Surrounding Related Quotes

A shaft of moonlight illuminated a row of sentinel silver birch in a phosphorescent glow, appearing almost ethereal in the relative surrounding gloom. Boris had stopped again, his silhouette a stark black juxtaposition against the background of illuminated branches.

The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our "hump" - that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable - that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.

To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at those points where there is a cost in our doing so, is to push the next generation in the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us.

Literature has the same impact as a match lit in the middle of a field in the middle of the night. The match illuminates relatively little, but it enables us to see how much darkness surrounds it.

Literature has the same impact as a match lit in the middle of a field in the middle of the night. The match illuminates relatively little, but it enables us to see how much darkness surrounds it.

London The Institute Year of Our Lord 1878 “Mother, Father, my chwaer fach, It’s my seventeenth birthday today. I know that to write to you is to break the law, I know that I will likely tear this letter into pieces when it is finished. As I have done on all my birthdays past since I was twelve. But I write anyway, to commemorate the occasion - the way some make yearly pilgrimages to a grave, to remember the death of a loved one. For are we not dead to each other? I wonder if when you woke this morning you remembered that today, seventeen years ago, you had a son? I wonder if you think of me and imagine my life here in the Institute in London? I doubt you could imagine it. It is so very different from our house surrounded by mountains, and the great clear blue sky and the endless green. Here, everything is black and gray and brown, and the sunsets are painted in smoke and blood. I wonder if you worry that I am lonely or, as Mother always used to, that I am cold, that I have gone out into the rain again without a hat? No one here worries about those details. There are so many things that could kill us at any moment; catching a chill hardly seems important. I wonder if you knew that I could hear you that day you came for me, when I was twelve. I crawled under the bed to block out the sound of you crying my name, but I heard you. I heard mother call for her fach, her little one. I bit my hands until they bled but I did not come down. And, eventually, Charlotte convinced you to go away. I thought you might come again but you never did. Herondales are stubborn like that. I remember the great sighs of relief you would both give each time the Council came to ask me if I wished to join the Nephilim and leave my family, and each time I said no and I send them away. I wonder if you knew I was tempted by the idea of a life of glory, of fighting, of killing to protect as a man should. It is in our blood - the call to the seraph and the stele, to marks and to monsters. I wonder why you left the Nephilim, Father? I wonder why Mother chose not to Ascend and to become a Shadowhunter? Is it because you found them cruel or cold? I have no fathom side. Charlotte, especially, is kind to me, little knowing how much I do not deserve it. Henry is mad as a brush, but a good man. He would have made Ella laugh. There is little good to be said about Jessamine, but she is harmless. As little as there is good to say about her, there is as much good to say about Jem: He is the brother Father always thought I should have. Blood of my blood - though we are no relation. Though I might have lost everything else, at least I have gained one thing in his friendship. And we have a new addition to our household too. Her name is Tessa. A pretty name, is it not? When the clouds used to roll over the mountains from the ocean? That gray is the color of her eyes. And now I will tell you a terrible truth, since I never intend to send this letter. I came here to the Institute because I had nowhere else to go. I did not expect it to ever be home, but in the time I have been here I have discovered that I am a true Shadowhunter. In some way my blood tells me that this is what I was born to do.If only I had known before and gone with the Clave the first time they asked me, perhaps I could have saved Ella’s life. Perhaps I could have saved my own. Your Son, Will

Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.

You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and lie, dismayed and puzzled at how alone you can feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed, how awful it is to go unloved, even as you are surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millennia and then out of the corner of your eye you see someone looking at you and absolute pleasure is written all over the person's face, and then you realize that you are not as revolting a presence as you think you are. And so, ordinarily, you are a nice person, an attractive person, a person capable of drawing to yourself the affection of other people, a person at home in your own skin: a person at home in your own house, with its nice backyard, at home on your street, your church, in community activities, your job, at home with your family, your relatives, your friends - you are a whole person.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.

The Beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.

The ordinary man is aware of his surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to his own personal self. The illumined egoless man is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities.

There is a vast mythology surrounding meat, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary. The Three Ns have been invoked to justify all exploitative systems, from African slavery to the Nazi Holocaust. When an ideology is in its prime, these myths rarely come under scrutiny. However, when the system finally collapses, the Three Ns are recognized as ludicrous.

The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, ‘Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There’s already enough beauty where you are.

Seeing come before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it.

Stress is essential to leadership. Living with stress, knowing how to handle pressure, is necessary for survival. It is related to man's ability to wrest control of his own destiny from the circumstances that surround him or, if you like, to prevail over technology.

This girl is very nice-looking,” Krum said, recalling Harry to his surroundings. Krum was pointing at Ginny, who had just joined Luna. “She is also a relative of yours?” “Yeah,” said Harry, suddenly irritated, “and she’s seeing someone. Jealous type. Big bloke. You wouldn’t want to cross him.” Krum grunted. “Vot,” he said, draining his goblet and getting to his feet again, “is the point of being an international Quidditch player if all the good-looking girls are taken?

Here at our ministry we refuse to present a picture of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” a portrait that tugs at your sentiments or pulls at your heartstrings. That’s because we deal with so many people who suffer, and when you’re hurting hard, you’re neither helped nor inspired by a syrupy picture of the Lord, like those sugary, sentimental images many of us grew up with. You know what I mean? Jesus with His hair parted down the middle, surrounded by cherubic children and bluebirds. Come on. Admit it: When your heart is being wrung out like a sponge, when you feel like Morton’s salt is being poured into your wounded soul, you don’t want a thin, pale, emotional Jesus who relates only to lambs and birds and babies. You want a warrior Jesus. You want a battlefield Jesus. You want his rigorous and robust gospel to command your sensibilities to stand at attention. To be honest, many of the sentimental hymns and gospel songs of our heritage don’t do much to hone that image. One of the favorite words of hymn writers in days gone by was sweet. It’s a term that down’t have the edge on it that it once did. When you’re in a dark place, when lions surround you, when you need strong help to rescue you from impossibility, you don’t want “sweet.” You don’t want faded pastels and honeyed softness. You want mighty. You want the strong arm an unshakable grip of God who will not let you go — no matter what.

It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

People usually associate the colour pink with weakness and naiveté; but I associate this colour with the most beautiful parts of the day— dawn and dusk! And in my searching through mystical writings, I have found that pink is actually related to the utmost levels of the Tree of Life. I've also seen it in pictures of the sky surrounding the most magnificent Aurora Borealis! So pink is strong and wonderful.

I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.

With the attempt to self-remember many new sensations begin to awaken in man, particularly sensations connected with his own existence and his relation to the surrounding world. And these in turn may give rise to the realization of the different influences playing upon him and to the possibility of choosing between them.

Taoism as the "art of being in the world," for it deals with the present—ourselves. It is in us that God meets with Nature, and yesterday parts from to-morrow. The Present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.

People tried to relate and tell their own stories surrounding their experience with death, but nothing could soothe that ache. Nothing came close to your own personal story.

Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking—ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supported facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world.

...I found myself surrounded by people--starting with my mom, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, and leading to a string of wonderful role models and mentors--who kept pushing me to see more than what was directly in front of me, to see the boundless possibilities of the wider world and the unexplored possibilities within myself. People who taught me that no accident of birth--not being black or relatively poor, being from Baltimore or the Bronx or fatherless--would ever define or limit me.

She has never understood, nor been able to relate to a herd mentality. She doesn't get along with followers and avoids the bandwagon. She marches to her own tune and does it alone. She's despised by the weak-minded and respected by the strong. She ruffles the feathers of the flock because she champion's the defenseless and pick's on the mob. Does she wish she could not give a damn and live an ordinary life surrounded by nodding and needy ordinary people? At times...but she'd be bored out of her mind when she's never bored alone, and because of that she's patient because a couple of times in a lifetime she's lucky enough to come across a memorable, magnetic and remarkable person - one worth knowing, even if just for the brevity of a conversation.

It's interesting that economy and ecosystem share a root prefix — eco; which is defined as relating to ecology. And ecology is defined as dealing with the relations of organisms to one another and to their surroundings. Swap out the word organisms for the word businesses and you can see how economies and ecosystems have a lot in common.

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.

The new dam, of course, will improve things. If ever filled it will back water to within sight of the Bridge, transforming what was formerly an adventure into a routine motorboat excursion. Those who see it then will not understand that half the beauty of Rainbow Bridge lay in its remoteness, its relative difficulty of access, and in the wilderness surrounding it, of which it was an integral part. When these aspects are removed the Bridge will be no more than an isolated geological oddity, an extension of that museumlike diorama to which industrial tourism tends to reduce the natural world.

When ye've lived as long as I have, ye realize how relative time is. I've endured centuries that passed in the blink of an eye as if I were barely breathing.' He stopped and faced her. 'Or I can experience an entire lifetime in the span of a few nights. All the hope and passion that makes life worth living, 'tis suddenly surrounding me like a gift from God.' (Angus MacKay)

Dasein does not fill up a track or stretch ‘of life’ — one which is somehow present-at-hand — with the phases of its momentary actualities. It stretches itself along in such a way that its own being is constituted in advance as a stretching-along. The ‘between’ which relates to birth and death already lies in the being of Dasein … It is by no means the case that Dasein ‘is’ actual in a point of time, and that, apart from this, it is ‘surrounded’ by the non-actuality of its birth and death. Understood existentially, birth is not … something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; and death is just as far from having the kind of being of something … not yet present-at-hand but coming along … Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the ‘ends’ and their ‘between’ *are*, and they are in the only way possible on the basis of Dasein’s being as *care* … As care, Dasein is the ‘between’.

The hell is not something which is full of trash, because one can adjust and find comfort in trash after some time. The hell is when our little temple of purity gets surrounded by trash.

When a man sleeps he is shut up within the narrow activities of his physical life. He lives, but he knows not the varied relations of his life to his surroundings, - therefore he knows not himself.

Watch particularly for traces of God in other people. Since humans are that part of creation most directly reflecting the divine image and likeness, it should be here that we most readily sense traces of God. Cultivate the spiritual habit of looking through Spirit-filled eyes at those you encounter and watching for Jesus. Recall that he said that he is there - particularly in those most broken and least likely to be suspected of bearing the Christ within their being. Watching for the presence of God in others will change the way you relate to them as you begin to see yourself surrounded by bearers of our Lord's presence in the world.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. The word ‘honey skinned’ recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably applied to hers as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark skinned.

Then, looking beyond the Earth itself to the magnificence of the larger scene, there was a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught. My understanding of the separate distinctness and the relative independence of movement of those cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony-a sense of interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft. Particular scientific facts about stellar evolution took on new significance.

Today on the platform, surrounded by so many people, I asked myself whether I would miss any one of them if they weren't here, and then: Whether they would miss me if I weren't here. Whether we are not all somehow here in order to touch one another. When the train finally came and I saw my reflection in its windows and in the sleeping faces rolling by behind them, there was no question, only an insight: We must all, every one of us, relate to one another.

her mind in that freshness which is sometimes falsely supposed to be an invariable attribute of rusticity. Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings; and this breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie from the time when she had followed the bright gleam that beckoned her to Silas’s hearth;

I’ve always preferred moths to butterflies. They aren’t flashy or cocky; they mind their own business and just try to blend in with their surroundings and live their lives. They don’t want to be seen, and that’s something I can relate to.

Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 85 percent of Americans still died at home.

Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited. There is nothing new or recent about fear—it is doubtless as old as the life of man on the planet. Fears are of many kinds—fear of objects, fear of people, fear of the future, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, fear of old age, fear of disease, and fear of life itself. Then there is fear which has to do with aspects of experience and detailed states of mind. Our homes, institutions, prisons, churches, are crowded with people who are hounded by day and harrowed by night because of some fear that lurks ready to spring into action as soon as one is alone, or as soon as the lights go out, or as soon as one’s social defenses are temporarily removed. The ever-present fear that besets the vast poor, the economically and socially insecure, is a fear of still a different breed. It is a climate closing in; it is like the fog in San Francisco or in London. It is nowhere in particular yet everywhere. It is a mood which one carries around with himself, distilled from the acrid conflict with which his days are surrounded. It has its roots deep in the heart of the relations between the weak and the strong, between the controllers of environment and those who are controlled by it. When the basis of such fear is analyzed, it is clear that it arises out of the sense of isolation and helplessness in the face of the varied dimensions of violence to which the underprivileged are exposed. Violence, precipitate and stark, is the sire of the fear of such people. It is spawned by the perpetual threat of violence everywhere. Of course, physical violence is the most obvious cause. But here, it is important to point out, a particular kind of physical violence or its counterpart is evidenced; it is violence that is devoid of the element of contest. It is what is feared by the rabbit that cannot ultimately escape the hounds.

The history of ideas, then, is the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history. But it can also, by that very fact, describe, from one domain to another, the whole interplay of exchanges and intermediaries: it shows how scientific knowledge is diffused, gives rise to philosophical concepts, and takes form perhaps in literary works; it shows how problems, notions, themes may emigrate from the philosophical field where they were formulated to scientific or political discourses; it relates work with institutions, social customs or behaviour, techniques, and unrecorded needs and practices; it tries to revive the most elaborate forms of discourse in the concrete landscape, in the midst of the growth and development that witnessed their birth. It becomes therefore the discipline of interferences, the description of the concentric circles that surround works, underline them, relate them to one another, and insert them into whatever they are not.

You've got to keep the people who make you feel unalone. You can be surrounded by a tribe and still feel alone; but you can be with just one person and feel unalone. Do you realise how rare it is to feel unalone in your soul? It is the entire answer to being here! So why are you not keeping these extremely rare people or person? Why do you instead run after pictures in your mind of how things should be? If you have found unaloneness, you keep it, you need to keep it.

Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.

Electrons, when they were first discovered, behaved exactly like particles or bullets, very simply. Further research showed, from electron diffraction experiments for example, that they behaved like waves. As time went on there was a growing confusion about how these things really behaved ---- waves or particles, particles or waves? Everything looked like both. This growing confusion was resolved in 1925 or 1926 with the advent of the correct equations for quantum mechanics. Now we know how the electrons and light behave. But what can I call it? If I say they behave like particles I give the wrong impression; also if I say they behave like waves. They behave in their own inimitable way, which technically could be called a quantum mechanical way. They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before. Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete. The behavior of things on a very tiny scale is simply different. An atom does not behave like a weight hanging on a spring and oscillating. Nor does it behave like a miniature representation of the solar system with little planets going around in orbits. Nor does it appear to be somewhat like a cloud or fog of some sort surrounding the nucleus. It behaves like nothing you have seen before. There is one simplication at least. Electrons behave in this respect in exactly the same way as photons; they are both screwy, but in exactly in the same way…. The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it. There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ I combined that with another refrain, ‘May the road rise with you’. When I was growing up, that was a phrase my mum and dad – and half the surrounding neighbourhood, who happened to be Irish also – used to say. ‘May the road rise, and your enemies always be behind you!’ So it’s saying, ‘There’s always hope’, and that you don’t always have to resort to violence to resolve an issue. Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better. When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there. Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.

Jane Austen knew about money and power, too, Mimi reminded herself, in the specialness of her surroundings that night. Austin saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austin knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius - - a genius no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own - - she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast soley by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.

Looking at any particle with sufficient care, and following the chain that links all things together, we can arrive at the universe—the correspondences are there, if the eye is skillful enough to detect them. The guts of the anatomized hare faithfully render the picture of the entire world. And because that hare is everything, it is also us. Having understood and experienced this marvelous congruity, man can no longer examine his surroundings merely as a surface scattered with alien objects and creatures related to him only by their usefulness

It's the secrecy surrounding drone strikes that's most troubling. . . We don't know the targeting criteria, or whether the rules for CIA and military drone strikes differ; we don't know the details of the internal process through which targets are vetted; we don't know the chain of command, or the details of congressional oversight. The United States does not release the names of those killed, or the location or number of strikes, making it impossible to know whether those killed were legitimately viewed as combatants or not. We also don't know the cost of the secret war: How much money has been spent on drone strikes? What's the budget for the related targeting and intelligence infrastructures? How is the government assessing the costs and benefits of counterterrorism drone strikes? That's a lot of secrecy for a targeted killing program that has reportedly caused the deaths of several thousand people. (117-118)

This relation of the Self to all surrounding nature and even the cosmos probably comes from the fact that the "nuclear atom" of our psyche is somehow woven into the whole world, both outer and inner.

