Spontaneous Escapes Quotes

Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.

Daydreaming is not an intellectual process but rather an escape from intellectualism.

But the most obvious fact about praise -- whether of God or anything -- strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. ... The world rings with praise -- lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game. ... I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen. I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man... Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing. Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object. ...we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration: 'The world is my country; to do good my religion.' Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in 'The Rights of Man', and that genius busy at his favorite task - liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, 'The Rights of Man' yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke's effort in his 'Reflections'. Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him. 'Tom Paine is quite right,' said Pitt, the Prime Minister, 'but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.' Here we see the progressive quality of Paine's genius at its best. 'The Rights of Man' amplified and reasserted what already had been said in 'Common Sense', with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France. So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre's enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument. But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of 'The Age of Reason' and now turned his time to the latter part. Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events 'The Age of Reason' appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle - a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?

It is above all the valorizing of the present that requires emphasizing. The simple fact of existing, of living in time, can comprise a religious dimension. This dimension is not always obvious, since sacrality is in a sense camouflaged in the immediate, in the "natural" and the everyday. The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it reveals the bliss of existing, of sharing — even fugitively — in the spontaneity of life and the majesty of the world. Like so many others before and after them, the Greeks learned that the surest way to escape from time is to exploit the wealth, at first sight impossible to suspect, of the lived instant.

You consider issues, but not deeply enough. Your spring is frozen. Faith is a flowing. Don't try to forge cold iron. Study David, the ironsmith, and dancer, and musician. Move into the sun. You're wrapped in fantasy and inner mumbling. When spirit enters, a man begins to wander freely, escaped and overrunning through the garden plants, spontaneous and soaking in. Now a miracle story...

The more man gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an 'individual,' he has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world that destroys his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.

Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses re-open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before he merged as an “individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; it is also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. Thus it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities.

Jung writes that women with a negative mother complex often miss the first half of life; they walk past it in a dream. Life to them is a constant source of annoyance and irritation. But if they can overcome this negative mother complex, they have a good chance in the second half of rediscovering life with the youthful spontaneity missed in the first half. For though, as Jung says in the last paragraph, a part of life has been lost, its meaning has been saved. That is the tragedy of such women, but they can get to the turning point, and in the second half of life have their hands healed and can stretch them out for what they want — not from the animus or from the ego, but, according to nature, simply stretch out their hands toward something they love. Though it is infinitely simple, it is extremely difficult, for it is the one thing the woman with a negative mother complex cannot do; it needs God's help. Even the analyst cannot help her — it must one day just happen, and this is generally when there has been sufficient suffering. One cannot escape one's fate; the whole pain of it must be accepted, and one day the infinitely simple solution comes.

It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self. . . . Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students.

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world.

The intelligent use humor as a shield against humiliation. The cruel use humor as a sword to insult others. The irresponsible use humor to escape from responsibility. The fool takes humor too seriously! Humor is spontaneous; to make an effort to be humorous makes no sense.

That her son had developed all the latent characteristics of a three-dollar bill escaped her notice—all she knew was that she was glad he lived in Birmingham because he was oppressively devoted to her, which meant that she felt obliged to make an effort to reciprocate, which she could not with any spontaneity do.

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today, as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton. That his life has become empty and lost its meaning. The victory over all kinds of authoritarian systems will be possible only if democracy does not retreat, but takes the offensive and proceeds to realise what has been its aim in the minds of those who fought for freedom throughout the last centuries. It will triumph over the forces of nihilism only if it can imbue people with a faith that is the strongest the human mind is capable of - the faith in life and in truth and in freedom, as the active and spontaneous realisation of the individual self.

Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.

Countless others, however, failed to escape the relentless pursuit of the auditors, who assured society that law would prevail. They hunted those who tried to circumvent their rules, which were harsh to prevent the city’s power supply from failing. The rules had to be harsh to avoid bad precedents. Nobody had the freedom to spontaneously use their imagination. This was the order of things.

If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

There was something about those birds in the glass aviary that was foreboding and sad. They could fly, but they had no sky. The one who had escaped- the homing pigeon- was mourned, but shouldn't he have been celebrated? He had freedom; he had escaped his predictable route between Malibu and Bel-Air and was now flying in bigger and brighter skies, with a flight plan that was spontaneous and new. And then there was the girl: I had forced myself to forget her but was only successful for an hour or two, and then she would creep back in, the way a spider returns to a musty corner of a room to spin her web.

Cancer may be seen as a disease of cell replication. The normal processes of cell division and cell death are somehow subverted. A cell that should give rise to healthy offspring escapes from control and divides into malformed facsimiles that replicate themselves without regard to the biological needs of the organism. With millions of cells dying or being formed in the body every day, natural accident would, by itself, lead to a great number of spontaneous abnormal transformations. “It’s a fact that every one of us has a number of tiny cancerous tumours growing in our bodies at every moment,” writes Candace Pert.

