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He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax...
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Bohumil Hrabal (I Served the King of England)
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If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
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Leaders who want to show sensitivity should listen often and long and talk short and seldom. Many so-called leaders are too busy to listen. True leaders know that time spent listening is well invested.
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J. Oswald Sanders (Spiritual Leadership (Commitment To Spiritual Growth))
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In short, you do not have to take the job that will create excessive stress and overarousal. Someone else will take it and flourish in it. You do not have to work long hours. Indeed, it may be your duty to work shorter ones. It may not be best to advertise it, but keeping yourself healthy and in your right range of arousal is the first condition for helping others.
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You)
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Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....
There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.
Intelligences are atoms of perception -- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them -- so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How, but in the medium of a world like this?
This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion -- or rather it is a system of Spirit Creation...
I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive -- and yet I think I perceive it -- that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways....
As various as the lives of men are -- so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence.
This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity...
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John Keats
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Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph—at least in the short run—over more ethically sensitive competitors.
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Tony Judt (Ill Fares The Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents)
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How the mighty have fallen,” he said, looking down on Aten. Ard-Greimne was short and incredibly sensitive about his height. He always wore shoes with lifts in them. When Aten didn’t respond, he tried again. “I said, how the mighty—”
“It wasn’t funny or even clever the first time you said it,” Aten said. “Nor is it original.
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Michael Scott (The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, #6))
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In short, a strong royal advisor class insists on stopping and thinking. And it tries, I think with growing success in modern times, to direct the wonderful, expansive energy of their society away from aggression and domination. Better to use that energy for creative inventions, exploration, and protection of the planet and the powerless.
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person)
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The belt slid down her thin hips, and she nervously gripped at it, pulling it up. Short sleeves showed her very thin arms and big delicate elbow joints. Her body was all concave and jerkily fluid lines; it moved with sensitive looseness, loosely threaded together: each movement had a touch of exaggeration , as though some secret power kept springing out.
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Elizabeth Bowen (The Death of the Heart)
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Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence, change of place and of face, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her instance as it has done in many others.
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Walter Scott (Tales of My Landlord. Incl: The Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, Count Robert of Paris & Castle Dangerous. (mobi))
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The efficiency of Wu Wei is like that of water flowing over and around the rocks in its path—not the mechanical, straight-line approach that usually ends up short-circuiting natural laws, but one that evolves from an inner sensitivity to the natural rhythm of things.
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Lao Tzu (The Tao of Pooh)
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Life is rather a short walk through eternity. Be they seeds, pups or infants, on the trek all pick up weight, sensitivity and awareness. Then, much before the end of the run, they deteriorate, head, legs and lungs. The tragicomedy of existence: the long walk of slow decay.
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Dagobert D. Runes (A Dictionary of Thought)
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Words... are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind....Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed......Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.
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Virginia Woolf (The Death of the Moth and Other Essays)
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greatest surprises I have encountered has been that the people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.
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Pico Iyer (The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books))
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One day, John asked her to define sin. I doubt any theologian could have done better than she did: “Son, whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things; in short, if anything increases the authority and power of the flesh over the Spirit, then that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself.”1That definition became the guiding beacon for John. He carved it into his consciousness. His mother inbred in him his sensitivity to sin.
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Ravi Zacharias (The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives)
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Stubbornness is a weapon.
People tend to draw it out when a sensitive part of their identity is threatened—be it dignity, honor, pride, desires, etc. If loaded with righteous resolve, stubbornness can assist in overcoming obstacles and achieving great feats; however, more often than not it is loaded with anger, used as a means of destruction for both the possessor and those whom he turns his weapon upon. It is best utilized by wise individuals who are able to dispassionately perceive if their stubbornness will accomplish good, or if it should be put away and replaced by a humble substitute to spare the lives of everyone affected.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year)
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When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and “discover themselves.” The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire.
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Christina Hoff Sommers (The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men)
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When a body succeeds in emitting or in reflecting luminous vibrations in a distinct and recognizable order--I thought--what does it do with these vibrations? Put them in its pocket? No, it releases them on the first passer-by. And how will the latter behave in the face of vibrations he can't utilize and which, taken in this way, might even be annoying? Hide his head in a hole? No, he'll thrust it out in that direction until the point most exposed to the optic vibrations becomes sensitized and develops the mechanism for exploiting them in the form of images. In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image.
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Italo Calvino (Cosmicomics)
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His wounds, incidentally, must have healed up by now, he felt no handicap anymore, which was astonishing; for, as recalled, after he had nicked his finger with a knife over a month ago, the injury had still been hurting the day before yesterday. "Am I less sensitive now?" he wondered, greedily sucking at the cheese, which had promptly exerted a more emphatic attraction on him than any of the other food. His eyes watered with contentment as he gulped down the cheese, the vegetables, and the sauce in rapid succession. By contrast, he did not relish the fresh foods, he could not even stand their smells, and he actually dragged the things he wanted to eat a short distance away.
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Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories: The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka)
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At Stage Four of EBV, viral neurotoxins flood the body’s bloodstream and travel to the brain, where they short out neurotransmitters; plus the virus inflames or goes after the nerves throughout the body, making them sensitive and even allergic to the neurotoxins. As a result, it’s common to experience heavier brain fog, memory loss, confusion, depression, anxiety, migraines, joint pain, nerve pain, heart palpitations, eye floaters, restless legs, ringing in the ears, insomnia, difficulty healing from injuries, and more.
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Anthony William (Medical Medium Thyroid Healing: The Truth behind Hashimoto's, Graves', Insomnia, Hypothyroidism, Thyroid Nodules & Epstein-Barr)
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Hawkins was eloquent and poetic--but most of all he was exquisitely sensitive to a woman's moods. He sensed it when Annie was depressed, though she never told him she was, and he would say just the right thing to cheer her. And when she was elated, he nourished her elation, and kept it alive for weeks instead of fleeting minutes.
--"Out, Brief Candle
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction)
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Life is short and filled with limits and responsibilities. We each get a piece of the “good” to enjoy, just as we each contribute a piece of that good to the world.
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Survive and Thrive When the World Overwhelms You)
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As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra — But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice — he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun — how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade — how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony — goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window- stained tomb. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either.
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Virginia Woolf (Flush)
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In short, I was not a favourite there with anybody, not even with myself, for those who did like me
could not show it, and those who did not showed it so plainly that I had a sensitive consciousness of always appearing constrained, boorish, and dull.
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Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
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Thus the esthetically sensitive man stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher does to the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for these pictures afford him an interpretation of life, and it is by these processes that he trains himself for life. And it is not only the agreeable and friendly picture that he experiences in himself with such perfect understanding: but the serious, the troubled, the sad, the gloomy, the sudden restraints, the tricks of fate, the uneasy presentiments, in short, the whole DIVINE COMEDY of life, and the inferno, also pass before him, not like mere shadows in the wall - for in these scenes he lives and suffers - and yet without that fleeting sensation of appearance.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)
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In short, I was not a favourite with Miss Murdstone. In short, I was not a favourite there with anybody, not even with myself; for those who did like me could not show it, and those who did not showed it so plainly that I had a sensitive consciousness
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Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
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Their conversation ceased abruptly with the entry of an oddly-shaped man whose body resembled a certain vegetable. He was a thickset fellow with calloused and jaundiced skin and a patch of brown hair, a frizzy upheaval. We will call him Bell Pepper. Bell Pepper sidled up beside The Drippy Man and looked at the grilled cheese in his hand. The Drippy Man, a bit uncomfortable at the heaviness of the gaze, politely apologized and asked Bell Pepper if he would like one.
“Why is one of your legs fatter than the other?” asked Bell Pepper.
The Drippy Man realized Bell Pepper was not looking at his sandwich but towards the inconsistency of his leg sizes.
“You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man.
“Just curious. Never seen anything like it before.”
“I was raised not to feel shame and hide my legs in baggy pants.”
“So you flaunt your deformity by wearing short shorts?”
“Like you flaunt your pockmarks by not wearing a mask?”
Bell Pepper backed away, kicking wide the screen door, making an exit to a porch over hanging a dune of sand that curved into a jagged upward jab of rock.
“He is quite sensitive,” commented The Dry Advisor.
“Who is he?”
“A fellow who once manipulated the money in your wallet but now curses the fellow who does.
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Jeff Phillips (Turban Tan)
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One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor? As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time—by definition, if you are turning on the sympathetic nervous system all the time, you’re chronically shutting off the parasympathetic. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about something. How can you diagnose a vagus nerve that’s not doing its part to calm down the cardiovascular system at the end of a stressor? A clinician could put someone through a stressor, say, run the person on a treadmill, and then monitor the speed of recovery afterward. It turns out that there is a subtler but easier way of detecting a problem. Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations). Therefore, the length of time between heartbeats tends to be shorter when you’re inhaling than exhaling. But what if chronic stress has blunted the ability of your parasympathetic nervous system to kick the vagus nerve into action? When you exhale, your heart won’t slow down, won’t increase the time intervals between beats. Cardiologists use sensitive monitors to measure interbeat intervals. Large amounts of variability (that is to say, short interbeat intervals during inhalation, long during exhalation) mean you have strong parasympathetic tone counteracting your sympathetic tone, a good thing. Minimal variability means a parasympathetic component that has trouble putting its foot on the brake. This is the marker of someone who not only turns on the cardiovascular stress-response too often but, by now, has trouble turning it off.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping)
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Oliver was made of sterner stuff, less delicate and sensitive, more carefree, in short, the right human clay; he could endure life. Who had taken a harder knock than he? But a tiny upward turn in his fortunes, a lucky theft, a successful swindle, restored him to contentment.