To form correct views of individuals we must regard them as forming parts of a great whole — we must measure them by their relation to the mass of beings by whom they are surrounded, and, in contemplating the incidents in their lives or condition which tradition has handed down to us, we must rather consider the general bearing of the whole narrative, than the respective probability of its details.

During the ice age, many animals died of cold, so the porcupines decided to band together to provide one another with warmth and protection. But their spines or quills kept sticking into their surrounding companions, precisely those who provided most warmth. And so they drifted apart again. And again many of them died of cold. They had to make a choice: either risk extinction or accept their fellow porcupines’ spines. Very wisely, they decided to huddle together again. They learned to live with the minor wounds inflicted by their relatives, because the key to their survival was that shared warmth.

Boredom, resentment, and depression are all sentiments of disconnectedness. They present life to us as a broken connection. They give us a sense of not-belonging. In interpersonal relations, this disconnectedness is experienced as loneliness. When we are lonely we perceive ourselves as isolated individuals surrounded, perhaps, by many people, but not really part of any supporting or nurturing community.

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not.

PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein—hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings—is etched indelibly on our minds. “A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all,” writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years.

Join the PKM community. On Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, or your platform(s) of choice, follow and subscribe to thought leaders and join communities who are creating content related to personal knowledge management (#PKM), #SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought. Share your top takeaways from this book or anything else you’ve realized or discovered. There’s nothing more effective for adopting new behaviors than surrounding yourself with people who already have them.

Some of the stigmas seem so dated that you'd think these secrets couldn't hurt anymore, but they do. Because, in fact, out of those secrets came people– people who can sometimes still sense the shame that surrounded their hidden identities.

We are taught to believe that having deep passions is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. We live in a cultural moment that is suspicious of ardent desires and strong commitments, propagating the idea that few things in life matter, that we have outlived ideals and ethical principles, and that comprehensive cultural change is impossible. Many of us have adopted the view that because we cannot remedy the enormous inequalities of the social world, we should not even bother to try. We have resigned ourselves to the idea that in the long haul nothing we do has any real impact and that caring too much is consequently a waste of our energies. By the same token, our (postmodern and sophisticated) recognition that meaning is inherently relative at times causes us to stop looking for meaning altogether. Though we are surrounded by a multitude of objects, artifacts, cultural icons, and shimmering images, few of these items manage to affect us on a deep level. In some ways, we are increasingly reconciled to the idea that the best we can do is to avoid the more crushing disillusionments of life–that the less we invest ourselves, the more inoculated we are against the misfortunes of the world.

The house sits on a gentle curving street that ends in a cul-de-sac. The surrounding houses are all equally attractive and well maintained, and relatively similar. People who live here are successful and settled; everyone's a little bit smug.

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices, Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government. There must be a state religion just as there is a state policy; or, rather, religious and political dogmas must be merged and mingled together to form a complete common or national reason strong enough to repress the aberrations of individual reason, which of its nature is the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it produces only divergent opinions. All known nations have been happy and powerful to the extent that they have more faithfully obeyed this national reason, which is nothing other than the annihilation of individual dogmas and the absolute and general reign of national dogmas, that is to say, of useful prejudices. Let each man call upon his individual reason in the matter of religion, and immediately you will see the birth of an anarchy of belief or the annihilation of religious sovereignty. Likewise, if each man makes himself judge of the principles of government, you will at once see the birth of civil anarchy or the annihilation of political sovereignty. Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, and its ministers. To annihilate it or submit it to the discussion of each individual is the same thing; it lives only through national reason, that is to say through political faith, which is a creed. Man’s first need is that his nascent reason be curbed under this double yoke, that it be abased and lose itself in the national reason, so that it changes its individual existence into another common existence, just as a river that flows into the ocean always continues to exist in the mass of water, but without a name and without a distinct reality.

In any Arthurian text, whether a rewriting, a translation or a complication of episodes, engages implicitly as well as explicitly with the surrounding context provided by this corpus, and the reader cannot help but situate their reading in relation to this

We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct. We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would most seriously affect many of the others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be. But in the case of an island, or of a country partly surrounded by barriers, into which new and better adapted forms could not freely enter, we should then have places in the economy of nature which would assuredly be better filled up, if some of the original inhabitants were in some manner modified; for, had the area been open to immigration, these same places would have been seized on by intruders. In such case, every slight modification, which in the course of ages chanced to arise, and which in any way favoured the individuals of any of the species, by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved; and natural selection would thus have free scope for the work of improvement.

All organisms vary. It is in the highest degree improbable that any given variety should have exactly the same relations to surrounding conditions as the parent stock. In that case it is either better fitted (when the variation may be called useful), or worse fitted, to cope with them. If better, it will tend to supplant the parent stock; if worse, it will tend to be extinguished by the parent stock. If (as is hardly conceivable) the new variety is so perfectly adapted to the conditions that no improvement upon it is possible,—it will persist, because, though it does not cease to vary, the varieties will be inferior to itself. If, as is more probable, the new variety is by no means perfectly adapted to its conditions, but only fairly well adapted to them, it will persist, so long as none of the varieties which it throws off are better adapted than itself. On the other hand, as soon as it varies in a useful way, i.e. when the variation is such as to adapt it more perfectly to its conditions, the fresh variety will tend to supplant the former.

A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kingdom. Examined with attention, the dissected hare illuminates the parts and properties of all other animals and, by extension, their environment. The hare, like a blade of grass or a piece of coal, is not simply a small fraction of the whole but contains the whole within itself. This makes us all one. If anything, because we are all made of the same stuff. Our flesh is the debris of dead stars, and this is also true of the apple and its tree, of each hair on the spider’s legs, and of the rock rusting on planet Mars. Each minuscule being has spokes radiating out to all of creation. Some of the raindrops falling on the potato plants in your farm back in Sweden were once in a tiger’s bladder. From one living thing, the properties of any other may be predicted. Looking at any particle with sufficient care, and following the chain that links all things together, we can arrive at the universe—the correspondences are there, if the eye is skillful enough to detect them. The guts of the anatomized hare faithfully render the picture of the entire world. And because that hare is everything, it is also us. Having understood and experienced this marvelous congruity, man can no longer examine his surroundings merely as a surface scattered with alien objects and creatures related to him only by their usefulness. The carpenter who can only devise tabletops while walking through the forest, the poet who can only remember his own private sorrows while looking at the falling snow, the naturalist who can only attach a label to every leaf and a pin to every insect—all of them are debasing nature by turning it into a storehouse, a symbol, or a fact. Knowing nature, Lorimer would often say, means learning how to be. And to achieve this, we must listen to the constant sermon of things. Our highest task is to make out the words to better partake in the ecstasy of existence.

On Turgenev: He knew from Lavrov that I was an enthusiastic admirer of his writings; and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to Antokolsky's studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazarov. I frankly replied, 'Bazaraov is an admirable painting of the nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as mush as you did your other heroes.' 'On the contrary, I loved him, intensely loved him,' Turgenev replied, with an unexpected vigor. 'When we get home I will show you my diary, in which I have noted how I wept when I had ended the novel with Bazarov's death.' Turgenev certainly loved the intellectual aspect of Bazarov. He so identified himself with the nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazarov's point of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him. In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one or the other of these characters. 'Analysis first of all, and then egotism, and therefore no faith,--an egotist cannot even believe in himself:' so he characterized Hamlet. 'Therefore he is a skeptic, and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote, who fights against windmills, and takes a barber's plate for the magic helmet of Mambrino (who of us has never made the same mistake?), is a leader of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions, march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which is seen, perhaps, by no one but themselves. They search, they fall, but they rise again and find it,--and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a skeptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates it; Evil and Deceit are his enemies; and his skepticism is not indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume his will.' These thought of Turgenev give, I think, the true key for understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved Hamlet, and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazarov. He represented his superiority admirably well, he understood the tragic character of his isolated position, but he could not surround him with that tender, poetical love which he bestowed as on a sick friend, when his heroes approached the Hamlet type. It would have been out of place.

Before a Parisienne in lace, in the salon of some illustrious physician, a person of importance with medals and a carriage, the poor clerk, no doubt, would have trembled like a child; but here in Rouen, by the quay, with the wife of this small country practitioner, he felt at ease, certain in advance that he would dazzle her. Self-confidence depends upon surroundings: one does not speak the same way in a grand apartment as in a garret, and a rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

He had given himself over to endless wanderings, a life of migration from life-to-life, albeit not necessarily a set of migrations one must view as physical, but rather a set of migrations between circumstances, a set of migrations where the players surrounding him were just as likely to move as he, but nonetheless, a set of migrations calling forth a life unalterable only by its lack of permanence. Along with this came the slow, but dawning realization that he had relinquished his claim over those new memories he could have created alongside the friends and relatives closest to him; and that he had, furthermore, ceased to exist in such people’s minds, except as a faint and indistinct silhouette of what he had once been, situated seamlessly against the vivid and oddly memorable backdrops of spaces and moments which shall never be again.

The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.

The deception surrounding this case was an insult to the family: but more importantly, its primary purpose was to deceive a whole nation. We say these things with disappointment and sadness for our country. Once again, we have been used as props in a Pentagon public relations exercise.

We see, surrounding the narrow raft illuminated by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated on the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence.

Except for him, most of our fellow exiles had been shrunken by their experience, either absolutely through the aforementioned maladies of migration, or relatively, surrounded by Americans so tall they neither looked through nor looked down on these newcomers. They simply looked over them.

To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the wood, his own light-heartedness, and then the wolf's appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced, is art.

Understand that relativity is everywhere, and that we view everything through its lens - rose-colored or otherwise. When you meet someone in a different country or city and it seems that you have magical connection, realize that the enchantment might be limited to the surrounding circumstances.

But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.

When the individual, having given up all efforts to find himself in life outside himself, in relation to his surroundings, turns now after this shipwreck towards the highest, then after this emptiness the absolute rises not only in its fullness before him but also in the responsibility he feels is his.

Whereas the cloud of “animosity” surrounding the man is composed chiefly of sentimentality and resentment, in woman it expresses itself in the form of opinionated views, interpretations, insinuations, and misconstructions, which all have the purpose (sometimes attained) of severing the relation between two human beings. The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus.

Our efforts to ‘re-connect’ William all fail – even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in his quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excites and rattles him, forces him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and -seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allows this identity-delirium to relax, to subside; and by its quiet, non-human self-sufficiency and completeness allows him a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering (beneath, or beyond, all merely human identities and relations) a deep wordless communion with Nature itself, and with this the restored sense of being in the world, being real.

Oh, dear," Sophia said, looking through the binos. "What happens in the compartment, stays in the compartment. What happens in the...Oh, screw that!" "It's not his fault!" Lee Ann McGregor was just turned twelve and an orphan. Also extremely pregnant. She was shivering under a blanket in the relative cool of the saloon, drinking tomato soup as if it was nectar and arguing to spare the life of the young man sitting next to her. The hangdog young man in question, Kevin White, was seventeen. And currently surrounded by women who were looking at him like a zombie that was in their targeting reticle. Wisely, he was keeping his mouth shut.

Probably you were not quite well, my little dove, when you wrote to me, for a note of real melancholy pervaded your letter. I recognized in it a nature closely akin to my own. I know the feeling only too well. In my life, too, there are days, hours, weeks, aye, and months, in which everything looks black, when I am tormented by the thought that I am forsaken, that no one cares for me. Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone. Were I to vanish from the face of the earth to-day, it would be no great loss to Russian music, and would certainly cause no one great unhappiness. In short, I live a selfish bachelor’s life. I work for myself alone, and care only for myself. This is certainly very comfortable, although dull, narrow, and lifeless. But that you, who are indispensable to so many whose happiness you make, that you can give way to depression, is more than I can believe. How can you doubt for a moment the love and esteem of those who surround you? How could it be possible not to love you? No, there is no one in the world more dearly loved than you are. As for me, it would be absurd to speak of my love for you. If I care for anyone, it is for you, for your family, for my brothers and our old Dad. I love you all, not because you are my relations, but because you are the best people in the world.

I was endlessly vigilant. I focused my energy on controlling my surroundings. I managed my new reality by trying to will into existence a way to move through each day. I was entirely uncentered. For anyone who can relate to this, you know that substituting an external architecture for an internal sense of structure can be bulletproof for a time. But only for a time.

There is a tendency for people affected by this epidemic to police each other or prescribe what the most important gestures would be for dealing with this experience of loss. I resent that. At the same time, I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death of their lovers, friends, and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets. I worry because of the urgency of the situations, because of seeing death coming in from the edges of abstraction where those with the luxury of time have cast it. I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way. But, bottom line, this is my own feelings of urgency and need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture and communication. You can never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.

We're not migrating people,' she said. 'We live in our old houses, and eat on our old dishes and use our old silverware everyday. We're close to the past and comfortable with it. We've surrounded our lives with the pictures of all our relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things personality beyond just the material they're made of.

According to neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, the pleasurable “aha!” sensation we feel when we see related objects as a group suggests that the brain’s processes for identifying objects may be intrinsically connected to the reward mechanisms in the limbic system. In other words, joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings.

There is, of course, a still higher form of consciousness than the "I" consciousness - the spiritual consciousness which causes one to be aware of his relation to, and connection with, the source of all power. And those possessing this higher consciousness are far beyond the influence of Psychic Influence of others, for they are surrounded with an aura which repels vibrations on a lower plane.

To form correct views of individuals we must regard them as forming parts of a great whole-we must measure them by their relation tot the mass of beings by whom they are surrounded; and, in contemplating the incidents in their lives or condition which tradition has handed down to us, we must rather consider the general bearing of the whole narrative, than the respective probability of its details.

The parent-child relationship in the home usually reflects the objective cultural conditions of the surrounding social structure. If the conditions which penetrate the home are authoritarian, rigid, and dominating, the home will increase the climate of oppression.30 As these authoritarian relations between parents and children intensify, children in their infancy increasingly internalize the paternal authority.

So far, so good, but what about the man who rushes headlong into the fire to save a complete stranger? The stranger is probably not genetically related to the man who helps him, so this act must surely be truly unselfish and altruistic? The answer is Yes, but only by accident. The accident is caused by the rapid growth of human populations in the last few thousand years. Previously, for millions of years, man was tribal and any inborn urge to help his fellow-men would have meant automatically that he was helping gene-sharing relatives, even if only remote ones. There was no need for this urge to be selective, because there were no strangers around to create problems. But with the urban explosion, man rapidly found himself in huge communities, surrounded by strangers, and with no time for his genetic constitution to alter to fit the startlingly new circumstances. So his altruism inevitably spread to include all his new fellow-citizens, even though many of them may have been genetically quite unrelated to him. Politicians, exploiting this ancient urge, were easily able to spread the aid-system even further, to a national level called patriotism, so that men would go and die for their country as if it were their ancient tribe or their family.

Then there occurred to me the 'glucklichste Gedanke meines Lebens,' the happiest thought of my life, in the following form. The gravitational field has only a relative existence in a way similar to the electric field generated by magnetoelectric induction. Because for an observer falling freely from the roof of a house there exists-at least in his immediate surroundings-no gravitational field [his italics]. Indeed, if the observer drops some bodies then these remain relative to him in a state of rest or of uniform motion, independent of their particular chemical or physical nature (in this consideration the air resistance is, of course, ignored). The observer therefore has the right to interpret his state as 'at rest.' Because of this idea, the uncommonly peculiar experimental law that in the gravitational field all bodies fall with the same acceleration attained at once a deep physical meaning. Namely, if there were to exist just one single object that falls in the gravitational field in a way different from all others, then with its help the observer could realize that he is ina gravitational field and is falling in it. If such an object does not exist, however-as experience has shown with great accuracy-then the observer lacks any objective means of perceiving himself as falling in a gravitational field. Rather he has the right to consider his state as one of rest and his environment as field-free relative to gravitation. The experimentally known matter independence of the acceleration of fall is therefore a powerful argument for the fact that the relativity postulate has to be extended to coordinate systems which, relative to each other, are in non-uniform motion.

Twelfthly, there is no reason or sense-perception which, since we accept an infinity undivided, utterly simple and all-embracing, will not permit also a corporeal and extended infinity. Thirteenthly, our own surrounding space which appeareth to us so immense is neither part nor whole in relation to the infinite; nor can it be patient of infinite activity; compared to such activity, indeed, that which can be comprehended by our imbecile minds is merely nonbeing. And to a certain objection it may be replied that we base our argument for infinity not on the dignity of space but on the dignity of the natures [of worlds], since for the same reason that our space doth exist, so also should exist every other possible world; and their power of being is not actuated by our world's being, just as Elpino's power of being is not actuated by the existence of Fracastoro.