It is rather odd to find Dunbar referring to dance as useless: ‘dancing, a phenomenon that probably ranks, along with smiling and laughter’, he writes, ‘as one of the most futile of all human universals’.126 I say it is odd because he of all people ought to be able to see past its apparent uselessness to the individual, to its supposed usefulness to the group. Perhaps he does, and calls it ‘futile’ tongue in cheek. But I'd rather agree with him, nonetheless, that smiling, laughter and dance are – gloriously – useless: how many of us really believe that when we dance, laugh, or smile we do so ultimately because of some dreary utility to the group to which we belong? Perhaps there is no end in view. Perhaps these spontaneous behaviours are pointless, with no purpose beyond themselves, other than that they express something beyond our selves. Perhaps, indeed, the fact that so many of our distinguishing features are so ‘useless’ might make one think. Instead of looking, according to the manner of the left hemisphere, for utility, we should consider, according to the manner of the right hemisphere, that finally, through intersubjective imitation and experience, humankind has escaped from something worse even than Kant's ‘cheerless gloom of chance’: the cheerless gloom of necessity.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see who it was. My jaw dropped! Ralph and I exchanged looks of dismay and resignation. Standing behind us were our three top PJ bosses. Somehow they had tracked us down. We were caught red-handed and there was no escape. The air went out of my emotional sails, and I felt deflated. I didn’t even begin to try to talk my way out of this. I said, “OK. You got us. What can I say?” The PJ bosses looked at me funny and started to laugh. Then a long line of PJs streamed into the bar. The bosses were just the vanguard of a boisterous posse of PJs. Cabin fever had become unbearable and apparently almost every single PJ had decided to sneak off base! Everyone was loud, animated, and ready to do some serious drinking. Thus began a spontaneous and epic night of partying. Somehow, everyone made it back onto base afterwards without incident.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so causedhim to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

I see your birth. Your violent entrance into the barren and endless space. Sent here by accident or with purpose, Krona does not even know. Casting your presence across the entire universe. Light fighting back darkness by creating the stars and planets. Creating your shelter, earth, at the very spot you were thrust into the universe. The planet in which you made your home under molten rock -- and primordial waters. I see you touch the oceans, transforming them into seas of spontaneous life. Overflowing with evolution. Gaining complexity. Conjuring thought. I watch the first sentient creature in the universe to ever will itself to move...do just that. And it is the origin of Willpower itself. The creature ignites with emerald light and transforms, elevated above the others. It is Ion. Thousands of years fly before my eyes as the creature escapes earth's oceans and crawl to land. Some take to the air. Fleeing for survival, this thing transforms into the emotional power it emits. Fear is born. And thus Parallax. As Love ignites into existence, so does the Predator. As a creature eats what it does not need, Avarice consumes all it touches. Rage grows from murder. Hope from prayer. And at last, Compassion is offered to us all.

Then, in 1974, Stephen Hawking made a dramatic discovery. He decided to examine for the forst time what occurs when one applies the notions of quantum mechanics to black holes. What he discovered was that black holes are not completely black. When quantum mechanics is included in the discussion of their properties, it is possible for energy to escape from the surface of the black hole and be recorded by an outside observer. The variation in the strength of the gravitational field near the horizon surface is strong enough to create pairs of particles and antiparticles spontaneously. The energy necessary to do this is extracted from the source of the gravitational field, and as the process continues, so the mass of the black hole ebbs away. If one waits long enough, it should disappear completely unless some unknown physics intervenes in the final stages. Such a discovery was exciting enough, but its most satisfying aspect was the fact that the particles radiated away from the surface of the black hole were found to have all the characteristics of heat radiation, with a temperature precisely equal to the gravitational field at the horizon and an entropy given by its surface area, just as the analogy had suggested. Black holes did possess a non-zero temperature and obeyed the laws of thermodynamics, but only when quantum mechanics was included in their description.

Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary in a way that is hard to appreciate today, now that its discoveries have become second nature to most of us. The historian David Wootton reminds us of the understanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution in 1600: He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any in England—he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. . . . He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7 A century and a third later, an educated descendant of this Englishman would believe none of these things. It was an escape not just from ignorance but from terror. The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the Middle Ages “the belief that an external force controlled daily life contributed to a kind of collective paranoia”: Rainstorms, thunder, lightning, wind gusts, solar or lunar eclipses, cold snaps, heat waves, dry spells, and earthquakes alike were considered signs and signals of God’s displeasure. As a result, the “hobgoblins of fear” inhabited every realm of life. The sea became a satanic realm, and forests were populated with beasts of prey, ogres, witches, demons, and very real thieves and cutthroats. . . . After dark, too, the world was filled with omens portending dangers of every sort: comets, meteors, shooting stars, lunar eclipses, the howls of wild animals.8 To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. That knowledge includes an understanding of ourselves.

