracy, thus becoming guilty in the eyes of the revolution. We must save them, help them recover their revolutionary virtues. Others, while pretending to serve the Fatherland and the people, indulge in embezzlement and waste, and harm the Fatherland and the people. We must educate them, and lead them to the revolutionary path. Embezzlement, waste, and bureaucracy are evils left by the old society. They spring from self-interest and selfishness. They are begotten by the regime of “exploitation of man by man.

Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540–2093); the dilemma being addressed is how we—the children of the Enlightenment—failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind—even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093).

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work, one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and economic would have been a herculean task; but when to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement,—in such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure. The very name of the [Freedmen's] Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The government has a great need to restore its credibility, to make people forget its history and rewrite it. The intelligentsia have to a remarkable degree undertaken this task. It is also necessary to establish the "lessons" that have to be drawn from the war, to ensure that these are conceived on the narrowest grounds, in terms of such socially neutral categories as "stupidity" or "error" or "ignorance" or perhaps "cost." Why? Because soon it will be necessary to justify other confrontations, perhaps other U.S. interventions in the world, other Vietnams. But this time, these will have to be successful intervention, which don't slip out of control. Chile, for example. It is even possible for the press to criticize successful interventions - the Dominican Republic, Chile, etc. - as long as these criticisms don't exceed "civilized limits," that is to say, as long as they don't serve to arouse popular movements capable of hindering these enterprises, and are not accompanied by any rational analysis of the motives of U.S. imperialism, something which is complete anathema, intolerable to liberal ideology. How is the liberal press proceeding with regard to Vietnam, that sector which supported the "doves"? By stressing the "stupidity" of the U.S. intervention; that's a politically neutral term. It would have been sufficient to find an "intelligent" policy. The war was thus a tragic error in which good intentions were transmuted into bad policies, because of a generation of incompetent and arrogant officials. The war's savagery is also denounced, but that too, is used as a neutral category...Presumably the goals were legitimate - it would have been all right to do the same thing, but more humanely... The "responsible" doves were opposed to the war - on a pragmatic basis. Now it is necessary to reconstruct the system of beliefs according to which the United States is the benefactor of humanity, historically committed to freedom, self-determination, and human rights. With regard to this doctrine, the "responsible" doves share the same presuppositions as the hawks. They do not question the right of the United States to intervene in other countries. Their criticism is actually very convenient for the state, which is quite willing to be chided for its errors, as long as the fundamental right of forceful intervention is not brought into question. ... The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates - indeed, encourages - a variety of forms of opposition, such as those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially neutral category not linked in any way to concrete social and economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for domination" to the employment of force by the United States government in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible to exploitation by U.S.-based corporations - that is extremely impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction - in short, belief - grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up - a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows - the actual past - from another such simulacrum - the actual future? One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. Proposition: I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey.

As in other Buddhist Tantric techniques, recommended preliminaries for these practices include developing skill at both calm-abiding (zhi gnas; śamatha) and insight meditation (lhag mthong; vipaśyanā). As in earlier Buddhist teachings, many Chöd dehadāna practices emphasize renunciation, purification, and self-transformation through the accumulation of merit and the exhaustion of demerit. Rather than suggesting that one must wait to accumulate adequate merit before offering the gift of the body, however, Chöd provides the opportunity for immediately efficacious offering of the body through techniques of visualization. Using a technique which echoes the traditional Buddhist teaching of the of the mind-made body (manomayākāya), the practitioner engages in visualizations which allow her to experience the non-duality of agent and object as she offers her body. The process of giving the body as a means of attainment is commonly articulated in Chöd practice texts (sgrub pa; sādhana). These practice texts exhibit the framework of mature Tantra sādhana, including the stages of generating bodhicitta, going for refuge, meditating on the four immeasurables, and making the eight-limbed offering. Generally speaking, the main section of a developed Chöd sādhana has three components. The first two—a transference of consciousness (nam mkha’ sgo ‘byed) practice, and a body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) practice—have distinctly purifying purposes. The Chöd transference of consciousness practice has parallels with other Buddhist practices called "’pho ba." In this part of the visualization practice, the practitioner’s consciousness is "ejected" from one's body through the Brahma aperture at the crown of one's head. At this time, one's consciousness can be visualized as becoming identical with an enlightened consciousness, which is embodied in a figure such as Machik, Vajrayoginī (Rdo rje rnal byor ma) or Vajravārāhī (Rdo rje phag mo). [....] In th[e] first stage of this transformation, the practitioner identifies with an enlightened being, thus overcoming attachment to her own body-mind aggregates and purifying them through this non-attachment. In the second stage, the practitioner can extend this identification: the practitioner identifies the microcosm of her body with macrocosms of the mundane and supramundane worlds. The body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) stage also allows the practitioner to reconceptualize her body as expanding through space and time and becoming indistinguishable from the realm of the supramundane, or the Dharmadhātu (chos kyi dbyings). Through the process of reconstructing her identity, the practitioner is able to see herself as the ultimate source of offerings for all sentient beings.