For the sake of more than a billion people today who have yet to even hear the gospel, I want to risk it all. For the sake of twenty-six thousand children who will die today of starvation or preventable disease, I want to risk it all. For the sake of an increasingly marginalized and relatively ineffective church in our culture, I want to risk it all. For the sake of my life, my family, and the people who surround me, I want to risk it all.

There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them.

In a common lesson about electromagnetic forces, students are given an exercise in which a bar magnet is placed on a table surrounded by scattered iron filings. The invisible field surrounding the magnet will draw the filings into alignment with it, until the swirling starburst shape of the field becomes visible. The capital relation is a kind of social magnet, with capital at one end and labor at the other, that tends to align all other social hierarchies with the master hierarchy based on money. Hence the hierarchy of athletic ability is translated into a hierarchy of payment for performing professionally. And yet the magnetism of capital is not so strong that it can perfectly align all the systems. Fame, for example, may in general be translatable into money (as when Kim Kardashian releases a smartphone game that becomes wildly successful), but the conversion is not an exact or uniform one.

The one Asian nation with which we have, alas, made no headway whatsoever is China. … The Chinese government, in fact, is totally committed to the Arab war against Israel, and Mr. Arafat and his comrades are constantly given arms, money, and moral support by Peking, though I, for one, have never understood why, and for years, lived under the illusion that if we could only talk to the Chinese, we might get through to them. Two pictures come to my mind when I mention China. The first is the horror with which I picked up a mine manufactured in China – so far away and remote from us – which had put an end to the life of a six-year-old girl in a border settlement in Israel. I stood there near that small coffin, surrounded by weeping, enraged relatives. ‘What on earth can the Chinese have against us?’ I kept thinking. ‘They don’t even know us.’ Then I remember, at the celebration of Kenya’s independence, sitting at a table near that of the Chinese delegation. It was a very relaxed, festive occasion, and I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps if I go over and sit down with them, we can talk a bit.’ So I asked Ehud to introduce himself to the Chinese. He walked over, held out his hand to the head of the delegation and said, ‘My foreign minister is here and would like to meet you.’ The Chinese just averted their gaze. They didn’t even bother to say, ‘No, thank you, we don’t want to meet her.

In India, it was Dalits who gravitated toward me like long-lost relatives, surrounding me and propping themselves on a sofa near me for an impromptu subordinate-caste tête-à-tête. I discovered that they wanted to hear from me, or, I should say, commune with someone they recognized as a kindred spirit who shared a common condition. “We read James Baldwin and Toni Morrison because they speak to our experiences,” a Dalit scholar said to me. “They help us in our plight.

I have always loved quitting jobs. Whether because the job itself was repugnant or the people working at it with me, I have always held my right to quit my job as one of my most sacred privileges. An entire ritual surrounds this shedding of employment. First, there is the glorious moment when, after the unpleasantness of my position and my general unhappiness become overwhelmingly apparent to me, I say to myself (and I quote), “Fuck this. I don’t have to take this shit anymore. They think they can make me do what they want, but I’m out of here.” Ah, there it is, the almost orgasmic release I feel when I first make the profane declaration to myself, the feeling of reclaimed power coursing invisibly through me. But not just that: this singular moment, this coveted private knowledge is formed into a golden kernel and popped into existence again in my mind as a reaction to every unfortunate work-related moment I’m forced to endure before I make my destined departure. It’s such a glorious thing, the harboring of this secret knowledge, that in itself it has kept me at many a job even longer than I had originally intended, because just knowing that I would soon be free was the most effective of panaceas. So much so that there were times when even though it was impossible for me to quit I would say the same words to myself and mercifully delude my conscious mind that I could get the hell out of there if I wanted to.

Finally we touch that Great Fact, which Goethe incorporated into his final words: the 'ever-womanly.' It is a sin against Goethe to say that here he means the female sex. He refers to that profundity signifying the human soul as related to the mystery of the world; that which deeply yearns as the eternal in man, the ever-womanly which draws the soul to the eternally immortal, the eternal wisdom, and which gives itself to the 'eternal masculine.' The ever-womanly draws us towards the ever-masculine. It has nothing to do with something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore can we truly seek this ever-womanly in man and woman: the ever-womanly which aspires to the union with the ever-manly in the cosmos, to become one with the Divine-Spiritual that inter-penetrates and permeates the world towards which Faust strives. This mystery of man of all ages pursued by Faust from the beginning, this secret to which Spiritual Science is to lead us in a modern sense, is expressed by Goethe paradigmatically and monumentally in those five words at the conclusion of the second part of Faust represented as a mystic Spirit Choir; that everything physical surrounding us in the sense world is Maya, illusion; a symbol only of the spiritual. But this spiritual we can perceive if we penetrate that which covers it like a veil. And in it we see attained what on earth was impossible of attainment. We see that, which for ordinary intellect is indescribable, transformed into action as soon as the human spirit unites with the spiritual world. 'The ineffable wrought in love.' And we see the significance of the moment when the soul becomes united with the eternal masculine of the cosmic world. That is the great secret expressed by Goethe in the words: 'All of mere transient date As symbol showeth; Here the inadequate To fullness groweth; Here the ineffable Wrought is in love; The ever-womanly Draws us above ...

One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost — and, conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there… Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to instantly resize us against our surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.

We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

In the campaign of 1876, Robert G. Ingersoll came to Madison to speak. I had heard of him for years; when I was a boy on the farm a relative of ours had testified in a case in which Ingersoll had appeared as an attorney and he had told the glowing stories of the plea that Ingersoll had made. Then, in the spring of 1876, Ingersoll delivered the Memorial Day address at Indianapolis. It was widely published shortly after it was delivered and it startled and enthralled the whole country. I remember that it was printed on a poster as large as a door and hung in the post-office at Madison. I can scarcely convey now, or even understand, the emotional effect the reading of it produced upon me. Oblivious of my surroundings, I read it with tears streaming down my face. It began, I remember: "The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the great struggle for national life.We hear the sounds of preparation--the music of boisterous drums--the silver voices of heroic bugles. We see the pale cheeks of women and the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers..." I was fairly entranced. he pictured the recruiting of the troops, the husbands and fathers with their families on the last evening, the lover under the trees and the stars; then the beat of drums, the waving flags, the marching away; the wife at the turn of the lane holds her baby aloft in her arms--a wave of the hand and he has gone; then you see him again in the heat of the charge. It was wonderful how it seized upon my youthful imagination. When he came to Madison I crowded myself into the assembly chamber to hear him: I would not have missed it for every worldly thing I possessed. And he did not disappoint me. A large handsome man of perfect build, with a face as round as a child's and a compelling smile--all the arts of the old-time oratory were his in high degree. He was witty, he was droll, he was eloquent: he was as full of sentiment as an old violin. Often, while speaking, he would pause, break into a smile, and the audience, in anticipation of what was to come, would follow him in irresistible peals of laughter. I cannot remember much that he said, but the impression he made upon me was indelible. After that I got Ingersoll's books and never afterward lost an opportunity to hear him speak. He was the greatest orater, I think, that I have ever heard; and the greatest of his lectures, I have always thought, was the one on Shakespeare. Ingersoll had a tremendous influence upon me, as indeed he had upon many young men of that time. It was not that he changed my beliefs, but that he liberated my mind. Freedom was what he preached: he wanted the shackles off everywhere. He wanted men to think boldly about all things: he demanded intellectual and moral courage. He wanted men to follow wherever truth might lead them. He was a rare, bold, heroic figure.

She’d just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, “See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they’d supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn’t move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies.” “So if these two Dillers are related . . .” Lucas began. “I promise you, they are,” Marvel said. Kidd said, “Marvel’s a state senator. In Arkansas.” Marvel added, “This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can’t think of.

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.

The other side of this coin is that viruses may be genes who have broken loose from ‘colonies’ such as ourselves. Viruses consist of pure DNA (or a related self-replicating molecule) surrounded by a protein jacket. They are all parasitic. The suggestion is that they have evolved from ‘rebel’ genes who escaped, and now travel from body to body directly through the air, rather than via the more conventional vehicles—sperms and eggs. If this is true, we might just as well regard ourselves as colonies of viruses!

You inhabit the land you know, pragmatically and conceptually. But imagine what lies just outside of that. There exists an immense space of things you do not know, but which other people might comprehend, at least in part. Then, outside of what anyone knows, there is the space of things that no one at all knows. Your world is known territory, surrounded by the relatively unknown, surrounded by the absolutely unknown—surrounded, even more distantly, by the absolutely unknowable. Together, that is the canonical, archetypal landscape. The unknown manifests itself to you in the midst of the known. That revelation—sometimes exciting, but often quite painful—is the source of new knowledge. But a fundamental question remains: How is that knowledge generated? What is comprehended and understandable does not just leap in one fell swoop from the absolutely unknown to the thoroughly and self-evidently articulated. Knowledge must pass through many stages of analysis—a multitude of transformations—before it becomes, let us say, commonplace.

One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the unconscious; but one point of Freud’s work is that it makes it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies — by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor is it an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific.

Time seemed to stop, and the Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin—we are all related—came to me, and in that moment I understood what those words meant. I inhabited them, as images, thoughts, and memories arose amidst the old vehicles. I saw my mother, gone but still with me, my father, who’d died too soon, and my sister, who I’d loved like my own life. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends. They appeared before me, all of my relations, my ancestors, Native and white, who’d loved and struggled, hunted and gathered, worked and played; they’d stood on this continent, looking up at these stars and these planets. It was daylight, but I could see the stars now, all of them, surrounding me, lighting the air, their brilliance shining and radiating off the monoliths. And then it was dark, a black-hole sky. But I looked down and saw that the stars—every one of them—were now in my hands, lighting up my veins, my muscles, my bones. I stood there, alone with my ancestors, and listened to them. Finally I turned away. As I walked back to my life, the words my mother used to say finally came to me. Wakan Tanka nici un. May the Creator guide you.

There is a change underway, however. Our society used to be a ladder on which people generally climbed upward. More and more now we are going to a planetary structure, in which the great dominant lower middle class, the class that determines our prevailing values and organizational structures in education, government, and most of society, are providing recruits for the other groups — sideways, up, and even down, although the movement downward is relatively small. As the workers become increasingly petty bourgeois and as middle-class bureaucratic and organizational structures increasingly govern all aspects of our society, our society is increasingly taking on the characteristics of the lower middle class, although the poverty culture is also growing. The working class is not growing. Increasingly we are doing things with engineers sitting at consoles, rather than with workers screwing nuts on wheels. The workers are a diminishing, segment of society, contrary to Marx’s prediction that the proletariat would grow and grow. I have argued elsewhere that many people today are frustrated because we are surrounded by organizational structures and artifacts. Only the petty bourgeoisie can find security and emotional satisfaction in an organizational structure, and only a middle-class person can find them in artifacts, things that men have made, such as houses, yachts, and swimming pools. But human beings who are growing up crave sensation and experience. They want contact with other people, moment-to-moment, intimate contact. I’ve discovered, however, that the intimacy really isn’t there. Young people touch each other, often in an almost ritual way; they sleep together, eat together, have sex together. But I don’t see the intimacy. There is a lot of action, of course, but not so much more than in the old days, I believe, because now there is a great deal more talk than action. This group, the lower middle class, it seems to me, holds the key to the future. I think probably they will win out. If they do, they will resolutely defend our organizational structures and artifacts. They will cling to the automobile, for instance; they will not permit us to adopt more efficient methods of moving people around. They will defend the system very much as it is and, if necessary, they will use all the force they can command. Eventually they will stop dissent altogether, whether from the intellectuals, the religious, the poor, the people who run the foundations, the Ivy League colleges, all the rest. The colleges are already becoming bureaucratized, anyway. I can’t see the big universities or the foundations as a strong progressive force. The people who run Harvard and the Ford Foundation look more and more like lower-middle-class bureaucrats who pose no threat to the established order because they are prepared to do anything to defend the system.

Our direct experience is necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns. The everyday world in which we hunger and make love is hardly the mathematically determined “object” toward which the sciences direct themselves. Despite all the mechanical artifacts that now surround us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to calculate and measure it is not an inert or mechanical object but a living field, an open and dynamic landscape subject to its own moods and metamorphoses.

Where religious doctrines exist, for example, they can only become real to the extent that there exist concrete semiotic practices by which they can be enacted, embodied, experienced, and transmitted. But those practices will be subject to such factors as logistics, aesthetics, economics, or prior history, that are independent of the logical, political, or emotional demands of and constraints on doctrine itself. [...] Even textual forms as relatively autonomous, portable, and durable as written scriptures depend for their persistence and power on social dynamics surrounding contextualization and entextualization.

Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. They are called virtual in so far as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this very brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. The virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and which go on in turn to react upon the actual: ‘in the heart of the cloud of the virtual there is a virtual of a yet higher order ... every virtual particle surrounds itself with a virtual cosmos and each in its turn does likewise indefinitely.’ It is the dramatic identity of their dynamics that makes a perception resemble a particle: an actual perception surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images, distributed on increasingly remote, increasingly large, moving circuits, which both make and unmake each other. These are memories of different sorts, but they are still called virtual images in that their speed or brevity subjects them too to a principle of the unconsciousness. It is by virtue of their mutual inextricability that virtual images are able to react upon actual objects. From this perspective, the virtual images delimit a continuum, whether one takes all of the circles together or each individually, a spatium determined in each case by the maximum of time imaginable. The varyingly dense layers of the actual object correspond to these, more or less extensive, circles of virtual images. These layers, whilst themselves virtual, and upon which the actual object becomes itself virtual, constitute the total impetus of the object. The plane of immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object itself occurs, is itself constituted when both object and image are virtual. But the process of actualization undergone by the actual is one which has as great an effect on the image as it does on the object. The continuum of virtual images is fragmented and the spatium cut up according to whether the temporal decompositions are regular or irregular. The total impetus of the virtual object splits into forces corresponding to the partial continuum, and the speeds traversing the cut-up spatium. The virtual is never independent of the singularities which cut it up and divide it out on the plane of immanence. As Leibniz has shown, force is as much a virtual in the process of being actualized as the space through which it travels. The plane is therefore divided into a multiplicity of planes according to the cuts in the continuum, and to the divisions of force which mark the actualization of the virtual. But all the planes merge into one following the path which leads to the actual. The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without there being any assignable limit between the two. The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but virtual as its subject. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted. The actual falls from the plane like a fruit, whist the actualization relates it back to the plane as if to that which turns the object back into a subject.

To the extent that anyone gives up the mentality of antithesis, he has moved over to the other side, even if he still tries to defend orthodoxy or evangelicalism. If Christians are to take advantage of the death of romanticism, we must consciously build back the mentality and practice of antithesis among Christians in doctrine and life. We must do it in our teaching and example toward compromise, both ecclesiastically and in evangelism. To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at these points where there is a cost in doing so, is to push the next generation into the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us.

The 20th Siddhi also relates to the eighth plane of reality, the true ground of our Divinity known as the Logoic plane. As consciousness expands through each of the seven layers or sheaths that surround the human being (see the 22nd Gene Key for a full description of each) — the eternal cosmic ocean of consciousness in which we swim — the body of the logos or divine word is finally revealed in all its glory. This logoic sphere, the eighth transcendent plane, is beyond humanity, beyond words and beyond form. THE SEVEN SACRED BODIES OF HUMANITY 1. Physical 2. Astral 3. Mental 4. Causal 5. Buddhic 6. Atmic 7. Monadic 8. Logoic

Discriminatory barriers in housing seem to be almost the sine qua non of prejudice. Men reflect their true values, ideas, and attitudes, most directly in the intimate primary realm of living that surrounds the home. Discriminatory barriers in housing are strong because they are probably the last citadel for those basic attitudes of racial antipathy which … still exist in the minds of the majority of white people. The idea of integration in housing directly challenges this citadel and the attitudes it represents. Integration in housing, therefore, has much deeper implication than integration in any other area of social intercourse.