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10

In going down into the secrets of his own mind, [a person] has descended into the secrets of all minds…. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find true for them also…. The deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and universally true.

One of the most striking consequences for philosophy of the evolutionary origins of many intuitions is that it is very difficult for a brain, designed by spontaneous processes that intrinsically favour existence, to escape its own biases and arrive at counterintuitive conclusions that put its own value into question.

I usually struggle to answer many questions people ask because my mind is always in the future, while the questions they ask are always in the past, or at best, in the present. That is a very factual way of observing the spiritual level of someone. The "what job you have?" and "how much money do you make?" that people stuck in a present time loop obsessively ask is based on what they see, while the "where are you from?" and "what did you study?" comes from people stuck in the past, and with the idea that the past conditions the present, not your decisions. The first thinks matter controls life and the second that life is the result of randomity and chaos. Both represent the vast majority of the population and both are absolutely stupid. As they are too stupid to perceive the future, they call it dreaming, insanity or, at best, motivation and inspiration. They don't know what consciousness is, even when using this word. Thus, every change is for them like a spontaneous miracle, or a mistake in the system that shouldn't have occurred. They look at those who break their mental laws as criminals because when someone is too stupid, he perceives knowledge as a threat to his values. Jealousy and competition come precisely from this state of mind. These subhumans think like a character of a video game that is trapped in a world that never changes and in which they have no capacity to make effective decisions. When they are faced with a library or a religion that promotes wisdom, they close their eyes to escape or read about fantasies, because they are not mentally capable of processing reality.

that man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an “individual,” has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.

For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now gives to its machines and computers. This order of change is as hard for most people to conceive as was the change from the classic power complex of Imperial Rome to that of Christianity, or, later, from supernatural medieval Christianity to the machine-modeled ideology of the seventeenth century. But such changes have repeatedly occurred all through history; and under catastrophic pressure they may occur again. Of only one thing we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

e=mc^2. I know. I promised there would be no equations and, except for a few footnotes, I've kept my promise. But I think you will forgive me for making an exception for the world's most famous equation-the only equation to have its biography written. And the thing is this: e = mc^2 pops right out of QFT. Einstein had to work hard to find it (it was published in a separate paper that followed his breakthrough paper on relativity theory in 1905), but in QFT it appears as an almost trivial consequence of the two previous results. Since both mass and energy are associated with oscillations in the field, it doesn't take an Einstein to see that there must be a relationship between the two. Any schoolboy can combine the two equations and find (big drum roll, please) e = mc^2. Not only does the equation tumble right out of QFT, its meaning is seen in the oscillations or "shimmer" of the fields. Frank Wilczek calls these oscillations "a marvelous bit of poetry" that create a "Music of the Grid" (Wilczek's term for space seen as a lattice of points): Rather than plucking a string, blowing through a reed, banging on a drumhead, or clanging a gong, we play the instrument that is empty space by plunking down different combinations of quarks, gluons, electrons, photons,...and let them settle until they reach equilibrium with the spontaneous activity of Grid...These vibrations represent particles of different mass m...The masses of particles sound the Music of the Grid. ----- Frank Wilczek

Kane wanted Avery, wanted to do exactly what he suggested, but it was a bad idea. He fought emotions he shouldn't feel. Kane attempted to make his escape, sliding first to the right, only to find Avery had caged him in. Instinctively, he turned to the left. He had to get out from under this seductive assault or he was going to spontaneously combust. Avery blocked his escape with his left arm, keeping him right there—stuck between the bottles of wine and Avery's hard body with his brain too stunned to think.

INSIDE OF MY KISS   Drawing my fingers and hands down from the lower portion of her neck passed her stomach I kiss her once more. Gradually guiding her hands down my chest with our fingers partly intertwined I drag them all the way down in an oily residue that slides like warm agave. I watch as her eyes soften, her mouth becoming the place for my lips to escape to. Little spatters of paint graze our legs and feet as she desperately tries to find refuge inside of my kiss, our bodies soon becoming one. Naked and partially covered in paint we move across the floor over a large piece of canvas that captures every stir and motion. As paint and sweat smear across this surface giving memory to our intense romance an organic and spontaneous masterpiece is made. Again I surrender myself inside of her breathtaking kiss that warms me. Smudged into this colorful muck our love is made once again and to a tune that never grows tired. Here in this place where time stands still there is nothing that can take the place of this bond and this passion that continues to become more with each kiss. Taken by the instinctive beauty of solicitude we now lead each other in poetic faith. Inside the splendor of each breath and each kiss do we make all that there is to make, our love only intensifying within each passing moment.