Reviewing how American memory of the Pilgrims and the First Thanksgiving has changed over time exposes our fundamental self-centeredness, for we see how readily we reconstruct the past in self-serving ways, using history to further our agendas rather than learning from it to challenge our hearts. But we need not despair. In God’s divine economy, guilt acknowledged calls forth grace, and grace received gives rise to gratitude, culminating in the second predictable hallmark of Christian reflection: praise to our gracious Lord. Theology should always lead to doxology, J. I. Packer once observed. I think the same is true of history. If theology teaches us the nature of God, history—viewed through eyes of faith—reminds us of our need for God. “If You, LORD, should mark iniquities,” asks the 130th Psalm, “O Lord, who could stand?” Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage. (PSALM 84:5 NIV)

Colonialism is a form of vampirism that empowers and bloats the self image of the colonizing empire by draining the life energies of the colonized people; just enough blood is left to allow the colonial subject to perform a day’s work for the objective empire. And these drained energies are not only of the present and future, but of the past, of memory itself: the continuity of identity of a people, and of each individual who is colonized. No one should recognize this process better than women; for the female sex has functioned as a colony of organized patriarchal power for several thousand years now. Our brains have been emptied out of all memory of our own cultural history, and the colonizing power systematically denies such a history ever existed. The colonizing power mocks our attempts to rediscover and celebrate our ancient matriarchies as realities. In the past women have had to accept this enforced female amnesia as “normal”; and many contemporary women continue to believe the female sex has existed always and ab aeterno as an auxiliary to the male-dominated world order. But we continue to dig in the ruins, seeking the energy of memory; believing that the reconstruction of women’s ancient history has a revolutionary potential equal to that of any political movement today.

He spoke about how we are permeable fluid beings instead of stable unitary isolates; about recursive reconstruction of the self; about an engagement with the world that constantly creates a new you, only you don’t know it, because you’re not the person you would have been otherwise—you’re a one-person experiment that has lost its control.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

Third, character is functional, in the sense that it is no mere accidental accretion of responsive patterns. Character {39} development fulfills a task set by the requirements of personality organization: the defense of the individual against inner and outer demands which threaten him. “Biologically speaking, character formation is an autoplastic function. In the conflict between instinct and frustrating outer world, and motivated by the anxiety arising from this conflict, the organism erects a protection mechanism between itself and the outer world.”[9] Whatever the special content of varying theories of character-formation, they share an emphasis on the reconstruction of the self as a way of solving anxiety-laden problems.

Traveling down a road of self-destruction With no room for any reconstruction

A key finding is that violence is remembered, given meaning and lived with in the present, in ethical terms. As we have seen from the stories belonging to former insurgents and former state counter-insurgency officers, the mediation of violent memories is fundamentally an ethical exercise for those who have participated in violence. It entails a reconstruction of one’s experiences in moral terms, in ways that enable ‘perpetrators’ to continue living with their unsettling pasts in the present. Memories of violence are morally tendentious, rather than being abstract and objective recollections of a recorded past. Shaped by the changing socio-political and moral contexts of recall, memories of violence are continuously reworked in the present, with profound implications for notions of the self and sociality.