Hume had shown that we naively read causality into this world and think that we grasp necessary succession in intuition. The same is true of everything that makes the body of the everyday surrounding world into an identical thing with identical properties, relations, etc. (and Hume had in fact worked this out in detail in the Treatise, which was unknown to Kant). Data and complexes of data come and go, but the thing, presumed to be simply experienced sensibly, is not something sensible which persists through this alteration. The sensationalist thus declares it to be a fiction. He is substituting, we shall say, mere sense-data for perception, which after all places things (everyday things) before our eyes. In other words, he overlooks the fact that mere sensibility, related to mere data of sense, cannot account for objects of experience. Thus he overlooks the fact that these objects of experience point to a hidden mental accomplishment and to the problem of what kind of an accomplishment this can be. From the very start, after all, it must be a kind which enables the objects of pre-scientific experience, through logic, mathematics, mathematical natural science, to be knowable with objective validity, i.e., with a necessity which can be accepted by and is binding for everyone.

Humans do not perceive the value of thing in absolute terms. We never have. Just as our eyes process the color and luminosity of an object relative to its surroundings, the brain constantly adjusts its idea of what we need in order to be happy. It compares what we have now to what we had yesterday and what we might possibly get next. It compares what we have to what everyone else has. Then it recalibrates the distance to a revised finish line. But the finish line moves even when other conditions stay the same, simply because we get used to things. So happiness, in these economists' particular formulation, is inherently remote. It never stands still.

Naming species is not big science. It is like mapmaking or dictionary work and, on its own, of relatively little use. But it is the first step. It is the first thing children do as they lay hold of their surroundings. It is the simplest measure of the world. It is analogous to finding and naming the planets and the stars. Once named, it is another matter altogether to set the stars and planets, the moons and other bodies in motion relative to each other, but it is the beginning. Every culture known names species, then groups them, and then builds them into knowledge and stories. Naming, and the learning associated with it, is part of what makes us human.

One of the accusations made against the Pope is that he did not give a public and obvious denunciation of anti-Semitism during the Holocaust. It's a valid issue but one that is often discussed with too little understanding of the reality of 1940s Europe. Such explicit condemnations of Nazi anti-Semitism were not really made in London, Washington, or Moscow, but it's always assumed that Rome should somehow have been different, in spite of the fact that the Vatican was surrounded by Nazi or pro-Nazi troops and that millions of Roman Catholics lived under Nazi occupation whereas London, Washington, and even Moscow were relatively cocooned and the latter even comparatively safe.

So the badger poked up the fire, poured himself another cup of tea, and went back to the History to read the curious story of the Fern Vale dwelves, a story (he suspected) that was mostly unknown to the Big Folk. Of course, that sort of thing wasn't at all unusual, for although the human residents of the Land between the Lakes thought they knew everything about their surroundings, and although scholarly books related the history, inventoried the animals and plants, and catalogued the folktales, people were aware of only a fraction of what went on around them. One was not criticizing when one said this; one was simply stating the fact. Humans, by and large, were ignorant of the mysteries of life and land.

There is ... a contemporary trend to make a sort of 'common intellect' out of society and forbid man his own independent access to truth. All is culture-clouded, and society as the climate of thought is the cause of our thoughts. But in Thomas's theory a man can transcend his environment just as he can transcend the material conditions surrounding any essence; material conditions will be his point of departure, and yet arrival at the truth or being of whatever he is studying is not ruled out. As an unlimited power, man's intellect opens man to the infinite, although only love reaches it. The relation of each man to transcendent existence in his knowing and living experience - this is the ground of objectivity.

The doctrine of Relativity is carried to a fallacious pitch, when applied to prove that there must be something absolute, because the Relative must suppose the non- Relative. If there be Relation, it is said, there must be something Un-related, or above all relation. But Relation cannot in this way, be brought round on itself, except by a verbal juggle. Relation means that every conscious state has a correlative state ; which brings us at last to a couple (the subject-mind, and the object or extended world). This is the final end of all possible cognition. We may view the two facts separately or together; and we may call the conjunct view an Absolute (as Ferrier does), but this adds nothing to our knowledge. A self-contradiction is committed by inferring from * everything is relative,' that * something is non-relative.' Fallacies of Relativity often arise in the hyperboles of Rhetoric. In order to reconcile to their lot the more humble class of manual labourers, the rhetorician proclaims the dignity of all labour, without being conscious that if all labour is dignified, none is ; dignity supposes inferior grades ; a mountain height is abolished if all the surrounding plains are raised to the level of its highest peak. So, in spurring men to industry and perseverance, examples of distinguished success are held up for universal imitation ; while, in fact, these cases owe their distinction to the general backwardness.

He stared at Dickie’s blue eyes that were still frowning, the sun-bleached eyebrows white and the eyes themselves shining and empty, nothing but little pieces of blue jelly with a black dot in them, meaningless, without relation to him. You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he would have seen if he had looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror. Tom felt a painful wrench in his breast, and he covered his face with his hands. It was as if Dickie had been suddenly snatched away from him. They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear. He felt in the grip of a fit, as if he would fall to the ground. It was too much: the foreignness around him, the different language, his failure, and the fact that Dickie hated him. He felt surrounded by strangeness, by hostility.

Seeing the possibilities: It would be much easier to let go of outcomes if every choice turned out well. And why shouldn’t it? In the one reality there are no wrong turns, only new turns. But the ego personality likes things to be connected. Coming in second today is better than coming in third yesterday, and tomorrow I want to come in first. This kind of linear thinking reflects a crude conception of progress. Real growth happens in many dimensions. What happens to you can affect how you think, feel, relate to others, behave in a given situation, fit into your surroundings, perceive the future, or perceive yourself. All these dimensions must evolve in order for you to evolve. Try to see the possibilities in whatever happens.

The conclusion that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were acquainted with both the Fibonacci series and the Golden Section, says Stecchini, is so startling in relation to current assumptions about the level of Egyptian mathematics that it could hardly have been accepted on the basis of Herodotus' statement alone, or on the fact that the phi [golden] proportion happens to be incorporated in the Great Pyramid. But the many measurements made by Professor Jean Philippe Lauer, says Stecchini, definitely prove the occurrence of the Golden Section throughout the architecture of the Old Kingdom.... Schwaller de Lubicz also found graphic evidence that the pharonic Egyptians had worked out a direct relation between pi and phi in that pi = phi^2 x 6/5.

The color is yet another variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attracts it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.

The ‘labour theory of value’, implicit in Adam Smith and made explicit by David Ricardo, presented labour as the source of economic value, the prime mover of the market and the part of man’s nature that is inherently priced. By harnessing labour we replace the old relation between nature and need with the new relation between man and his products. The translation of use into exchange, of nature into commodities, of personal relations into the disguises assumed by human power – all these changes that mystify the world, placing a veil between human beings and their fulfilment, and surrounding them with the will-o’-the-wisps engendered by their own malleable appetites, had their origin in the trick, the deception, the ‘forging’ that had given one man the power to extract labour from another. To

[Chang Yu relates the following anecdote of Kao Tsu, the first Han Emperor: “Wishing to crush the Hsiung-nu, he sent out spies to report on their condition. But the Hsiung-nu, forewarned, carefully concealed all their able-bodied men and well-fed horses, and only allowed infirm soldiers and emaciated cattle to be seen. The result was that spies one and all recommended the Emperor to deliver his attack. Lou Ching alone opposed them, saying: “When two countries go to war, they are naturally inclined to make an ostentatious display of their strength. Yet our spies have seen nothing but old age and infirmity. This is surely some ruse on the part of the enemy, and it would be unwise for us to attack.” The Emperor, however, disregarding this advice, fell into the trap and found himself surrounded at Po-teng.”] 19.  Thus one who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move maintains deceitful appearances, according to which the enemy will act. [Ts’ao Kung’s note is “Make a display of weakness and want.” Tu Mu says: “If our force happens to be superior to the enemy’s, weakness may be simulated in order to lure him on; but if inferior, he must be led to believe that we are strong, in order that he may keep off. In fact, all the enemy’s movements should be determined by the signs that we choose to give him.” Note the following anecdote of Sun Pin, a descendent of Sun Wu: In 341 B.C., the Ch’i State being at war with Wei, sent T’ien Chi and Sun Pin against the general P’ang Chuan, who happened to be a deadly personal enemy of the later. Sun Pin said: “The Ch’i State has a reputation for cowardice, and therefore our adversary despises us. Let us turn this circumstance to account.” Accordingly, when the army had crossed the border into Wei territory, he gave orders to show 100,000 fires on the first night, 50,000 on the next, and the night after only 20,000. P’ang Chuan pursued them hotly, saying to himself: “I knew these men of Ch’i were cowards: their numbers have already fallen away by more than half.” In his retreat, Sun Pin came to a narrow defile, with he calculated that his pursuers would reach after dark. Here he had a tree stripped of its bark, and inscribed upon it the words: “Under this tree shall P’ang Chuan die.” Then, as night began to fall, he placed a strong body of archers in ambush near by, with orders to shoot directly they saw a light. Later on, P’ang Chuan arrived at the spot, and noticing the tree, struck a light in order to read what was written on it. His body was immediately riddled by a volley of arrows, and his whole army thrown into confusion. [The above is Tu Mu’s version of the story; the SHIH CHI, less dramatically but probably with more historical truth, makes P’ang Chuan cut his own throat with an exclamation of despair, after the rout of his army.] ] He sacrifices something, that the enemy may snatch at it. 20.  By holding out baits, he keeps him on the march; then with a body of picked men he lies in wait for him. [With an emendation suggested by Li Ching, this then reads, “He lies in wait with the main body of his troops.”] 21.  The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals.

Two entirely distinct state of consciousness were present which alternated very frequently and without warning and which became more and more differentiated in the course of the illness. In one of these states she recognized her normal surroundings; she was melancholy and anxious, but relatively normal. In the other state she hallucinated and was "naughty" —that is to say, she was abusive, used to throw the cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed, tore buttons off her bedclothes and linen with those of her fingers which she could move, and so on. At this stage of her illness if something had been moved in the room or someone had entered or left it (during her other state of consciousness) she would complain of having "lost" some time and would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts.

There is a tradition relating to the proceedings of St. Patrick in this place, which deserves to be noticed, as an example of the way in which Roman Catholic miracles come into existence. One of his biographers states, that when he arrived at the top of the mountain he was surrounded by vast numbers of birds; other writers, improving on this simple fact, transformed the birds into demons, and described him as driving them into the sea at the foot of the mountain. Another, again, perhaps believing reptiles and demons to belong to the same genus, adds, that all the venomous reptiles were collected there from every part of Ireland, and “in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”[56] This is firmly believed by the peasantry at the present day; and it is from such lying wonders they derive their ideas of the character and acts of St. Patrick.

Once the immediate danger of the reactor fire was over, work began on a gargantuan operation to clean up radioactive dust and debris across the newly established 30km exclusion zone - particularly around Chernobyl itself - and to design and construct a gigantic cover over Unit 4 to isolate it from the surrounding environment. Military and civilian personnel throughout the Soviet Union were drafted in for the operation, where they became known as Liquidators - liquidating the disaster’s effects. According to the World Health Organisation, some 240,000 men and women working within the 30km Exclusion Zone were recognised as Liquidators between 1986 and ‘87. The clean-up operation continued on a relatively large scale until 1990, by which time around 600,000 civilian and military personnel had received special certificates confirming their status as Liquidators.215

Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they're not coincidences. Human bodies and their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millenia in response to all the different foods--mostly plants--they raised or gathered from the land surrounding them. They may have died young from snakebite or blunt trauma, but they did not have diet-related illnesses like heart disease and Type II diabetes that are prevalent in our society now, even in some young adults and children. [from an entry by Barbara Kingsolver's daughter Camille]

As neither the man who engages in deforming himself to a self ceases to be a man; nor the surrounding reality of God and man, world and society does change its structure; nor the relations between man and his surrounding reality can be abolished; frictions between the shrunken self and reality are bound to develop. The man who suffers from the disease of contraction, however, is not inclined to leave the prison of his selfhood, in order to remove the frictions. He rather will put his imagination to further work and surround the imaginary self with an imaginary reality apt to confirm the self in its pretense of reality; he will create a Second Reality, as the phenomenon is called, in order to screen the First Reality of common experience from his view. The frictions consequently, far from being removed, will grow into a general conflict between the world of his imagination and the real world.

Such is the lot of the knight that even though my patrimony were ample and adequate for my support, nevertheless here are the disturbances which give me no quiet. We live in fields, forests, and fortresses. Those by whose labors we exist are poverty-stricken peasants, to whom we lease our fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods. The return is exceedingly sparse in proportion to the labor expended. Nevertheless the utmost effort is put forth that it may be bountiful and plentiful, for we must be diligent stewards. I must attach myself to some prince in the hope of protection. Otherwise every one will look upon me as fair plunder. But even if I do make such an attachment hope is beclouded by danger and daily anxiety. If I go away from home I am in peril lest I fall in with those who are at war or feud with my overlord, no matter who he is, and for that reason fall upon me and carry me away. If fortune is adverse, the half of my estates will be forfeit as ransom. Where I looked for protection I was ensnared. We cannot go unarmed beyond to yokes of land. On that account, we must have a large equipage of horses, arms, and followers, and all at great expense. We cannot visit a neighboring village or go hunting or fishing save in iron. Then there are frequently quarrels between our retainers and others, and scarcely a day passes but some squabble is referred to us which we must compose as discreetly as possible, for if I push my claim to uncompromisingly war arises, but if I am too yielding I am immediately the subject of extortion. One concession unlooses a clamor of demands. And among whom does all this take place? Not among strangers, my friend, but among neighbors, relatives, and those of the same household, even brothers. These are our rural delights, our peace and tranquility. The castle, whether on plain or mountain, must be not fair but firm, surrounded by moat and wall, narrow within, crowded with stalls for the cattle, and arsenals for guns, pitch, and powder. Then there are dogs and their dung, a sweet savor I assure you. The horsemen come and go, among them robbers, thieves, and bandits. Our doors are open to practically all comers, either because we do not know who they are or do not make too diligent inquiry. One hears the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cattle, the barking of dogs, the shouts of men working in the fields, the squeaks or barrows and wagons, yes, and even the howling of wolves from nearby woods. The day is full of thought for the morrow, constant disturbance, continual storms. The fields must be ploughed and spaded, the vines tended, trees planted, meadows irrigated. There is harrowing, sowing, fertilizing, reaping, threshing: harvest and vintage. If the harvest fails in any year, then follow dire poverty, unrest, and turbulence.

Keeping a new church outwardly focused from the beginning is much easier than trying to refocus an inwardly concerned church. In order to plant a successful church, you have to know that you know that you are undeniably called by God. The call to start a new church plant is not the same as the call to serve in an existing church or work in a ministry-related organization. You may be the greatest preacher this side of Billy Graham but still not be called to start a church. If you think you may have allowed an improper reason, voice or emotion to lead you to the idea of starting a new church, back away now. Spend some more time with God. You don’t want to move forward on a hunch or because you feel “pretty sure” that you should be planting a church. You have to be completely certain. “You’re afraid? So what. Everybody’s afraid. Fear is the common ground of humanity. The question you must wrestle to the ground is, ‘Will I allow my fear to bind me to mediocrity?’” When you think of a people group that you might be called to reach, does your heart break for them? If so, you may want to consider whether God is specifically calling you to reach that group for His kingdom. Is your calling clear? Has your calling been confirmed by others? Are you humbled by the call? Have you acted on your call? Do you know for certain that God has called you to start a new church? Nail it down. When exactly were you called? What were the circumstances surrounding your call? How did it match up with the sources of proper calling? Do you recognize the four specific calls in your calling? How? How does your call measure up to biblical characteristics? What is the emerging vision that God is giving you with this call? As your dependence on God grows, so will your church. One of the most common mistakes that enthusiastic and well-meaning church starters make is to move to a new location and start trying to reach people without thinking through even a short-term strategy. Don’t begin until you count the cost. why would you even consider starting a church (the only institution Jesus left behind and the only one that will last forever) without first developing a God-infused, specific, winning strategy? There are two types of pain: the pain of front-end discipline and the pain of back-end regret. With the question of strategy development, you get to choose which pain you’d rather live with. Basically, a purpose, mission and vision statement provides guiding principles that describe what God has called you to do (mission), how you will do it (purpose) and what it will look like when you get it done (vision). Keep your statement simple. Be as precise as possible. Core values are the filter through which you fulfill your strategy. These are important, because your entire strategy will be created and implemented in such a way as to bring your core values to life. Your strategic aim will serve as the beacon that guides the rest of your strategy. It is the initial purpose for which you are writing your strategy. He will not send more people to you than you are ready to receive. So what can you do? The same thing Dr. Graham does. Prepare in a way that enables God to open the floodgates into your church. If you are truly ready, He will send people your way. If you do the work we’ve described in this chapter, you’ll be able to build your new church on a strong base of God-breathed preparation. You’ll know where you are, where you’re going and how you are going to get there. You’ll be standing in the rain with a huge bucket, ready to take in the deluge. However, if you don’t think through your strategy, write it down and then implement it, you’ll be like the man who stands in the rainstorm with a Dixie cup. You’ll be completely unprepared to capture what God is pouring out. The choice is yours!