Enlightenment is possible – for everyone. However, I don‘t think we will all awaken spontaneously in the way contemporary spiritual teachers Krishnamurti or Eckhart Tolle did. Most of us will never experience a voice from on high, a flash of life-altering insight, stigmata, or a transcendent miracle. Anything is possible, but the odds are not in our favor. What these teachers experienced is like winning the lottery. Yet, from the Buddhist perspective, most of us have already won the lottery: against all probability, we have been born as human beings with intact senses and a bit of interest in pursuing something spiritual. This is even more remarkable when we consider the obstacles and temptations of our materialistic culture, in which spirit is thrown out with the bathwater of religious dogma, God is proclaimed dead, consciousness is reduced to epiphenomena of the brain, and life‘s purpose is made a hedonic scramble on a treadmill to nowhere. What is far more likely than sudden enlightenment is gradual awakening. Following a systematic educational process like a college curriculum, gradual awakening builds on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. This gradual process of awakening doesn‘t offer an escape hatch to another realm of reality or disavow our human wounds, limits, and foibles in this realm; rather it embraces and transforms them, because the only way out is through.

not happening anymore, and that is disappointing. If you go back to the same place where you saw the butterfly, and it’s not there, it becomes a negative experience. Understand, you have just made life a lose-lose situation. If anything reminds you of what bothered you before, you lose. If you are not getting to reexperience what you liked before, you lose. This is in drastic contrast to what Zen calls beginner’s mind. If you are not expecting anything in particular from a situation, and then something special happens, it can touch you really deeply. It could be a beautiful sunset, the first unexpected kiss, or some other welcome surprise. If it touches you so deeply because you have no samskaras in your mind about the event—you have beginner’s mind. Otherwise, you will be expecting something based on prior experiences, and that will interfere with the spontaneity of the event. The end result is that these samskaras have ruined your life. You’ve made it so that unless something drastically different happens to pull you out of this preference system, you can’t feel anything fully. That’s why some people must go to the extremes to get a rush. It is also why some people try to keep everything exactly the same so life doesn’t disturb their samskaras. In either case, trying to keep the mind a decent place to live in can force people to look for escapes, such as drinking and drugs. You get to the point where you’re running around trying to appease your mind. Eventually, you will come to realize that it’s not the job, the spouse, or the car that gets old—it’s listening to the mess in your mind that gets old. While all of these patterns from the past are blocked in your mind, you in there can neither experience the miracle of life unfolding before you, nor can you experience the natural beauty within you. Your awareness is completely distracted by these stored mental patterns, and you must devote your days and nights to serving them. You can no longer experience reality—you are stuck experiencing yourself.

Jess, didn't we agree to take the town by storm? How can you do that in that orange shorts jumpsuit? You look like you escaped from a prison ward and kept the outfit." She smirked and took a spontaneous photo of Charlie and me. I teased back, "It's an on-trend romper, and I prefer it to your black-on-black grim reaper leisurewear, thank you very much.

man’s spontaneous activity. It is the security acquired each moment by man’s spontaneous activity. It is the security that only freedom can give, that needs no illusions because it has eliminated those conditions that necessitate illusions.

It has been the thesis of this book that freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an “individual,” but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual’s potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously. Freedom has reached a critical point where, driven by the logic of its own dynamism, it threatens to change into its opposite. The future of democracy depends on the realization of the individualism that has been the ideological aim of modern thought since the Renaissance. The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell. The victory of freedom is possible only if democracy develops into a society in which the individual, his growth and happiness, is the aim and purpose of culture, in which life does not need any justification in success or anything else, and in which the individual is not subordinated to or manipulated by any power outside of himself, be it the State or the economic machine; finally, a society in which his conscience and ideals are not the internalization of external demands, but are really his and express the aims that result from the peculiarity of his self. These aims could not be fully realized in any previous period of modern history; they had to remain largely ideological aims, because the material basis for the development of genuine individualism was lacking. Capitalism has created this premise. The problem of production is solved—in principle at least—and we can visualize a future of abundance, in which the fight for economic privileges is no longer necessitated by economic scarcity. The problem we are confronted with today is that of the organization of social and economic forces, so that man—as a member of organized society—may become the master of these forces and cease to be their slave.

Today the vast majority of the people not only have no control over the whole of the economic machine, but they have little chance to develop genuine initiative and spontaneity at the particular job they are doing.

