Sequential Quotes

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When one has come to explore the ' instant moment ' and one has chosen to savor the delights of life, which are hidden behind the curtain of haste and superficiality, then ' mental time ' is replacing ' sequential time '. So ' here ' and ' now ' are keeping hustle and impatience in check. (" Just for a moment ")
Erik Pevernagie
This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc. -- and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of it at any given instant.
David Foster Wallace
Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.
Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art)
The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.
Gary Keller (The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results)
Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time. “Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
Life is not a list of checkboxes that we have to tick off sequentially one after another. Got a degree? Tick. Booked a house under my name? Tick. Got married? Tick. Had Children? Tick. All this sound too cliché, too depressing. These are acts which people do under the influence of peer pressure, mimicking each other, and not willingly as a genuine choice of their own.
Abhaidev (That Thing About You)
Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify.
Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality)
....Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy Competition in Hangchow three years in a row.
Barry Hughart (Bridge of Birds (The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, #1))
I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?
James Lee Burke (The Glass Rainbow (Dave Robicheaux, #18))
Thus, sped by currents of curiosity afloat the swift river of rumor do secrets sail to strange ports.
Will Eisner (Comics and Sequential Art)
Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.
Will Eisner (Comics and Sequential Art)
If the path has been laid down, why the successive appearance of different teachers? Why would anyone reinvent the wheel, if everything were as cosy and sequential as primitive longing so easily convinces us?
Idries Shah (Sufi Thought and Action: An Anthology of Important Papers)
Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential fashion. "I'll get enlightened first, and then I'll engage in social action." Those who are not engaged in spiritual pursuits put it differently: "I'll get my head straight first, I'll get psychoanalyzed, I'll overcome my inhibitions or neuroses or my hang-ups (whatever description you give to samsara) and then I'll wade into the fray." Presupposing that world and self are essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one before healing the other. This stance conveys the impression that human consciousness inhabits some haven, or locker-room, independent of the collective situation -- and then trots onto the playing field when it is geared up and ready. It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -- release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.
Joanna Macy (World as Lover, World as Self)
In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.
James Lee Burke (The Glass Rainbow (Dave Robicheaux, #18))
What happened to the world was gradual. I've forgotten what it actually was, but I have faint, fetal memories of what it was like. A smoldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn't much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.
Isaac Marion
When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.
Robert M. Pirsig
extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous. What starts out linear becomes geometric. You do the right thing and then you do the next right thing. Over time it adds up, and the geometric potential of success is unleashed. The domino effect applies to the big picture, like your work or your business, and it applies to the smallest moment in each day when you’re trying to decide what to do next.
Gary Keller (The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results)
Still,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience.
Will Eisner (Comics and Sequential Art)
Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Our brain is organized to act and feel before we think. This is also how our brain develops—sequentially, from the bottom up. The developing infant acts and feels, and these actions and feelings help organize how they will begin to think.
Oprah Winfrey (What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
Polite conversation followed rules. Topics were sequential, orderly, and flowed from one to the next like a gentle current when all those conversing were skilled.
Kresley Cole (If You Dare (MacCarrick Brothers, #1))
The tension of constructing an explanation, from A to B to C to D, apparently so simple a task, irritates many people with ADD. While they can hold the information in mind, they do not have the patience to sequentially put it out. That is too tedious. They would like to dump the information in a heap on the floor all at once and have it be comprehended instantly. Otherwise,
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
This edition of The Motorcycle Diaries, the notes describing a journey made without hesitation, aboard the noisy motorcycle La Poderosa II (which gave out halfway, but only after transmitting to the adventure a joyous impulse we, too, receive), free as the wind, with the sole purpose of getting to know the world, is dedicated to people whose youth is not merely sequential, but wholehearted and spiritual.
Ernesto Che Guevara (The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey)
The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Just as people live life out of order, they go through transitions out of order. While some people experience these phases sequentially, others experience them in reverse; others start in the middle and work their way out. Some finish one stage before going on to a new one; others move on to a new phase, then double back to the one they thought they had finished. Many get stuck in one phase for a very long time.
Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
I was never ready and could you see it in the way time collapsed in my syntax? Because melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.
Jackie Wang
A good scientist (DT quoted Einstein) will acknowledge that more than 50% of scientific breakthroughs are reached through post-rationalised ideas, not through sequential logic.
Rory Sutherland (Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man)
When you find yourself playing a strategic game, you must determine whether the interaction is simultaneous or sequential.
Avinash K. Dixit (The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life)
Many of the most profound discoveries were reported to have come through intuition rather than sequential analysis processed by linguistic understanding.
Ilchi Lee (Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential)
Richard Felder is co-developer of the Index of Learning Styles. He suggests that there are eight different learning styles. Active learners absorb material best by applying it in some fashion or explaining it to others. Reflective learners prefer to consider the material before doing anything with it. Sensing learners like learning facts and tend to be good with details. Intuitive learners like to identify the relationships between things and are comfortable with abstract concepts. Visual learners remember best what they see, while verbal learners do better with written and spoken explanations. Sequential learners like to learn by following a process from one logical step to the next, while global learners tend to make cognitive leaps, continuously taking in information until they “get it.