As soon as any relation to our will, to our person, even of those objects of pure contemplation, again enters consciousness, the magic is at an end. We fall back into knowledge governed by the principle of sufficient reason; we now no longer know the Idea, but the individual thing, the link of a chain to which we also belong, and we are again abandoned to all our woe. Most men are almost always at this standpoint, because they entirely lack objectivity, i.e., genius. Therefore they do not like to be alone with nature; they need company, or at any rate a book, for their knowledge remains subject to the will. Therefore in objects they seek only some relation to their will, and with everything that has not such a relation there sounds within them, as it were like a ground-bass, the constant, inconsolable lament, “It is of no use to me.” Thus in solitude even the most beautiful surroundings have for them a desolate, dark, strange, and hostile appearance.

An aesthetics of the earth?... Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion. Finding the fever of passion for the ideas of 'environment' (which I call surroundings) and 'ecology', both apparently such futile notions in these landscapes of desolation. Imagining the idea of love for the earth - so ridiculously inadequate or else frequently the basis for such sectarian intolerance - with all the strength of charcoal fires or sweet syrup. Aesthetics of rupture and connection. Because that is the crux of it, and almost everything is said in pointing out that under no circumstances could it ever be a question of transforming land into territory again. Territory is the basis of conquest. Territory requires filiation be planted and legitimated. Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. That is the reason it is worth defending against every form of alienation. Aesthetics of a variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum.

God has created nothing more noble than intelligence,' he said, 'and His wrath is on him who despises it'; and here intelligence might be defined as the capacity to perceive and assimilate the truth on every level, on one hand distinguishing between the Absolute and the relative, and on the other, perceiving that two and two make four. He said also: 'God is beautiful and He loves beauty.' This relates closely to the concept of fitrah, for the human norm is one of beauty of spirit, beauty of soul, beauty of comportment and, finally, the beauty of those things with which we choose to surround ourselves - home, dress, utensils and so on. Anger, condemned in the Qur'an and hadith on moral grounds, is condemned also because it disfigures the human countenance. An ugly building is un-Islamic, however functional it may be, as is everything cheap and tawdry. The true and the beautiful, therefore, belong to this final faith in a very special way. Stupidity and ugliness have no place in it.

Unchopping a Tree. Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work. It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the latter when the leaves have once become dry — as they are bound to do, for this is not the labor of a moment. Also it hardly needs saying that this the time fro repairing any neighboring trees or bushes or other growth that might have been damaged by the fall. The same rules apply. Where neighboring trees were of the same species it is difficult not to waste time conveying a detached leaf back to the wrong tree. Practice, practice. Put your hope in that. Now the tackle must be put into place, or the scaffolding, depending on the surroundings and the dimension of the tree. It is ticklish work. Almost always it involves, in itself, further damage to the area, which will have to be corrected later. But, as you've heard, it can't be helped. And care now is likely to save you considerable trouble later. Be careful to grind nothing into the ground. At last the time comes for the erecting of the trunk. By now it will scarcely be necessary to remind you of the delicacy of this huge skeleton. Every motion of the tackle, every slightly upward heave of the trunk, the branches, their elaborately reassembled panoply of leaves (now dead) will draw from you an involuntary gasp. You will watch for a lead or a twig to be snapped off yet again. You will listen for the nuts to shift in the hollow limb and you will hear whether they are indeed falling into place or are spilling in disorder — in which case, or in the event of anything else of the kind — operations will have to cease, of course, while you correct the matter. The raising itself is no small enterprise, from the moment when the chains tighten around the old bandages until the boles hands vertical above the stump, splinter above splinter. How the final straightening of the splinters themselves can take place (the preliminary work is best done while the wood is still green and soft, but at times when the splinters are not badly twisted most of the straightening is left until now, when the torn ends are face to face with each other). When the splinters are perfectly complementary the appropriate fixative is applied. Again we have no duplicate of the original substance. Ours is extremely strong, but it is rigid. It is limited to surfaces, and there is no play in it. However the core is not the part of the trunk that conducted life from the roots up to the branches and back again. It was relatively inert. The fixative for this part is not the same as the one for the outer layers and the bark, and if either of these is involved

On the bus, I pull out my book. It's the best book I've ever read, even if I'm only halfway through. It's called Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, with two dots over the e. Jane Eyre lives in England in Queen Victoria's time. She's an orphan who's taken in by a horrid rich aunt who locks her in a haunted room to punish her for lying, even though she didn't lie. Then Jane is sent to a charity school, where all she gets to eat is burnt porridge and brown stew for many years. But she grows up to be clever, slender, and wise anyway. Then she finds work as a governess in a huge manor called Thornfield, because in England houses have names. At Thornfield, the stew is less brown and the people less simple. That's as far as I've gotten... Diving back into Jane Eyre... Because she grew up to be clever, slender and wise, no one calls Jane Eyre a liar, a thief or an ugly duckling again. She tutors a young girl, Adèle, who loves her, even though all she has to her name are three plain dresses. Adèle thinks Jane Eyre's smart and always tells her so. Even Mr. Rochester agrees. He's the master of the house, slightly older and mysterious with his feverish eyebrows. He's always asking Jane to come and talk to him in the evenings, by the fire. Because she grew up to be clever, slender, and wise, Jane Eyre isn't even all that taken aback to find out she isn't a monster after all... Jane Eyre soon realizes that she's in love with Mr. Rochester, the master of Thornfield. To stop loving him so much, she first forces herself to draw a self-portrait, then a portrait of Miss Ingram, a haughty young woman with loads of money who has set her sights on marrying Mr. Rochester. Miss Ingram's portrait is soft and pink and silky. Jane draws herself: no beauty, no money, no relatives, no future. She show no mercy. All in brown. Then, on purpose, she spends all night studying both portraits to burn the images into her brain for all time. Everyone needs a strategy, even Jane Eyre... Mr. Rochester loves Jane Eyre and asks her to marry him. Strange and serious, brown dress and all, he loves her. How wonderful, how impossible. Any boy who'd love a sailboat-patterned, swimsuited sausage who tames rabid foxes would be wonderful. And impossible. Just like in Jane Eyre, the story would end badly. Just like in Jane Eyre, she'd learn the boy already has a wife as crazy as a kite, shut up in the manor tower, and that even if he loves the swimsuited sausage, he can't marry her. Then the sausage would have to leave the manor in shame and travel to the ends of the earth, her heart in a thousand pieces... Oh right, I forgot. Jane Eyre returns to Thornfield one day and discovers the crazy-as-a-kite wife set the manor on fire and did Mr. Rochester some serious harm before dying herself. When Jane shows up at the manor, she discovers Mr. Rochester in the dark, surrounded by the ruins of his castle. He is maimed, blind, unkempt. And she still loves him. He can't believe it. Neither can I. Something like that would never happen in real life. Would it? ... You'll see, the story ends well.

I am, “ answered the apparition, “the spirit of Brother John de Via. I thank you for the prayers which you have poured forth to Heaven in my behalf, and I come to ask of you one more act of charity. Know that, thanks to the Divine mercy, I am in the place of salvation, among those predestined for Heaven the light which surrounds me is a proof of this. Yet I am not worthy to see the face of God on account of an omission which remains to be expiated. During my mortal life I omitted, through my own fault, and that several times, to recite the Office for the Dead, when it was prescribed by the Rule. I beseech you, my dear brother, for the love you bear Jesus Christ, to say those offices in such a manner that my debt may be paid, and I may go to enjoy the vision of my God.” Brother Ascension ran to the Father Guardian, related what had happened, and hastened to say the offices required. Then the soul of Blessed Brother John de Via appeared again, but this time more brilliant than before, He was in possession of eternal happiness.

And still I had not admitted to myself that I should have stopped seeing Albertine long before, for she had entered, in relation to me, that wretched period when a being, dispersed in space and time, is no longer a woman in our eyes, but a series of events on which we cannot shed light, a series of insoluble problems, a sea which, like Xerxes, we absurdly try to beat, to punish it for all that it has swallowed up. Once this period has begun, one is inevitably defeated. Happy are those who see it in time not to be drawn into a useless, exhausting battle, surrounded on all sides by the limits of our imagination, where jealousy struggles so humiliatingly that the same man who once, if the eyes of his constant companion fell for a moment on another man, imagined a conspiracy, suffered who knows what torments, may later allow her to go out alone, sometimes with the man he knows is her lover, choosing this torture which is at least familiar in preference to the terrible unknown. It is a question of finding a rhythm which one afterward follows from habit.

Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were traveling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could almost believe they were hardly moving at all. Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was traveling toward them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the aircar dipped sharply and headed downward in what seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what had happened. They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed had been their own, relative to the glow of light which was a stationary hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The insane blur of silver was the circular wall of the tunnel down which they were shooting, apparently at several hundred miles an hour. He closed his eyes in terror. After a length of time which he made no attempt to judge, he sensed a slight subsidence in their speed and some while later became aware that they were gradually gliding to a gentle halt. He opened his eyes again. They were still in the silver tunnel, threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be a crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their termini here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultraviolet. Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes. “Earthman,” he said, “we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea.

I think it would be true to say that every boy in the school hated and feared her. Yet we all fawned on her in the most abject way, and the top layer of our feelings towards her was a sort of guilt-stricken loyalty. Bingo, although the discipline of the school depended more on her than on Sim, hardly pretended to dispense justice. She was frankly capricious. An act which might get you a caning one day, might next day be laughed off as a boyish prank, or even commended because it “showed you had guts.” There were days when everyone cowered before those deepset, accusing eyes, and there were days when she was like a flirtatious queen surrounded by courtier-lovers, laughing and joking, scattering largesse, or the promise of largesse (“And if you win the Harrow History Prize I’ll give you a new case for your camera!”), and occasionally even packing three or four favoured boys into her Ford car and carrying them off to a teashop in town, where they were allowed to buy coffee and cakes. Bingo was inextricably mixed up in my mind with Queen Elizabeth, whose relations with Leicester and Essex and Raleigh were intelligible to me from a very early age. A word we all constantly used in speaking of Bingo was “favour.

Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. The dissonances as well as the harmonies have to be made concordant by means of some ultimate complementarity. Later biblical scholarship has sought different explanations, and more sophisticated concords; but the motive is the same, however the methods may differ. An epoch, as Einstein remarked, is the instruments of its research. Stoic physics, biblical typology, Copenhagen quantum theory, are all different, but all use concord-fictions and assert complementarities. Such fictions meet a need. They seem to do what Bacon said poetry could: 'give some show of satisfaction to the mind, wherein the nature of things doth seem to deny it.' Literary fictions ( Bacon's 'poetry') do likewise. One consequence is that they change, for the same reason that patristic allegory is not the same thing, though it may be essentially the same kind of thing, as the physicists' Principle of Complementarity. The show of satisfaction will only serve when there seems to be a degree of real compliance with reality as we, from time to time, imagine it. Thus we might imagine a constant value for the irreconcileable observations of the reason and the imagination, the one immersed in chronos, the other in kairos; but the proportions vary indeterminably. Or, when we find 'what will suffice,' the element of what I have called the paradigmatic will vary. We measure and order time with our fictions; but time seems, in reality, to be ever more diverse and less and less subject to any uniform system of measurement. Thus we think of the past in very different timescales, according to what we are doing; the time of the art-historian is different from that of the geologist, that of the football coach from the anthropologist's. There is a time of clocks, a time of radioactive carbon, a time even of linguistic change, as in lexicostatics. None of these is the same as the 'structural' or 'family' time of sociology. George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time distinguished between 'absolute' and 'systematic' age, a hierarchy of durations from that of the coral reef to that of the solar year. Our ways of filling the interval between the tick and tock must grow more difficult and more selfcritical, as well as more various; the need we continue to feel is a need of concord, and we supply it by increasingly varied concord-fictions. They change as the reality from which we, in the middest, seek a show of satisfaction, changes; because 'times change.' The fictions by which we seek to find 'what will suffice' change also. They change because we no longer live in a world with an historical tick which will certainly be consummated by a definitive tock. And among all the other changing fictions, literary fictions take their place. They find out about the changing world on our behalf; they arrange our complementarities. They do this, for some of us, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false; but the way to understand their development is to see how they are related to those other fictional systems. It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers. This may, in the absence of a supreme fiction-or the possibility of it, be a hard fate; which is why the poet of that fiction is compelled to say From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own, and much more, nor ourselves And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days.

We are not individually much cleverer than the average animal, a heron or a mole, but the knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire. Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage. The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds – a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.

There are many things that men and women ought to think about, and must think about, in private, that they would not for a moment discuss in public. There are books on the proper conduct of women in certain most sacred relations of life, relations of life which are as holy as any, and which can be entered into in the presence of a holy God with no question of His approval, but which do not permit of public mention. . . . That the Bible is a pure book is evidenced by the fact that it is not a favourite book in dens of infamy. But on the other hand, books that try to make out that the Bible is an obscene book, and that endeavour to keep people from reading it, are favourite books in dens of infamy. The unclean classes, both men and women, were devoted admirers of the most brilliant man this country ever produced who attacked what he called the "obscenity of the Bible." These unclean classes do not frequent Bible classes. They do frequent infidel lectures. These infidel objectors to the book as an "obscene book" constantly betray their insincerity and hypocrisy. Colonel Ingersoll . . . objected to the Bible for telling these vile deeds "without a touch of humour." In other words, he did not object to telling stories of vice, if only a joke was made of the sin. Thank God, that is exactly what the Bible does not do--make a joke of sin. It makes sin hideous, so men who are obscene in their own hearts object to the Bible as being an obscene book. . . . To sum up, there are in the Bible descriptions of sins that cannot wisely be read in every public assembly, but these descriptions of sin are morally most wholesome in the places where God, the Author of the Book, manifestly intends them to be read. The child who is brought up to read the Bible as a whole, from Genesis to Revelation, will come to know in the very best way possible what a child ought to know very early in life if he is to be safeguarded against the perils that surround our modern life on every hand. A child who is brought up upon a constant, thorough, continuous reading of the whole Bible is more likely than any other child to be free from the vices that are undermining the mental, moral, and physical strength of our boys and girls, and young men and young women. But the child who is brought up on infidel literature and conversation is the easiest prey there is for the seducer and procuress. The next easiest is the one who, through neglect of the Bible, is left in ignorance of the awful pitfalls of life.

[Nero] castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife. This Sporus, decked out with the finery of the empresses and riding in a litter, he took with him to the assizes and marts of Greece, and later at Rome through the Street of the Images,​ fondly kissing him from time to time. That he even desired illicit relations with his own mother, and was kept from it by her enemies, who feared that such a help might give the reckless and insolent woman too great influence, was notorious, especially after he added to his concubines a courtesan who was said to look very like Agrippina. Even before that, so they say, whenever he rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by the stains on his clothing. He so prostituted his own chastity that after defiling almost every part of his body, he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched​ by his freedman Doryphorus; for he was even married to this man in the same way that he himself had married Sporus, going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. He made a palace extending all the way from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which at first he called the House of Passage, but when it was burned shortly after its completion and rebuilt, the Golden House. Its size and splendour will be sufficiently indicated by the following details. Its vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor a hundred and twenty feet high; and it was so extensive that it had a triple colonnade​ a mile long. There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities,​ besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures and woods, with great numbers of wild and domestic animals. In the rest of the house all parts were overlaid with gold and adorned with gems and mother-of‑pearl. There were dining-rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens. His mother offended him by too strict surveillance and criticism of his words and acts. At last terrified by her violence and threats, he determined to have her life, and after thrice attempting it by poison and finding that she had made herself immune by antidotes, he tampered with the ceiling of her bedroom, contriving a mechanical device for loosening its panels and dropping them upon her while she slept. When this leaked out through some of those connected with the plot, he devised a collapsible boat,​ to destroy her by shipwreck or by the falling in of its cabin. ...[He] offered her his contrivance, escorting her to it in high spirits and even kissing her breasts as they parted. The rest of the night he passed sleepless in intense anxiety, awaiting the outcome of his design. On learning that everything had gone wrong and that she had escaped by swimming, driven to desperation he secretly had a dagger thrown down beside her freedman Lucius Agermus, when he joyfully brought word that she was safe and sound, and then ordered that the freedman be seized and bound, on the charge of being hired to kill the emperor; that his mother be put to death, and the pretence made that she had escaped the consequences of her detected guilt by suicide.