The portrayal of counter-insurgency officers in moral and heroic terms, a division of the world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and a rationalisation of the counter-insurrection characterised their alternative ‘truth’. Through their stories, former counter-insurgency officers engaged in a reworking of the past and a retrospective refashioning of the self, in order to alter their relationship to that past and make it more conducive to life in the present. Their narrative reconstructions allowed them to imbue their morally troubling experiences with meaning, and to find ways of coming to terms with their actions in the aftermath of terror.

away from accessible consciousness, and that is possibly where and when the self matures, thanks to the gradual sedimentation and reworking of one’s memory. As lived experiences are reconstructed and replayed, whether in conscious reflection or in nonconscious processing, their substance is reassessed and inevitably rearranged, modified minimally or very much in terms of their factual composition and emotional accompaniment. Entities and events acquire new emotional weights during this process. Some frames of the recollection are dropped on the mind’s cutting-room floor, others are restored and enhanced, and others still are so deftly combined either by our wants or by the vagaries of chance that they create new scenes that were never shot. That is how, as years pass, our own history is subtly rewritten. That is why facts can acquire a new significance and why the music of memory plays differently today than it did last year.

An effective contradiction exists only where the relation between the positive and the negative is not one of alternation, but where the negation of the negation is capable of exercising its function against itself as an abstract or immediate negation and so founding contradiction while founding its transcendence. The Hegelian notion of the negation of the negation is not a solution of despair, nor is it a verbal artifice to escape from embarrassment. It is the formula of every operative contradiction and by leaving it aside one abandons dialectical thought itself, which is the fecundity of contradiction. The notion of a labor of the negative, as a negation which neither exhausts itself in the exclusion of the positive nor, when confronted with it, exhausts itself in conjuring up a term which annuls it, but instead reconstructs the positive beyond its limitations, destroying it and preserving it, is not a gradual perfecting or sclerosis of dialectical thought: it is its primordial resort (moreover, it is not astonishing to find it intimated in Plato where he calls the "same" the "other than the other"). We have related the notion of negation to the modern notion of transcendence, that is to say, to a being which is in principle at a distance, in regard to which distance is a bond but with which there can be no question of coïncidence. Here, as in the other case, the relation of self to self passes through the external, the immediate demands mediation, or, again, mediation exists through the self.

Negroes did not surrender the ballot easily or immediately. They continue to hold remnants of political power in South Carolina and Florida, Louisiana, in parts of N. Carolina, in Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia. Black Congressman came out of the south until 1895 and black legislators served as late as 1896. But it was losing battle, with public opinion, industry, wealth, and religion against them, Their own leaders decried "politics" and preached submission, All their efforts towards manly self assertion were distracted by defeatism and counsels of despair, backed by the powerful propaganda of a religion which taught meekness, sacrifice, and humility.

America thus stepped forward in the modern age and added to the art of beauty gift of the Renaissance and to freedom of belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self sustaining men. What an idea and idea for its realization--endless land of richest fertility, natural resources such as Earth seldom exhibited before, a population infinite in variety, of universal gift, burned in the fires of poverty and caste, yearning toward the Unknown God; and self reliant pioneers, unafraid of man or devil. It was the Supreme Adventure, in the last great battle of the west, for that human freedom which would release the human spirit from lower lust for more meat, and set its feet to dream and sing...And then some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of heaven and dropped a black man in the midst. It transformed the world. It turned democracy back to Roman Imperialism and fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy; it replaced freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of humanity from the vast majority of human beings.

It was as if personality itself had a “face.” This nonphysical “face of personality” seemed to be the real key to personality change. If it remained scarred, distorted, “ugly,” or inferior, the person himself acted out this role in his behavior regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this “face of personality” could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery. Once I began to explore this area, I found more and more phenomena that confirmed the fact that the “self-image,” the individual’s mental and spiritual concept or “picture” of himself, was the real key to personality and behavior. More about this in the first chapter.

By transforming the past into a history, the psychoanalyst creates a series of densely symbolic stories that will serve as ever-present dream material in the patient’s life, generating constant and continuous associations. Unlike the past, which as a signifier sits in the self as a kind of lead weight, history requires work, and when the work is done the history is sufficiently polysemous to energize many unconscious elaborations. The work of recollecting seemingly insignificant details from the past symbolically brings prior selves contained in these mnemic objects back to life – and in this way transforms debris into meaningful presence – and thus is the work of a life instinct, but ironically it also puts these past lives into a new place of destruction, for the unconscious work has a dismantling effect, as historical texts of reconstruction give birth to other ideas and contrary reflective theories, which destroy the placid aim of creating commemorative plaques to one’s new discoveries. Historical construction collects in order to retrieve the self from its many meaningless deaths – the amnesial ‘gone’ – and then it generatively destroys these details and saturates them with new meaning created through the very act of retrieval, which has given them the imaginative and symbolic energy to make this past available for the self’s future.