Ken Robinson (Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life)
I guess the basic difference is that animation is sequential in time but in spatially juxtaposed as comics are. Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space--the screen--while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. Space does for comics what time does for film!
Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art)
Dr. Semmelweis held several sequential staff positions, and wherever his hygiene method was followed, maternal mortality rates dropped. But most of his contemporaries ignored such outrageous and offensive “nonsense.
Suzanne Humphries (Dissolving Illusions)
Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she, From water the color of sky except where Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver, Rises. Stands on the raw grass. Against The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness Glimmers and, at bosom and flank, drips With fluent silver. The man, Some ten strokes out, but now hanging Motionless in the gunmetal water, feet Cold with the coldness of depth, all History dissolving from him, is Nothing but an eye. Is an eye only. Sees The body that is marked by his use, and Time's, Rise, and in the abrupt and unsustaining element of air, Sway, lean, grapple the pond-bank. Sees How, with that posture of female awkwardness that is, And is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge down in The pure curve of their weight and buttocks Moon up and, in swelling unity, Are silver and glimmer. Then The body is erect, she is herself, whatever Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each hand, Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but With face lifted toward the high sky, where The over-wash of rose color now fails. Fails, though no star Yet throbs there. The towel, forgotten, Does not move now. The gaze Remains fixed on the sky. The body, Profiled against the darkness of spruces, seems To draw to itself, and condense in its whiteness, what light In the sky yet lingers or, from The metallic and abstract severity of water, lifts. The body, With the towel now trailing loose from one hand, is A white stalk from which the face flowers gravely toward the high sky. This moment is non-sequential and absolute, and admits Of no definition, for it Subsumes all other, and sequential, moments, by which Definition might be possible. The woman, Face yet raised, wraps, With a motion as though standing in sleep, The towel about her body, under her breasts, and, Holding it there hieratic as lost Egypt and erect, Moves up the path that, stair-steep, winds Into the clamber and tangle of growth. Beyond The lattice of dusk-dripping leaves, whiteness Dimly glimmers, goes. Glimmers and is gone, and the man, Suspended in his darkling medium, stares Upward where, though not visible, he knows She moves, and in his heart he cries out that, if only He had such strength, he would put his hand forth And maintain it over her to guard, in all Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever Inclemency of sky or slur of the world's weather Might ever be. In his heart he cries out. Above Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he sees The first star pulse into being. It gleams there. I do not know what promise it makes him.
Robert Penn Warren
Knowing that all of manifestation and creation starts on the most subtle levels, and then sequentially unfolds itself like the seed growing into a tree, it is also the level from which change occurs, from which any form of transformation from one state into the next occurs.
Maha Devi Li Ra La
People undergo several sequential steps in maturing from infancy including childhood, adolescences, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Each stage presents distinct challenges that require a person to amend how they think and act. The motive for seeking significant change in a person’s manner of perceiving the world and behaving vary. Alteration of person’s mindset can commence with a growing sense of awareness that a person is dissatisfied with an aspect of his or her life, which cause a person consciously to consider amending their lifestyle.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
There is a type of warfare in which the entire pattern is made up of a collection of lesser actions, but these lesser or individual actions are not sequentially interdependent. Each individual one is no more than a single statistic, an isolated plus or minus, in arriving at the final result.
J.C. Wylie (Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (Classics of Sea Power))
Given the intervention of the gods and other magical and supernatural happenings, I have—as mentioned in the Introduction that you so wisely skipped—thought it best to tell the story of the war and its aftermath without attempting to dot every sequential iota or cross every chronological tau.
Stephen Fry (Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology #3))
It is the ego's purpose that makes everything seem dis-united and like separate events. The constant purpose is the thread that ties all events together. The script is really a continuous thing, rather than discreet events. I did this next and this happened, then I went there. That is the way it is talked about when the mind believes in sequential time and events. But once we get a sense that there is purpose that ties them all together, that is when the fusion between all the events takes place.
David Hoffmeister (Unwind Your Mind Back to God: Experiencing A Course in Miracles)
Knowing is most of my job,” the Transcendent Pig said. “But then there’s a long tradition of oracular pigs. I should know: I started it.” It paused. “That is, assuming you’re into sequential time.” “It works all right for me,” Nita said, rather cautiously. “Well, preference is everything, as far as time’s concerned; you can handle it however you like.
Diane Duane (The Wizard's Dilemma (Young Wizards, #5))
The number of months of a project depends upon its sequential constraints. The maximum number of men depends upon the number of independent subtasks.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
They’ve heard of sequential numbering in Supply but clearly aren’t convinced that it’d work, so Block 374 is wedged in between Blocks 217 and 434.
K.J. Parker (Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (The Siege, #1))
Chaos is just glorified bullsh*t happening in sequential events… Later recorded… and called history.
Tyler Lazarus Stump (Mister. E: Enemy of the State, Friend of the People (Atomic Dial, Nuclear Hands: The Sequels That Always Existed.))
Nalanda’s approach to investing comprises three straightforward, sequential steps: 1. Avoid big risks. 2. Buy high quality at a fair price. 3. Don’t be lazy—be very lazy.
Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy Competition in Hangchow three years in a row.
Barry Hughart (The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox (The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, #1-3))
The fact that the brain develops sequentially—and also so rapidly in the first years of life—explains why extremely young children are at such great risk of suffering lasting effects of trauma: their brains are still developing. The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well.
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
I pity those reviewers above, and people like them, who ridicule authors like R.A. Boulay and other proponents of similar Ancient Astronaut theories, simply for putting forth so many interesting questions (because that's really what he often throughout openly admits is all he does does) in light of fascinating and thought-provoking references which are all from copious sources. Some people will perhaps only read the cover and introduction and dismiss it as soon as any little bit of information flies in the face of their beliefs or normalcy biases. Some of those people, I'm sure, are some of the ones who reviewed this book so negatively without any constructive criticism or plausible rebuttal. It's sad to see how programmed and indoctrinated the vast majority of humanity has become to the ills of dogma, indoctrination, unverified status quos and basic ignorance; not to mention the laziness and conformity that results in such acquiescence and lack of critical thinking or lack of information gathering to confirm or debunk something. Too many people just take what's spoon fed to them all their lives and settle for it unquestioningly. For those people I like to offer a great Einstein quote and one of my personal favorites and that is: "Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance" I found this book to be a very interesting gathering of information and collection of obscure and/or remote antiquated information, i.e. biblical, sacred, mythological and otherwise, that we were not exactly taught to us in bible school, or any other public school for that matter. And I am of the school of thought that has been so for intended purposes. The author clearly cites all his fascinating sources and cross-references them rather plausibly. He organizes the information in a sequential manner that piques ones interest even as he jumps from one set of information to the next. The information, although eclectic as it spans from different cultures and time periods, interestingly ties together in several respects and it is this synchronicity that makes the information all the more remarkable. For those of you who continue to seek truth and enlightenment because you understand that an open mind makes for and lifelong pursuit of such things I leave you with these Socrates quotes: "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
Socrates
*One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘present’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car—nice car by the way—and the past is the road we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate—which we do, it’s the only way you can—95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc.—how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain—THE END." footnote ("Good Old Neon")
David Foster Wallace (Oblivion)
We'd rather have satisfaction and the maximum titillation than real information, and so history, I insist to my good friend Steve Welch, isn't a cold sequential list of facts, it's a prize anthology of the best fiction.
Poe Ballantine (Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir)
We process outcomes sequentially, treating each outcome as if it stands alone. We don’t sit back and wait to update our beliefs until we have enough data to overcome the uncertain relationship between outcomes and decisions.
Annie Duke (How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices)
extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous. What starts out linear becomes geometric. You do the right thing and then you do the next right thing. Over time it adds up, and the geometric potential of success is unleashed.
Gary Keller (The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results)
The same is true of scientific progress. It is easy to depict a discovery, once made, as resulting from a logical, and linear process, but that does not mean that science should progress according to neat, linear and sequential rules.
Rory Sutherland (Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life)
Cadence is the use of a regular, predictable rhythm within a process. This rhythm transforms unpredictable events into predictable events. It plays an important role in preventing variability from accumulating in a sequential process.
Donald G. Reinertsen (The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development)
A red-tailed hawk rose high on an air current, calling out shrill, sequential rasps of raptor joy. She scanned the sky for another one. Usually when they spoke like that, they were mating. Once she'd seen a pair of them coupling on the wing, grappling and clutching each other and tumbling curve-winged through the air in hundred-foot death dives that made her gasp, though always they uncoupled and sailed outward and up again just before they were bashed to death in senseless passion.
Barbara Kingsolver
ELLIE IGNORED random access and advanced sequentially through the television stations. Lifestyles of the Mass Murderers and You Bet Your Ass were on adjacent channels. It was clear at a glance that the promise of the medium remained unfulfilled.
Carl Sagan (Contact)
If you have a library of concepts and solutions internalized as chunked patterns, you can more easily skip to the right solution to a problem by listening to the whispers from your diffuse mode. Your diffuse mode can also help you connect two or more chunks together in new ways to solve unusual problems. There are two ways to solve problems—first, through sequential, step-by-step reasoning, and second, through more holistic intuition. Sequential thinking, where each small step leads deliberately toward the solution, involves the focused mode. Intuition, on the other hand, often seems to require a creative, diffuse mode linking of several seemingly different focused mode thoughts. Most difficult problems are solved through intuition, because they make a leap away from what you are familiar with.24 Keep in mind that the diffuse mode’s semi-random way of making connections means that the solutions it provides with should be carefully verified using the focused mode. Intuitive insights aren’t always correct!25
Barbara Oakley (A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra))
To-do lists inherently lack the intent of success. In fact, most to-do lists are actually just survival lists—getting you through your day and your life, but not making each day a stepping-stone for the next so that you sequentially build a successful life.