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Knut Hamsun (The Women at the Pump)
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an animal capable of learning new tricks, and almost continually vigilant and sensitive to novelty, but with a “short attention span” and a tendency to have attention “captured” by distracting environmental features. No long-term projects for this animal, at least not novel projects.
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Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained)
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In the first place, the ideas of people who are not intellectually free are always in a muddle, and it's extremely difficult to talk to them; and, secondly, they usually love no one, and have nothing to do with women, and their mysticism has an unpleasant effect on sensitive people. I
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Anton Chekhov (The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories)
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Does it distress you, reader, how I remind you of their sexes in each sentence? ‘Hers’ and ‘his’? Does it make you see them naked in each other’s arms, and fill even this plain scene with wanton sensuality? Linguists will tell you the ancients were less sensitive to gendered language than we are, that we react to it because it’s rare, but that in ages that heard ‘he’ and ‘she’ in every sentence they grew stale, as the glimpse of an ankle holds no sensuality when skirts grow short. I don’t believe it. I think gendered language was every bit as sensual to our predecessors as it is to us, but they admitted the place of sex in every thought and gesture, while our prudish era, hiding behind the neutered ‘they,’ pretends that we do not assume any two people who lock eyes may have fornicated in their minds if not their flesh. You protest: My mind is not as dirty as thine, Mycroft. My distress is at the strangeness of applying ‘he’ and ‘she’ to thy 2450s, where they have no place. Would that you were right, good reader. Would that ‘he’ and ‘she’ and their electric power were unknown in my day. Alas, it is from these very words that the transformation came which I am commanded to describe, so I must use them to describe it. I am sorry, reader. I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.
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Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1))
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In short, somewhere inside you there is a Machiavelli. Yes, he is a ruthless manipulator; but no prince, especially a kind one, would stay in power long without at least one advisor with as remorseless a point of view as that of the enemies a prince will surely have. The trick is to listen well but keep Machiavelli in his place.
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You)
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Some gifted people have all five and some less. Every gifted person tends to lead with one. As I read this list for the first time I was struck by the similarities between Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities and the traits of Sensitive Intuitives. Read the list for yourself and see what you identify with: Psychomotor This manifests as a strong pull toward movement. People with this overexcitability tend to talk rapidly and/or move nervously when they become interested or passionate about something. They have a lot of physical energy and may run their hands through their hair, snap their fingers, pace back and forth, or display other signs of physical agitation when concentrating or thinking something out. They come across as physically intense and can move in an impatient, jerky manner when excited. Other people might find them overwhelming and they’re routinely diagnosed as ADHD. Sensual This overexcitability comes in the form of an extreme sensitivity to sounds, smells, bright lights, textures and temperature. Perfume and scented soaps and lotions are bothersome to people with this overexcitability, and they might also have aversive reactions to strong food smells and cleaning products. For me personally, if I’m watching a movie in which a strobe light effect is used, I’m done. I have to shut my eyes or I’ll come down with a headache after only a few seconds. Loud, jarring or intrusive sounds also short circuit my wiring. Intellectual This is an incessant thirst for knowledge. People with this overexcitability can’t ever learn enough. They zoom in on a few topics of interest and drink up every bit of information on those topics they can find. Their only real goal is learning for learning’s sake. They’re not trying to learn something to make money or get any other external reward. They just happened to have discovered the history of the Ming Dynasty or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and now it’s all they can think about. People with this overexcitability have intellectual interests that are passionate and wide-ranging and they study many areas simultaneously. Imaginative INFJ and INFP writers, this is you. This is ALL you. Making up stories, creating imaginary friends, believing in Santa Claus way past the ordinary age, becoming attached to fairies, elves, monsters and unicorns, these are the trademarks of the gifted child with imaginative overexcitability. These individuals appear dreamy, scattered, lost in their own worlds, and constantly have their heads in the clouds. They also routinely blend fiction with reality. They are practically the definition of the Sensitive Intuitive writer at work. Emotional Gifted individuals with emotional overexcitability are highly empathetic (and empathic, I might add), compassionate, and can become deeply attached to people, animals, and even inanimate objects, in a short period of time. They also have intense emotional reactions to things and might not be able to stomach horror movies or violence on the evening news. They have most likely been told throughout their life that they’re “too sensitive” or that they’re “overreacting” when in truth, they are expressing exactly how they feel to the most accurate degree.
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Lauren Sapala (The Infj Writer: Cracking the Creative Genius of the World's Rarest Type)
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There’s an interesting story about Abraham Lincoln. During the American Civil War he signed an order transferring certain regiments, but Secretary of War Edwin Stanton refused to execute it, calling the president a fool. When Lincoln heard he replied, ‘If Stanton said I’m a fool then I must be, for he’s nearly always right, and he says what he thinks. I’ll step over and see for myself.’ He did, and when Stanton convinced him the order was in error, Lincoln quietly withdrew it. Part of Lincoln’s greatness lay in his ability to rise above pettiness, ego, and sensitivity to other people’s opinions. He wasn’t easily offended. He welcomed criticism, and in doing so demonstrated one of the strengths of a truly great person: humility. So, have you been criticised? Make it a time to learn, not lose.
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Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
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Such a nasty bruise,” he says, staring straight into my eyes. I am stunned he can see it. Delicate to the touch and tender on every side, the bruise is deeper than days. My hand automatically moves to my chest.
Science taught me with valid assurance that my heart was fixed in my rib cage, but life has since shown me otherwise. My heart in fact dangles from a tangle of strings. The ends are grasped tight by numerous people who yank and release, having caused many painful bruises over time. I cry because they are invisible to most.
“Such a nasty bruise,” he repeats, tugging on my poor heart.
His kind eyes fall away from mine as I feel a squeeze on my arm. He twists it enough to show me a small, round patch of purple surrounded by a sickly yellowish corona.
“Oh. My elbow.” I let the air exhale from my lungs. Another bruise forms where my heart has hit the floor. It is jerked up again.
“Can I do anything for you?” I see in his eyes the mirror image of a finger—his finger—wrapped in one of the dangling strings. He tugs and I feel it.
“No,” I reply to his question. But it is a lie. There is something he could do, along with all who grasp a portion of the web entangling my heart. I wish they would mercifully let go.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year)
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All through those splendid years of travel Pons was as happy as was possible to a man with a great soul, a sensitive nature, and a face so ugly that any “success with the fair” (to use the stereotyped formula of 1809) was out of the question; the realities of life always fell short of the ideals which Pons created for himself; the world without was not in tune with the soul within, but Pons had made up his mind to the dissonance.
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Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
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In 2018, I publicly disclosed that I had experienced psychological abuse by my sisters. Prior to uploading my first YouTube video on this sensitive topic, I had no idea if anyone else would relate. Shortly after my video went live, I received hundreds of comments by strangers who shared similar stories of being bullied, manipulated, gaslit, and abused by their own siblings. Five years later, my videos now have over 163,234K views and thousands of comments.
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Dana Arcuri CTRC (Toxic Siblings: A Survival Guide to Rise Above Sibling Abuse & Heal Trauma)
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Keep interactions as short as possible; you can be cordial, but do not engage. Narcissists are master provocateurs who will subject you to dizzying diversion tactics to make you feel off-center and off-balance. That’s why you must understand when you are being manipulated and stay focused on your real goals. If your goal is to do your best work at your job, then you must do everything in your power to stay focused on that goal and channel your energy into producing high-quality work.
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Shahida Arabi (The Highly Sensitive Person's Guide to Dealing with Toxic People: How to Reclaim Your Power from Narcissists and Other Manipulators [Standard Large Print 16 Pt Edition])
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What happens, Kissinger asked, “if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one?” In this system there was little room for human will or agency or the cultivation of such human qualities as ambiguity and intuition. Hard facts bred a tyranny of their own that prioritized the immediate present over an understanding of the past or a sensitivity toward the future. Focus groups and opinion polls replaced individual decision-making and responsibility; the immediate headline-driven mood of the crowd overrode long-range perspective. Foreign policy was “in danger of turning into a subdivision of short-term domestic politics” in which “the quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions.” The United States was in danger of “careening through crises without comprehending them.” This was no way for a great power to engage with the rest of the world, least of all in a world armed with nuclear weapons.
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Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
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Readers acquainted with the recent literature on human sexuality will be familiar with what we call the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, hereafter shortened to the standard narrative. It goes something like this:
1. Boy Meets girl,
2. Boy and girl assess one and others mate value, from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities. He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previous sexual experience and likelihood of future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources.