Cares for Something/Someone Outside the Self “It is the capacity to care — to care intensely about something beyond the limited self — that we seem to find our best clue to what mature individuality is.” —The Mind Alive The Overstreets convincingly argue that, for several reasons, the capacity to deeply care for someone or something forms the very core of the mature mind. First, it slays adolescent ego-absorption by shifting an individual’s focus outside the self, and training that focus on something bigger than the self. Second, it requires the “emotional overflow” of well-developed inner resources, particularly the development of courage, as sincerely caring is underrated as a truly frightening endeavor: “Caring — whether for another person, a line of work, a field of knowledge, or a conviction — is, in a sense, the most hazardous of human experiences. The emotionally impoverished person cannot afford it; for it means choosing to be vulnerable. . . . There is, in psychological truth, a certain terror that is part of the experience of deep caring: the terror of letting one’s self go; putting one’s whole capacity to feel and suffer at the disposal of something beyond the self. No one, it seems safe to assume, who has ever deeply and genuinely loved another human being or a chosen vocation or a social cause or a religious faith has ever wholly escaped this terror.” Third, it is the only way to catalyze one’s full potential: “If the risks of caring are great, so are the rewards; for it is one of the basic facts of human life that the ungiven self is the unfulfilled self. Only the individual who builds a strong, sound relationship with his world can himself become strong, sound, and resourceful: ready for what happens; able to be affirmative and creative in his dealings with experience.” Caring is such a key element of human fulfillment, in part because it provides a non-duplicable source of motivation:   “If a person never greatly cares about anything beyond himself, he has little spontaneous reason to get over the hump of inertia and submit himself to the discipline of a working material or a body of knowledge. . . . an individual’s area of caring and the strength of his caring determine the inconveniences he will willingly suffer and the risks he will run.” Finally, the practice of caring for things outside the self — a process in which the arrows of influence and need work both ways — disabuses you of delusional notions of complete autonomy and control (ideals maturity approaches, but can never completely attain, nor would find desirable to attain); it serves as a visceral, humbling reminder of where you remain (wonderfully) dependent. In caring for some person or idea, you come to an understanding of humanity’s interconnectedness, a “sense of how things hang together; not just the thing itself, but the meaning of it.” As the Overstreets conclude, “the capacity to care — to enjoy richly, love deeply, feel strongly, and if need be, suffer intensely — is, in short, the best guarantee any one of us can have against” the complete stagnation of the self.

Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.

American Indians, for example, had resisted every effort by the English to teach them the arts of civilization. Franklin thought this striking, yet hardly inexplicable. “They visit us frequently,” he told Collinson, “and see the advantages that arts, sciences, and compact society procure us. They are not deficient in natural understanding, and yet they have never shewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our arts.” The reason was plain enough: “In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plenty.” Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” In one case an Englishman raised with the Indians inherited a substantial estate; he came home to test his new circumstances but soon abandoned them, leaving the estate to a younger brother and carrying off only a gun and a coat. Franklin related yet another story that further illustrated his point. Some years earlier one of the colonies had concluded a treaty with the Six Nations (the Iroquois confederacy of the lower Great Lakes region). All that remained was the exchange of civilities. The English commissioners offered to underwrite the education of half a dozen of the brightest Indian lads at the College of William and Mary, the finest educational institution in the region. The Indians responded that they were most grateful for this kind offer but must decline. Some Indian youths had been educated in this way several years before and had returned good for nothing, being unable to hunt, trap, or fight. The Indians made a counteroffer: to take a dozen English children to the Indians’ great council, where they would be raised as real and useful men.

Our world is an artful illusion—of light, color, and sound. It feels spontaneous when you’re in it, but it isn’t. Beneath it all, or above it all, there’s something both significant and unknowable. A design. A sequence that can be maneuvered within, but never escaped.

S. Lewis had his own misconceptions about this notion of praise and wrote of the lesson he learned: But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. . . . The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their game. . . . I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is appointed consummation.7 Lewis realized that praise stems from doing what one can’t help doing—giving utterance to what we regard as supremely valuable: “It is good to sing praises to our God.” Why? “For it is pleasant and praise is becoming” (Ps. 147:1).

The sattwic quality is a first mediator between the higher and the lower nature. It must indeed at a certain point transform or escape from itself and break up and dissolve into its source; its conditioned derivative seeking light and carefully constructed action must change into the free direct dynamic and spontaneous light of the spirit.