Gary Keller (The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results)
There is a confusion between myself and the literary world about what should constitute a text. I believe (along with many other writers historically) that a text should be elusive, and that the act of reading a text should make the reader conscious of the life they are living. That is, the text should overflow its borders, demonstrating the complicity of our consciousness with the coloring of our surroundings and the supposed sequentiality of events. To write texts this way, one must stop prior to the point of total explanation.
Jesse Ball (Autoportrait)
generic definition of a blockchain: a distributed, append-only ledger of provably signed, sequentially linked, and cryptographically secured transactions that’s replicated across a network of computer nodes, with ongoing updates determined by a software-driven consensus.
Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
Living in this world with all its travail, so caught up in misery, sorrow and violence, is it possible to bring the mind to a state that is highly sensitive and intelligent? That is the first and an essential point in meditation. Second: a mind that is capable of logical, sequential perception; in no way distorted or neurotic. Third: a mind that is highly disciplined. The word 'discipline' means 'to learn', not to be drilled. Discipline is an act of learning - the very root of the word means that. A disciplined mind sees everything very clearly, objectively, not emotionally, not sentimentally. Those are the basic necessities to discover that which is beyond the measure of thought, something not put together by thought, capable of the highest form of love, a dimension that is not the projection of one's own little mind.
J. Krishnamurti (You Are the World)
When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the worldviews that ultimately arose were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose. —
Ted Chiang (Arrival)
I do not think we can ever adequately define or understand love; I do not think we were ever meant to. We are meant to participate in love without really comprehending it. We are meant to give ourselves, live ourselves into love’s mystery. It is the same for all important things in life; there is a mystery within them that our definitions and understandings cannot grasp. Definitions and understandings are images and concepts created by our brains to symbolize what is real. Our thoughts about something are never the thing itself. Further, when we think logically about something, our thoughts come sequentially – one after another. Reality is not confined to such linearity; it keeps happening all at once in each instant. The best our thoughts can do is try to keep a little running commentary in rapid, breathless sequence. . . A certain asceticism of mind, a gentle intellectual restraint, is needed to appreciate the important things in life. To be open to the truth of love, we must relinquish our frozen comprehensions and begin instead to appreciate. To comprehend is to grasp; to appreciate is to value. Appreciation is gentle seeing, soft acknowledgement, reverent perception. Appreciation can be a pleasant valuing: being awed by a night sky, touched by a symphony, or moved by a caress without needing to understand why. It can also be painful: feeling someone’s suffering, being shocked by loss or disaster without comprehending the reason. Appreciation itself is a kind of love; it is our direct human responsiveness, valuing what we cannot grasp. Love, the life of our heart, is not what we think. It is always ready to surprise us, to take us beyond our understandings into a reality that is both insecure and wonderful.
Gerald G. May (The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need)
Though I thought there weren't any words any more, only fucking signifiers. And since texts have no objective univocal meaning, I feel sure that when I call you a bunch of moronic cunts you will be able to decode that sequence of sequential signifiers with the appropriate emancipated subjectivity.
Jonathan Lynn (Mayday)
THE NINE WORLDS OF THE ODINIC MYSTERIES.      The Nordic Mysteries were given in nine chambers, or caverns, the candidate advancing through them in sequential order. These chambers of initiation represented the nine spheres into which the Drottars divided the universe: (1) Asgard, the Heaven World of the Gods; (2) Alf-heim, the World of the light and beautiful Elves, or Spirits; (3) Nifl-heim, the World of Cold and Darkness, which is located in the North; (4) Jotun-heim, the World of the Giants, which is located in the East; (5) Midgard, the Earth World of human beings, which is located in the midst, or middle place; (6) Vana-heim, the World of the Vanes, which is located in the West; (7) Muspells-heim, the World of Fire, which is located in the South; 8) Svart-alfa-heim, the World of the dark and treacherous Elves, which is under the earth; and (9) Hel-heim, the World of cold and the abode of the dead, which is located at the very lowest point of the universe. It is to be understood that all of these worlds are invisible to the senses, except Midgard, the home of human creatures, but during the process of initiation the soul of the candidate—liberated from its earthly sheath by the secret power of the priests—wanders amidst the inhabitants of these various spheres. There is undoubtedly a relationship between the nine worlds of the Scandinavians and the nine spheres, or planes, through which initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries passed in their ritual of regeneration.
Manly P. Hall (The Secret Teachings of All Ages)
Most child behavioral development research is implicitly stage oriented, concerning: (a) the sequence with which stages emerge; (b) how experience influences the speed and surety with which that sequential tape of maturation unreels; and (c) how this helps create the adult a child ultimately becomes.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
In college zoology classes I learned there are plenty of animal species that change sex. It’s called sequential hermaphroditism. Clown fish are all born male, but the most dominant one becomes a female. Wrasses work in reverse, with a female able to transform her ovaries into testes in about a week’s time.