A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.

Who can say how long the eye of the vulture or the lynx requires to grasp the totality of a landscape, or whether in a comprehensive instant the seemingly inexhaustible confusion of detail falls upon their eyes in an ordered and intelligible series of distances and shapes, where the last detail is perceived in relation to the corporate mass? It may be that the hawk sees nothing but those grassy uplands, and among the coarse grasses, more plainly than the field itself, the rabbit or the rat, and that the landscape in its entirety is never seen, but only those areas lit, as it were with a torch, where the quarry slinks, the surrounding regions thickening into cloud and darkness on the yellow eyes. Whether the scouring, sexless eye of the bird or beast of prey disperses and sees all or concentrates and evades all saving that for which it searches, it is certain that the less powerful eye of the human cannot grasp, even after a life of training, a scene in its entirety. No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance. Only the recognition of damsel, horse on fly and the assumption of damsel, horse or fly; and so with dreams and beyond, for what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.

Before art school, I approached art as though it illustrated social relations and history, upholding or denouncing the political status quo. During my years in art school I increasingly concentrated on visual meaning, on how artwork looked—its composition, its color, its artist’s style, as separate from what it said about society. Critics call a preoccupation with appearance that ignores social meaning formalism, which carries a negative taint these days when formalism divorces art from the power relations surrounding its creation and circulation. Coming from the Left, I began as an anti-formalist. But as a maker of art, I moved toward formalism as I sought to discover processes of how art was made, a move prompted by the neglect of the formal qualities of the work of black artists, assumed to be important only according to the degree to which it critiqued American racism. Where Romare Bearden had figured in my mind as celebrating blackness and black Harlem, I now investigated how he made his work, step by step, how he decided what to depict and how to depict it. I was now seeing my father’s prized Sharecropper, by Elizabeth Catlett, which he bought from her in her studio in Mexico, less as a salute to black workers and more as a masterly lino print. From the opposite starting point, my relationship to Warhol encapsulated my trajectory.

What nonsense you do talk, to be sure,’ said Stephen. ‘What “balls”, as you sea-officers say: it is a matter of common observation that a man may be sincerely attached to two women at once – to three, to four, to a very surprising number of women. However,’ he said, ‘no doubt you know more of these things than I. No: what I had in mind were those wider loyalties, those more general conflicts – the candid American, for example, before the issue became envenomed; the unimpassioned Jacobite in ‘45; Catholic priests in France today – Frenchmen of many complexions, in and out of France. So much pain; and the more honest the man the worse the pain. But there at least the conflict is direct: it seems to me that the greater mass of confusion and distress must arise from these less evident divergencies – the moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honour, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation, gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those that practise it. All sometimes, indeed generally, at variance; none ever in an entirely harmonious relation to the rest; and a man is perpetually required to choose one rather than another, perhaps (in his particular case) its contrary. It is as though our strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system – it is as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty mangers.

As I have said, mandala means ‘circle.’ There are innumerable variants of the motif shown here, but they are all based on the squaring of a circle. Their basic motif is the premonition of a centre of personality, a kind of central point within the psyche, to which everything is related, by which everything is arranged, and which is itself a source of energy. The energy of the central point is manifested in the almost irresistible compulsion and urge to become what one is, just as every organism is driven to assume the form that is characteristic of its nature, no matter what the circumstances. This centre is not felt or thought of as the ego but, if one may so express it, as the self. Although the centre is represented by an innermost point, it is surrounded by a periphery containing everything that belongs to the self—the paired opposites that make up the total personality. This totality comprises consciousness first of all, then the personal unconscious, and finally an indefinitely large segment of the collective unconscious whose archetypes are common to all mankind. A certain number of these, however, are permanently or temporarily included within the scope of the personality and, through this contact, acquire an individual stamp as the shadow, anima, and animus, to mention only the best-known figures. The self, though on the one hand simple, is on the other hand an extremely composite thing, a “conglomerate soul,” to use the Indian expression.

At first of course everybody had been quiet, fearful. The funeral procession snaked its way through the drab, slushy little city in dead silence. The only sound was the slap-slap-slap of thousands of sockless shoes on the silver-wet road that led to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Young men carried seventeen coffins on their shoulders. Seventeen plus one, that is, for the re-murdered Usman Abdullah, who obviously could not be entered twice in the books. So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that's all the little procession amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace. Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections. Of all the sugar crystals carried by the ants that winter morning, the smallest crystal of course went by the name of Miss Jebeen.

Remembrance in its most elementary, tangible form is to chant the names of God. Remembrance is everything. Our destination as spiritually developing human beings is to live our lives in such a way that we are completely within that continual remembrance. That is the world and universe we live in. It surrounds and informs us. It illuminates our perception and softens our hearts. It should also bring us joy and happiness. That is our reality, because looking at life through the distorting eyes of the ego is, at best, a secondhand reality. The word for „remembrance“ in Arabic literally means „to mention,“ yet we translate it as „remembrance.“ When you mention someone, in a way, you‘re remembering the one you are calling to mind. We are remembering our Origin, remembering that we come from God and to God we will return. People sometimes talk about how children have an open channel to the Divine because they just came from God relatively recently. Remembering our Origin is a fundamental truth that we need to call to mind. This is expressed in the hadith „Whoever belongs to God, God will belong to him or her.“ In that sense, if remembrance is deep enough, complete enough, it is the Divine remembering in you. In the state of belonging to God, what you want is not different than what the Divine wants. And „God“ wants what you want; there is then no separate „you“ wanting. There is no duality or personal will pulling in the opposite direction. Rumi calls that being under „the compulsion of love.“(p. 6)

Silence is not just that which happens around words and underneath images and events. It has a life of its own. It’s a phenomenon with an almost physical identity. It is a being in itself to which we can relate [...] Silence precedes, undergirds, and grounds everything. We cannot just think of it as an accident, or as something unnecessary. Unless we learn how to live there, go there, abide in this different phenomenon, the rest of things—words, events, relationships, identities—become rather superficial, without depth or context. They lose meaning, so we end up searching for more events and situations which must increasingly contain ever-higher stimulation, more excitement, and more color to add vital signs to our inherently bored and boring existence. Really, the simplest and most stripped-down things ironically have the power to give us the greatest happiness—if we respect them as such. Silence is the essence of simple and stripped down. [...] Silence is not just an absence, but also a presence. Silence surrounds every “I know” event with a humble and patient “I don’t know.” [...]  Without silence around a thing, which is a mystery, it can be difficult to find a meaning that lasts. It’s just another event in a sequence of ever-quicker events, which we call our lives. Without silence, we do not really experience our experiences. We have many experiences, but they do not have the power to change us, to awaken us, to give us that joy or “peace that the world cannot give,” as Jesus says (John 14:27).

To the Po'lice In case you are wondering the answer is yes: you have hurt us. Deeply. Just as you intended: you and those who sent you. You do know by now that you do not send yourself? I imagine your Designers sitting back in the shadows laughing as we weep. Though usually devoid of feeling, they are experiencing a sensation they almost enjoy: they get to witness, by twisted enchantment, dozens of strong black mothers weeping. They planned and nurtured your hatred and fear and focused the kill shot. Then watched you try to explain your innocence on TV. It is entertainment for them. They chuckle and drink Watching you squirm. They have tied you up in a bag of confusion from which you will never escape. It’s true you are white, but you are so fucking poor, and dumb, to boot, they say. A consideration that turns them pink with glee. (They have so many uses planned for the poor, white, and dumb: you would be amazed). You and the weeping mothers have more in common than you might think: the mothers know this. They have known you far longer than you have known them. After centuries, even those in the shadows, your masters, offer little mystery. If you could find your true courage you might risk everything to sit within a circle, surrounded by these women. Their eyes red from weeping, their throats raw. (They might strike you too, who could swear they wouldn’t?) Their sons are dead and it was you who did the deed. Scary enough. But within that enclosure Naked to their grief Is where you must center If you are ever To be freed.

Chinese seek victory not in a decisive battle but through incremental moves designed to gradually improve their position. To quote Kissinger again: “Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash: elaborate multi-year maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.”48 In an instructive analogy, David Lai illustrates this by comparing the game of chess with its Chinese equivalent, weiqi—often referred to as go. In chess, players seek to dominate the center and conquer the opponent. In weiqi, players seek to surround the opponent. If the chess master sees five or six moves ahead, the weiqi master sees twenty or thirty. Attending to every dimension in the broader relationship with the adversary, the Chinese strategist resists rushing prematurely toward victory, instead aiming to build incremental advantage. “In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battlefields; and the way to fight is force on force,” Lai explains. By contrast, “The philosophy behind go is to compete for relative gain rather than seeking complete annihilation of the opponent forces.” In a wise reminder, Lai warns that “It is dangerous to play go with the chess mindset. One can become overly aggressive so that he will stretch his force thin and expose his vulnerable parts in the battlefields.

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man. Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life. Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words “to live” and “to be among men” (inter homines esse) or “to die” and “to cease to be among men” (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.

Sexual reproduction is thus a costly investment that has to pay for itself in the short run. The details of theory and experiment on this topic are fascinating (see, e.g., Maynard Smith, 1978; Ridley, 1993), but for our purposes a few highlights from the currently front-running theory are most instructive: sex (in vertebrates like us, at least) pays for itself by making our offspring relatively inscrutable to the parasites we endow them with from birth. Parasites have short lifespans compared with their hosts, and typically reproduce many times during their host’s lifetime. Mammals, for instance, are hosts to trillions of parasites. (Yes, right now, no matter how healthy and clean you are, there are trillions of parasites of thousands of different species inhabiting your gut, your blood, your skin, your hair, your mouth, and every other part of your body. They have been rapidly evolving to survive against the onslaught of your defenses since the day you were born.) Before a female can mature to reproductive age, her parasites evolve to fit her better than any glove. (Meanwhile, her immune system evolves to combat them, a standoff—if she is healthy—in an ongoing arms race.) If she gave birth to a clone, her parasites would leap to it and find themselves at home from the outset. They would be already optimized to their new surroundings. If instead she uses sexual reproduction to endow her offspring with a mixed set of genes (half from her mate), many of these genes—or, more directly, their products, in the offspring’s internal defenses—will be alien or cryptic to the ship-jumping parasites. Instead of home sweet home, the parasites will find themselves in terra incognita. This gives the offspring a big head start in the arms race.

Quotes from the Book: “The main characteristic of the approaches of the Hour is escalating disorder and confusion and that there shall be such turbulence affecting both the world of ideas and that of events that, as other hadiths say, even stable intelligent people will be in danger of losing their bearings. Only those will be able to find their way that have armed themselves with the knowledge of how to understand these times and guard themselves against their dangers. When as Muslims we speak of dangers, it must be understood that the gravest of all as far as we are concerned is disbelief, not physical danger. Next to disbelief comes moral confusion leading to corruption of such magnitude as to lead, even in the presence of faith, to punishment in Hell. This is why the Prophet—may God’s blessings and peace be upon him—warned of this worst kind of danger, saying: ‘Seditions will occur, when a man shall awaken in the morning a believer, becoming a disbeliever by nightfall, save he whom God has given life to by means of knowledge.’ [Ibn Maja, Sunan, Kitab (36) al-Fitan, Bab (9) Mā yakūn min al-fitan, 3954]. * This then is how to approach the subject: first one should familiarize oneself with the details, meditate on them at length, while applying the knowledge to the surrounding phenomena and events, then strive to extract and grasp the patterns, after which one may move on to deduce the principles, which are the all-inclusive cosmic laws involved. Principles, precisely because of their all-inclusive nature, are few, but need effort and time to be adequately comprehended. Having understood these, one is under obligation to transmit this knowledge and discuss it frequently with one’s children, relatives, friends, and as far as possible transmit it to the entire upcoming generation.

Let me put the contrast in a single concrete example. The physician who finds time to give personal attention to his patients and listens to them. carefully probing inner conditions that may be more significant than any laboratory reports, has become a rarity. Where the power complex is dominant, a visit to a physician is paced, not to fit the patient's needs, but mainly to perform the succession of physical tests upon which the diagnosis will be based. Yet if there were a sufficient number of competent physicians on hand whose inner resources were as available as their laboratory aids, a more subtle diagnosis might be possible, and the patient's subjective response might in many cases effectively supplement the treatment. Thoreau expressed this to perfection when he observed in his 'Journal' that "the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure." Without this slowing of the tempo of all activities the positive advantages of plenitude could not be sufficiently enjoyed; for the congestion of time is as threatening to the good life as the congestion of space or people, and produces stresses and tensions that equally undermine human relations. The inner stability that such a slowdown brings about is essential to the highest uses of the mind, through opening up that second life which one lives in reflection and contemplation and self-scrutiny. The means to escape from the "noisy crowing up of things and whatsoever wars on the divine" was one of the vital offerings of the classic religions: hence their emphasis was not on technological productivity but on personal poise. The old slogan of New York subway guards in handling a crush of passengers applies with even greater force to the tempo of megatechnic society: "What's your hurry...Watch your step!

We discovered that existential authenticity has traditionally often been conceived as a matter of resisting collective complacency and of assuming responsibility for one’s beliefs, passions, and unique perspective. I would propose that the line of reasoning that Lacan advances regarding unconscious desire represents a specifically psychoanalytic answer to the question of authenticity. In other words, I would like to highlight the similarity between the philosophical conception of authenticity and the Lacanian conviction that actively listening to, and taking responsibility for, the “truth” of one’s desire—even (or particularly) when this “truth” seems alien or uncomfortable—allows one to distance oneself from the dominant dictates of the symbolic Other. Lacan in fact implies that only the subject who has been able to liberate itself from the Other’s desire retains the capacity for satisfaction. The flipside of this “unfettered” subject position is that the subject is less likely to expect the Other to compensate for the catastrophes of its desire. If the subject under the sway of fantasies tends to repeatedly re-create the same relationship—of being punished, suffocated, persecuted, loved, or admired, for instance—to the collective world of the Other, the shattering of fantasies allows it to gain a measure of self-sufficiency in relation to the Other. It grows to be less afraid of the world’s judgments, which suggests that it becomes increasingly capable of independent deliberation and action. As Bruce Fink underscores, one of the aspirations of Lacanian analysis is to facilitate the subject’s departure from ideals and configurations of thought that have been inculcated within its psyche by the various authority figures that surround it from birth; the goal of Lacanian analysis is to allow the subject to think and act without being overly dependent on the views and opinions of others.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.

Linguistic and musical sound systems illustrate a common theme in the study of music-language relations. On the surface, the two domains are dramatically different. Music uses pitch in ways that speech does not, and speech organizes timbre to a degree seldom seen in music. Yet beneath these differences lie deep connections in terms of cognitive and neural processing. Most notably, in both domains the mind interacts with one particular aspect of sound (pitch in music, and timbre in speech) to create a perceptually discretized system. Importantly, this perceptual discretization is not an automatic byproduct of human auditory perception. For example, linguistic and musical sequences present the ear with continuous variations in amplitude, yet loudness is not perceived in terms of discrete categories. Instead, the perceptual discretization of musical pitch and linguistic timbre reflects the activity of a powerful cognitive system, built to separate within-category sonic variation from differences that indicate a change in sound category. Although music and speech differ in the primary acoustic feature used for sound category formation, it appears that the mechanisms that create and maintain learned sound categories in the two domains may have a substantial degree of overlap. Such overlap has implications for both practical and theoretical issues surrounding human communicative development. In the 20th century, relations between spoken and musical sound systems were largely explored by artists. For example, the boundary between the domains played an important role in innovative works such as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Reich's Different Trains (cf. Risset, 1991). In the 21st century, science is finally beginning to catch up, as relations between spoken and musical sound systems prove themselves to be a fruitful domain for research in cognitive neuroscience. Such work has already begun to yield new insights into our species' uniquely powerful communicative abilities.