A WHILE BACK, a game designer friend of mine named Phil Fish made a plea on Twitter, “Hey bloggers, no more ‘blank rebuilt in Minecraft’ posts, please. We get it. You can make things in Minecraft. Thanks.” Fish was referring to the popular online game Minecraft, in which players hunt for resources that are used to construct models and apparatuses with the game’s characteristic, cubical visual style. The Internet being what it is, given such tools extreme fans do insane things, like elaborately reconstructing the city King’s Landing from Game of Thrones using nothing but this square matter mined from Minecraft. Seeing Fish’s tweet, an enterprising ironoiac recreated the form of the embedded tweet itself inside Minecraft, a fact that the tech blog VentureBeat then dutifully blogged about, thus completing not one but two cycles of an ironoia self-treatment the environmental philosopher Timothy Morton names “anything you can do I can do meta.”14 In a futile attempt to prevent further metastasis, the blogger concluded his post with the line, “Yes, we’re fully aware of the irony of this post.”15 But rather than satisfying anyone, such a provocation only further irritated the ironoiac itch. Fish tweeted a link to the blog post covering the Minecraft construction of a model of Fish’s tweet protesting blog posts about Minecraft constructions, which one of his followers one-upped by observing the fact that Fish had in fact “tweeted about somebody blogging about somebody making [his] tweet about Minecraft in Minecraft.” Another chimed in, “How long ’til someone recreates that blog post in Minecraft?” Each step represents an attempt to overcome the absurdity of the last by fixing it in a new voice, even though each ironic gesture was evanescent, quickly replaced by yet another layer of buffer from yet another desperate ironoiac. Why do we do it, then? Today, satisfaction is more elusive than ever. In part, the precarity of life after the 2008 global financial collapse and the Great Recession that followed it (and whose effects still linger) makes every transaction with the world feel suspect and risky. We fear that things might turn on us, because we have good evidence that they can, and do. But

Truth in the human world, is constructed, defined and then reconstructed by the human self.

Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one’s own country. This means holding fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance, and thus solving one’s own problems for oneself on one’s own responsibility under all circumstances.

This path of 'Akram' (step-less path to Self-realization) is a diversion road, it is not a path where others views are refuted and one's own are maintained. All the 'bridges' on the 'Kramic' path (step-by-step path to Self-realization) have broken down, that is why this 'diversion road' has come about. Once the 'bridges' have been reconstructed, this 'diversion road' will disappear!

Tieken has suggested, on the basis of the problems we have outlined, that all the Sangam poems in the major anthologies were composed to order by poets who were perfectly aware of the fictive nature of their subject (tuṟai) and its context. Thus eighth- or ninth-century poets at the Pandya court, in Tieken’s reconstruction, deliberately composed poems with an internal speaker addressing a far more ancient hero or patron—as if a poet today were to adopt the persona of, say, Christopher Marlowe writing verses for Queen Elizabeth. But there is no need to conjure up such a scenario, with early-medieval court poets busy composing thousands of poems deliberately retrojected into the distant past, using conventional themes as well as invented materials meant to bring these ancient kings and bards to life. Is it not far more economical to imagine a process whereby the poems, many of them very old, all of them self-conscious literary efforts to begin with, survived through a slow process of recording, editorial accretion, and explication? Moreover, the relation of poem to colophon must have been, in many cases, far more intimate than any linear development could account for. There may well have been cases where the text and the colophon are, in a special sense, mutually determining—that is, cases where the poetic situation at work in the poem fits and informs the colophon long before the latter was recorded. Again, there is no need to assume that the “fictive” nature of the colophon means it is false. Quite the contrary may be the case: poem and colophon, though certainly distinct, usually share a single mental template. Fiction often offers a much closer approximation to truth than what passes for fact can give us. It’s also possible that some of the colophons are arbitrary editorial interventions long after the period of composition—that is, that well-known, ancient names were recycled by creative editors. We need to keep an open, critical mind as we investigate these materials.

It is not just that ‘traumatic events’ disrupt ‘attachments of family, friendship, love, and community’ or ‘shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others.’ More fundamentally, trauma specialist Judith Herman asserts, trauma directly disrupts the very ‘systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community.’ Thus, another specialist has defined traumatic events as ones ‘that cannot be assimilated with the victim’s “inner schemata” of self in relation to the world.’ The ‘work of reconstruction,’ Herman writes, ‘actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor’s life story.