Jodi Picoult (Mad Honey)
When the attachment figure is also a threat to the child, two systems with conflicting goals are activated simultaneously or sequentially: the attachment system, whose goal is to seek proximity, and the defense systems, whose goal is to protect. In these contexts, the social engagement system is profoundly compromised and its development interrupted by threatening conditions. This intolerable conflict between the need for attachment and the need for defense with the same caregiver results in the disorganized–disoriented attachment pattern (Main & Solomon, 1986). A contradictory set of behaviors ensues to support the different goals of the animal defense systems and of the attachment system (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999; Main & Morgan, 1996; Steele, van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2001; van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006). When the attachment system is stimulated by hunger, discomfort, or threat, the child instinctively seeks proximity to attachment figures. But during proximity with a person who is threatening, the defensive subsystems of flight, fight, freeze, or feigned death/shut down behaviors are mobilized. The cry for help is truncated because the person whom the child would turn to is the threat. Children who suffer attachment trauma fall into the dissociative–disorganized category and are generally unable to effectively auto- or interactively regulate, having experienced extremes of low arousal (as in neglect) and high arousal (as in abuse) that tend to endure over time (Schore, 2009b). In the context of chronic danger, patterns of high sympathetic dominance are apt to become established, along with elevated heart rate, higher cortisol levels, and easily activated alarm responses. Children must be hypervigilantly prepared and on guard to avoid danger yet primed to quickly activate a dorsal vagal feigned death state in the face of inescapable threat. In the context of neglect, instead of increased sympathetic nervous system tone, increased dorsal vagal tone, decreased heart rate, and shutdown (Schore, 2001a) may become chronic, reflecting both the lack of stimulation in the environment and the need to be unobtrusive.
Pat Ogden (Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
One of the hardest things to grasp about implicit bias and racism is that your beliefs and values do not always drive your behavior. These beliefs and values are stored in the highest, most complex part of your brain—the cortex. But other parts of your brain can make associations—distorted, inaccurate, racist associations. The same person can have very sincere anti-racist beliefs but still have implicit biases that result in racist comments or actions. Understanding sequential processing in the brain is essential to grasping this, as is appreciating the power of developmental experiences to load the lower parts of our brain with all kinds of associations that create our worldview.
Bruce D. Perry (What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act. M
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
The left hemisphere reasons sequentially, analyzes details, and excels at linear analysis. “Left-brained” or “linear” thinkers who are analytically strong are often called “bright.” 2. The right hemisphere thinks across categories, recognizes themes, and synthesizes the big picture. “Right-brained” or “lateral” thinkers with more street smarts are often called “smart.
Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments. Because he believed that Apple's great advantage was its integration of the whole widget- from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. " Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said. This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders-Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive- rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work. " Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they'll fit in," Jobs said.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Thought is sequential, successive, one-dimensional, while the real world presents itself as a multidimensional, non-successive, simultaneous pattern of infinite richness and variety; and trying to make the one grasp the other is like trying to appreciate a beautiful landscape by looking through a narrow slit in a fence or trying to take in a Renoir painting by microscope alone.
Ken Wilber (The Spectrum of Consciousness)
For instance, if a computer does not power up, you can start testing at the electrical socket; move to the power supply, power supply connectors, power switch, motherboard; and then move to the devices. This process moves through the sequential chain along the possible path that power would flow. Following a possible resolution path from one end to the other is sometimes referred to as the layered or linear approach.
Glen E. Clarke (CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®)
The psychoanalytic session, like the Sabbath, takes you out of mundane time and forces you into what might be called sacred time--the timeless time of the unconscious, with its yawning infantile unboundedness, its shattered sequentiality. It may not be pleasant, it may not be convenient, you may not want to go, but you do. On time. And the fixed time limits also keep you from losing yourself in that disorienting , disorganizing flux.
Judith Shulevitz
We walk quickly to the footbridge across the railway line. There’s a dog waste bin here, and in the heat the slope up to the stairs stinks of shit and wee. Indigo lists the dogs whose markers she can smell. Not what their owners call them, unless there are really three dogs called George H-19, George H-15, George H-26. “All gun dogs are designated George,” says Indigo. “The H stands for Heath and the numbers are allocated sequentially.
Ben Aaronovitch (What Abigail Did That Summer (Rivers of London, #5.3))
This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
Alert> Five Chikoya approaching, open assault formation. Multiple target acquisition. Armed> Disruptor pulse. Maximum power rating. Sequential fire. U-shadow update: landing exit capsule behind Building-D. Armed> Neutron lasers. Maximum power rating. Sequential fire. U-shadow update: decoy capsules on collision vector. Mach eight. Accelerating. Armed> Microkinetics. Enhanced explosive warheads. Free fire authority. Armed> Ariel smartseeker stealth mines. Chikoya profile loaded. Dispense. Alert> New targets.
Peter F. Hamilton (The Evolutionary Void (Void, #3))
The fact is that it’s extremely rare to find anyone who has had only one sexual partner for his or her entire life. These days, it’s increasingly unusual to find anyone who has only had one “significant other” throughout his or her life. So the question is not so much whether to love more than one but rather whether it works better to have multiple partners sequentially or at the same time. There are definitely some people who are far better off taking it one at a time, and there are some situations that cry out for other possibilities.