But great adepts can initiate by a mere touch or glance or even simply by visualizing the disciple. Sri Ramakrishna, the great nineteenth-century master, placed his foot on Swami Vivekananda’s chest and promptly plunged his young disciple into a deep state of formless ecstasy (nirvikalpa-samādhi). THE GURU AS TRANSMITTER According to Indic Yoga, the guru is a teacher who not merely instructs or communicates information, as does the preceptor (ācārya). Rather the guru transmits wisdom and, by his very nature, reveals—to whatever degree—the spiritual Reality. If the guru is fully enlightened, or liberated, his every word, gesture, and mere presence is held to express and manifest the Spirit. He or she is then a veritable beacon of Reality. Transmission in such a case is spontaneous and continuous. Like the Sun, to which the sad-guru or teacher of the Real is often compared, he or she constantly transmits the liberating “energy” of the transcendental Being. In Yoga, with adepts who are not yet fully liberated, transmission is largely but not exclusively based on the teacher’s will and effort. Many schools also admit of an element of divine grace (prasāda) entering into the configuration for which the teacher serves as a temporal vehicle. Thus the traditional teacher plays a crucial role in the life of the disciple. As the Sanskrit word guru (meaning literally “weighty”) suggests, he or she is a true “heavyweight” in spiritual matters. THE GURU AS GUIDE Apart from triggering and even constantly reinvigorating the spiritual process in a disciple, the guru also serves as a guide along the path. This occurs primarily through verbal instruction but also by being a living example on the spiritual path. Since the path to liberation includes many formidable hurdles, a disciple is clearly in need of guidance. The written teachings, which form the precious heritage of a given lineage of adepts, are a powerful beacon along the way. But they typically require explanations, or an oral commentary, to yield their deeper meaning. By virtue of the oral transmission received from his or her own teacher or teachers and also in light of his or her own experience and realization, the guru is able to make the written teachings come alive for the disciple. This is an invaluable gift. THE GURU AS ILLUMINATOR Tradition explains the term guru as being composed of the two syllables gu and ru; the former is taken to represent darkness, while the latter is said to stand for its removal. Thus the guru is a dispeller of spiritual darkness, that is, he or she restores sight to those who are blind to their true nature, the Spirit. If we compare the ego to a black hole from which no light can escape, the guru is like the radiant sun: an ever-lustrous being that illumines every dark niche in the disciple’s mind and character.

The findings that were deemed believable enough to be published, however, revolutionized ethologists’ thinking. Ethologists began to speak less often of a chasm between man and ape; they began to speak instead of a dividing “line.” And it was a line that, in the words of Harvard primatologist Irven De Vore, was “a good deal less clear than one would ever have expected.” What makes up this line between us and our fellow primates? No longer can it be claimed to be tool use. Is it the ability to reason? Wolfgang Kohler once tested captive chimps’ reasoning ability by placing several boxes and a stick in an enclosure and hanging a banana from the high ceiling by a string. The animals quickly figured out that they could get to the banana by stacking the boxes one atop the other and then reaching to swat at the banana with a stick. (Once Geza Teleki found himself in exactly this position at Gombe. He had followed the chimpanzees down into a valley and around noon discovered he had forgotten to bring his lunch. The chimps were feeding on fruit in the trees at the time, and he decided to try to knock some fruit from nearby vines with a stick. For about ten minutes he leaped and swatted with his stick but didn’t manage to knock down any fruit. Finally an adolescent male named Sniff collected a handful of fruit, came down the tree, and dropped the fruit into Geza’s hands.) Some say language is the line that separates man from ape. But this, too, is being questioned. Captive chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught not only to comprehend, but also to produce language. They have been taught American Sign Language (ASL), the language of the deaf, as well as languages that use plastic chips in place of words and computer languages. One signing chimp, Washoe, often combined known signs in novel and creative ways: she had not been taught the word for swan, but upon seeing one, she signed “water-bird.” Another signing chimp, Lucy, seeing and tasting a watermelon for the first time, called it a “candy-drink”; the acidic radish she named “hurt-cry-food.” Lucy would play with toys and sign to them, much as human children talk to their dolls. Koko, the gorilla protegee of Penny Patterson, used sign language to make jokes, escape blame, describe her surroundings, tell stories, even tell lies. One of Biruté’s ex-captives, a female orangutan named Princess, was taught a number of ASL signs by Gary Shapiro. Princess used only the signs she knew would bring her food; because she was not a captive, she could not be coerced into using sign language to any ends other than those she found personally useful. Today dolphins, sea lions, harbor seals, and even pigeons are being taught artificial languages, complete with a primitive grammar or syntax. An African grey parrot named Alex mastered the correct use of more than one hundred spoken English words, using them in proper order to answer questions, make requests, do math, and offer friends and visitors spontaneous, meaningful comments until his untimely death at age 31 in 2007. One leading researcher, Ronald Schusterman, is convinced that “the components for language are present probably in all vertebrates, certainly in mammals and birds.” Arguing over semantics and syntax, psychologists and ethologists and linguists are still debating the definitions of the line. Louis Leakey remarked about Jane’s discovery of chimps’ use of tools that we must “change the definition of man, the definition of tool, or accept chimps as man.” Now some linguists have actually proposed, in the face of the ape language experiments, changing the definition of language to exclude the apes from a domain we had considered uniquely ours. The line separating man from the apes may well be defined less by human measurement than by the limits of Western imagination. It may be less like a boundary between land and water and more like the lines we draw on maps separating the domains of nations.