There's a line people spout, usually people who want to sound sage and wise, about wherever you travel, you can never escape yourself. That's bullshit. Get far enough away from the relationships that bind you, the people that define you, the familiar landscapes and routines that tether you to an identity, and you can easily escape yourself, for a whole at least. Self is only a construct. You can dismantle it, reconstruct it, pimp up a new you. As long as you never go back. Then, that new you falls away like the emperor's new clothes, leaving you naked and exposed, all your ugly flaws and mistakes revealed for the world to see.

In this turn against Reconstruction we see how the American idea of freedom is a living, evolving thing. Before, Greeley believed that simply ending slavery and providing a background of free labor policies would be enough to ensure that people could be self-sufficient, independent, and removed from the arbitrary domination of others. It led Greeley to promote ideas that were genuine and remarkable in creating this freedom, with free homesteads among the most important. But the challenge of Reconstruction showed Greeley that this wouldn’t be sufficient in a new era.

Cities can do this. Cast off their onetime identity and - while wearing the same (but now reconstructed) exterior-become something new. We as individuals can also change physical shape. We can lose weight and gain muscle, or go the other way and give in to flab. We can wear clothes that speak volumes about the images we want to present to the world. We can display our wealth, our poverty, our sense of confidence, our sense of self doubt. We can, like cities, change all the externals. But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities- it's capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got, all that we got but never wanted, all that was found and lost.

Kim Il-sung’s goal wasn’t merely to build a new country; he wanted to build better people, to reshape human nature. To that end, he created his own philosophical system, juche, which is commonly translated as “self-reliance.” Juche drew on Marx’s and Lenin’s ideas about the struggle between landlord and peasant, between rich and poor. It similarly declared that man, not God, shaped his own fate. But Kim Il-sung rejected traditional Communist teachings about universalism and internationalism. He was a Korean nationalist in the extreme. He instructed Koreans that they were special—almost a chosen people—and that they no longer had to rely on their more powerful neighbors, China, Japan, or Russia. The South Koreans were a disgrace because of their dependence on the United States. “Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one’s own country. This means holding fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance,” he expounded in one of his many treatises. This was seductive to a proud people whose dignity had been trampled by its neighbors for centuries.

That’s how one of my stories that has received the most praise from critics and, especially, from readers came to be published. However, that experience did not prevent me from continuing to rip up manuscripts I didn’t think were publishable, but rather taught me that it’s necessary to tear them in such a way that they can never be pieced back together.

Racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people. And yet, this strategy is based on one of the oldest myths in the modern era, a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America. It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle and low income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle and upper income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free from racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latino racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.

The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness. It pained her not to have had that revelation many years before when it had still been possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light…

As psychologist Brent Slife states in Time and Psychological Explanation (italics mine): We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present . . . Our memories are not “stored” and “objective” entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.

Tom sees Jesus as consciously living out a messianic vocation, including seeing his own death within that framework. My historical judgment is, “It’s possible but very difficult to know with any degree of probability, and if I had to bet, probably not.” To be more precise, I am sufficiently doubtful that we can trace a messianic self-awareness back to Jesus so that I do not use the term messiah (or any of the other exalted metaphors) in my historical reconstruction of Jesus. I do not see Jesus as seeing himself in messianic terms, and I do not think he saw his death as central to a messianic vocation or as in some sense the purpose of his life.

Supposing there were no self-identical "A", such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the "A" were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirrn it. The "thing"--that is the real substratum of "A"; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The "A" of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing--If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a "real world" (--this, however, is the apparent world once more--).

It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it... And just in case thou art not all that, we will fix it with a bit of cleverness in reconstructing reality!

We correct history, reconstructing the past so that it will be consistent with the present, reaffirming our sense of self and place in the world. We reconstruct history every day, not to fool others but to fool ourselves, because it is integral to the process of going on.8 So we would expect that, in addition to the initial failure to register the teleconference fully, the effects of forgetting, the media effect on personal recollections, and the intentional self-protection in response to occupational risk, accounts of that evening would also be affected by the unconscious editing that goes on as people attempt to rescue order from disorder—perhaps driven in this case by a need to be guiltless, a need to have been “correct.