The fact that I forgo having a father precisely because I do not recognize him as my genitor is an altogether different matter. I seek a man for whom I can feel respect. This is possible even in Eumeswil, albeit exceptional. One finds spiritual foster fathers. The bonds one forms with them are stronger than those of blood. Of course, such a statement must be handled with care, for a material substratum will always be present. In this respect, one owes one's father the link to an infinite network. In the act of procreation, he celebrates a mystery that is unknown even to him. His intrinsic nature might perish in it. Thus, we could be more closely related to an uncle or a distant forebear than to him. Genealogists and also biologists are familiar with such surprises; they often shatter their system. The genetic burden is endless; it reaches all the way into the inanimate world. It can bring forth creatures that died out long ago. This digression may indicate why I prefer adoption to natural kinship. The fatherhood becomes spiritual; we are chosen rela­tives and not natural ones. Thus, Eros must also prevail in spiri­tual kinship; adoption is a more sublime repetition of godfather­ing. We pick the godfather, the pater spiritualis; and he recognizes himself in us—he accepts us. That is a contact to which we owe life, albeit in a different, an—I dare say—immortal manner. I do not wish to speak of the heart; this is not the right place. My birth and the surroundings in which I was put may explain why I felt this kinship with three academic teachers, three profes­sors. If I had had a vocation for craft, art, religion, war, I would have had different models—and different ones again had I opted for a criminal career. During the tuna fishing, I watch the rais and his fishermen performing the drudgery; their obedience is simply the equip­ment of the trust that binds them to him; he is their leader, they have elected him. More fatherhood is to be felt here—even when he treats them severely—than when I sit with my old man, who swims in stagnant waters.

come to call “ideograms.” An ideogram is often a pictorial character that refers not to the visible entity that it explicitly pictures but to some quality or other phenomenon readily associated with that entity. Thus—to invent a simple example—a stylized image of a jaguar with its feet off the ground might come to signify “speed.” For the Chinese, even today, a stylized image of the sun and moon together signifies “brightness”; similarly, the word for “east” is invoked by a stylized image of the sun rising behind a tree.5 The efficacy of these pictorially derived systems necessarily entails a shift of sensory participation away from the voices and gestures of the surrounding landscape toward our own human-made images. However, the glyphs which constitute the bulk of these ancient scripts continually remind the reading body of its inherence in a more-than-human field of meanings. As signatures not only of the human form but of other animals, trees, sun, moon, and landforms, they continually refer our senses beyond the strictly human sphere.6 Yet even a host of pictograms and related ideograms will not suffice for certain terms that exist in the local discourse. Such terms may refer to phenomena that lack any precise visual association. Consider, for example, the English word “belief.” How might we signify this term in a pictographic, or ideographic, manner? An image of a phantasmagorical monster, perhaps, or one of a person in prayer. Yet no such ideogram would communicate the term as readily and precisely as the simple image of a bumblebee, followed by the figure of a leaf. We could, that is, resort to a visual pun, to images of things that have nothing overtly to do with belief but which, when named in sequence, carry the same sound as the spoken term “belief” (“bee-leaf”). And indeed, such pictographic puns, or rebuses, came to be employed early on by scribes in ancient China and in Mesoamerica as well as in the Middle East, to record certain terms that were especially amorphous or resistant to visual representation. Thus, for instance, the Sumerian word ti, which means

The outcome of colonialism has been a controlling or blocking of interconnectivity and interdependence in related arenas: the environment (where rivers are dammed, channeled, or drained and natural geographies replaced by grids), in societies (where communities are divided in a pseudologic of superiority/inferiority), in economies (where resources like trees, coal, or oil are extracted as rapidly and brutally as possible without regard for surrounding destruction and pollution), and thought (where knowledge is organized under the rubrics of specialization, expertise, and compartmentalization, affected by racism and Eurocentrism). Colonialism, globalization, and development planning are ways of thinking as well as ways of life, and we need to find their alternatives, islands where other ways of life are explored through the resurgence of interconnectivity at local levels, creating dialogue among diverse points of view and projects of counter-development and liberation. When we take the idea of colonialism out of its location in history texts as a period of conquest located in the past, and begin to think of it as a metaphor for a way to live in the environment, certain general patterns appear. Before colonialism, there were environments of interpenetrating local biodiversities with cyclic retreats and advances, in which human groups integrated and competed; after colonialism, there was a large-scale monoculture, control of land and resources by distant privileged elites who exploit and fragment local communities while polluting and destroying ecosystems. Before colonialism, there were many diverse cultural worlds, each its own center of meaning-making and language arts, with Europe at the periphery. After colonialism, cultures were ranked on a kind of "great chain of being" according to European notions of culture and development, with Europe at the center. As a corollary, individual subjectivities were ranked as to how completely they could think through decontextualized universals in European languages. One way to think about liberation psychologies is as an evolving and multiple set of projects of decolonization.

Pull in Friendships and Fresh Adventures: Five men are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on an outing organized by their wives who are college friends. The women move ahead in animated conversation. One man describes the engineering involved in the bridge's long suspension. Another points to the changing tide lines below. A third asked if they've heard of the new phone apps for walking tours. The fourth observes how refreshing it is to talk with people who aren't lawyers like him. Yes, we tend to notice the details that most relate to our work or our life experience. It is also no surprise that we instinctively look for those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the disruptive changes surrounding us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We can be blindsided by events and trends coming at us from directions we did not see. The more we see reinforcing evidence that we are right in our beliefs the more rigid we become in defending them. Hint: If you are part of a large association, synagogue, civic group or special interest club, encourage the organization to support the creation of self-organized, special interest groups of no more than seven people, providing a few suggestions of they could operate. Such loosely affiliated small groups within a larger organization deepen a sense of belonging, help more people learn from diverse others and stay open to growing through that shared learning and collaboration. That's one way that members of Rick Warren's large Saddleback Church have maintained a close-knit feeling yet continue to grow in fresh ways. imilarly the innovative outdoor gear company Gore-Tex has nimbly grown by using their version of self-organized groups of 150 or less within the larger corporation. In fact, they give grants to those who further their learning about that philosophy when adapted to outdoor adventure, traveling in compact groups of "close friends who had mutual respect and trust for one another.

Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander points out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasingly global strategy of dealing with populations of people of color and immigrant populations from the countries of the Global South as surplus populations, as disposable populations. Put them all in a vast garbage bin, add some sophisticated electronic technology to control them, and let them languish there. And in the meantime, create the ideological illusion that the surrounding society is safer and more free because the dangerous Black people and Latinos, and the Native Americans, and the dangerous Asians and the dangerous White people, and of course the dangerous Muslims, are locked up! And in the meantime, corporations profit and poor communities suffer! Public education suffers! Public education suffers because it is not profitable according to corporate measures. Public health care suffers. If punishment can be profitable, then certainly health care should be profitable, too. This is absolutely outrageous! It is outrageous. It is also outrageous that the state of Israel uses the carceral technologies developed in relation to US prisons not only to control the more than eight thousand Palestinian political prisoners in Israel but also to control the broader Palestinian population. These carceral technologies, for example, the separation wall, which reminds us of the US-Mexico border wall, and other carceral technologies are the material constructs of Israeli apartheid. G4S, the organization, the corporation G4S, which profits from the incarceration and the torturing of Palestinian prisoners, has a subsidiary called G4S Secure Solutions, which was formerly known as Wackenhut. And just recently a subsidiary of that just have one more page of notes corporation, GEO Group, which is a private prison company, attempted to claim naming rights at Florida Atlantic University by donating something like $6 million, right? And, the students rose up. They said that our football stadium will not bear the name of a private prison corporation! And the students won. The students won; the name came down from the marquee.

Man belongs to two spheres. And Scripture not only teaches that these two spheres are distinct, it also teaches what estimate of relative importance ought to be placed upon them. Heaven is the primordial, earth the secondary creation. In heaven are the supreme realities; what surrounds us here below is a copy and shadow of the celestial things. Because the relation between the two spheres is positive, and not negative, not mutually repulsive, heavenly-mindedness can never give rise to neglect of the duties pertaining to the present life. It is the ordinance and will of God, that not apart from, but on the basis of, and in contact with, the earthly sphere man shall work out his heavenly destiny. Still the lower may never supplant the higher in our affections. In the heart of man time calls for eternity, earth for heaven. He must, if normal, seek the things above, as the flower's face is attracted by the sun, and the water-courses are drawn to the ocean. Heavenly-mindedness, so far from blunting or killing the natural desires, produces in the believer a finer organization, with more delicate sensibilities, larger capacities, a stronger pulse of life. It does not spell impoverishment, but enrichment of nature. The spirit of the entire Epistle shows this. The use of the words "city" and "country" is evidence of it. These are terms that stand for the accumulation, the efflorescence, the intensive enjoyment of values. Nor should we overlook the social note in the representation. A perfect communion in a perfect society is promised. In the city of the living God believers are joined to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, and mingle with the spirits of just men made perfect. And all this faith recognizes. It does not first need the storms and stress that invade to quicken its desire for such things. Being the sum and substance of all the positive gifts of God to us in their highest form, heaven is of itself able to evoke in our hearts positive love, such absorbing love as can render us at times forgetful of the earthly strife. In such moments the transcendent beauty of the other shore and the irresistible current of our deepest life lift us above every regard of wind or wave. We know that through weather fair or foul our ship is bound straight for its eternal port.

Two Types of Subatomic Particles Fermions (matter) Bosons (forces) electron, quark, photon, graviton, neutrino, proton Yang-Mills Bunji Sakita and Jean-Loup Gervais then demonstrated that string theory had a new type of symmetry, called supersymmetry. Since then, supersymmetry has been expanded so that it is now the largest symmetry ever found in physics. As we have emphasized, beauty to a physicist is symmetry, which allows us to find the link between different particles. All the particles of the universe could then be unified by supersymmetry. As we have emphasized, a symmetry rearranges the components of an object, leaving the original object the same. Here, one is rearranging the particles in our equations so that fermions are interchanged with bosons and vice versa. This becomes the central feature of string theory, so that the particles of the entire universe can be rearranged into one another. This means that each particle has a super partner, called a sparticle, or super particle. For example, the super partner of the electron is called the selectron. The super partner of the quark is called the squark. The superpartner of the lepton (like the electron or neutrino) is called the slepton. But in string theory, something remarkable happens. When calculating quantum corrections to string theory, you have two separate contributions. You have quantum corrections coming from fermions and also bosons. Miraculously, they are equal in size, but occur with the opposite sign. One term might have a positive sign, but there is another term that is negative. In fact, when they are added together, these terms cancel against each other, leaving a finite result. The marriage between relativity and the quantum theory has dogged physicists for almost a century, but the symmetry between fermions and bosons, called supersymmetry, allows us to cancel many of these infinities against each other. Soon, physicists discovered other means of eliminating these infinities, leaving a finite result. So this is the origin of all the excitement surrounding string theory: it can unify gravity with the quantum theory. No other theory can make this claim. This may satisfy Dirac’s original objection. He hated renormalization theory because, in spite of its fantastic and undeniable successes, it involved adding and subtracting quantities that were infinite in size. Here, we see that string theory is finite all by itself, without renormalization

To test these ideas, Dr. Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal recruited a group of fifteen Carmelite nuns who agreed to put their heads into an MRI machine. To qualify for the experiment, all of them must “have had an experience of intense union with God.” Originally, Dr. Beauregard had hoped that the nuns would have a mystical communion with God, which could then be recorded by an MRI scan. However, being shoved into an MRI machine, where you are surrounded by tons of magnetic coils of wire and high-tech equipment, is not an ideal setting for a religious epiphany. The best they could do was to evoke memories of previous religious experiences. “God cannot be summoned at will,” explained one of the nuns. The final result was mixed and inconclusive, but several regions of the brain clearly lit up during this experiment: •  The caudate nucleus, which is involved with learning and possibly falling in love. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling the unconditional love of God?) •  The insula, which monitors body sensations and social emotions. (Perhaps the nuns were feeling close to the other nuns as they were reaching out to God?) •  The parietal lobe, which helps process spatial awareness. (Perhaps the nuns felt they were in the physical presence of God?) Dr. Beauregard had to admit that so many areas of the brain were activated, with so many different possible interpretations, that he could not say for sure whether hyperreligiosity could be induced. However, it was clear to him that the nuns’ religious feelings were reflected in their brain scans. But did this experiment shake the nuns’ belief in God? No. In fact, the nuns concluded that God placed this “radio” in the brain so that we could communicate with Him. Their conclusion was that God created humans to have this ability, so the brain has a divine antenna given to us by God so that we can feel His presence. David Biello concludes, “Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them.” Dr. Beauregard concluded, “If you are an atheist and you live a certain kind of experience, you will relate it to the magnificence of the universe. If you are a Christian, you will associate it with God. Who knows. Perhaps they are the same thing.” Similarly, Dr. Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford University and an outspoken atheist, was once placed in the God helmet to see if his religious beliefs would change. They did not. So in conclusion, although hyperreligiosity may be induced via temporal lobe epilepsy and even magnetic fields, there is no convincing evidence that magnetic fields can alter one’s religious views.

If the symbolic father is often lurking behind the boss--which is why one speaks of 'paternalism' in various kinds of enterprises--there also often is, in a most concrete fashion, a boss or hierarchic superior behind the real father. In the unconscious, paternal functions are inseparable from the socio-professional and cultural involvements which sustain them. Behind the mother, whether real or symbolic, a certain type of feminine condition exists, in a socially defined imaginary context. Must I point out that children do not grow up cut off from the world, even within the family womb? The family is permeable to environmental forces and exterior influences. Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfere with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious is not something that exists by itself to be gotten hold of through intimate discourse. In fact, it is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analyzed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative arrangements, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms... The customary psychoanalytical family-based reductions of the unconscious are not 'errors.' They correspond to a particular kind of collective enunciative arrangement. In relation to unconscious formation, they proceed from the particular micropolitics of capitalistic societal organization. An overly diversified, overly creative machinic unconscious would exceed the limits of 'good behavior' within the relations of production founded upon social exploitation and segregation. This is why our societies grant a special position to those who specialize in recentering the unconscious onto the individuated subject, onto partially reified objects, where methods of containment prevent its expansion beyond dominant realities and significations. The impact of the scientific aspirations of techniques like psychoanalysis and family therapy should be considered as a gigantic industry for the normalization, adaption and organized division of the socius. The workings of the social division of labor, the assignment of individuals to particular productive tasks, no longer depend solely on means of direct coercion, or capitalistic systems of semiotization (the monetary remuneration based on profit, etc.). They depend just as fundamentally on techniques modeling the unconscious through social infrastructures, the mass media, and different psychological and behavioral devices...Even the outcome of the class struggle of the oppressed--the fact that they constantly risk being sucked into relations of domination--appears to be linked to such a perspective.

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: You were also looking for some operational criteria for false memory syndrome: what a clinician could look for or test for, and so on. I spoke with several of our scientific advisory board members and I have some information for you that isn't really in writing at this point but I think it's a direction you want us to go in. So if I can read some of these notes . . . TAT: Please do. Freyd: One would look for false memory syndrome: 1. If a patient reports having been sexually abused by a parent, relative or someone in very early childhood, but then claims that she or he had complete amnesia about it for a decade or more; 2. If the patient attributes his or her current reason for being in therapy to delayed-memories. And this is where one would want to look for evidence suggesting that the abuse did not occur as demonstrated by a list of things, including firm, confident denials by the alleged perpetrators; 3. If there is denial by the entire family; 4. In the absence of evidence of familial disturbances or psychiatric illnesses. For example, if there's no evidence that the perpetrator had alcohol dependency or bipolar disorder or tendencies to pedophilia; 5. If some of the accusations are preposterous or impossible or they contain impossible or implausible elements such as a person being made pregnant prior to menarche, being forced to engage in sex with animals, or participating in the ritual killing of animals, and; 6. In the absence of evidence of distress surrounding the putative abuse. That is, despite alleged abuse going from age two to 27 or from three to 16, the child displayed normal social and academic functioning and that there was no evidence of any kind of psychopathology. Are these the kind of things you were asking for? TAT: Yeah, it's a little bit more specific. I take issue with several, but at least it gives us more of a sense of what you all mean when you say "false memory syndrome." Freyd: Right. Well, you know I think that things are moving in that direction since that seems to be what people are requesting. Nobody's denying that people are abused and there's no one denying that someone who was abused a decade ago or two decades ago probably would not have talked about it to anybody. I think I mentioned to you that somebody who works in this office had that very experience of having been abused when she was a young teenager-not extremely abused, but made very uncomfortable by an uncle who was older-and she dealt with it for about three days at the time and then it got pushed to the back of her mind and she completely forgot about it until she was in therapy. TAT: There you go. That's how dissociation works! Freyd: That's how it worked. And after this came up and she had discussed and dealt with it in therapy, she could again put it to one side and go on with her life. Certainly confronting her uncle and doing all these other things was not a part of what she had to do. Interestingly, though, at the same time, she has a daughter who went into therapy and came up with memories of having been abused by her parents. This daughter ran away and is cutoff from the family-hasn't spoken to anyone for three years. And there has never been any meeting between the therapist and the whole family to try to find out what was involved. TAT: If we take the first example -- that of her own abuse -- and follow the criteria you gave, we would have a very strong disbelief in the truth of what she told.