She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, physical health and likelihood that he will stick around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children, known as "male parental investment".
3. Boy gets girl. Assuming they meet one and others criteria, they mate, forming a long term pair bond, "the fundamental condition of the human species" as famed author Desmond Morris put it. Once the pair bond is formed, she will be sensitive to indications that he is considering leaving, vigilant towards signs of infidelity involving intimacy with other women that would threaten her access to his resources and protection while keeping an eye out (around ovulation especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically superior to her husband.
He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities which would reduce his all important paternity certainty while taking advantage of short term sexual opportunities with other women as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful.
Researchers claim to have confirmed these basic patterns in studies conducted around the world over several decades. Their results seem to support the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, which appears to make a lot of sense, but they don't, and it doesn't.
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Cacilda Jethá (Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality)
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Shirley Jackson’s work and its nature and purpose have been very little understood. Her fierce visions of dissociation and madness, of alienation and withdrawal, of cruelty and terror, have been taken to be personal, even neurotic, fantasies. Quite the reverse: they are a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb. She was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned “The Lottery,” and she felt that they at least understood the story.
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Shirley Jackson (The Magic of Shirley Jackson)
“
Taken to extremes, life is a process of reorientation after shame or glory and when anxiety sweeps in there is a relief at not having left any definite tracks.
Before you understand where the emotion is going to lead, you talk to anyone and everyone about the object of your love. All of a sudden, this stops. By then the ice is already thin and slippery. You realize that every word could expose your infatuation. Feigning indifference is as hard as acting normally and fundamentally the same thing.
There is a resistance in the party who wants to leave, a fear of the unknown, of the hassle and of changing one's mind. A party not wanting to be left must exploit that resistance. But then they must restrain their need for clarity and honesty. The matter must remain unformulated. A party not wanting to be left must leave it to the one wanting to go to express the change. That is the only way to keep a person who does not want to be with you. Hence the widespread silence in the relationships of the world.
Love needs no words. For a short period you can put your trust in wordless emotion. But in the long run there is no love without words and no love with words alone. Love is a hungry beast. It feeds off touch and repeated assurances.
The sense of desolation in a flat that your lover has just left is the most complete sense of desolation that exists.
Her desperation being real, she was extra-sensitive to the ways desperation could be expressed.
When the brain perceives contact as possible, every houris too long. That is the state of enslavement. The state in which the prospect of intoxication takes over the organism.
”
”
Lena Andersson
“
Michelson talked Alexander Graham Bell, newly enriched inventor of the telephone, into providing the funds to build an ingenious and sensitive instrument of Michelson’s own devising called an interferometer, which could measure the velocity of light with great precision. Then, assisted by the genial but shadowy Morley, Michelson embarked on years of fastidious measurements. The work was delicate and exhausting, and had to be suspended for a time to permit Michelson a brief but comprehensive nervous breakdown, but by 1887 they had their results.
”
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
MANIFESTO OF THE HUNGRY GENERATION
Poetry is no more a civilizing maneuver, a replanting of the bamboozled gardens; it is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning five, a sowing of the tempestual Hunger.
Poetry is an activity of the narcissistic spirit. Naturally, we have discarded the blankety-blank school of modern poetry, the darling of the press, where poetry does not resurrect itself in an orgasmic flow, but words come out bubbling in an artificial muddle. In the prosed- rhyme of those born-old half-literates, you must fail to find that scream of desperation of a thing wanting to be man, the man wanting to be spirit.
Poetry of the younger generation too has died in the dressing room, as most of the younger prosed -rhyme writers, afraid of the Satanism, the vomitous horror, the self-elected crucifixion of the artist that makes a man a poet, fled away to hide in the hairs.
Poetry from Achintya to Ananda and from Alokeranjan to Indraneel, has been cryptic, short-hand, cautiously glamorous, flattered by own sensitivity like a public school prodigy. Saturated with self-consciousness, poems have begun to appear from the tomb of logic or the bier of unsexed rhetoric.
Published by Haradhon Dhara from 269 Netaji Subhas Road, Howrah, West Beng
”
”
Malay Roy Choudhury
“
She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence. Her eyes were large and very dark and tilted and set widely. She wore dark Bermuda shorts and sandals and a crisp blue and white blouse, no jewelry of any kind, a sparing touch of lipstick.
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John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-By)
“
Other early symptoms that begin to show up at the same time or shortly after those we just talked about can include:
• Hypervigilance (being “on guard” at all times)
• Intrusive imagery or flashbacks
• Extreme sensitivity to light and sound • Hyperactivity
• Exaggerated emotional and startle responses
• Nightmares and night terrors
• Abrupt mood swings (rage reactions or temper tantrums, frequent anger, or crying)
• Shame and lack of self-worth
• Reduced ability to deal with stress (easily and frequently stressed out)
• Difficulty sleeping
Several of these symptoms can also show up later, even years later. Remember, this list is not for diagnostic purposes.
”
”
Peter A. Levine
“
That is no more what it is like to be a bat than the following is a good picture of what it is like to see colour: use an instrument to measure the wavelength of the light that is entering your eye: if it is long, you are seeing red, if it is short you are seeing violet or blue. It happens to be a physical fact that the light that we call red has a longer wavelength than the light that we call blue. Different wavelengths switch on the red-sensitive and the blue-sensitive photocells in our retinas. But there is no trace of the concept of wavelength in our subjective sensation of the colours. Nothing about ‘what it is like’ to see blue or red tells us which light has the longer wavelength.
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Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design)
“
It was safe to say, standing as close to him as she was, that she was very aware of the rise of his aroused sensuality. Even if his hand had not been burning across her skin, the unapologetic hardness of his body pressing with erotic familiarity against hers would have told her how very much lost in his need for her he was. Gideon had to be the most sexual creature she had ever encountered. And yet, only a few short days ago, if she had been asked her opinion on that particular subject, she would have made suppositions that were quite the opposite. Was he telling her the truth when he said it was because of her?
“I never lie, my beauty,” he murmured, reminding her of her own understandings about that. His lips against her hair, just beneath the back of her ear, were warm and smiling even as he kissed the thrillingly sensitive spot. “And even if I were just a dirty old man, Neliss,” he whispered like the warmth of sunshine in her ear, “it would never account for the tenderness you see in me even now.” He tightened his hold on her, drawing her so close that he burned hotly against her. “And you would have been in my bed, beneath the press of my body, open and inviting me in by now.”
The raw observation and the aggressive heat of his body made her grasp, a mix between shocked sensibilities and excited delight. Legna looked up into his famished eyes, licking her lips with a hunger all her own.
“If we do not find something to do, we will end up in bed together,” she reminded him with her heart pounding so obviously against his chest.
“Yes. Perhaps without the intention of rousing until Jacob and Bella’s Beltane wedding,” he mused, the pleasure of the speculation quite evident in his expression.
It was an attractive thought to Legna as well, especially as his mouth dipped beneath her hair to continue to tease the sensitive skin of her neck. But just the same, she took matters into her own hand, so to speak, and teleported out of his grasp, reappearing all the way on the other side of the room. Finding his arms so abruptly vacated, Gideon gave her an eloquent look. She was going to pay for her little trick one day, and his eyes promised it to her as thoroughly as a worded threat.
”
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Jacquelyn Frank (Gideon (Nightwalkers, #2))
“
We should expect artists to be more sensitive and more open to abstract thoughts and ideas. If they are more open, they should be capable of tapping into the mystical static that is bouncing around the collective ether. True inspiration is a mystery, and any artist can describe how getting lost in this zone can create a sort of timeless trance where things just flow magically. An artist’s best work comes from a mindless place, unhindered by logic and intellect. This could be the concert violinist standing on stage, or the illustrator hunched over in the corner with a sketchbook. Although it almost always falls short, the Hollywood machine is continually trying to come up with the next UFO-themed product. But where do these ideas come from?
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Mike Clelland (The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee)
“
Treason the only crime defined in the Constitution. Tyranny as under the Stuart and Tudor kings characterized by the elimination of political dissent under the laws of treason. Treason statutes which were many and unending, the instrument by which the monarch eliminated his opposition and also added to his wealth. The property of the executed traitor forfeited by his heirs because of the loathsomeness of his crime. The prosecution of treason, like witchcraft, an industry. Founding Fathers extremely sensitive to the establishment of a tyranny in this country by means of ambiguous treason law. Themselves traitors under British law. Under their formulation it became possible to be guilty of treason only against the nation, not the individual ruler or party. Treason was defined as an action rather than thought or speech. "Treason against the US shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort...No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same Overt act, or on Confession in Open Court." This definition, by members of the constitutional convention, intended that T could not be otherwise defined short of constitutional amendment. "The decision to impose constitutional safeguards on treason prosecutions formed part of a broad emerging American tradition of liberalism...No American has ever been executed for treason against his country," says Nathaniel Weyl, Treason the story of disloyalty and betrayal in American history, published in the year 1950. I say if this be treason make the most of it.