This is what I’ve come to realize: we need to edify ourselves. We need to start a new program of deprogramming our minds. We actually need to rewire our brains… and some claim this is actually physically as well… and train it to think positive thoughts about ourselves. We need to reconstruct (and for many of us it is construct for the very first time) a self-image that is positive rather than negative.

this ultimate freedom (of genetic self-reconstruction) coincides with the ultimate non-freedom: I am myself reduced to an object which can be endlessly refashioned.

Disruptive empathy is a process of engagement that facilitates movement toward a level of open-heartedness and open-mindedness that can take in all that appears to be ‘utterly other’ -- even when, or especially when, the ‘Otherness’ appears in ourselves. … [W]e have to loosen our attachment to the narratives about self and other. We must be willing to be surprised and accept the part of ourselves we previously found embarrassing or shameful. (p. 66)

To only consider Nietzschean thought for its nihilistic, pessimistic, and destructive aspect is to only understand it partially. This view misses its real motivation and its creative and spiritual side. It's true that this destructive side is essential to Nietzsche's philosophy, but it's not the complete picture. Many often overlook Nietzsche’s spiritual and creative aspects. To him, nihilism was an essential part of his philosophy, but it wasn't the end goal. Today, many people mistakenly view it as such. Nietzsche used nihilism as a tool to destroy the false ideals of Judeo-Christian beliefs. However, he also differentiated these beliefs from Christ's original teachings. His ultimate goal was the "transvaluation", or revaluation, of all values. Nietzsche’s nihilism was a necessary but transitory phase which was meant to precede his grand and veritable task of reconstruction, of creation: the Übermensch, the Superman, who embodies the advanced stage of a superior humanity which would have transcended its "human, all-too-human" nature, to reach a supra-human, post-human stage, in conformity with the Nietzschean vital principle of eternal becoming and self-overcoming.

A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.

Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history. 'Do you really think that it could happen here?' remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding 'Yes.' For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.' And 'it' was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of 'all men.

1. If postmodern thought has tried to gag God, unsuccessfully, by its radical hermeneutics and its innovative epistemology, the church is in danger of gagging God in quite another way. The church in Laodicea, toward the end of the first century, thought of itself as farsighted, respectable, basically well off. From the perspective of the exalted Christ, however, it was blind, naked, bankrupt. The nearby town of Colossae enjoyed water that was fresh and cold, and therefore useful; the nearby town of Hierapolis enjoyed hotsprings where people went to take the cure: its water, too, was useful. But Laodicea’s foul water was channeled in through stone pipes, and it was proverbial for its nauseating taste. The church had become much like the water it drank: neither hot and useful, nor cold and useful, but merely nauseating. Jesus is prepared to spue this church out of his mouth (Rev. 3:16). This church makes the exalted Jesus gag. I cannot escape the dreadful feeling that modern evangelicalism in the West more successfully effects the gagging of God, in this sense, than all the postmodernists together, in the other sense. 2. This calls for repentance. The things from which we must turn are not so much individual sins—greed, pride, sexual promiscuity, or the like, as ugly and as evil as they are—as fundamental heart attitudes that squeeze God and his Word and his glory to the periphery, while we get on with religion and self-fulfillment. 3. At issue is not only what we must turn from, but also what we must turn to: We will not be able to recover the vision and understanding of God’s grandeur until we recover an understanding of ourselves as creatures who have been made to know such grandeur. This must begin with the recovery of the idea that as beings made in God’s image, we are fundamentally moral beings, not consumers, that the satisfaction of our psychological needs pales in significance when compared with the enduring value of doing what is right. Religious consumers want to have a spirituality for the same reason that they want to drive a stylish and expensive auto. Costly obedience is as foreign to them in matters spiritual as self-denial is in matters material. In a culture filled with such people, restoring weight to God is going to involve much more than simply getting some doctrine straight; it’s going to entail a complete reconstruction of the modern self-absorbed pastiche personality.94 4. It follows that teachers and preachers in seminaries and churches must be people “for whom the great issue is the knowledge of God,”95 whatever their area of specialization might be. Preachers and teachers who do not see this point and passionately hold to it are worse than useless: they are dangerous, because they are diverting.