But great adepts can initiate by a mere touch or glance or even simply by visualizing the disciple. Sri Ramakrishna, the great nineteenth-century master, placed his foot on Swami Vivekananda’s chest and promptly plunged his young disciple into a deep state of formless ecstasy (nirvikalpa-samādhi). THE GURU AS TRANSMITTER According to Indic Yoga, the guru is a teacher who not merely instructs or communicates information, as does the preceptor (ācārya). Rather the guru transmits wisdom and, by his very nature, reveals—to whatever degree—the spiritual Reality. If the guru is fully enlightened, or liberated, his every word, gesture, and mere presence is held to express and manifest the Spirit. He or she is then a veritable beacon of Reality. Transmission in such a case is spontaneous and continuous. Like the Sun, to which the sad-guru or teacher of the Real is often compared, he or she constantly transmits the liberating “energy” of the transcendental Being. In Yoga, with adepts who are not yet fully liberated, transmission is largely but not exclusively based on the teacher’s will and effort. Many schools also admit of an element of divine grace (prasāda) entering into the configuration for which the teacher serves as a temporal vehicle. Thus the traditional teacher plays a crucial role in the life of the disciple. As the Sanskrit word guru (meaning literally “weighty”) suggests, he or she is a true “heavyweight” in spiritual matters. THE GURU AS GUIDE Apart from triggering and even constantly reinvigorating the spiritual process in a disciple, the guru also serves as a guide along the path. This occurs primarily through verbal instruction but also by being a living example on the spiritual path. Since the path to liberation includes many formidable hurdles, a disciple is clearly in need of guidance. The written teachings, which form the precious heritage of a given lineage of adepts, are a powerful beacon along the way. But they typically require explanations, or an oral commentary, to yield their deeper meaning. By virtue of the oral transmission received from his or her own teacher or teachers and also in light of his or her own experience and realization, the guru is able to make the written teachings come alive for the disciple. This is an invaluable gift. THE GURU AS ILLUMINATOR Tradition explains the term guru as being composed of the two syllables gu and ru; the former is taken to represent darkness, while the latter is said to stand for its removal. Thus the guru is a dispeller of spiritual darkness, that is, he or she restores sight to those who are blind to their true nature, the Spirit. If we compare the ego to a black hole from which no light can escape, the guru is like the radiant sun: an ever-lustrous being that illumines every dark niche in the disciple’s mind and character. This illuminating function depends on the degree of the guru’s own realization.

Each time I escape through reasons to ease my fear and present.

But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. . . . The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their game. . . . I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is appointed consummation

At the most primitive level, the ”delinquents” (blousons noirs) of the world use violence to express their rejection of society and its sterile options. But their refusal is an abstract one: it gives them no chance of actually escaping the contradictions of the system. They are its products– negative, spontaneous, but none the less exploitable. All the experiments of the new social order produce them: they are the first side-effects of the new urbanism; of the disintegration of all values; of the extension of an increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the growing control of every aspect of everyday life by the psycho-humanist police force; and of the economic survival of a family unit which has lost all significance.

that man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an “individual,” has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.9

We cannot step beyond the everyday. The marvellous can only continue to exist in fiction and the illusions that people share. There is no escape. And yet we wish to have the illusion of escape as near to hand as possible. An illusion not entirely illusory, but constituting a 'world' both apparent and real (the reality of appearances and the apparently real) quite different from the everyday world yet as open-ended and as closely dovetailed into the everyday as possible. So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work. A vicious circle. “Thus is established a complex of activities and passivities, of forms of sociability and communication which the sociologist can study. Although he cannot describe or analyse them without criticizing them as being (partially) illusory, he must nevertheless start from the fact that they contain within themselves their own spontaneous critique of the everyday. They are that critique in so far as they are other than everyday life, and yet they are in everyday life, they are alienation. They can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive appearance. (62)

She watched with envy as dancers bobbed and swayed to the raging music like an undulating wave in an angry sea. Pungent odors of sweat and incense mingled with the less obtrusive smells of whiskey and flash pots from the stage. Laser lights and strobes flashed like lightning in time to the thunder of heavy bass and drums. The whole place thrummed with energy as if on the brink of an explosion. Any other time, she might have felt out of place in her conservative cream silk blouse and knee-length taupe skirt amidst the metal-studded leather and ripped denim. The women frowned at her attire while the men gave her a wide berth as if she might burst into religious sermon if they came too close. With a resigned shrug, she raised a hand to pat the sleek French twist in her hair lest one of the unruly locks escape its prison. Satisfied that every hair held its place, she turned her gaze to the crowd around her. “Hey there, pretty girl.” One of the bartenders set a gin and tonic with two slices of lime in front of her before she had spoken a word. She tried to hand him a ten-dollar bill but he waved it away with a shrug and a wink. “Your drinks are on the house tonight.” As he returned to the other end of the bar, her gaze followed him. This particular broad-shouldered bartender was the reason most females came to Felony, and she was no exception. His name was Jack. They had a passing acquaintance limited to brief discussions of the weather and sports, mingled with occasional flirtatious remarks. Although she had a huge crush on him, she’d never admitted it to anyone including herself. Jack represented everything that was absent from her life; spontaneity, promiscuity… adventure. He was the green grass on the other side of her self-imposed fence, a temptation that she coveted but would never taste.