”
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E.L. Doctorow (The Book of Daniel)
“
Imagine you are tied to a chair with your hands tightly bound behind you, preventing you from covering your ears. Before you is a giant chalkboard. A woman enters the room. Her fingernails are long, hard, and ready for attack. You follow her with your eyes as she saunters to the chalkboard and raises her hand to make a claw. She looks at you with a blank stare as she digs her fingernails into the chalkboard and drags downward. As the harsh sound hits your ears, you squeeze your eyes shut in an instinctive yet vain effort to shut out the noise, but the absence of sight only magnifies the vile sound. Your ears have become hypersensitive, and you feel an unpleasant chill shoot through your body down to the toes of your feet. Finally, the sound stops as she removes her nails from the board, and a wave of relief passes over you. But the reprieve is short-lived. Again, the nails dig into the board and screech all the way down. The process repeats itself several times, and each time she stops dragging, you think it has ended for good, but soon she starts all over again. You frantically call out to her and ask her why she is doing this. You wonder what you have done to earn this perpetual torture. But she only looks back at your with a blank, almost quizzical stare, and that is when you realize that she is unaware of the pain she is causing. You feel the hopelessness pass over you. You squirm to free yourself from the chair, but it's no use. This is your life now, listening to this terribly unpleasant sound with no way to stop it. Sometimes she leaves, but she always comes back to repeat the scene, oblivious to the torture she creates.
”
”
Rachel Cinelli
“
The whitewash of Kingdom of Heaven Kingdom of Heaven is a classic cowboys-and-Indians story in which the Muslims are noble and heroic and the Christians are venal and violent. The script is heavy on modern-day PC clichés and fantasies of Islamic tolerance; brushing aside dhimmi laws and attitudes (of which Ridley Scott has most likely never heard), it invents a peace-and-tolerance group called the “Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians.” But of course, the Christians spoiled everything. A publicist for the film explained, “They were working together. It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar caused friction between them.” Ah yes, those nasty “Christian extremists.” Kingdom of Heaven was made for those who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the wicked white men of America and Europe would be more tolerant. Ridley Scott and his team arranged advance screenings for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, making sure that sensitive Muslim feelings were not hurt. It is a dream movie for the PC establishment in every way except one: It isn’t true. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of A Short History of the Crusades and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all” as it “depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.
”
”
Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades))
“
She stood on the willow bank. It was bright as mid-afternoon in the openness of the water, quiet and peaceful. She took off her clothes and let herself into the river. She saw her waist disappear into reflection less water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All seemed one weight, one matter -- until she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. the iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled, it was at the smoothness of a fish or a snake that crossed her knees. In the middle of the river, whose downstream or upstream could not be told by a current, she lay on her stretched arm, not breathing, floating. Virgie had reached the point where in the next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock her. She hung suspended in the Big Black River as she would know how to hang suspended in felicity. Far to the west, a cloud running fingerlike over the sun made her splash the water. She stood, walked along the soft mud of the bottom, and pulled herself out of the water by a willow branch, which like a warm rain brushed her back with its leaves. The moon, while she looked into the high sky, took its own light between one moment and the next. A wood thrush, which had begun to sing, hushed its long moment and began again. Virgie put her clothes back on. She would have given much for a cigarette, always wishing for a little more of what had just been.
(from the short story The Wanderers)
”
”
Eudora Welty
“
It cannot be effaced from a man's soul what his ancestors have preferably and most constantly done: whether they were perhaps diligent economizers attached to a desk and a cash-box, modest and citizen-like in their desires, modest also in their virtues; or whether they were accustomed to commanding from morning till night, fond of rude pleasures and probably of still ruder duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, at one time or another, they have sacrificed old privileges of birth and possession, in order to live wholly for their faith—for their "God,"—as men of an inexorable and sensitive conscience, which blushes at every compromise. It is quite impossible for a man NOT to have the qualities and predilections of his parents and ancestors in his constitution, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race. Granted that one knows something of the parents, it is admissible to draw a conclusion about the child: any kind of offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid envy, or of clumsy self-vaunting—the three things which together have constituted the genuine plebeian type in all times—such must pass over to the child, as surely as bad blood; and with the help of the best education and culture one will only succeed in DECEIVING with regard to such heredity.—And what else does education and culture try to do nowadays! In our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, "education" and "culture" MUST be essentially the art of deceiving—deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul. An educator who nowadays preached truthfulness above everything else, and called out constantly to his pupils: "Be true! Be natural! Show yourselves as you are!"—even such a virtuous and sincere ass would learn in a short time to have recourse to the FURCA of Horace, NATURAM EXPELLERE: with what results? "Plebeianism" USQUE RECURRET.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Dear Lucas,
I never met a boy with manners as good as yours. You ought to have a British accent. At homecoming, you wore a cravat and it suited you so well I think you could wear one all the time and get away with it.
Oh, Lucas! I wish I knew what kind of girls you liked. As far as I can tell, you haven’t dated anyone…unless you have a girlfriend at another school. You’re just so mysterious. I hardly know a thing about you. The things I know are so unsubstanial, so unsatisfying, like that you eat a chicken sandwich every day at lunch, and you’re on the golf team. I guess the one remotely real thing I know about you is you’re a good writer, which must mean you have deep reserves of emotion. Like that short story you wrote in creative writing about the poisoned well, and it was from a six-year-old boy’s perspective. It was so sensitive, so keen!
That story made me feel like I knew you at least a little bit. But I don’t know you, and I wish I did.
I think you’re very special. I think you are probably one of the most special people at our school, and I wish more people knew that about you. Or maybe I don’t, because sometimes it’s nice to be the only one who knows something.
Love, Lara Jean
”
”
Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #1))
“
mistake—could these facts lead to any conclusion other than that they were the desperate emissaries of some body, political or otherwise, who intended to sacrifice themselves, their fellow-passengers, and the ship, in one great holocaust? The whitish granules which I had seen one of them pour into the box formed no doubt a fuse or train for exploding it. I had myself heard a sound come from it which might have emanated from some delicate piece of machinery. But what did they mean by their allusion to to-night? Could it be that they contemplated putting their horrible design into execution on the very first evening of our voyage? The mere thought of it sent a cold shudder over me, and made me for a moment superior even to the agonies of sea-sickness. I have remarked that I am a physical coward. I am a moral one also. It is seldom that the two defects are united to such a degree in the one character. I have known many men who were most sensitive to bodily danger, and yet were distinguished for the independence and strength of their minds. In my own case, however, I regret to say that my quiet and retiring habits had fostered a nervous dread of doing anything remarkable or making myself conspicuous, which exceeded, if possible, my fear of personal peril.
”
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Arthur Conan Doyle (120 Short Stories)
“
To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.
”
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Amy-Jill Levine (Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi)
“
Since our new-found sensitivity decrees that only the victim shall be the hero, the white American male starts bawling for victim status too. Hence the rise of cult therapies which teach that we are all the victims of our parents: that whatever our folly, venality, or outright thuggishness, we are not to be blames for it, since we come from "dysfunctional families". [...]
Thus the pursuit of the Inner Child has taken over just at the moment when Americans ought to be figuring out where their Inner Adult is, and how that disregarded oldster got buried under the rubble of pop psychology and specious short-term gratification. [...]
The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics. To seem strong may only conceal a rickety scaffolding of denial, but to be vulnerable is to be invincible. Complaint gives you power - even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt. [...]
In these and a dozen other ways we create an infantilized culture of complaint, in which Big Daddy is always to blame and the expansion of rights goes on without the other half of citizenship - attachment to duties and obligations. To be infantile is a regressive way to defy the stress of corporate culture: Don't tread on me, I'm vulnerable. The emphasis is on the subjective: how we feel about things, rather than what we think or can know.
”
”
Robert Hughes (Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (American Lectures))
“
On November 3, 2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI, Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing: Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. . . . Michael, Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the republican nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in.... We will manage this process better than anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly. That the game changer.327 Later that day, Sater followed up: Donald doesn't stare down, he negotiates and understands the economic issues and Putin only want to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to negotiate. "Business, politics, whatever it all is the same for someone who knows how to deal" I think I can get Putin to say that at the Trump Moscow press conference. If he says it we own this election. Americas most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald is a good guy to negotiate. . . . We can own this election. Michael my next steps are very sensitive with Putins very very close people, we can pull this off. Michael lets go. 2 boys from Brooklyn getting a USA president elected. This is good really good.328
”
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Robert S. Mueller III (The Mueller Report)
“
The first result of this randomized trial was predictable from prior studies: in the control group, children with the short variant-i.e., the "high risk" form of the gene- were twice as likely to veer toward high-risk behaviors, including binge drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity as adolescents, confirming earlier studies that had suggested an increased risk within this genetic subgroup. The second result was more provocative: these very children were also the most likely to respond to the social interventions. In the intervention group, children with the high-risk allele were most strongly and rapidly "normalized"-i.e., the most drastically affected subjects were also the best responders. In a parallel study, orphaned infants with the short variant of 5HTTLRP appeared more impulsive and socially disturbed than their long-variant counterparts as baseline-but were also the most likely to benefit from placement in a more nurturing foster-care environment.