Once we allow the logical reconstruction of something (a being, a theodicy, and the like) to have internal self contradiction, it obviously becomes possible to prove absolutely anything, whatever one pleases. Consider how the matter lies. We are speaking of creating someone and of endowing him with a particular logic, and then demanding that this same logic be offered up in sacrifice to a belief in the Maker of all things. If this model itself is to remain noncontradictory, it calls for the application, in the form of a metalogic, of a totally different type of reasoning from that which is natural to the logic of the one created. |If that does not reveal the outright imperfection of the Creator, then it reveals a quality that I would call mathematical inelegance – a sui generic unmethodicalness (incoherence) of the creative act.

Once we allow the logical reconstruction of something (a being, a theodicy, and the like) to have internal self contradiction, it obviously becomes possible to prove absolutely anything, whatever one pleases. Consider how the matter lies. We are speaking of creating someone and of endowing him with a particular logic, and then demanding that this same logic be offered up in sacrifice to a belief in the Maker of all things. If this model itself is to remain noncontradictory, it calls for the application, in the form of a metalogic, of a totally different type of reasoning from that which is natural to the logic of the one created. |If that does not reveal the outright imperfection of the Creator, then it reveals a quality that I would call mathematical inelegance – a sui generic unmethodicalness (incoherence) of the creative act.

The major function of social work is concerned with helping people perform their normal life tasks by providing information and knowledge, social support, social skills, and social opportunities; it is also concerned with helping people deal with interference and abuse from other individuals and groups, with physical and mental disabilities, and with overburdening responsibilities they have for others. Most important, social work’s objective is to strengthen the community’s capacities to solve problems through development of groups and organizations, community education, and community systems of governance and control over systems of social care. The concern of psychotherapy is with helping people to deal with feelings, perceptions, and emotions that prevent them from performing their normal life tasks because of impairment or insufficient development of emotional and cognitive functions that are intimately related to the self. Social workers help people make use of and develop community and social resources to build connections with others and reduce alienation and isolation; psychotherapists help people to alter, reconstruct, and improve the self.

authorities in the expelling and receiving countries alike embarked upon a course that they fully recognized would result in the immediate impoverishment of both; divert vital transport resources away from reconstruction and relief to a wholly unproductive purpose; and leave a trail of human misery in its wake. Their persistence in such a profoundly self-defeating enterprise raises questions about what lessons, if any, the victors had learned from the unhinged Hitlerian effort to reshape the demographics of the European continent during the Second World War.

To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster,” he said. “Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.” He then introduced a crucial phrase: “I pledge you, I pledge myself,” FDR said, “to a New Deal for the American people.” The crisis was existential. “His impulse,” Winston Churchill wrote of FDR in the mid-1930s, “is one which makes toward the fuller life of the masses of the people in every land, and which, as it glows the brighter, may well eclipse both the lurid flames of German Nordic self-assertion and the baleful unnatural lights which are diffused from Soviet Russia.

That Mr. Chamberlain, with his limited outlook and inexperience of the European scene, should have possessed the self-sufficiency to wave away the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic leaves one, even at this date, breathless with amazement. The lack of all sense of proportion, and even of self-preservation, which this episode reveals in an upright, competent, well-meaning man, charged with the destinies of our country and all who depended upon it, is appalling. One cannot to-day even reconstruct the state of mind which would render such gestures possible.

It took me a long time to understand that she wasn't being incoherent or contradictory, but rather it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into to a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values--values I'd adopted precisely in order to construct a self in opposition to my parents, in opposition to my family--that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic hat lies behind any given discourse or practice.

It is not about changing views (the aggregate of perception) but about reconstructing patterns of habitual reaction (the aggregate of formations). Fortunately the Buddha bequeathed us a powerful tool for doing this — mindfulness.

At times in life God will break you down so he can reconstruct and rebuild you into his divine masterpiece.

Even as he was speaking, he was having a vision of what Miro’s life must have been like: paranoia raised to an art form. He must have logged every item Jaime ever brought into his flat, and logged each one out again after he’d left. Burned the bedlinen, replaced the crockery; vacuumed the ceilings in Jaime’s wake, so there’d be nothing to remind him he’d ever been there. Which was a kind of self-protection; one that erased happiness as soon as it departed, so its souvenirs didn’t lacerate the present.

When you draw on a memory, you always do so from the perspective of your present self. Psychologists call memory a “reconstruction,” because it is always reconstructed based on your present views, which influence how you see and perceive past events.14,15,16 As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., stated, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of 'black' writers, I ended up on the very distant and very 'other' side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed. But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.