Stendhal knows the source of his greatest happiness and his worst misery: the reflexivity of his spiritual life. When he loves, enjoys beauty, feels free and unconstrained, he realizes not only the bliss of these feelings but, at the same time, the happiness of being aware of this happiness. But now that he ought to be completely absorbed by his happiness and feel redeemed from all his limitations and inadequacies, he is still full of problems and doubts: Is that the whole story?—he asks himself. Is that what they call love? Is it possible to love, to feel, to be delighted and yet to observe oneself so coolly and so calmly? Stendhal’s answer is by no means the usual one, which assumes the existence of an insurmountable gulf between feeling and reason, passion and reflexion, love and ambition, but is based on the assumption that modern man simply feels differently, is enraptured and enthusiastic differently from a contemporary of Racine or Rousseau. For them, spontaneity and reflexivity of the emotions were incompatible, for Stendhal and his heroes they are quite inseparable; none of their passions is so strong as the desire to be constantly calling themselves to account for what is going on inside them. Compared with the older literature, this self consciousness implies just as profound a change as Stendhal’s realism, and the overcoming of classical-romantic psychology is just as strictly one of the preconditions of his art as the abolition of the alternative between the romantic escape from the world and the anti-romantic belief in the world.

Because blunders were a tributary of spontaneity, and without it, they would vanish like an illusion. In this respect, Actyn might have gone too far, and he might now be entering the arena where all his efforts were automatically sterile. Ever since he had decided to turn all his firepower against Dr. Aira and his Miracle Cures, he had burned through stages, unable to stop because of the very dynamic of the war, in which he was the one who took every initiative. In reality, he had overcome the first stages — those of direct confrontation, libel, defamation, and ridicule — in the blink of an eye, condemned as they were to inefficiency. Actyn had understood that he could never achieve results in those terrains. The historical reconstruction of a failure was by its very nature impossible; he ran the risk of reconstituting a success. He then moved on (but this was his initial proposition, the only one that justified him) to attempts to produce the complete scenario, to pluck one out of nothingness . . . He had no weapons besides those of performance, and he had been using them for years without respite. Dr. Aira, in the crosshairs, had gotten used to living as if he were crossing a minefield, in his case mined with the theatrical, which was constantly exploding. Fortunately they were invisible, intangible explosions, which enveloped him like air. Escaping from one trap didn’t mean anything, because his enemy was so stubborn he would set another one; one performance sprung from another; he was living in an unreal world. He could never know where his pursuer would stop, and in reality he never stopped, and at nothing. Actyn, in his eyes, was like one of those comic-book supervillains, who never pursues anything less than world domination . . . the only difference being that in this adventure it was Dr. Aira’s mental world that was at stake. But, according to the law of the circle, everything flowed into its opposite, and the lie moved in a great curve toward the truth, theater toward reality . . . The authentic, the spontaneous, were on the reverse side of these transparencies.

He was captured, tortured by the French, escaped, rejoined the F.L.N., and found himself torturing, under orders to do so, French prisoners. He knew that he should feel something about this that he did not in fact feel. He discussed his state of mind late one night with one of the French prisoners whom he had tortured. The French prisoner was a young intellectual, a student of philosophy. This young man (the two men were talking secretly in the prisoner’s cell) complained that he was in an intellectual prison-house. He recognised, had recognised for years, that he never had a thought, or an emotion, that didn’t instantly fall into pigeon-holes, one marked “Marx”and one marked “Freud.”His thoughts and emotions were like marbles rolling into predetermined slots, he complained. The young Algerian soldier found this interesting, he didn’t find that at all, he said, what troubled him—though of course it didn’t really trouble him, and he felt it should—was that nothing he thought or felt was what was expected of him. The Algerian soldier said he envied the Frenchman—or rather, he felt he ought to be envying him. While the French student said he envied the Algerian from the bottom of his heart: he wished that just once, just once in his life, he felt or thought something that was his own, spontaneous, undirected, not willed on him by Grandfathers Freud and Marx. The voices of the two young men had risen more than was wise, particularly that of the French student, crying out against his situation.

By comparison, another mansin interviewed by Kendall had a far easier experience. Though she had long felt the presence of the Gods in her life, as when she escaped from some North Korean soldiers during the war after a providential dream visitation by a Sansin or mountain-dwelling God, her God-descent came when attending a kut, or shamanic ceremony. She was spontaneously possessed while dancing the mugam, in which laypersons wear the costumes of deities as a form of tribute to their personal guardian Gods, without expectation of spirit possession. She became forcefully possessed, however, by one of the Obang Sinjang, or Spirit Warriors of the Five Directions, leading to her initiation as a mansin a year later