In both cases, it seems, the short variant encodes a hyperactive "stress sensor" for psychic susceptibility, but also a sensor most likely to respond to an intervention that targets the susceptibility. The most brittle or fragile forms of psyche are the most likely to be distorted by trauma-inducing environments-but are also the most likely to be restored by targeted interventions. It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core: some humans are born resilient (but are less responsive to interventions), while others are born sensitive (but more likely to respond to changes in their environments.)
”
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil medicines. After large sugar plantations were established in America, ever-increasing amounts of sugar began to reach Europe. The price of sugar dropped and Europe developed an insatiable sweet tooth. Entrepreneurs met this need by producing huge quantities of sweets: cakes, cookies, chocolate, candy, and sweetened beverages such as cocoa, coffee and tea. The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eighteen pounds in the early nineteenth century. However, growing cane and extracting its sugar was a labour-intensive business. Few people wanted to work long hours in malaria-infested sugar fields under a tropical sun. Contract labourers would have produced a commodity too expensive for mass consumption. Sensitive to market forces, and greedy for profits and economic growth, European plantation owners switched to slaves. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations. Labour conditions were abominable. Most slaves lived a short and miserable life, and millions more died during wars waged to capture slaves or during the long voyage from inner Africa to the shores of America. All this so that Europeans could enjoy their sweet tea and candy – and sugar barons could enjoy huge profits. The slave trade was not
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Since Fe is INTPs’ inferior function, it is often more sensitive and less resilient than it is in FJ types. This can make INTPs extremely uncomfortable in emotional situations, especially those involving potential conflict or disharmony. Because of their Fe's concern for maintaining external harmony (or what may be better understood as its discomfort with disharmony), INTPs may abstain from expressing their judgments in order to avoid unsettling others. While not as overtly warm or effusive as FJ types, INTPs can be sensitive to others’ feelings and may go out of their way to avoid hurting or offending them. For instance, in the midst of a discussion, an INTP may want to explain how human mating practices are primarily a product of evolutionary pressures. But if she suspects that others may take offense to such an explanation, she may withhold it to avoid introducing disharmony. Although functioning as superficial peacemakers, INTPs are generally slower to go out of their way to help others (at least in direct, hands-on ways). Especially early in their development, most forgo community service and avoid investing extensive time and energy helping others. This is particularly evident when under stress. If burdened by too many external pressures or demands, INTPs' willingness to help others is one of the first things to go. In short, INTPs’ Fe is more concerned with preserving harmony than it is with extensive helping. This is especially true early in life, when they have yet to achieve their Ti goals. Once those goals have been satisfactorily met, however, they may become more benevolent. We can see this with Einstein, for instance, who displayed increasing beneficence and generosity toward people in the second half of his life.
”
”
A.J. Drenth (The INTP: Personality, Careers, Relationships, & the Quest for Truth and Meaning)
“
3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy—if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed. 4. In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: ‘I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.’ Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken.
”
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C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
“
Drowning in guilt and fear and desire, she tried to push his caressing hand away from her throat. His fingers delved into her hair with a grip just short of painful. His mouth was close to hers. He was surrounding her, all the strength and force and maleness of him, and she closed her eyes as her senses went quiet and dark in helpless waiting. "I'll make you tell me," she heard him mutter.
And then she was kissing her.
Somehow, Beatrix thought hazily, Christopher seemed to be under the impression she would find his kisses so objectionable that she would confess anything to make him desist. She couldn't think how he had come by such a notion. In fact, she couldn't really think at all.
His mouth moved over hers in supple, intimate angles, until he found some perfect alignment that made her weak all over. She reached around his neck to keep from dropping bonelessly to the floor. Gathering her closer into the hard support of his body, he explored her slowly, the tip of his tongue stroking, tasting.
Her body listed more heavily against his as her limbs became weighted with pleasure. She sensed the moment when his anger was eclipsed by passion, desire changing to white-hot need. Her fingers sank into his beautiful hair, the shorn locks heavy and vibrant, his scalp hot against her palms. With each inhalation, she drew in more of his fragrance, the trace of sandalwood on warm male skin.
His mouth slid from hers and dragged roughly along her throat, crossing sensitive places that made her writhe. Blindly turning her face, she rubbed her lips against his ear. He drew in a sharp breath and jerked his head back. His hand came to her jaw, clamping firmly.
"Tell me what you know," he said, his breath searing her lips. "Or I'll do worse than this. I'll take you here and now. Is that what you want?"
As a matter of fact ...
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
“
If we want to sum up the value of the priestly existence in the shortest slogan, we could at once put it like this: the priest is the person who alters the direction of ressentiment. For every suffering person instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, or, more precisely, an agent, or, even more precisely, a guilty agent sensitive to suffering — in short, he seeks some living person on whom he can, on some pretext or other, unload his feelings, either in fact or in effigy: for the discharge of feelings is the most important way a suffering man seeks relief — that is, some anaesthetic — it’s his involuntarily desired narcotic against any kind of torment. In my view, only here can we find the true physiological cause of ressentiment, revenge, and things related to them, in a longing for some anaesthetic against pain through one’s emotions. People usually look for this cause, most incorrectly, in my opinion, in the defensive striking back, a merely reactive protective measure, a “reflex movement” in the event of some sudden damage and threat, of the sort a decapitated frog still makes in order to get rid of corrosive acid.
But the difference is fundamental: in one case, people want to prevent suffering further damage; in the other case, people want to deaden a tormenting, secret pain which is becoming unendurable by means of a more violent emotion of some kind and, for the moment at least, to drive it from their consciousness — for that they need some emotion, as unruly an emotion as possible, and, in order to stimulate that, they need the best pretext available. “Someone or other must be guilty of the fact that I am ill” — this sort of conclusion is characteristic of all sick people, all the more so if the real cause of their sense that they are sick, the physiological cause, remains hidden (—it can lie, for example, in an illness of the nervus sympathicus [sympathetic nerve], or in an excessive secretion of gall, or in a lack of potassium sulphate and phosphate in the blood, or in some pressure in the lower abdomen, which blocks the circulation, or in a degeneration of the ovaries, and so on).
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Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals)
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ESTABLISH STABLE ANCHORS OF ATTENTION Mindfulness meditation typically involves something known as an anchor of attention—a neutral reference point that helps support mental stability. An anchor might be the sensation of our breath coming in and out of the nostrils, or the rising and falling of our abdomen. When we become lost in thought during practice, we can return to our anchor, fixing our attention on the stimuli we’ve chosen. But anchors can also intensify trauma. The breath, for instance, is far from neutral for many survivors. It’s an area of the body that can hold tension related to a trauma and connect to overwhelming, life-threatening events. When Dylan paid attention to the rising and falling of his abdomen, he would be swamped with memories of mocking faces while walking down the hallway. Other times, feeling a constriction of his breath in the chest echoed a feeling of immobility, which was a traumatic reminder. For Dylan, the breath simply wasn’t a neutral anchor. As a remedy, we can encourage survivors to establish stabilizing anchors of attention. This means finding a focus of attention that supports one’s window of tolerance—creating stability in the nervous system as opposed to dysregulation. Each person’s anchor will vary: for some, it could be the sensations of their hands resting on their thighs, or their buttocks on the cushion. Other stabilizing anchors might include another sense altogether, such as hearing or sight. When Dylan and I worked together, it took a while until he could find a part of his body that didn’t make him more agitated. He eventually found that the sense of hearing was a neutral anchor of attention. At my office, he’d listen for the sound of the birds or the traffic outside, which he found to be stabilizing. “It’s subtle,” he said to me, opening his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “But it is a lot less charged. I’m not getting riled up the same way, which is a huge relief.” In sessions together, Dylan’s anchor was a spot he’d rest his attention on at the beginning of a session or a place to return to if he felt overwhelmed. If he practiced meditation at home—I’d recommended short periods if he could stay in his window of tolerance—he used hearing as an anchor, or “home base” as he called it. “I finally feel like I can access a kind of refuge,” he said quietly, placing his hand on his belly. “My body hasn’t felt safe in so long. It’s a relief to finally feel like I’m learning how to be in here.” Anchors of attention you can offer students and clients practicing mindfulness—besides the sensation of the breath in the abdomen or nostrils—include different physical sensations (feet, buttocks, back, hands) and other senses (seeing, smelling, hearing). One client of mine had a soft blanket that she would touch slowly as an anchor. Another used a candle. For some, walking meditation is a great way to develop more stable anchors of attention, such as the feeling of one’s feet on the ground—whatever supports stability and one’s window of tolerance. Experimentation is key. Using subtler anchors does come with benefits and drawbacks. One advantage to working with the breath is that it is dynamic and tends to hold our attention more easily. When we work with a sense that’s less tactile—hearing, for instance—we may be more prone to drifting off into distraction. The more tangible the anchor, the easier it is to return to it when attention wanders.
”
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David A. Treleaven (Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing)
“
You are a totally pathetic, historical example of the phallocentric, to put it mildly."
"A pathetic, historical example," Oshima repeats, obviously impressed. By his tone of voice he seems to like the sound of that phrase.
"In other words you're a typical sexist, patriarchic male," the tall one pipes in, unable to conceal her irritation.