Deborah Anapol (Polyamory in the 21st Century: Love and Intimacy with Multiple Partners)
Length, I want to suggest, has a peculiar significance for the reader of a Victorian novel and especially so if we are concerned with an awareness of it as a book; a physical object held in the hand... The distinctive achievement of novels like Bleak House and Middlemarch is an expanding density and complexity towards the creation of a realised and felt fictional world. Their imaginative breadth demands both a spatial freedom and temporal capacity equal to the creative intention... The Victorian novel, then, assumes through its length the possibility of a completed and enclosed fictional world. The reading experience, through a linear and sequential development will be, quite obviously, distinct from, say Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. It is what Josipovici has called the 'swelling continuity' of Victorian narrative, a form which encourages a particular kind of reading response: Reading an intricately plotted nineteenth-century novel is very much like travelling by train. Once one has paid for one's ticket and found one's seat one can settle down in comfort and forget all everyday worries until one reaches one's destination, secure that one is in good hands
Ian Gregor (Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form (Vision critical studies))
Engineers speak of a “control loop,” in which the “man in the loop” is the problematical element. This is the human component in a series of sequentially interacting pieces of equipment that control or adjust a function. But when the pilot is suddenly and unexpectedly brought into the control loop (in other words, participates in decision making) as a result of (inevitable) equipment failure, he is disoriented. Long periods of passive monitoring make one unprepared to act in emergencies. The sudden appearance of several alarms, all there for safety reasons, leads to disorientation.
Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies - Updated Edition)
Everyone who said it was coming didn't have the privilege of being born blindfolded, but their words were always quieter than sight, anyways. Is there a greater horror than always being proven right? If tomorrow always shows up yesterday for those that cannot see, are prophets then vehicles of the future? Or do they just see now as it is? The Doppler Effect of Ignorance destroys sequentiality. But we always show up today, whether we were a day late or not, to revel in the horrors that await us. Only the rationalists can watch the world burn with a smile on their face, a smile that no one else can see.
Lil Low-Cu$$'t (S!UT Botulism)
Many researchers, who have been conditioned to using cognitive models, might not initially see the difference between “levels” and “layers.” With levels, processes are sequential (or, as electrical engineers would say, “in series”), while with a layered architecture, processing goes on simultaneously (“in parallel”). When processing through levels, all the steps are performed one after another, like a baton relay. You need one level to finish before the next one up can start. Processing in layers, on the other hand, can have all the runners leave at the same time and go different places. This change in architecture makes for big differences.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind)
Each Beatle is to receive one of the first four albums in the run, with a sequential number printed on each cover. John wants the first of the first, calling out, “Bagsy No. 1!” “John got 000001 because he shouted the loudest,”12 Paul remembers. Ringo keeps his double album in a bank vault. And there it stays until 2015, when the drummer discovers that his copy, not John’s,13 is the original — number 000001. That Saturday, December 5, 2015, Julien’s Auctions, in Beverly Hills, sets a guide price of $40,000 to $60,000, which will go to Ringo’s charity, the Lotus Foundation. The bidding shatters records, bringing $790,000. Ringo has a message for the buyer: “Whoever gets it it will have my fingerprints
James Patterson (The Last Days of John Lennon: ‘I totally recommend it’ LEE CHILD)
In college zoology classes I learned there are plenty of animal species that change sex. It’s called sequential hermaphroditism. Clown fish are all born male, but the most dominant one becomes a female. Wrasses work in reverse, with a female able to transform her ovaries into testes in about a week’s time. The slipper limpet, when touched by other male limpets, can become female. Male bearded dragons can change sex while still in their eggs, if exposed to warmer temperatures. Spotted hyena females have what look like penises and have to retract them into their bodies for mating. Coral can go from male to female or vice versa. Common reed frogs spontaneously change sex in the wild. In other words, it’s perfectly natural.
Jodi Picoult (Mad Honey)
If physical discomfort discourages the reading of texts sequentially, from start to finish, computers make it spectacularly easy to move through texts in other ways – in particular, by searching for particular pieces of information. Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author. And this is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master. Information is not knowledge; searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.
David A. Bell
The movie style eventually known as ‘Film Noir’ served up hard-bitten crime stories featuring morally bankrupt men and mysterious femme fatales, blending violence and sexual desire into bleak tales of modern life, without clear messages of morality. The comic book industry offered younger readers its own version of the Film Noir mood with a wave of crime comics that began sweeping the newsstands around 1947.
Mike Madrid (The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines)
Forward blocking provides one of the most spectacular refutations of the associationist view.5 In blocking experiments, an animal is given two sensory clues, say, a bell and a light, both of which predict the imminent arrival of food. The trick is to present them sequentially. We start with the light: the animal learns that whenever the light is on, it predicts the arrival of food. Only then do we introduce dual trials where both light and bell predict food. Finally, we test the effect of the bell alone. Surprise: it has no effect whatsoever! Upon hearing the bell, the animal does not salivate; it seems utterly oblivious to the repeated association between the bell and the food reward. What happened? The finding is incompatible with associationism, but it fits perfectly with the Rescorla-Wagner theory. The key idea is that the acquisition of the first association (light and food) blocked the second one (bell and food). Why? Because the prediction based on light alone suffices to explain everything.
Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
Dwarves are sequential hermaphroditic parthenogens," Ruby said, anticipating his question. "What?" "They can change back and forth from male to female and are capable of fertilizing themselves to make more dwarves. They exhibit what we regard as male characteristics, typically, but some favor a more feminine approach." Durham sat with his mouth hanging open. Ruby poked him in the tongue with her quill feather making him gag and sputter. "So, Ginny is, what, short for Regina? Virginia?" "I rather think it's long to 'Gin'," Ruby answered. "She's head of hazard team and Thud's second." "So, the changing sex thing. How does that work? Does it take a while or is it the sort of thing that might happen in the middle of a conversation?" "Hard to say," Ruby said. "Does she need to clear her throat or did she just become a male? Is he just pausing for thought or did he just impregnate himself mid-sentence?" She shrugged. "Dwarf physiology isn't really my field." "Is there an easy way to tell?" "Which sex a dwarf is at the moment? Not that I'm aware of but I haven't managed to think of a situation where it would matter, either, so I've not dwelt on it much.
Jeffery Russell (The Dungeoneers (The Dungeoneers, #1))
Plan-driven development works well if you are applying it to problems that are well defined, predictable, and unlikely to undergo any significant change. The problem is that most product development efforts are anything but predictable, especially at the beginning. So, while a plan-driven process gives the impression of an orderly, accountable, and measurable approach, that impression can lead to a false sense of security. After all, developing a product rarely goes as planned. For many, a plan-driven, sequential process just makes sense, understand it, design it, code it, test it, and deploy it, all according to a well-defined, prescribed plan. There is a belief that it should work. If applying a plan-driven approach doesn’t work, the prevailing attitude is that we must have done something wrong. Even if a plan-driven process repeatedly produces disappointing results, many organizations continue to apply the same approach, sure that if they just do it better, their results will improve. The problem, however, is not with the execution. It’s that plan-driven approaches are based on a set of beliefs that do not match the uncertainty inherent in most product development efforts.
Kenneth S. Rubin (Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process)
You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man), and after I successfully explained my thesis on symbiogenesis, we began conversing more openly and freely, and I got the chance to peer inside his head. He asked me if I’d heard of Turing’s oracle machines. In time, I have come to regard that simple question as a test. Luckily for me, I knew that Turing had written about oracle machines in his PhD thesis when he was just twenty-six years old: these were regular computers that worked, like all modern devices, following a precise set of sequential instructions. But Turing knew—from his study of Gödel and the halting problem—that all such devices would suffer from inescapable limitations, and that many problems would forever remain beyond their ability to solve. That weakness tortured the grandfather of computers: Turing longed for something different, a machine that could look beyond logic and behave in a manner more akin to humans, who possess not only intelligence but also intuition. So he dreamed up a computer capable of taking the machine equivalent of a wild guess: just like the Sibyl in her ecstatic drunkenness, his device would, at a certain point in its operations, make a nondeterministic leap.
Benjamín Labatut (The MANIAC)
INSTRUCTIONS Welcome to Hanoi Puzzle Deluxe. This eBook contains several fully-interactive "Towers of Hanoi" puzzles to challenge and entertain you. Each puzzle is comprised of three fixed columnal pegs and a set number of movable discs. The rules of the game are quite simple. Each puzzle (except for the special challenges) starts with all discs arranged in order in the leftmost game column. Your challenge is to transport the pegs so that they appear in the same sequential order in the rightmost game column. Sounds easy, right? What makes it challenging is the fact that you can only move one disc at a time and you cannot place a larger disc on top of a smaller disc. At the top of the screen, you'll find all available moves available to you at the time. Using your kindle directional controller, select the move you desire and the puzzle will update. Each move is represented by one of the following six descriptions: A_to_B, A_to_C, B_to_A, B_to_C, C_to_A, C_to_B. The first letter of the move syntax describes from which stack you'll remove a disc. The second letter of the syntax is the destination to put that disc. Therefore, "A_to_B" means remove the top disc from column A and place it in column B. It's that simple. Puzzle difficulty gets harder the more discs are in play. The 4-disc version should be quite easily solved. It's a good one for novices to do in order to become familiar with the game. The 8-disc and especially 9-disc puzzle are challenging. Don't be discouraged if you don't solve them immediately. Finally, for the Hanoi experts, I've included some special challenges where the game starts mid-stream instead of with all disc in the left column. Can you solve these mid-stream puzzles as well? Good luck and have fun!
K. Lenart (Hanoi Puzzle Deluxe for Kindle (16 Interactive Puzzles Variations))
But when you actually break down the amount of time, energy, skill, planning, and maintenance that go into care tasks, they no longer seem simple. For example, the care task of feeding yourself involves more than just putting food into your mouth. You must also make time to figure out the nutritional needs and preferences of everyone you’re feeding, plan and execute a shopping trip, decide how you’re going to prepare that food and set aside the time to do so, and ensure that mealtimes come at correct intervals. You need energy and skill to plan, execute, and follow through on these steps every day, multiple times a day, and to deal with any barriers related to your relationship with food and weight, or a lack of appetite due to medical or emotional factors. You must have the emotional energy to deal with the feeling of being overwhelmed when you don’t know what to cook and the anxiety it can produce to create a kitchen mess. You may also need the skills to multitask while working, dealing with physical pain, or watching over children. Now let’s look at cleaning: an ongoing task made up of hundreds of small skills that must be practiced every day at the right time and manner in order to “keep going on the business of life.” First, you must have the executive functioning to deal with sequentially ordering and prioritizing tasks.1 You must learn which cleaning must be done daily and which can be done on an interval. You must remember those intervals. You must be familiar with cleaning products and remember to purchase them. You must have the physical energy and time to complete these tasks and the mental health to engage in a low-dopamine errand for an extended period of time. You must have the emotional energy and ability to process any sensory discomfort that comes with dealing with any dirty or soiled materials. “Just clean as you go” sounds nice and efficient, but most people don’t appreciate the hundreds of skills it takes to operate that way and the thousands of barriers that can interfere with execution.
K.C. Davis (How to Keep House While Drowning)
Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's. "Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with." I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen. "The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place." Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home. "The third level is social. A sense of belonging." Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country. "Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem." I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression. The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America. "The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness." Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.
Judy A. Bernstein (Disturbed in Their Nests: A Journey from Sudan's Dinkaland to San Diego's City Heights)
It is cheaper and more efficient to replace labour than to reproduce it sequentially by fulfilling the rights of women workers to maternity leave and support for breastfeeding and childcare.
Gabrielle Palmer (The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business)
The invention of the roll of film, made possible by the use of celluloid plastic, led directly to the technology of motion pictures. The idea that a picture could be made to “move” by sequentially showing small changes in the image had been known for hundreds of years, but without a flexible transparent material, the only way it could be made to work was using the rotating cylinder of a zoetrope. Celluloid changed everything, allowing a sequence of photographs to be taken on a roll of film and then played back fast enough for the picture to appear to move. This not only allowed a longer sequence of motion to be shown than with the zoetrope, but the moving image could be projected, and so the experience could be shared by the whole audience of a theater. This was the key insight of the Lumière brothers and led to the establishment of the cinema.
Mark Miodownik (Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World)
Moving forward requires us to reframe our basic assumptions about life. Moving forward” does not mean that we heal in a linear, sequential way.
Laurie Nadel (The Five Gifts: Discovering Hope, Healing and Strength When Disaster Strikes)
Moving forward” does not mean that we heal in a linear, sequential way.
Laurie Nadel
Selfhood allows a person to hold a sense of a personal narrative comprising of a sequential autobiography of his or her life experiences. Selfhood embraces a social identity, a moral identity, emotional identity, behavioral identity, and an ethical identity. Selfhood comprises other feelings related to self-esteem. Selfhood entails numerous personal assessments and its spackled span includes evaluation of a person’s abilities in relation to other people. Selfhood includes comparing and rating a person’s level of intelligence, personality quirks, and physical powers with respect to other people. It also encompasses a personal image of a person’s body type, and a lengthily list of other observable facts including assessing a person’s comparative physical, mental, and psychological strengths and deficits.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
And yet what a potentially dangerous device, what a terrible opportunity to bury valuable, even vital sensory information beneath the fears and prejudices and suppressions of the higher brain! We absolutely must exercise constant discrimination upon the steady barrage of sensations if they are to take on any meaningful form and direct sequential activities; but what bizarre, even ghastly shapes this discrimination is free to invent. Attitudes, moods, neuroses, fixations, and avoidances of all kinds contribute to the sensitivity of the ascending sensory pathways themselves, so that minor irritations can be magnified to overwhelming proportions, pleasures can be erased or actually turned into torments, serious internal difficulties can be blotted completely out of consciousness. The principle of selectivity is crucial to organized behavior, but the possibilities for its abuse are enormous. The mind is capable of distorting incoming information to almost any degree, and it can actually construct a body image that has very little to do with the bulk of sensory data which the body is providing. These two directions of sensory transmission are both occurring all the time, and we cannot say that our idea of reality is more clearly established by one than by the other. Or, if we have to make a choice, we must admit that it is the descending, centrifugal sensory current that is the more important one: We all receive stimulation from the same external world through identical sensory devices, but it is the process of selection and interpretation which makes us respond differently, makes each of us the unique individuals that we are. In this process, discriminating mind descends into and is active in every synapse of the sensory system. The two processes of transmitting data through the nervous system and of interpreting it cannot be separated. Information is processed at each synaptic level of the afferent pathways. There is no one point along the afferent pathways or one particular level beneath the central nervous system below which activity cannot be a conscious sensation and above which it is a recognizable, defineable sensory experience. Perception has many levels, and it seems that the many separate stages are arranged in a hierarchy, with the more complex stages receiving input only after they are processed by the more elementary systems.13 And the more elementary systems are in turn facilitated or inhibited by the higher, more complex ones. The conclusions towards which these observations push us seems unequivocal. The cognitive, associational processes of the higher brain have just as much to do with our construction of physical reality—both within us and outside of us—as do our sensory devices and their specific stimulations. And remember, it is the perception of this sensory reality which initiates and directs our motor responses, our postures, and our behavior.
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)