In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known. To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541): The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body. Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3). By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week. Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.

We must rediscover the structure of the perceived world through a process similar to that of an archaeologist. For the structure of the perceived world is buried under the sedimentations of later knowledge. Digging down to the perceived world, we see that sensory qualities are not opaque, indivisible "givens," which are simply exhibited to a remote consciousness—a favorite idea of classical philosophy. We see too that colors (each surrounded by an affective atmosphere which psychologists have been able to study and define) are themselves different modalities of our co-existence with the world. We also find that spatial forms or distances are not so much relations between different points in objective space as they are relations between these points and a central perspective—our body. In short, these relations are different ways for external stimuli to test, to solicit, and to vary our grasp on the world, our horizontal and vertical anchorage in a place and in a here-and-now. We find that perceived things, unlike geometrical objects, are not bounded entities whose laws of construction we possess a priori, but that they are open, inexhaustible systems which we recognize through a certain style of development, although we are never able, in principle, to explore them entirely, and even though they never give us more than profiles and perspectival views of themselves. Finally, we find that the perceived world, in its turn, is not a pure object of thought without fissures or lacunae; it is, rather, like a universal style shared in by all perceptual beings. While the world no doubt coordinates these perceptual beings, we can never presume that its work is finished. Our world, as Malebranche said, is an "unfinished task." If we now wish to characterize a subject capable of this perceptual experience, it obviously will not be a self-transparent thought, absolutely present to itself without the interference of its body and its history. The perceiving subject is not this absolute thinker; rather, it functions according to a natal pact between our body and the world, between ourselves and our body. Given a perpetually new natural and historical situation to control, the perceiving subject undergoes a continued birth; at each instant it is something new. Every incarnate subject is like an open notebook in which we do not yet know what will be written. Or it is like a new language; we do not know what works it will accomplish but only that, once it has appeared, it cannot fail to say little or much, to have a history and a meaning. The very productivity or freedom of human life, far from denying our situation, utilizes it and turns it into a means of expression.

The apartment building appeared colourless and soulless in the picture. There was not a single person in it, neither on its windows or balconies, nor on the sidewalks or the streets. It resembled a child of war with no living relatives and no eyes to watch her lonely growth. It looked equally placeless. One could not get a clue about what the city surrounding it, if there was one, looked like. It could be anywhere in the world and of any other than the present...

Why hasn’t a lifetime of spirituality in the church, surrounded by the truth of Jesus Christ, transformed deeply their inner lives and marriage? Where is the rich, abundant fruit of a life well lived in God? Why are so many of us living lives with deeply entrenched parts of us apparently untouched by the power and mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ? This entire book, I hope, begins to offer an answer to this challenge. One critical ingredient, however, relates to our need to go back in order to go forward. This can be summed up in two essential biblical truths: 1. The blessings and sins of our families going back two to three generations profoundly impact who we are today. 2. Discipleship requires putting off the sinful patterns of our family of origin and relearning how to do life God’s way in God’s family.

...since there is so much confusion surrounding it in the industry. You will often hear claims to the effect that relational attributes can only be of very simple types (numbers, strings, and so forth). The truth is, however, that there is absolutely nothing in the relational model to support such claims. ...in fact, types can be as simple or as complex as we like, and so we can have attributes whose values are numbers, or strings, or dates, or times, or audio recordings, or maps, or video recordings, or geometric points (etc.). The foregoing message is so important‒and so widely misunderstood‒that we state it again in different terms: The question of what data types are supported is orthogonal to the question of support for the relational model.

In the concert hall, when I reopen my eyes, visible space seems narrow in relation to that other space where the music was unfolding just a moment ago, and even if I keep my eyes open during the performance of the piece, it seems to me that the music is not truly contained in this precise and shabby space. The music insinuates a new dimension across visible space where it unfurls just as, for persons suffering hallucinations, the clear space of perceived things is mysteriously doubled with a 'dark space' where other presences are possible...Music is not in visible space, music erodes visible space, surrounds it, and causes it to shift, such that these overdressed listeners--who take on a judgmental air and exchange comments or smirks without noticing that the ground begins to tremble beneath them--are soon like a ship's crew tossed about on the surface of a stormy sea.

Becoming closer to success in life is very often just relative to the amount of investment one has in faith, work and persistence, as all elements surrounding us can conspire to bring one closer to it, including those that seem to come our way to push us towards directions we didn’t intend to go and aren’t even willing to accept.

As the social sciences became increasingly central to the formulation of public policy, this doctrine reinforced the political and legal drive for school desegregation. So powerful was the presumption that when Congress in 1964 ordered a survey on “the lack of availability of equal educational opportunity for individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin,” James Coleman, the study’s director, could tell an interviewer even before the field work was done: “… the study will show the difference in the quality of schools that the average Negro child and the average white child are exposed to. You know yourself that the difference is going to be striking.” So Coleman and most of the academic establishment were startled and dismayed eight months later by just how little difference his survey detected. When the results were in from this, the second-largest social science research project in history, they produced conclusions sharply at variance with the reigning doctrine. Popular impressions to the contrary, Coleman’s investigators found little difference between physical facilities and curricula at black and white schools. Moreover, the differences they did recognize had little effect on black and white performance. Even racial integration had relatively little impact on student achievement, as measured by standardized tests. The significant variables lay, not in the schools at all, but in the homes from which the children came and the cultural and class influences surrounding those homes. If the Coleman Report—as it came to be known—was a thunderclap in the cloistered world of social science research, its implications for public policy were even more earthshaking. Science magazine called it “a spear pointed at the heart of the cherished American belief that equality of educational opportunity will increase the equality of educational achievements.” But its implications went even deeper than that. For if the family, not the school, made the difference; if the poor, the black, and the disenfranchised were less susceptible to educational influence than hitherto believed; if differences between Americans were rooted in the bedrock of class—then social progress would be far more difficult to achieve than most people of goodwill had assumed.

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not. The birdcage metaphor helps us understand why racism can be so hard to see and recognize: we have a limited view. Without recognizing how our position in relation to the bird defines how much of the cage we can see, we rely on single situations, exceptions, and anecdotal evidence for our understanding, rather than on broader, interlocking patterns. Although there are always exceptions, the patterns are consistent and well documented: People of color are confined and shaped by forces and barriers that are not accidental, occasional, or avoidable. These forces are systematically related to each other in ways that restrict their movement. Individual whites may be “against” racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group. David Wellman succinctly summarizes racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”17 These advantages are referred to as white privilege, a sociological concept referring to advantages that are taken for granted by whites and that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context (government, community, workplace, schools, etc.).18 But let me be clear: stating that racism privileges whites does not mean that individual white people do not struggle or face barriers. It does mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.

What is happening is that we are in a cycle of increased solar activity, and this is the real reason behind global warming trends and climate change in general, which really is happening. The global warming alarmists at the UN have intentionally ignored and clouded the facts surrounding the massive amount of scientific data that clearly shows that warming and cooling of the Earth’s climate is directly related to solar activity.

First, redesign your relational field. Psychically add green to it if you are dealing with a physical illness or trauma; add pink if your core issues are relational in nature, such as social phobias or abuse issues. Add gold if the most striking symptoms are chronic, repetitive, or addictive in nature; if your issues are spiritual (linked with entities or attachments); or if you are lacking in boundaries altogether. You can also combine these colors. Now ask the Divine to link your inner child with a healing stream of grace and to then plug the same stream of grace into your relational field. Request that the Divine fill this field (and surround the child) with the appropriate hue, intensity, and amount of the heart colors just described. Know that this incoming energy will push out all undesirable energies. Allow this healing stream and the incoming energy to continue flowing as long as necessary.

The twelve-petal lotus is another powerful tool for healing physical conditions through the relational boundary. In the Hindu tradition, the symbol for the heart chakra is two superimposed triangles set within a circle, both surrounded by lotus petals. One triangle is right side up; the other points down. These differing directions symbolize a choice: we can either rise to feelings of unconditional love and devotion or fall into despair and negativity. The twelve petals of the lotus represent the higher virtues, those that can lift us up: love, understanding, peace, harmony, empathy, blessing, clarity, unity, compassion, kindness, purity, and forgiveness. The circle reflects unity and perfection.

I have heard politicians like John Major in the U.K. and his counterparts in the U.S. say that what we need to do to solve the problem of crime and violence is to teach criminals to learn the different between right and wrong. In other words, we need to teach them to recognize the difference between justice and injustice, and to pursue the former and eschew the latter. But what the politicians who mouth these sentiments do not realize is that the violent criminals are perfectly aware of the difference between right and wrong. They realize that they have been victims of injustice (most of all, from those who preach to them most loudly about it), and they commit their crimes in order to achieve some measure of justice, by taking something back from a society that has subjected them to a degree of deprivation to which it does not subject others. For example, how can we, as a society, say that we have something to teach about justice, when we permit the perpetuation of an economic system in which some people inherit millions of pounds while most people inherit nothing? How can we speak of equality of opportunity under those conditions? Violent criminals are not violent because they are dumb, out of touch with reality, or unable to recognize hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice when they see it. They are violent precisely because they are aware of the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and injustice that surrounds them and of which they have been the victims. That does not mean that they respond to those conditions in a rational or just way, or that we should tolerate and permit their violence — which affects their fellow victims much more often than it does their oppressors. But it does mean that we cannot expect to stop the kind of violence that we call crime until we stop the kind of violence that I have called structural in "Structural Violence" (1999). By this I mean the deaths and disabilities that are caused by the economic structure of our society, its division into rich and poor. Structural violence is not only the main form of violence, in the sense that poverty kills far more people (almost all of them very poor) than all the behavioral violence put together, it is also the main cause of violent behavior. Eliminating structural violence means eliminating relative poverty.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

In my monastery, as in all those belonging to the Zen tradition, there is a very fine portrait of Bodhidharma. It is a Chinese work of art in ink, depicting the Indian monk with sober and vigorous features. The eyebrows, eyes, and chin of Bodhidharma express an invincible spirit. Bodhidharma lived, it is said, in the fifth century A.D. He is considered to be the First Patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China. It might be that most of the things that are reported about his life have no historical validity; but the personality as well as the mind of this monk, as seen and described through tradition, have made him the ideal man for all those who aspire to Zen enlightenment. It is the picture of a man who has come to perfect mastery of himself, to complete freedom in relation to himself and to his surroundings—a man having that tremendous spiritual power which allows him to regard happiness, unhappiness, and all the vicissitudes of life with an absolute calm. The essence of this personality, however, does not come from a position taken about the problem of absolute reality, nor from an indomitable will, but from a profound vision of his own mind and of living reality. The Zen word used here signifies "seeing into his own nature." When one has reached this enlightenment, one feels all systems of erroneous thought crushed inside oneself. The new vision produces in the one enlightened a deep peace, a great tranquility, as well as a spiritual force characterized by the absence of fear. Seeing into one's own nature is the goal of Zen.

Society is against the heart, because the heart lives through love. And love cannot be controlled and conditioned. The heart is basically rebellious. The heart always lives in the moment. It never repeats the old. The heart always responds to the present moment. This is why society is against the heart. Society disciplines the head, because the head functionslike a machine. Machines are never rebellious. They simply follow orders. They are obedient. Hence the state, the church and the establishment, the status quo, are interested in the head. Our heart is the door to allow existence to guide us – instead of being directed by our own ideas, attitudes and preconceived expectations of how life should be. The heart creates inconvenience for society and for the established order. The heart is spontaneous and never repeats the old. The head lives in the past, which is why the head is traditional and conventional.  The heart relates to unconditional love and acceptance both for ourselves and for other people.  The heart relates to qualities such as empathy, joy, acceptance, trust, intuition, understanding, compassion, playfulness, healing, friendship, sincerity and a sense of oneness in love. Love is not an exclusive relationship with another person; love is the quality that arises when we are in contact with our inner being, with our authentic self, withthe meditative quality within, with the inner silence and emptiness. This inner emptiness is experienced by others and is expressed on the outside as love. This love is not addressed to a specific person; it is a presence that surrounds a person like a fragrance. Love is perfect as it is. Love is enough unto itself. Love has to be understood. Love is the flight of your consciousness to higher realms beyond the body. Love is the fragrance of a rising consciousness. Love is like the fragrance of a flower. The moment you are overflowing with joy, a longing arises to share it. This sharing is love. Love is not something that you can get from somebody else, who has not attained to a state of joy. Everybody is asking to be loved, and pretending to love. You cannot love, because you don't know what consciousness is. You don't know the truth; you don't know the experience of the divine.  You don't know what love is, because you have not yet gone deeper in your consciousness. In this ignorance and blindness love does not grow. If you really want to know love, forget about love and remember meditation. Love is the defeat of all imposed rules and conditions. hence there is  a struggle between the individual who follows his heart and the collective who follows the imposed order. The individual who follows his heart has to be aware of this struggle, because he is moving towards the freedom of being himself. Being himself means that he is not going to be ruled by the collective, by the crowd. It means that now he will live according to his own heart, according to his own light. When he becomes independent, he will start feeling that he is  becoming one with the whole, one with the universal.  It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that we are not separated from life. We begin to understand that we are not small separate islands in a great ocean, but that life is one and that we all are small parts of the Whole. We begin to understand what is really important and meaningful in life. It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that life is about sharing, rather than hoarding. We begin to understand that life is about giving, rather than taking.

Related to this, when we look at people we often are really seeing only their reputation, the myth that surrounds them, the position they occupy, and not the individual.

Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things.

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices.

Not only do we inherit traits from our own parents but also from their parents—also in varying degrees from other relatives.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in India, a married person inherits their spouse’s family. Whether they like it or not. The likelihood of getting along with your spouse over the long term is relatively low if you don’t like your spouse’s first, second, and occasionally, even third cousins. For the record, my in-laws are the best. Investing in companies is no different. Buying into a business means also buying into the industry of that business. For example, while I may think I am investing in a company that makes and sells sanitaryware, I am inheriting all the good and the bad of the sanitaryware industry. No company is an island. We can never ignore the kinds of businesses that surround it.

The procession to the flight and then the numbing experience of flying itself involves a kind of stripping-away of the self and surroundings until everything becomes smooth and uniform. It’s a recognizable feeling—that slight separation from reality that happens when the plane takes off, or the clean burst of anonymity when opening the door of a hotel room for the first time. “The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude,” Augé writes. He describes “the passive joys of identity-loss.

As Monnica T. Williams, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote in Psychology Today in 201521: We are surrounded by constant reminders that race-related danger can occur at any time, anywhere, to anyone. We might see clips on the nightly news featuring unarmed African Americans being killed on the street, in a holding cell, or even in a church. Learning of these events brings up an array of painful racially-charged memories, and what has been termed “vicarious traumatization.” Even if the specific tragic news item has never happened to us directly, we may have had parents or aunts who have had similar experiences, or we know people in our community who have, and their stories have been passed down. Over the centuries the Black community has developed a cultural knowledge of these sorts of horrific events, which then primes us for traumatization when we hear about yet another act of violence. Another unarmed Black man has been shot by police in our communities and nowhere feels safe.

The major benefit is that ALBA is essentially a barter system, in which countries decide for themselves what any given commodity or service is worth, rather than letting traders in New York, Chicago or London set the prices for them. That makes trade far less vulnerable to the kind of sudden price fluctuations that devastated Latin American economies in the recent past. Surrounded by turbulent financial waters, Latin America is creating a zone of relative economic calm and predictability, a feat presumed impossible in the globalization era.