"A patriarchic male," Oshima again repeats.
The short one ignores this and goes on. "You're employing the status quo and the cheap phallocentric logic that supports it to reduce the entire female gender to second-class citizens, to limit and deprive women of the rights they're due. You're doing this unconsciously rather than deliberately, but that makes you even guiltier. You protect vested male interests and become inured to the pain of others, and don't even try to see what evil your blindness causes women and society. I realize that problems with restrooms and card catalogs are mere details, but if we don't begin with the small things we'll never be able to throw off the cloak of blindness that covers our society. Those are the principles by which we act."
"That's the way every sensible woman feels," the tall one adds, her face expressionless.
[...]
A frozen silence follows.
"At any rate, what you've been saying is fundamentally wrong," Oshima says, calmly yet emphatically. "I am most definitely not a pathetic, historical example of a patriarchic male."
"Then explain, simply, what's wrong with what we've said," the shorter woman says defiantly.
"Without sidestepping the issue or trying to show off how erudite you are," the tall one adds.
"All right. I'll do just that—explain it simply and honestly, minus any sidestepping or displays of brilliance," Oshima says.
"We're waiting," the tall one says, and the short one gives a compact nod to show she agrees.
"First of all, I'm not a male," Oshima announces.
A dumbfounded silence follows on the part of everybody. I gulp and shoot Oshima a glance.
"I'm a woman," he says.
"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't joke around," the short woman says, after a pause for breath. Not much confidence, though. It's more like she felt somebody had to say something.
Oshima pulls his wallet out of his chinos, takes out the driver's license, and passes it to the woman. She reads what's written there, frowns, and hands it to her tall companion, who reads it and, after a moment's hesitation, gives it back to Oshima, a sour look on her face.
"Did you want to see it too?" Oshima asks me. When I shake my head, he slips the license back in his wallet and puts the wallet in his pants pocket. He then places both hands on the counter and says, "As you can see, biologically and legally I am undeniably female. Which is why what you've been saying about me is fundamentally wrong. It's simply impossible for me to be, as you put it, a typical sexist, patriarchic male."
"Yes, but—" the tall woman says but then stops. The short one, lips tight, is playing with her collar.
"My body is physically female, but my mind's completely male," Oshima goes on.
"Emotionally I live as a man. So I suppose your notion of being a historical example may be correct. And maybe I am sexist—who knows. But I'm not a lesbian, even though I dress this way. My sexual preference is for men. In other words, I'm a female but I'm gay. I do anal sex, and have never used my vagina for sex. My clitoris is sensitive but my breasts aren't. I don't have a period. So, what am I discriminating against? Could somebody tell me?
”
”
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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Are you interested in medical marijuana but have no idea what it is? In recent years, there is a growing cry for the legalization of cannabis because of its proven health benefits. Read on as we try to look into the basics of the drug, what it really does to the human body, and how it can benefit you. Keep in mind that medical marijuana is not for everyone, so it’s important that you know how you’re going to be using it before you actually use it.
What is Marijuana?
Most likely, everyone has heard of marijuana and know what it is. However, many people hold misconceptions of marijuana because of inaccurate news and reporting, which has led to the drug being demonized—even when numerous studies have proven the health benefits of medical marijuana when it is used in moderation. (Even though yes, weed is also used as a recreational drug.)
First and foremost, medical marijuana is a plant. The drug that we know of is made of its shredded leaves and flowers of the cannabis sativa or indica plant. Whatever its strain or form, all types of cannabis alter the mind and have some degree of psychoactivity. The plant is made of chemicals, with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) being the most powerful and causing the biggest impact on the brain.
How is Medical Marijuana Used?
There are several ways medical weed is used, depending on the user’s need, convenience and preference. The most common ways are in joint form, and also using bongs and vaporizers. But with its growing legalization, we’re seeing numerous forms of cannabis consumption methods being introduced (like oils, edibles, drinks and many more).
● Joint – Loose marijuana leaves are rolled into a cigarette. Sometimes, it’s mixed with tobacco to cut the intensity of the cannabis.
● Bong – This is a large water pipe that heats weed into smoke, which the user then inhales.
● Vaporizer – Working like small bongs, this is a small gadget that makes it easier to bring and use weed practically anywhere.
What’s Some Common Medical Marijuana Lingo?
We hear numerous terms from people when it comes to describing medical marijuana, and this list continually grows. An example of this is the growing number of marijuana nicknames which include pot, grass, reefer, Mary Jane, dope, skunk, ganja, boom, chronic and herb among many others. Below are some common marijuana terms and what they really mean.
● Bong – Water pipe that allows for weed to be inhaled
● Blunt – Hollowed-out cigar with the tobacco replaced with weed
● Hash – Mix of medical weed and tobacco
● Joint – Rolled cigarette-like way to consume medical cannabis
How Does It Feel to be High?
When consumed in moderation, weed’s common effects include a heightened sense of euphoria and well-being. You’ll most likely talk and laugh more. At its height, the high creates a feeling of pensive dreaminess that wears off and becomes sleepiness. In a group setting, there are commonly feelings of exaggerated physical and emotional sensitivity as well as strong feelings of camaraderie.
Medical marijuana also has a direct impact on a person’s speech patterns, which will get slower. There will be an impairment in your ability to carry out conversations. Cannabis also affects short-term memory. The usual high that one gets from cannabis can last for about two hours; when you overindulge, it can last for up to 12 hours.
Is Using Medical Marijuana Safe?
Medical cannabis is scientifically proven to be safer compared to alcohol or nicotine. Marijuana is slowly being legalized around the world because of its numerous health benefits, particularly among people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety and stress. It also has physical benefits, like helping in managing pain and the treatment of glaucoma and cancer.
”
”
Kurt
“
What we have seen does not sit comfortably with conventional views of the brain. Electrophysiology has been a powerful tool and its returns have permeated our thinking about how the brain works, but the resulting understanding is cursed by overinterpretation. Because spike activity appears to have so much capacity for encoding information, we are tempted to think it in fact conveys a huge volume of information. When we find, in the spike activity of some neuron or another, correlation between some facet and some particular external events, it is tempting to think this is the message the cell is conveying.
A message is only a message if it can be understood by its recipient. Neurons can't decipher long and complex sentences. They have a short attention span, are easily distracted, and much of the time they aren't even listening. A neuron that is quiet at a particular time is likely also to be less sensitive to an input; a cell that is very active might be saturated; and a cell recently activated might be refractory to further activation.
Spike activity is not the output of any neuron, only one of several means by which some of its chemical signals are generated. These signals are generated unreliably and erratically and are recognized imperfectly by their targets. The message carried by the spike activity of a vasopressin cell makes no sense when considered alone. The important signal is generated by a cacophony of noisy and messy cells , and the miracle that demands to be recognized is that this population response is indeed clean, refined and fit for purpose.
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Gareth Leng (The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones)
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This idea that Jesus is meek, mild, indifferent, and non-judgmental is the stuff of pure myth. Pastor Mark Driscoll says he used to believe Jesus was dull, boring, passionless—in short, unappealing—until he read the Bible. He didn’t recognize in its pages the Jesus about Whom he’d always been told. Driscoll challenges us to read the Gospel of Mark, which will “spin your head around.” Jesus, says Driscoll, tells people to “repent.” He tells people to quit their jobs and follow him. He tells a demon to shut up. After He heals a leper He swears him to silence, too. Then He picks a fight with Sunday school teachers, He tells His mom He’s busy, He rebukes the wind, He kills two thousand pigs, and “he offends people, but doesn’t go to sensitivity training.” He calls people hypocrites and calls Peter “Satan,” He curses and kills a tree, He tells people they’re going to hell, and He rebukes the disciples for falling asleep on Him in the garden.21 Driscoll’s point is not that Jesus was mean or bad in any way; merely that the lukewarm, pacifist image this culture has created of Him is as ridiculous as it is inaccurate.
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David Limbaugh (Jesus on Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel)
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of stimulating reward pathways in the brain, such as drugs, sex, aggression, and intimidating others, could become relatively more attractive and less constrained by concern about violating trusting relationships. The ability to modify behavior based on negative experiences may be impaired.30 Hard-core drug addicts, whose lives invariably began under conditions of severe stress, are all too readily triggered into a stress reaction. Not only does the stress response easily overwhelm the addict’s already-challenged capacity for rational thought when emotionally aroused, but the hormones of stress also “cross-sensitize” with addictive substances. The more one is present, the more the other is craved. Addiction is a deeply ingrained response to stress, an attempt to cope with it through self-soothing. Maladaptive in the long term, it is highly effective in the short term. Predictably, stress is a major cause of continued drug dependence. It increases opiate craving and use, enhances the reward efficacy of drugs, and provokes relapse to drug seeking and drug taking.31 “Exposure to stress is the most powerful and reliable experimental manipulation used to induce reinstatement of alcohol or drug use,” one team of researchers reports.32 “Stressful experiences,” another research group points out, “increase the vulnerability of the individual to either develop drug self-administration or relapse.”33
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
“
Most researchers on temperament have studied short-term arousal. It’s easy to study, for it’s quite apparent from the higher levels of heartbeat, respiration, perspiration, pupil dilation, and adrenaline. There is another system of arousal, however, that is governed more by hormones. It goes into action just as quickly, but the effect of its main product, cortisol, is most noticeable after ten to twenty minutes. An important point is that when cortisol is present, the short-term arousal response is also even more likely. That is, this long-term type of arousal makes us even more excitable, more sensitive, than before.
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person)
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Another important point is that the more cortisol in an infant’s body, the less the child will sleep, and the less sleep, the more cortisol. In the daytime, the more cortisol, the more fear, the more fear, the more cortisol. Uninterrupted sleep at night and timely naps all reduce cortisol in infants. And remember, lower cortisol also means fewer short-term alarms. It was easy to see that this was a constant problem with Rob. It may have been for you, too. Furthermore, if sleep problems beginning in infancy are not controlled, they may last into adulthood and make a highly sensitive person almost unbearably sensitive. So get your sleep!
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person)
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What makes it through the filter is determined by the part of the brain called the reticular activating system, or RAS for short. The RAS is responsible for a number of functions, including sleep and behavior modification. It also acts as the gatekeeper of information through a process called habituation, which allows the brain to ignore meaningless and repetitive stimuli and remain sensitive to other inputs.
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Jim Kwik (Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life)
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Many people do not realize that uniformly good health depends upon: (1) proper eating, less eating, and occasional fasting. (2) proper exercise, fresh air, and sun baths, (3) conservation of vital energy by self-control, (4) good thoughts control and calmness of the heart, (5) meditation and/or prayers Wrong habits, overindulgence, the lack of exercise, and abuses of the senses should be avoided. Take sun baths as often as you can, from ten minutes to half an hour a day, if possible, depending on the sensitivity of one's skin and the strength of the sun's rays. Six times a day breathe deeply at least three times in the fresh air: (1) first, exhale quickly through the mouth. (2) inhale slowly through the nostrils only, counting 1 to 12 (or any length which is long and comfortable for you). (3) Hold your breath, counting 1 to 6. (4) Exhale, counting 1 to 12. (5) Hold your breath, counting 1 to 6 – and repeat the whole cycle Try to establish the habit of doing this whenever you are walking outdoors. Let the count during inhalation, holding the breath, and exhalation be modified if necessary, for comfort; but maintain the ratio. However, there are many other exercises given from time to time that may be practiced for specific purposes or as a short supplementary routine to be practiced at any time during
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Sri Yogananda (Kriya Yoga in Practice)
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Never quit on her
To deal with the desires and feelings of the heart,
Demands you to be an artist who knows life’s every art,
That to love, feel loved and be sometimes discarded like scrap,
And still steer the heart from this destiny’s trap,
Where it seeks to push you into the base of the pit,
Where longing and agony become your permanent habit,
And if you realise it and yet you love her true,
The pit shall reveal to you the sky that is clear and blue,
And from there too your heart shall say,
“I love you everyday and anyway!”
It is then you shall become the artist who can paint hearts,
Fo to paint hearts needs the knowledge of life’s most faint and sensitive colours of all sorts,
That make the admirer believe in its beauty that throbs always,
Though the person is not around but her feelings somehow seep into life’s long nights and short days!
Just to keep you alive in the pit,
So that you still love her and you do not quit!
”
”
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
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But a written policy is one thing; its implementation is quite another. Robert Murphy took personal charge of the political oversight of U.S. denazification work in Germany almost immediately, and he made little secret of his inclinations. Meanwhile, the sensitive task of overseeing U.S. intelligence evaluations of German business and political leaders fell to an enterprising OSS man who was stationed in Berlin shortly after Hitler’s suicide. It was Allen Dulles.
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Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf Book 24))
“
I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent
did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her
membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here,
what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived
straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound
like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned
linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes,
the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology
field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the
headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis,
the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the
jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the
cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the
language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets,
strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned
pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much
was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments,
ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of
party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and
their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the
dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant
gunfire?
”
”
Amos Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness)
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In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution which doesn't smell of revolution. [They try to] deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy.
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”
Slavoj Žižek (Robespierre. Virtud y terror)
“
The light receptors in the eye that communicate “daytime” to the suprachiasmatic nucleus are most sensitive to short-wavelength light within the blue spectrum—the exact sweet spot where blue LEDs are most powerful. As a consequence, evening blue LED light has a more harmful impact on human nighttime melatonin suppression than the warm, yellow light from old incandescent bulbs, even when their lux intensities are matched.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
“
Beauvoir seemed more sensitive than Sartre was to these subtle interzones in human life. The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it. She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.
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Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others)
“
Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls —Robert Walser. A German-speaking Swiss writer, Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. Confined to a sanatorium in Herisau, Switzerland, he used to write ‘micrograms’, (undecipherable short texts handwritten in a nano text-size) and take long walks. On the 25th of December 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow.
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Robert Walser
“
Over thirty years ago, a fascinating study looked at the decision-making abilities of kids from ages nine to twenty-one.3 The study asked the participants how they would handle a really sensitive situation: a boy who refused to talk to family members or come out of his room for several weeks. Turns out, fourteen-year-olds made decisions that were very similar to those of eighteen-year-olds and twenty-one-year-olds. And those decisions resembled the recommendation made by most experts (which was that the boy get outpatient psychotherapy). Interestingly, half of the nine-year-olds chose that option, too. Overall, the fourteen-, eighteen-, and twenty-one-year-olds got virtually identical scores on decision making, and the nine-year-olds’ scores were only slightly lower. We think this shows not only that nine-year-olds are capable decision makers, but also that when they come up short it’s because of lack of knowledge, not necessarily judgment.
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William Stixrud (The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives)
“
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Hair Care Product Natural grown foods are higher in minerals like Vitamin C, iron, magnesium, and phosphorus, but have lower amounts of nitrates and pesticide residues when compared to conventionally grown foods, according to mounting data.
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You're not sure which soap is best for dry skin. Sensitive skin is difficult to deal with. Which is the best soap for dry skin patients may notice tightness and pallor even in the summer, so forget about winter dryness! Warm showers, as well as unsuitable soap, such as aloe vera, Aloe vera face mist, for example, could aggravate the issue. You can apply an after-shower lotion and emollients to keep your skin hydrated.
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”
”
Arun (Prachin Bharat Ka Prachann Itihas)
“
There Are Five Hallmark Symptoms of ADD Short attention span, for regular, routine, everyday tasks. People with ADD have a difficult time with boring tasks and need stimulation or excitement in order to stay engaged. Many people with ADD can pay attention just fine for things that are new, novel, interesting, highly stimulating, or frightening. Distractibility. People with ADD tend to notice more in their environment than others, which makes them easily distracted by outside stimuli, such as light, sounds, smells, certain tastes, or even the clothes they wear. Their keen sensitivity causes them to get easily off task. Disorganization. Most people with ADD tend to struggle with organization of time and space. They tend to be late and have trouble completing tasks on time. Many things get done at the last moment or even later. They also tend to struggle keeping their spaces tidy, especially their rooms, book bags, filing cabinets, drawers, closets, and paperwork. Procrastination. Tasks and duties get put off until the last moment. Things tend not to get done until there are deadlines or someone else is mad at them for not doing it. Poor internal supervision. Many people with ADD have issues with judgment and impulse control, and struggle not to say or do things without fully thinking them through. They also have a harder time learning from their mistakes.
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Daniel G. Amen (Healing ADD: The Breakthrough Program that Allows You to See and Heal the 7 Types of ADD)
“
Evidence suggests that people with irritable bowels have bodies that are more physically reactive to stress. I recently came across an article in the medical journal Gut that explained the circular relationship between cognition (your conscious thought) and physiological correlates (what your body does in response to that thought): people who are less anxious tend to have minds that don’t overreact to stress and bodies that don’t overreact to stress when their minds experience it, while clinically anxious people tend to have sensitive minds in sensitive bodies—small amounts of stress set them to worrying, and small amounts of worrying set their bodies to malfunctioning. People with nervous stomachs are also more likely than people with settled stomachs to complain of headaches, palpitations, shortness of breath, and general fatigue. Some evidence suggests that people with irritable bowel syndrome have greater sensitivity to pain, are more likely to complain about minor ailments like colds, and are more likely to consider themselves sick than other people.
”
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire. For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays—to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more. Despite the immense hubbub and nervous strain, we are convinced that sleep is a waste of valuable time and continue to chase these fantasies far into the night. Animals spend much of their time dozing and idling pleasantly, but, because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia so as to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure. It isn’t that the people who submit to this kind of thing are immoral. It isn’t that the people who provide it are wicked exploiters; most of them are of the same mind as the exploited, if only on a more expensive horse in this sorry-go-round. The real trouble is that they are all totally frustrated, for trying to please the brain is like trying to drink through your ears. Thus they are increasingly incapable of real pleasure, insensitive to the most acute and subtle joys of life which are in fact extremely common and simple.
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Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity)
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Arun (ANTARCTICA–THE COMING IMPACT: Preparing for the Next Frontier of Environmental and Scientific Challenges)
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There are two distinct types of remediation—traditional remediation and rapid remediation. Rapid remediation, a more focused and time-sensitive method, efficiently closes learning gaps, enabling students to meet specific academic goals and catch up with their peers within a very short period of time.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Each night after the children went to bed our team would meet to review the day and discuss each child. This “staffing” process began to reveal patterns that suggested therapeutic experiences were taking place in short, minutes-long interactions. As we charted these contacts we found that, despite having no formal “therapy” sessions, each child was actually getting hours of intimate, nurturing, therapeutic connections each day. The child controlled when, with whom and how she interacted with the child-sensitive adults around her. Because our staff had a variety of strengths—some were very touchy-feely and nurturing, others were humorous, still others good listeners or sources of information—the children could seek out what they needed, when they needed it. This created a powerful therapeutic web.
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Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
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In his paper, Dr Davis referred to the infamous 1980 Cash-Landrum UFO case, covered earlier in this book, where the Landrum family reported a massive diamond-shaped UFO hovering over their car in the road near Dayton, Texas. As well as the trio reporting terrible burns from what experts declared was ionising radiation, one of the weirdest claims in the Cash-Landrum sighting was that they said they saw 23 helicopters, including massive CH-47 Chinooks, closely following the object. The US military denied any of its choppers were in the air nearby that night, and 23 of them in one place does sound implausible. Dr Davis’s paper gave an explanation – that the helicopters were ‘mimicry techniques employed for the manipulation of human consciousness to induce the various manifestations of “absurd” interactions or scenery associated with the UFO encounter. This in combination with the mimicry of man-made aircrafts’ (helicopters) aggregate features were prominent in the Cash-Landrum UFO case’. There is no explanation for how Dr Davis reached this conclusion. No known science describes the capacity to manipulate human consciousness to induce hallucinations as described. Modern science would say it was science fiction. However, an answer may lie in extraordinary PowerPoint slides we know now were prepared for a briefing of senior officials at the US Department of Defence, detailed online by The Mind Sublime. The individual behind that site told me he found the intriguing PowerPoint slides in early August 2018 while he was trawling through former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Christopher Mellon’s personal website.4 (This was shortly after The New York Times had revealed the existence of the previously secret Pentagon UAP investigation program.) The Mind Sublime researcher screenshotted his discovery to prove the slides came from Mellon’s website, and, importantly, because the document was stated to be a PowerPoint for a briefing of the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence. Perhaps it was these slides that prompted Senator Harry Reid to ask the Department of Defence for Special Access Program protection for the investigation – because what the slides said was momentous. If the unredacted slides accurately reflect the Defence Department’s knowledge of the UAP phenomenon, they are explosive. They reveal how the Pentagon’s UAP investigation unit advised the Defence Department not only that the mysterious craft were a ‘game changer’ but that the US military was powerless against them.5 One of the slides, headed ‘AATIP Preliminary Assessments’, shows that Elizondo’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program privately advised the Defence Department that ‘Preliminary evidence indicates that the United States is incapable of defending itself towards some of those technologies . . . The nature of these technologies and the fact that the United States has no countermeasures is considered Highly Sensitive’.6 The document, prepared for the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence, pushed for further investigation ‘in order to determine the full scope of the threat and their capabilities to be either exploited or defeated’.
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Ross Coulthart (In Plain Sight)
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Some forms of physical activity, most notably high-intensity/short-duration exercises and competitive sports, can produce a short-term rise in blood sugar levels. This is due primarily to an adrenaline surge. But don’t forget that insulin sensitivity has still been increased.
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Gary Scheiner (Think Like a Pancreas: A Practical Guide to Managing Diabetes with Insulin)
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There hadn’t been a god for many years. Not the nightgownclad patriarch of Sunday school coloring books; not the sensitive young man with the inevitable auburn ringlets Anna had stared through in the stained-glass windows at Mass; not the many-armed and many-faceted deities of the Bhagavad Gita that she’d worshipped alongside hashish and Dustin Hoffman in her college days. Even the short but gratifying parade of earth goddesses that had taken her to their ample bosoms in her early thirties had gone, though she remembered them with more kindness than the rest.
God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.
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Nevada Barr (Track of the Cat (Anna Pigeon, #1))
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Takeaway: The more fructose we eat, the more sensitive we become to its effects. In other words, the more you like sugar, the more sugar likes you. Fortunately, you can “reboot” your system with short-term carbohydrate restriction.
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Richard J. Johnson (Nature Wants Us to Be Fat: The Surprising Science Behind Why We Gain Weight and How We Can Prevent-and Reverse-It)
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through. Breathing too much for short periods of time is not a significant problem, as no permanent change in the body occurs. However, when we breathe too much over an extended period of days to weeks, a biochemical change takes place inside us that results in an increased sensitivity or lower tolerance to carbon dioxide.
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Patrick McKeown (The Oxygen Advantage: The Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques for a Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter You)
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Your mind is telling your body how to react on instinct, seeking that reward,” he murmurs against my exposed thigh before licking the skin there with a long stroke of his tongue. Said body is on fire. I shudder at the feeling of his tongue so close to the ache. Suddenly, I need to be touched everywhere and all at once. Places that suddenly crave contact with things I’ve never experienced. He grips behind my right thigh, tossing it over his shoulder, opening me up to him. “That heat you feel right here?” he says, moving his mouth to the swollen place where his finger just brushed. I drop my head to watch him, struggling to breathe properly. He inhales a deep breath, absorbing my scent before his tongue slips through his lips and I feel the warmth of his long, slow lick over my shorts. The shorts that now feel wet, clinging to me. His tongue laps at that wetness through the damp cloth covering me and I gasp. “That’s your body priming you for me. That slippery wetness? It’s your body attempting to make it more comfortable for when I decide to fuck you.” His tongue laps up the sensitive area again in a
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Jescie Hall (That Sik Luv)
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An important point is that when cortisol is present, the short-term arousal response is also even more likely. That is, this long-term type of arousal makes us even more excitable, more sensitive, than before. Most of the effects of cortisol occur over hours or even days. They are mainly measured in the blood, saliva, or urine, so studying long-term arousal is less convenient. But psychologist Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota thought that the whole point of the pause-to-check system might be to protect the individual from this unhealthy, unpleasant, long-term arousal. Research shows that when people first encounter something new and potentially threatening, the short-term response always comes first. Meanwhile, we start to consider our resources. What are our abilities? What have we learned about this sort of situation from past experiences? Who is around who might help out? If we think we or those with us can cope with the situation, we stop seeing it as a threat. The short-term alert dies out, and the long-term alarm never goes off.
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Elaine N. Aron (The Highly Sensitive Person)
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He was wearing white Adidas boxing shoes and long black satin shorts and another of his endless supply of “Black Mamba” T-shirts, this one with Kobe Bryant’s likeness on it. In comparison, I was the one who looked like the thug, in a Red Sox T-shirt cut to the shoulders and baggy gray sweatpants and sneakers to match. “Good news for you,” Hawk said, watching me move from side to side in front of the bag, “is that your workout clothes won’t never go out of fashion, on account of never having been in no fashion in the first place.” “You planning to review my workout along with my functional attire?” I said. “Don’t require much planning. You been letting your elbow fly out from underneath your shoulder lately when you throw your hook.” “You’re just pointing that out now?” “Been workin’ up to it, I know how sensitive you are ’bout what’s left of your form.
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Mike Lupica (Robert B. Parker's Broken Trust (Spenser #50))
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Imprecatory psalms. Imprecatory psalms (Ps 12; 35; 52; 57—59; 69; 70; 83; 109; 137; 140) are usually lament psalms where the writer’s bitterness and desire for vindication are especially predominant. This leads to such statements as Psalm 137:8- 9, “[Happy is] he who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.” Such statements are shocking to modern sensitivities and cause many to wonder at the ethical standards of the biblical writers. However, several points must be made. The writer is actually pouring out his complaint to God regarding the exile, as in Psalm 137. He is also heeding the divine command of Deuteronomy 32:35 (Rom 12:19), “It is mine to avenge; I will repay.” Finally, as Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart note, the author is calling for judgment on the basis of the covenant curses (Deut 28:53-57; 32:25), which make provision for the complete annihilation of the transgressors, even family members (2003:221). The hyperbolic language is common in such emotional passages. In short, these do not really contradict the New Testament teaching to love our enemies. When we can pour out our animosity to God, that very act opens the door to acts of kindness akin to Romans 12:20 (Prov 25:21-22). In fact, meditation on and application of these psalms could be therapeutic to those who have suffered traumatic hurt (such as child abuse). By pouring out one’s natural bitterness to God, the victim could be freed to “love the unlovely.” We must remember that the same David who penned all the above except for Psalm 83 and Psalm 137 showed great mercy and love to Saul. When you have called out for justice after being deeply wounded (like the martyred saints in Rev 6:9-11), Romans 12:19 is actually being fulfilled because the vengeance is truly left with God, freeing you to forgive your enemy.
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Grant R. Osborne (The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation)