System Of A Down Love Quotes

The one thing I know for sure is that feelings are rarely mutual, so when they are, drop everything, forget belongings and expectations, forget the games, the two days between texts, the hard to gets because this is it, this is what the entire world is after and you’ve stumbled upon it by chance, by accident––so take a deep breath, take a step forward, now run, collide like planets in the system of a dying sun, embrace each other with both arms and let all the rules, the opinions and common sense crash down around you. Because this is love kid, and it’s all yours. Believe me, you're in for one hell of a ride, after all––this is the one thing I know for sure.

Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live. In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake. That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead. And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

Anyway. I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!” I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

the greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. they put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools of systems in their name. they never create or stir but just melt down into love

I call the high and light aspects of my being SPIRIT and the dark and heavy aspects SOUL. Soul is at home in the deep shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowes saturated with black grow there. The rivers flow like arm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul. Spirit is a land of high,white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sound travels great distances. There is soul music, soul food, and soul love. People need to climb the mountain not because it is there But because the soulful divinity need to be mated with the Spirit. Deep down we must have a rel affection for each other, a clear recognition of our shared human status. At the same time we must openly accept all ideologies and systems as means of solving humanity's problems. No matter how strong the wind of evil may blow, the flame of truth cannot be extinguished.

Pondering all this down in Reva's black room under her sad, pilly sheets, I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn't bring them up in me. I couldn't even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best - a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body. But that seemed directly tied to my nervous system - a physiological response. Was sadness the same kind of thing? Was joy? Was longing? Was love?

When all great movements are in their infancy, they are nourished basically on the mother's milk of righteous indignation. It is a time of red-faced screaming and finger pointing. That's a good thing - we need to be angry to move toward any systemic change. But ultimately the fingers have to stop pointing and the hand has got to get down to work - and the work is always messy.

A lot of people don’t heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives,” she said once. “Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, Meredith said, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.

I’m such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don’t know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down! I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it. I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me. Nature is horrible. It’s not cute and loveable. It’s kill or be killed. It’s very dangerous out there. The natural world is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in time. Reproduction – what could be more existentially repulsive? How I hate the courting ritual. I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth never left me alone. I was constantly driven by frustrated desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it. Old age is the only relief. I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor. I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.

Keeping feelings inside eventually will take its toll on one's health. Repression is a constant force that wears the system down, resulting in, possibly, a shorter life span.

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water—all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.

They will try to label you one thing. As if people can be categorized so easily. They fail to see their systems flaw. You are not one thing. You are many things. So full of personality and potential. Bravery and intelligence. Capability and love. Take the labels they have so generously given you and shove them down the garbage chute. Show them. Show them they were wrong. - 2:01 am

Here’s to the misfits and foolish ones who think differently. They’re not fond of simplicity. They live unconventionally existing at a different level of intensity. They add elasticity and flexibility to what’s inflexibly rigid, bringing warmth to the frigid systems of existence. You can hate them acidicly, discredit their credibility or even oppose them ritualistically. Look down on them cynically, say they became great accidentally, rain on them torrentially or see brilliance academically. You can look and see density or see a lovely symphony. About the only thing you can’t do is disqualify their eligibility. Because they change history. Everything in existence moves them restlessly on to destiny backed by infinity. Their spirit is immensity, they overcome resiliently and follow their hearts existentially. Though they may be misunderstood until the next century, we see their opponents’ adrenaline as only minimally convincing, simply for a time because in them there’s a tendency for the divine to visit earth coincidentally. And while others may see misfits and foolishness we see wisdom and genius because the ones crazy enough to think they can live and love limitlessly are the ones who actually do.

When love appears in the heart, it removes all causes of excitation from the system and cools it down to a perfectly normal state; and, invigorating the vital powers, expels all foreign matters - the germs of disease - by natural ways (perspiration and so forth). It thereby makes man perfectly healthy in body and mind.

The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

No Child of Yours I saw a child hide in the corner So I went and asked her name She was so naive and so petite With such a tiny frame. 'No one,' she replied, that's what I am called I have no family, no one at all I eat, I sleep, I get depressed There is no life, I have nothing left.' 'Why hide in the corner?' I had to ask twice Because I've been hurt, it not very nice I tried to stop it, it was out of my control I feared for myself I wanted to go. I begged for my sorrow to disappear I turned in my bed, oh God, I knew they were near 'So come on little girl, where do you go A path ahead, or a path to unknown?' With that she arose, her head hung low She held herself for only she knows Her tears held back, her heart like ice It looks as though she has paid the price. The ice started melting, her tears to flow The memories flood back, still so many years to go The pain, the anger all built up inside Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. It will get better, just wait and see You'll get a life, though you'll never be fire Open your heart and love yourself The abuse you suffered was NOT your fault.

When someone in your family system does something that violates your trust and doesn’t do anything or very little to restore it, then closing off and shutting down might feel like the only option.

The two men sat silent for a little, and then Lord Peter said: "D'you like your job?" The detective considered the question, and replied: "Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to the mark and not get slack. And there's a future to it. Yes, I like it. Why?" "Oh, nothing," said Peter. "It's a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I'd enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn't know any of the people and it's just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don't seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin' in, since I don't have to make my livin' by it. And I feel as if I oughtn't ever to find it amusin'. But I do.

There is a saturation of books on Amazon due to a sudden get-rich-quick surge in "everyone can be authors" seminars similar to the house flipping ones in the early 2000s which led to the housing bubble and an economic slowdown in the U.S. To distinguish quality books from those get-rich-quick ones, look at the author's track record - worldwide recognition as books that garnered credible awards, authors who speak at book industry events, authors who speak at schools, authors whose books are reference materials and reading sources at school and libraries. Get-rich books have a system to get over 500 reviews quickly, manipulates the Kindle Unlimited algorithm, and encourage collusion in the marketplace to knock out rivals. Be wary of trolls who are utilized to knock down the rankings of rival's books too. Once people have heard there is money to be made as a self-published author, just like house flipping, a cottage industry has risen to take advantage of it and turn book publishing into a get rich scheme, which is a shame for all the book publishers and authors, like me, who had published for the love of books, to write to help society, and for the love of literature. Kailin Gow, Parents and Books

dear samantha i’m sorry we have to get a divorce i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain: it’s not you it sure as hell isn’t me it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night i know you would never DO anything, you never do but.. i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication. after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away this is not true after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down while he still has control over his motor functions he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes spooning every morsel into her mouth she wastes nothing even the exoskeleton goes she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them now that.. is selflessness i could never do that for you so i have a new plan i’m gonna leave you now i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices i hope you do the same i will jay walk at every opportunity i will steal things i could easily afford i will be rude to strangers i hope you do the same i hope reincarnation is real i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures i hope we are reborn as flies so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.

You make out with a boy because he’s cute, but he has no substance, no words to offer you. His mouth tastes like stale beer and false promises. When he touches your chin, you offer your mouth up like a flower to to be plucked, all covered in red lipstick to attract his eye. When he reaches his hand down your shirt, he stops, hand on boob, and squeezes, like you’re a fruit he’s trying to juice. He doesn’t touch anything but skin, does not feel what’s within. In the morning, he texts you only to say, “I think I left the rest of my beer at your place, but it’s cool, you can drink it. Last night was fun.” You kiss a girl because she’s new. Because she’s different and you’re twenty two, trying something else out because it’s all failed before. After spending six weekends together, you call her, only to be answered by a harsh beep informing you that her number has been disconnected. You learn that success doesn’t come through experimenting with your sexuality, and you’re left with a mouth full of ruin and more evidence that you are out of tune. You fall for a boy who is so nice, you don’t think he can do any harm. When he mentions marriage and murder in the same sentence, you say, “Okay, okay, okay.” When you make a joke he does not laugh, but tilts his head and asks you how many drinks you’ve had in such a loving tone that you sober up immediately. He leaves bullet in your blood and disappears, saying, “Who wants a girl that’s filled with holes?” You find out that a med student does. He spots you reading in a bar and compliments you on the dust spilling from your mouth. When you see his black doctor’s bag posed loyally at his side, you ask him if he’s got the tools to fix a mangled nervous system. He smiles at you, all teeth, and tells you to come with him. In the back of his car, he covers you in teethmarks and says, “There, now don’t you feel whole again.” But all the incisions do is let more cold air into your bones. You wonder how many times you will collapse into ruins before you give up on rebuilding. You wonder if maybe you’d have more luck living amongst your rubble instead of looking for someone to repair it. The next time someone promises to flood you with light to erase your dark, you insist them you’re fine the way you are. They tell you there’s hope, that they had holes in their chest too, that they know how to patch them up. When they offer you a bottle in exchange for your mouth, you tell them you’re not looking for a way out. No, thank you, you tell them. Even though you are filled with ruins and rubble, you are as much your light as you are your dark.

Humans love to make things complicated. Look at belief. They build whole morality and judgment systems on it—who believes what, believes in the right way, believes strongly enough. It’s so unnecessary. Belief, when you get right down to it, is just a powerful story. Tell a story well, and the reader doesn’t just want it to be true—they know it is. Get enough souls to believe in a story, and you can change the world. Or make one.

The system works because it’s not questioned. The system works because men think they are passing it down out of love, when of course denying boys the full experience of their humanity is what truly loving them would look like.

Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred. Freedom is from within. Notwithstanding all the abuses to which freedom is now subject--marking man down as a commercial item and cutting him off from his birthright by senseless excess and the demoralization of the profit-system--yet man may still be in love with life and find life less and less abundant for this very reason. Truth is of freedom, always safe and affirmative, therefore conservative. Truth proclaims rejection of dated minor traditions, doomed by the great Tradition of The Law of Change is truth's great "eternal." Freedom is this "great becoming.

What rhymes with insensitive?” I tap my pen on the kitchen table, beyond frustrated with my current task. Who knew rhyming was so fucking difficult? Garrett, who’s dicing onions at the counter, glances over. “Sensitive,” he says helpfully. “Yes, G, I’ll be sure to rhyme insensitive with sensitive. Gold star for you.” On the other side of the kitchen, Tucker finishes loading the dishwasher and turns to frown at me. “What the hell are you doing over there, anyway? You’ve been scribbling on that notepad for the past hour.” “I’m writing a love poem,” I answer without thinking. Then I slam my lips together, realizing what I’ve done. Dead silence crashes over the kitchen. Garrett and Tucker exchange a look. An extremely long look. Then, perfectly synchronized, their heads shift in my direction, and they stare at me as if I’ve just escaped from a mental institution. I may as well have. There’s no other reason for why I’m voluntarily writing poetry right now. And that’s not even the craziest item on Grace’s list. That’s right. I said it. List. The little brat texted me not one, not two, but six tasks to complete before she agrees to a date. Or maybe gestures is a better way to phrase it... “I just have one question,” Garrett starts. “Really?” Tuck says. “Because I have many.” Sighing, I put my pen down. “Go ahead. Get it out of your systems.” Garrett crosses his arms. “This is for a chick, right? Because if you’re doing it for funsies, then that’s just plain weird.” “It’s for Grace,” I reply through clenched teeth. My best friend nods solemnly. Then he keels over. Asshole. I scowl as he clutches his side, his broad back shuddering with each bellowing laugh. And even while racked with laughter, he manages to pull his phone from his pocket and start typing. “What are you doing?” I demand. “Texting Wellsy. She needs to know this.” “I hate you.” I’m so busy glaring at Garrett that I don’t notice what Tucker’s up to until it’s too late. He snatches the notepad from the table, studies it, and hoots loudly. “Holy shit. G, he rhymed jackass with Cutlass.” “Cutlass?” Garrett wheezes. “Like the sword?” “The car,” I mutter. “I was comparing her lips to this cherry-red Cutlass I fixed up when I was a kid. Drawing on my own experience, that kind of thing.” Tucker shakes his head in exasperation. “You should have compared them to cherries, dumbass.” He’s right. I should have. I’m a terrible poet and I do know it. “Hey,” I say as inspiration strikes. “What if I steal the words to “Amazing Grace”? I can change it to…um…Terrific Grace.” “Yup,” Garrett cracks. “Pure gold right there. Terrific Grace.” I ponder the next line. “How sweet…” “Your ass,” Tucker supplies. Garrett snorts. “Brilliant minds at work. Terrific Grace, how sweet your ass.” He types on his phone again. “Jesus Christ, will you quit dictating this conversation to Hannah?” I grumble. “Bros before hos, dude.” “Call my girlfriend a ho one more time and you won’t have a bro.” Tucker chuckles. “Seriously, why are you writing poetry for this chick?” “Because I’m trying to win her back. This is one of her requirements.” That gets Garrett’s attention. He perks up, phone poised in hand as he asks, “What are the other ones?” “None of your fucking business.” “Golly gee, if you do half as good a job on those as you’re doing with this epic poem, then you’ll get her back in no time!” I give him the finger. “Sarcasm not appreciated.” Then I swipe the notepad from Tuck’s hand and head for the doorway. “PS? Next time either of you need to score points with your ladies? Don’t ask me for help. Jackasses.” Their wild laughter follows me all the way upstairs. I duck into my room and kick the door shut, then spend the next hour typing up the sorriest excuse for poetry on my laptop. Jesus. I’m putting more effort into this damn poem than for my actual classes.

It may be the first day of your life, the prime of youth or several decades in, when Medicine Woman calls you. Your name on her list. Her new initiate. She crept in whilst you were sleeping, when you over-exerted, when you kissed him, or ate that, or lived there or pushed too hard just one time too many. She crept in and curled up in your cells, your heart, waiting to meet you. Longing to know you. Longing for you to know her, at last. And what feels like the end is in fact a beginning, of a new road, an unknown path of pain and healing. She will show you how to slow down, she will run her fingers roughly through your life and help you sort the busyness from what matters, she will show you how to find support… and who you really are, beyond your roles and expectations… and even more beyond the System the world has forced you into. She transports you into the timelessness of big pains and tiny joys. Initiates you into your strength. Into your love. Into your courage. Into a world beyond your control. She has sent me an invitation. I see yours too, tucked in your bag, amongst all the receipts and bills, the pens and detritus of life. Take it out. It is time.

Love of Enemies' does not ease tensions; rather it challenges the whole system and becomes a subversive formula. Universal love comes down from the level of abstractions and becomes concrete and effective by becoming incarnate in the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed.

The whole point of meditation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and, however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practising of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and, like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self-isolation which is the common movement of one’s everyday life.

I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love?

The average person wastes his life. He has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. The life of an average person seems at the end utterly meaningless…without significance. When he looks back…what has he done? MIND The mind creates routine for its own safety and convenience. Tradition becomes our security. But when the mind is secure it is in decay. We all want to be famous people…and the moment we want to be something…we are no longer free. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential…the what is. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything new…and in that there’s joy. To awaken this capacity in oneself and in others is real education. SOCIETY It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals…whereas culture has invented a single mold to which we must conform. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person because he conforms to a pattern. He repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. What happens to your heart and your mind when you are merely imitative, naturally they wither, do they not? The great enemy of mankind is superstition and belief which is the same thing. When you separate yourself by belief tradition by nationally it breeds violence. Despots are only the spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power which is in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared there will be confusion and classes…hate and wars. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country to any religion to any political party. He is concerned with the understanding of mankind. FEAR You have religion. Yet the constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. You can only be afraid of what you think you know. One is never afraid of the unknown…one is afraid of the known coming to an end. A man who is not afraid is not aggressive. A man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free and peaceful mind. You want to be loved because you do not love…but the moment you really love, it is finished. You are no longer inquiring whether someone loves you or not. MEDITATION The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. In meditation you will discover the whisperings of your own prejudices…your own noises…the monkey mind. You have to be your own teacher…truth is a pathless land. The beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are…where you are going…what the end is. Down deep we all understand that it is truth that liberates…not your effort to be free. The idea of ourselves…our real selves…is your escape from the fact of what you really are. Here we are talking of something entirely different….not of self improvement…but the cessation of self. ADVICE Take a break with the past and see what happens. Release attachment to outcomes…inside you will feel good no matter what. Eventually you will find that you don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom…it is timeless spiritual truth. If you can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it. The answer is not separate from the problem. Suffer and understand…for all of that is part of life. Understanding and detachment…this is the secret. DEATH There is hope in people…not in societies not in systems but only in you and me. The man who lives without conflict…who lives with beauty and love…is not frightened by death…because to love is to die.

But if your parents pay the bills, they run the house. The emphasis is less on raising someone who can take care of themselves and more on following the ideas that have been passed down to you. And then suddenly, you're 18, you become a baby adult who is so angry and doesn't know how to self-soothe. You only know how to soothe your parents' nervous system.

When they feel the threat of intimacy, which would expose them to the enormous pain of not having their emotions acknowledged, their system shuts down and focuses on the tasks at hand.

We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect. Arthur Balfour, The Foundations of Belief, eighth edition, pp. 30-31.

The “9/11 truth movement” seemed to reach peak momentum around 2006. Possible factors in the slow-down since then include infiltration, infighting and fatigue. The economic crisis focused concern on existential issues. Elections under the two-party system always force attention to the politically correct middle ground, and the color revolution of the false prophet Obama sapped the energies of many idealists. Regime rotation removed Bush, the target the opposition most loved to hate. With him and his neo-con team went also much of the immediate and obvious relevance of 9/11. Is there still a way forward with 9/11 awareness as a political force? There needs to be, if only because if they can get away with 9/11, they can get away with anything.

As readers, as people, we might not have the capacity to change the justice system. But as Dylan says in the book, we can change one person’s perspective at a time. We can notice. We can speak up. We can teach this generation, my generation, that the way sexual assault is viewed and treated in this country is not okay, so that when it is our turn to step into the shoes of political office and criminal justice, we can continue changing the narrative from a place of power. And more than anything, we can support. And we can empower. We can love. We can be better.

dear samantha i’m sorry we have to get a divorce i know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain: it’s not you it sure as hell isn’t me it’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects do i love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our species i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night i know you would never DO anything, you never do but.. i saw the way you looked at the waiter last night did you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication. after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought together like if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go away this is not true after two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down while he still has control over his motor functions he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes spooning every morsel into her mouth she wastes nothing even the exoskeleton goes she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them now that.. is selflessness i could never do that for you so i have a new plan i’m gonna leave you now i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices i hope you do the same i will jay walk at every opportunity i will steal things i could easily afford i will be rude to strangers i hope you do the same i hope reincarnation is real i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures i hope we are reborn as flies so that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to

There is a single truth, it filters through different stories and languages because people come from different cultures and speak different languages. And this truth has manifested itself through millennia, in multiple ways. Different people belong to different manifestations of truth. Some people take those manifestations and turn them into religions, or into gathering places or into a system. Others take those manifestations and allow that light to illuminate the paths on their inward journeys. All in all, the only reason why there is strife or hatred in any way, is because of the strife and hatred and intolerance inside of people. Truth does not call for any division or any hatred or intolerance of any kind. In order to love one thing, this does not mean we need to put down another one.

Child, all books are magic. Just think,' he said, 'about what books make people do. People go to war on the basis of what they read in books. They believe in "facts" just because they are written down. They decide to adopt political systems, to travel to one place rather than another, to give up their job and go on a great adventure, to love or to hate. All books have tremendous power. And power is magic.' 'But are these books really magic...?

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made. I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.

The wild is an integral part of who we are as children. Without pausing to consider what or where or how, we gather herbs and flowers, old apples and rose hips, shiny pebbles and dead spiders, poems, tears and raindrops, putting each treasured thing into the cauldron of our souls. We stir our bucket of mud as if it were, every one, a bucket of chocolate cake to be mixed for the baking. Little witches, hag children, we dance our wildness, not afraid of not knowing. But there comes a time when the kiss of acceptance is delayed until the mud is washed from our knees, the chocolate from our faces. Putting down our wooden spoon with a new uncertainty, setting aside our magical wand, we learn another system of values based on familiarity, on avoiding threat and rejection. We are told it is all in the nature of growing up. But it isn't so. Walking forward and facing the shadows, stumbling on fears like litter in the alleyways of our minds, we can find the confidence again. We can let go of the clutter of our creative stagnation, abandoning the chaos of misplaced and outdated assumptions that have been our protection. Then beyond the half light and shadows, we can slip into the dark and find ourselves in a world where horizons stretch forever. Once more we can acknowledge a reality that is unlimited finding our true self, a wild spirit, free and eager to explore the extent of our potential, free to dance like fireflies, free to be the drum, free to love absolutely with every cell of our being, or lie in the grass watching stars and bats and dreams wander by. We can live inspired, stirring the darkness of the cauldron within our souls, the source, the womb temple of our true creativity, brilliant, untamed

[...] and I took her words as an insult and walked straight out and down the stairs and into the street. Is this the end, I wondered, playacting to myself? There's no need ever to go back. If I can get her out of my system, can't I find somewhere a quiet friendly marriage that would go on and on? Then perhaps I wouldn't feel jealous because I wouldn't love enough: I would just be secure, and my self-pity and hatred walked hand in hand across the darkening Common like idiots without a keeper.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don't mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favouritism. To reject this new social order was to reject Jesus, the very movement of God in flesh and blood.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

At once, the security system rewarded him with his worst memory. It was none of the memories he’d been expecting, but rather the one when he discovered that his father, in his will, had left him not the Barns, which Niall had loved, but rather a previous unknown town house in DC, because Declan had told him he wanted to be a politician, a desire Niall had not understood in the slightest. Boyo, he asked, do you know what politicians do? Declan emerged from the security system to find Jordan standing there waiting for him. He sat down directly in the middle of the drive with his hand tenderly over his wounded side and, for the first time since Niall had died, he cried. Jordan sat next to him and said nothing so he did not have to cry alone. After a space, a host of strange animals came out of the woods and sobbed with him, to keep him company. When he was finally done crying, Ronan drove to the end of the driveway to collect Declan’s spent body and take him and Jordan back to the farmhouse. “I miss them, too,” Ronan said.

You have some lovely books," she said. "I like the one with the pictures of polar bears." "The books with words too tricky?" She released a strangled laugh. "Would you care to explain the system?" Turner stared at the shelves. Matty moved in front of him and pointed. "They're sorted by color." "Ah." Dear God. "And by size." "Mmm." Turner felt his mouth start to twitch. "It didn't occur to you to shelve them alphabetically by author name or even title?" "Well, yes, but no." "The thing is, you have so many. I organized one boxful only to find the next box wrecked what I'd done so I thought they'd look nicer if all the same color spines sat together. I tried to follow the colors of the spectrum. Look, the books go up and down in waves." He'd noticed. It made him feel seasick.

When I choose to love my body, to look at it with compassion and remember all the awesome things it can do, I am rebelling against a system that wants to keep me down. I am actively protesting the status quo that aims to keep me self-obsessed, self-critical, and self-oppressing.

During my first few months of Facebooking, I discovered that my page had fostered a collective nostalgia for specific cultural icons. These started, unsurprisingly, within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. They commonly included a pointy-eared Vulcan from a certain groundbreaking 1960s television show. Just as often, though, I found myself sharing images of a diminutive, ancient, green and disarmingly wise Jedi Master who speaks in flip-side down English. Or, if feeling more sinister, I’d post pictures of his black-cloaked, dark-sided, heavy-breathing nemesis. As an aside, I initially received from Star Trek fans considerable “push-back,” or at least many raised Spock brows, when I began sharing images of Yoda and Darth Vader. To the purists, this bordered on sacrilege.. But as I like to remind fans, I was the only actor to work within both franchises, having also voiced the part of Lok Durd from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It was the virality of these early posts, shared by thousands of fans without any prodding from me, that got me thinking. Why do we love Spock, Yoda and Darth Vader so much? And what is it about characters like these that causes fans to click “like” and “share” so readily? One thing was clear: Cultural icons help people define who they are today because they shaped who they were as children. We all “like” Yoda because we all loved The Empire Strikes Back, probably watched it many times, and can recite our favorite lines. Indeed, we all can quote Yoda, and we all have tried out our best impression of him. When someone posts a meme of Yoda, many immediately share it, not just because they think it is funny (though it usually is — it’s hard to go wrong with the Master), but because it says something about the sharer. It’s shorthand for saying, “This little guy made a huge impact on me, not sure what it is, but for certain a huge impact. Did it make one on you, too? I’m clicking ‘share’ to affirm something you may not know about me. I ‘like’ Yoda.” And isn’t that what sharing on Facebook is all about? It’s not simply that the sharer wants you to snortle or “LOL” as it were. That’s part of it, but not the core. At its core is a statement about one’s belief system, one that includes the wisdom of Yoda. Other eminently shareable icons included beloved Tolkien characters, particularly Gandalf (as played by the inimitable Sir Ian McKellan). Gandalf, like Yoda, is somehow always above reproach and unfailingly epic. Like Yoda, Gandalf has his darker counterpart. Gollum is a fan favorite because he is a fallen figure who could reform with the right guidance. It doesn’t hurt that his every meme is invariably read in his distinctive, blood-curdling rasp. Then there’s also Batman, who seems to have survived both Adam West and Christian Bale, but whose questionable relationship to the Boy Wonder left plenty of room for hilarious homoerotic undertones. But seriously, there is something about the brooding, misunderstood and “chaotic-good” nature of this superhero that touches all of our hearts.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

Our language has folded us in half for most of our existence. We need language that will challenge us to get up from our knees, hand us back our dignity, ignite our compassion, and help us find all those crucial ways we need to live love into the world. Language that reinforces a system of belief that can drive someone back down to his knees, remove his dignity, hold him to a standard he can never meet, and silence his objection to the way things are with the promise of something no one has the right to promise unless she also has the power to bring it about is repugnant.

We are more than conquerors through him that loved us. We shall cast down the powers of darkness which are in the world, by our faith, and zeal, and holiness; we shall win sinners to Jesus, we shall overturn false systems, we shall convert nations, for God is with us, and none shall stand before us.

Trust the unpredictable intelligence of healing, and know that their “symptoms” may get worse before they get better; energy may become more intense before it dies down. What appears now as chaos and disintegration may in fact be a necessary release and an intelligent reorganization of blocked systems.

To keep the entire body in shape, tend to every part of it, every limb, every organ, every joint and system. Educate yourself about your own body. Learn what to feed it and how to fuel it. Learn what keeps it from breaking down and do those things. To not love you, is breaking one of God’s three highest commandments.

There is a persistent belief amongst abled people that a cure is what disabled people should want. To abandon our disabled selves and bodies and assimilate into a perhaps unachievable abled skin. Pushback to this idea often comes in the form of the social model of disability, which states that we are disabled by society and lack of access rather than by our bodies. For many, the social model can be liberating: by locating the cause of our problems outside our bodies, we can begin to love ourselves again. Tackling systemic ableism may feel like tilting at windmills, but it is still easier to address than some kind of failing within ourselves. There is a criticism of the social model of disability, located in the idea that some disabled people may want a cure. Particularly with matters like chronic pain/chronic illness, a cure is seen as something that can itself be liberating: a way to simply be in one’s body without feeling pain, for example. There is a danger in the cure mentality, as it can be a slippery slope toward eugenics when it is applied by abled people. Many in the Deaf and autistic communities do not want a cure and feel that those who advocate for a cure are advocating that they not exist anymore. Sometimes it comes down to how we see our individual disabilities: Are they an intrinsic part of who we are? Or are they an identity that comes with a side of agony we would gladly give up? How do we feel when abled people start advocating for “cures”—which may come in the form of eliminating our people entirely—rather than when the desire for a cure comes from disabled advocates?

It does not require much thinking to know that, under the operation of the brute law of force, the modern world is pressed down with the weight of misery and affliction, in spite of the vast system of organized Government and mechanical contrivances to make man happy. There seems to be no relief, unless we revert to the law of Love

Nick grinned, swooping in for another kiss and then leaning back and scruffing his hair up. “Harriet Manners, I’m about to give you six stamps. Then I’m going to write something on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope with your address on it.” “OK …” “Then I’m going to put the envelope on the floor and spin us as fast as I can. As soon as either of us manage to stick a stamp on it, I’m going to race to the postbox and post it unless you can catch me first. If you win, you can read it.” Nick was obviously faster than me, but he didn’t know where the nearest postbox was. “Deal,” I agreed, yawning and rubbing my eyes. “But why six stamps?” “Just wait and see.” A few seconds later, I understood. As we spun in circles with our hands stretched out, one of my stamps got stuck to the ground at least a metre away from the envelope. Another ended up on a daisy. A third somehow got stuck to the roundabout. One of Nick’s ended up on his nose. And every time we both missed, we laughed harder and harder and our kisses got dizzier and dizzier until the whole world was a giggling, kissing, spinning blur. Finally, when we both had one stamp left, I stopped giggling. I had to win this. So I swallowed, wiped my eyes and took a few deep breaths. Then I reached out my hand. “Too late!” Nick yelled as I opened my eyes again. “Got it, Manners!” And he jumped off the still-spinning roundabout with the envelope held high over his head. So I promptly leapt off too. Straight into a bush. Thanks to a destabilised vestibular system – which is the upper portion of the inner ear – the ground wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Nick, in the meantime, had ended up flat on his back on the grass next to me. With a small shout I leant down and kissed him hard on the lips. “HA!” I shouted, grabbing the envelope off him and trying to rip it open. “I don’t think so,” he grinned, jumping up and wrapping one arm round my waist while he retrieved it again. Then he started running in a zigzag towards the postbox. A few seconds later, I wobbled after him. And we stumbled wonkily down the road, giggling and pulling at each other’s T-shirts and hanging on to tree trunks and kissing as we each fought for the prize. Finally, he picked me up and, without any effort, popped me on top of a high wall. Like Humpty Dumpty. Or some kind of really unathletic cat. “Hey!” I shouted as he whipped the envelope out of my hands and started sprinting towards the postbox at the bottom of the road. “That’s not fair!” “Course it is,” he shouted back. “All’s fair in love and war.” And Nick kissed the envelope then put it in the postbox with a flourish. I had to wait three days. Three days of lingering by the front door. Three days of lifting up the doormat, just in case it had accidentally slipped under there. Finally, the letter arrived: crumpled and stained with grass. Ha. Told you I was faster. LBxx

I always felt that someone, a long time ago, organized the affairs of the world into areas that made sense-catagories of stuff that is perfectible, things that fit neatly in perfect bundles. The world of business, for example, is this way-line items, spreadsheets, things that add up, that can be perfected. The legal system-not always perfect, but nonetheless a mind-numbing effort to actually write down all kinds of laws and instructions that cover all aspects of being human, a kind of umbrella code of conduct we should all follow. Perfection is crucial in building an aircraft, a bridge, or a high-speed train. The code and mathematics residing just below the surface of the Internet is also this way. Things are either perfectly right or they will not work. So much of the world we work and live in is based upon being correct, being perfect. But after this someone got through organizing everything just perfectly, he (or probably a she) was left with a bunch of stuff that didn't fit anywhere-things in a shoe box that had to go somewhere. So in desperation this person threw up her arms and said, 'OK! Fine. All the rest of this stuff that isn't perfectible, that doesn't seem to fit anywhere else, will just have to be piled into this last, rather large, tattered box that we can sort of push behind the couch. Maybe later we can come back and figure where it all is supposed to fit in. Let's label the box ART.' The problem was thankfully never fixed, and in time the box overflowed as more and more art piled up. I think the dilemma exists because art, among all the other tidy categories, most closely resembles what it is like to be human. To be alive. It is our nature to be imperfect. The have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don't sometimes necessarily make sense. Art is all just perfectly imperfect. Once the word ART enters the description of what you're up to , it is almost getting a hall pass from perfection. It thankfully releases us from any expectation of perfection. In relation to my own work not being perfect, I just always point to the tattered box behind the couch and mention the word ART, and people seem to understand and let you off the hook about being perfect a go back to their business.

The other day I went to the pizza parlor with a friend and our kids. We ordered pizza and sat down. Suddenly a song came on the sound system there. There was a refrain about driving all night to get to his lover. It reminded me so much of Chris. He’d literally done that when we first met. I crumbled. “Just a song that got to me,” I told the others through my tears. “I’m okay.

In general, here is how it works: The teacher stands in front of the class and asks a question. Six to ten children strain in their seats and wave their hands in the teacher’s face, eager to be called on and show how smart they are. Several others sit quietly with eyes averted, trying to become invisible, When the teacher calls on one child, you see looks of disappointment and dismay on the faces of the eager students, who missed a chance to get the teacher’s approval; and you will see relief on the faces of the others who didn’t know the answer…. This game is fiercely competitive and the stakes are high, because the kids are competing for the love and approval of one of the two or three most important people in their world. Further, this teaching process guarantees that the children will not learn to like and understand each other. Conjure up your own experience. If you knew the right answer and the teacher called on someone else, you probably hoped that he or she would make a mistake so that you would have a chance to display your knowledge. If you were called on and failed, or if you didn’t even raise your hand to compete, you probably envied and resented your classmates who knew the answer. Children who fail in this system become jealous and resentful of the successes, putting them down as teacher’s pets or even resorting to violence against them in the school yard. The successful students, for their part, often hold the unsuccessful children in contempt, calling them “dumb” or “stupid.” This competitive process does not encourage anyone to look benevolently and happily upon his fellow students.77

By habit we perceive ourselves and the world around us as solid, real, and enduring. Yet without much effort, we can easily determine that not one aspect within the whole world’s system exists independent of change. I had just been in one physical location, and now I was in another; I had experienced different states of mind. We have all grown from babies to adults, lost loved ones, watched children grow, known changes in weather, in political regimes, in styles of music and fashion, in everything. Despite appearances, no aspect of life ever stays the same. The deconstruction of any one object—no matter how dense it appears, such as an ocean liner, our bodies, a skyscraper, or an oak tree—will reveal the appearance of solidity to be as illusory as permanence. Everything that looks substantial will break down into molecules, and into atoms, and into electrons, protons, and neutrons. And every phenomenon exists in interdependence with myriad other forms. Every identification of any one form has meaning only in relationship to another. Big only has meaning in relation to small. To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.

The topic of disinterested, non-calculating, and purposeless love for the sake of love is central to mysticism as such. To love God, not because of powerful institutions, or even because God commands it, but to do so in an act of unencumbered freedom, is the very source of mystical relation. To love God is all the reason there needs to be . . . The orthodoxies that have been handed down to us in the monotheistic religions called for obedience to the commanding God. They threatened with punishment and enticed with rewards - images of hell and heaven resting on that authority. In technologically advanced centers of the world, authoritarian religious systems are in sharp decline. Mystical perceptions and approaches to God, however, are entirely different: "God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting Beauty" (Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy). Mysticism may he regarded as the anti-authoritarian religion per se. In it, the commanding lord becomes the beloved; what is to come later becomes the now; and naked or even enlightened self-interest that is oriented by reward and punishment becomes mystical freedom.

Look, consider there are two types of myths. One like the politicians throw at us, the one that uses the word myth to mean ‘lie.’ They use it to bludgeon an idea. Like it was a myth, a lie, that the healthcare system in this country wasn’t broken. When we all knew it was terribly broken. Using myth that way is a bastardization of our language, a manipulation, a fabrication. And of course those types of myths get repeated over and over again. Just like false family myths.” I didn’t want to encourage him, but I loved watching his mind in motion. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me about the other kind of myth.” “The original, ancient meaning of myth is that it’s a truth that’s been passed down through the ages by men and women because of their experience. There’s a collective truth to it. It’s instructive. We should hold that myth with reverence, even if we don’t believe all of it.

Both women were mothers of children caught up in mind control cover-up, one of which paralleled Kelly’s and my case. She, too, had volumes of documents and evidences whereby it was inexcusable that justice had not prevailed. The other mother conveyed a story that touched me so deeply it undoubtedly will continue to motivate me with reverberating passion forever. This mother was very weak from the final stages of cancer and chemotherapy, and tears slid down her pale gray cheeks as she told me her story. When she reported sexual abuse of her three daughters, the local court system took custody of them. The children appeared dissociative identity disordered from their ordeal, yet were reportedly denied therapy and placed in Foster care “since the mother was dying anyway.” When she finally was granted brief visitation with her precious daughters, they looked dazed and robotic with no memory of her or their sexual abuse. Mind control was apparent to this mother, and she struggled to give voice to their plight to no avail. She explained how love and concern for her children had kept her alive far longer than her doctors thought possible. She embraced me and said, “Now I can die in peace knowing that you are out there talking, raising awareness with the same passion for justice and love for children that I have. Thank you. Please keep talking. Please remember my daughters.

Grief literally changes and rearranges the cells of our bodies. Our brains rewire, our nerves fire us up and settle us down, and our immune systems do everything they can to protect us from stress. When our loved one dies, our bodies feel it—from the immediate impact to the lasting effects. Grief leaves a visible and invisible impression on our lives, in our lungs, in our brains, and in our hearts. Everyone who has ever grieved is, at least partially, made up of grief.

What was going on here was that like so many people in contemporary society, along the way to gaining their superb educations, and their shiny opportunities, they had absorbed the wrong lessons. They had mastered formulas in calculus and chemistry. They had read great books and learned world history and become fluent in foreign languages. But they had had never formally been taught how to maximize their brains' potential or how to find meaning and happiness. Armed with iPhones and personal digital assistants, they had multitasked their way through a storm of resume-building experiences, often at the expense of actual ones. In their pursuit of high achievement, they had isolated themselves from their peers and loved ones and thus compromised the very support systems they so ardently needed. Repeatedly, I noticed these patterns in my own students, who often broke down under the tyranny of expectations we place on ourselves and those around us.

Do you ever think about it? About nothingness. I do, I think about it all the time. Because of course it’s nothingness that awaits us. Of course it is. If it weren’t why would our hearts keep pumping any longer than they had to? Why wouldn’t we all emerge into the world pure and innocent, and then before we had a chance to get in any trouble, before we had a chance to take our first oily shit, just immediately shut down our systems and head straight to the hereafter? If there were a better life after death, why bother getting fitter for survival’s sake? Why would evolution even be a thing? Why fight for something second best? If death was really awesome, in a life or death situation, our bodies wouldn’t muscle up with epinephrine and cortisol. Our brains would hit us up instead with sloppy, sleepy happy love. Hannibal Lecter would be our Mickey Mouse. No, there’s fuckall to look forward to. Our bodies understand this. The real problem is, it’s unbearable to know this. So we cope.

And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude. Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

MNEMONIC I was tired. So I lay down. My lids grew heavy. So I slept. Slender memory, stay with me. I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater. He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back. It is the sweater he wore to America, this one, which I’ve grown into, whose sleeves are too long, whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner. Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight, it is black in the folds. A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father would be ashamed of me. Not because I’m forgetful, but because there is no order to my memory, a heap of details, uncatalogued, illogical. For instance: God was lonely. So he made me. My father loved me. So he spanked me. It hurt him to do so. He did it daily. The earth is flat. Those who fall off don’t return. The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually. I won’t last. Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet. Once, I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.

If your daughter kills herself, whose business is that? When you think you know what’s best for her, it’s not love. How can you know what’s best for her? How can you know that life would be better for her than death? You would deprive her of her whole path. Who do you think you are? There’s no respect there. If my daughter is going to take her life and I know about it, I’m going to speak to her and offer myself in whatever way she thinks would be useful. And if she has killed herself, I’m not going to think, Sweetheart, you should have stayed here for my sake. I know you were suffering abominably, but you really should have stayed here and suffered so that I wouldn’t feel terrible. Is that love? Do you really want her to live in the torture chamber of her own mind? When our suffering gets too intense, we can inquire, and if we don’t have inquiry, some of us just knock out our painful thoughts with a gun or pills or whatever it takes, but we have to shut this system down. And it’s hell to open your eyes in the morning when you have this painful thought system going.

I once read the most widely understood word in the whole world is ‘OK’, followed by ‘Coke’, as in cola. I think they should do the survey again, this time checking for ‘Game Over’. Game Over is my favorite thing about playing video games. Actually, I should qualify that. It’s the split second before Game Over that’s my favorite thing. Streetfighter II - an oldie but goldie - with Leo controlling Ryu. Ryu’s his best character because he’s a good all-rounder - great defensive moves, pretty quick, and once he’s on an offensive roll, he’s unstoppable. Theo’s controlling Blanka. Blanka’s faster than Ryu, but he’s really only good on attack. The way to win with Blanka is to get in the other player’s face and just never let up. Flying kick, leg-sweep, spin attack, head-bite. Daze them into submission. Both players are down to the end of their energy bars. One more hit and they’re down, so they’re both being cagey. They’re hanging back at opposite ends of the screen, waiting for the other guy to make the first move. Leo takes the initiative. He sends off a fireball to force Theo into blocking, then jumps in with a flying kick to knock Blanka’s green head off. But as he’s moving through the air he hears a soft tapping. Theo’s tapping the punch button on his control pad. He’s charging up an electricity defense so when Ryu’s foot makes contact with Blanka’s head it’s going to be Ryu who gets KO’d with 10,000 volts charging through his system. This is the split second before Game Over. Leo’s heard the noise. He knows he’s fucked. He has time to blurt ‘I’m toast’ before Ryu is lit up and thrown backwards across the screen, flashing like a Christmas tree, a charred skeleton. Toast. The split second is the moment you comprehend you’re just about to die. Different people react to it in different ways. Some swear and rage. Some sigh or gasp. Some scream. I’ve heard a lot of screams over the twelve years I’ve been addicted to video games. I’m sure that this moment provides a rare insight into the way people react just before they really do die. The game taps into something pure and beyond affectations. As Leo hears the tapping he blurts, ‘I’m toast.’ He says it quickly, with resignation and understanding. If he were driving down the M1 and saw a car spinning into his path I think he’d in react the same way. Personally, I’m a rager. I fling my joypad across the floor, eyes clenched shut, head thrown back, a torrent of abuse pouring from my lips. A couple of years ago I had a game called Alien 3. It had a great feature. When you ran out of lives you’d get a photo-realistic picture of the Alien with saliva dripping from its jaws, and a digitized voice would bleat, ‘Game over, man!’ I really used to love that.

The broad principle, which appears throughout this book, bears repeating. Healthy parenting can be boiled down to those two essential ingredients: love and control. They must operate in a system of checks and balances. Any concentration on love to the exclusion of control usually breeds disrespect and contempt. Conversely, an authoritarian and oppressive home atmosphere is deeply resented by the child who feels unloved or even hated. The objective for the toddler years is to strike a balance between mercy and justice, affection and authority, love and control.

That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all th things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing - the stream.

It may not be as visible a mark of your class as bad teeth, but a history of violence being acted upon you by those you love is just as effective at keeping you from climbing too high. Violence isn’t so much a belief system as it is a symptom. The Bible only serves to provide a necessary excuse, because the truth is, you can’t afford the cure for the disease you inherited. It was passed down from your parents who still don’t believe in therapy. They inherited it from their dads who came back from France with shattered nerves and screamed at night, sucked it up and went to work.

This is often the primary difference between him and so many of those of us who follow him. When we encounter the many ills of the world, we find ourselves growing more and more callous toward people, more and more judgmental, less and less hopeful. Rather than seeing the hurting humanity we encounter every day as an opportunity to be the very loving presence of Jesus, we see them as reason to withdraw from it all. Faith becomes about retreating from the world when it should be about moving toward it. As we walk deeper into organized religion, we run the risk of eventually becoming fully blind to the tangible suffering around us, less concerned about mending wounds or changing systems, and more preoccupied with saving or condemning souls. In this way, the spiritual eyes through which we see the world change everything. If our default lens is sin, we tend to look ahead to the afterlife, but if we focus on suffering, we’ll lean toward presently transforming the planet in real time—and we’ll create community accordingly. The former seeks to help people escape the encroaching moral decay by getting them into heaven; the latter takes seriously the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples, that they would make the kingdom come—that through lives resembling Christ and work that perpetuates his work, we would actually bring heaven down. Practically speaking, sin management seems easier because essentially all that is required of us is to preach, to call out people’s errors and invite them to repentance, and to feel we’ve been faithful. But seeing suffering requires us to step into the broken, jagged chaos of people’s lives to be agents of healing and change. It’s far more time consuming and much more difficult to do as a faith community. It is a lot easier to train preachers to lead people in a Sinner’s Prayer than it is to equip them to address the systematic injustices around them.

Ronan steeled himself as he would steel himself for dreaming. He reminded himself of where his physical body was in the present. He reminded himself that what was about to happen to him was in the past. Then he headed through the gauzy dreamt security system. Memories rose up. He expected it to be horror, as it often was. Guts and blood. Bones and hair. Closed-casket funerals. The scream. Instead it was every time Ronan had been alone. There was no gore. No shrilling with terror. There was only the quiet that came after all those things. There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved. And then Ronan was through and swiping away the tears before Adam joined him by the shoulder, emerging from the dark with the bright dreamt light cupped in his hands. "Break will be here in just a few days," Adam said. He kissed Ronan's cheek, lightly, and then Ronan's mouth. "I'm coming back. Be here for me." "Tamquam--" Ronan said. "--alter idem." They embraced. Adam put on his helmet. Ronan stood there in the dark long after the taillight had disappeared. Alone. Then he returned to the house to dream of Bryde.

While some children are preoccupied with trying to get and keep their parents’ attention, others give up trying to connect. As Bowlby (1961) explained, after a child’s protests go repeatedly unanswered, or are mostly responded to harshly, the child experiences despair. Then, when he finally gives up all hope of being reassured and protected, he detaches—attempting to deactivate his attachment system by shutting down his emotions and his need for a caregiver—and becomes extremely self-reliant. As an adult, he is unlikely to experience the closeness that comes with romantic relationships. This characterizes the dismissing style of attachment.

Thought Control * Require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth * Adopt the group’s “map of reality” as reality * Instill black and white thinking * Decide between good versus evil * Organize people into us versus them (insiders versus outsiders) * Change a person’s name and identity * Use loaded language and clichés to constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts, and reduce complexities into platitudinous buzzwords * Encourage only “good and proper” thoughts * Use hypnotic techniques to alter mental states, undermine critical thinking, and even to age-regress the member to childhood states * Manipulate memories to create false ones * Teach thought stopping techniques that shut down reality testing by stopping negative thoughts and allowing only positive thoughts. These techniques include: * Denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking * Chanting * Meditating * Praying * Speaking in tongues * Singing or humming * Reject rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism * Forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy * Label alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful * Instill new “map of reality” Emotional Control * Manipulate and narrow the range of feelings—some emotions and/or needs are deemed as evil, wrong, or selfish * Teach emotion stopping techniques to block feelings of hopelessness, anger, or doubt * Make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault * Promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness, such as: * Identity guilt * You are not living up to your potential * Your family is deficient * Your past is suspect * Your affiliations are unwise * Your thoughts, feelings, actions are irrelevant or selfish * Social guilt * Historical guilt * Instill fear, such as fear of: * Thinking independently * The outside world * Enemies * Losing one’s salvation * Leaving * Orchestrate emotional highs and lows through love bombing and by offering praise one moment, and then declaring a person is a horrible sinner * Ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins * Phobia indoctrination: inculcate irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority * No happiness or fulfillment possible outside the group * Terrible consequences if you leave: hell, demon possession, incurable diseases, accidents, suicide, insanity, 10,000 reincarnations, etc. * Shun those who leave and inspire fear of being rejected by friends and family * Never a legitimate reason to leave; those who leave are weak, undisciplined, unspiritual, worldly, brainwashed by family or counselor, or seduced by money, sex, or rock and roll * Threaten harm to ex-member and family (threats of cutting off friends/family)

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you’re craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet. If you bring the right earnestness to your homemade ceremony, God will provide the grace. And that is why we need God.

I can't remember when I've spent a more...enjoyable Saturday." She sighed, then teased his tongue with hers. "Since I don't intend to move for at least twenty-four hours,we'll see how you like Sunday as well." "I think I'm going to love it." She slid a hand over his shoulder. "I don't like to be pushy, Senator, but when are you going to marry me?" "I thought September in Hyannis Port." "The MacGregor fortess." He saw by her eyes the idea appealed to hre. "But September's two and a half months away." "We'll make it August," he said as he nibbled at her ear. "In the meantime, you and your roommates can move in here, or we can start looking for another place. Would you like to honeymoon in Scotland?" Shelby nestled into his throat. "Yes." She tilted her head back. "In the meantime," she said slowly as her hands wandered down to his waist. "I've been wanting to tell you that there's one of your domestic policies I'm fully in favor or,Senator." "Really?" His mouth lowered to hover just above hers. "You have-" she nipped at his bottom lip "-my full support.I wonder if you could just...run through the prodecure for me one more time." Alan slid a hand down her side. "It's my civic duty to make myself avaiable to all my constituents." Shelby's fingers ran up his chest to stop his jaw just before he captured her lips. "As long as it's only me, Senator." She hooked her arm around his neck. "This is the one-man one-vote system.

The truth of Woodstock? The nonstop music was good but few bands played their best due to the confusion and pervasive drug ingestion. Yes it was peaceful, but after that first glorious day it was cold and wet, and we sat in the mud shivering, drenched, hungry, and thirsty. Huddled in the rain, a half million of us worked hard to relax, insistent in our success at finding freedom and joy outside the system. Peace, brother! In the downpour, over and over again we told ourselves that all we needed was love. We really had jumped outside the everyday world, but in our T-shirts, jeans, and little else, we were utterly unprepared as the relentless torrent hammered down. It was no contest as soft theory met bare-knuckled reality.

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire “empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.

Hold on,” I said. “Frank, name three things you like. And no, Darling doesn’t count.” “Easy,” Frank said. “Murder—” “Too dark. It’s abundantly clear that you like inflicting suffering on things, but we’re going for lighthearted interests at the moment, so try again.” “Uh, mayhem.” “Still too dark.” He paused for a very, very long moment. “Mmm… macarons.” “Are you just naming things that start with m?” “No.” “I think you are.” “Am not.” “Are too.” “Is this really the time for this argument?” Lars said. “I mean, macarons?” I said. “Seriously? That’s a weird flex.” “What is a flex?” Lars said. “How is that weird?” Frank said. “That’s a bougie cookie, man. I’m rich as hell and I still feel guilty buying macarons. Those things are expensive.” “I don’t think it’s about the money. I think deep down in your heart of hearts, you know that you don’t deserve macarons.” “Wow,” I said. “They’re not even that good.” “Macarons are the Cadillac of cookies and if you ever imply otherwise again I will cut that uncultured palate right out of your mouth and force you to eat it.” “Wow,” Lars said. “That’s a really strong opinion.” “Those are the only opinions I have,” Frank said. “Yeah, apparently the guy who’s all about mystery meat also likes macarons,” I said. “Go figure.” “Oh yeah,” Frank said. “I do love me some mysterious meats. I just really like the suspense of wondering what dead animal I’m about to bite into, you know?” “I really think we should go,” Lars said. “Yeah, you’re right. Frank, lemme know when you come up with a third thing.

start fresh.” “And Maryanne?” “She's devastated about what James put us through. I think she'd like a fresh start, too, and more time with Nathan. On the other hand . . . you know, she really loves James. Even after everything, I don't think she can bring herself to leave him.” James was in a coma. Between the blood loss and damage to his internal organs, his system had shut down. Doctors didn't think he'd ever regain consciousness. Mostly, they were surprised the man was still alive. “Maybe someday,” Bobby said. Catherine nodded. “Maryanne likes Arizona. She mentioned they'd always talked about buying a home out there. So maybe, afterwards . . .” His turn to nod. Now they both watched Nathan. The boy's cheeks were flushed, his breath coming in frosty pants. Trickster nipped at his

Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process. As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough. One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples. When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team. Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach. You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error—just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community. Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight. The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and process are much more important than material, models, and methods. The church is an organization that exists for its nonmembers. Christianity does not promise a storm-free life. However, if we build our lives on biblical foundations, the storms of life will not destroy us. We cannot have lives that are storm-free, but we can become storm-proof. Just as we have to figure out the most effective way to engage our community for Christ, we also have to figure out the most effective way to establish spiritual foundations in each unique context. There is really only one biblical foundation we can build our lives on, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Pastors, teachers, and church staff believe their primary role is to serve as mentors. Their task is to equip every believer for the work of the ministry. It is not to do all the ministry, but to equip all the people to do it. Their top priority is to equip disciples to do ministry and to make disciples. Do you spend more time ministering to people or preparing people to minister? No matter what your church responsibilities are, you can prepare others for the same ministry. Insecurity in leadership is a deadly thing that will destroy any organization. It drives pastors and presidents to defensive positions, protecting their authority or exercising it simply to show who is the boss. Disciple-making is a process that systematically moves people toward Christ and spiritual maturity; it is not a bunch of randomly disconnected church activities. In the context of church leadership, one of the greatest and most important applications of faith is to trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through those you are leading. Without confidence that the Holy Spirit is in control, there is no empowering, no shared leadership, and, as a consequence, no multiplication.

I pull back and tell him, “You’re amazing.” He gives me a soft smirk. “That is the general consensus.” I smile. “And I love you.” He sets my feet on the floor but keeps his arms around my waist. “Good. Then you’re going to let me put three locks on the door of whatever apartment you decide to move into. And a chain. And a dead bolt.” I smile wider. “Okay.” Drew slowly steps forward, backing me up toward the bed. “And you’re not going to bitch when I have a security system installed.” “Wouldn’t dream of it.” We take another step together, almost like we’re dancing. “I’m thinking about buying you one of those ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ necklaces too.” My eyes squint as I pretend to think about the idea. “We’ll talk about it.” “And . . . you’re going to let me walk you home from work every night.” “Yes.” The back of my legs make contact with the bed frame. “I’m also going to come to every doctor’s appointment with you.” “I didn’t for a second imagine you wouldn’t.” Drew cups my face in his hands. “And one day, I’m going to ask you to marry me. And you’re going to know it’s not because you’re pregnant, or because of some misguided attempt to keep you.” Tears spring into my eyes as we gaze at each other. In a rough voice, he continues, “You’re going to know I’m asking because nothing would make me prouder than to be able to say, ‘This is my wife, Kate.’ And when I do ask, you’re going to say yes.” When I nod, one tear trails down my cheek. Drew wipes it away with his thumb as I promise, “It’s a sure thing.” And then he’s kissing me, with all the passion and desire he’s held in check the last two days. Drew cradles my head as we fall on the bed together.

We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive. [...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.

Imagine yourself having a fight with your romantic partner. The tension of the situation makes your limbic system run at full throttle and you become flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin. The high levels of these chemicals suddenly make you so damn angry, that you burst out in front of your partner saying, “I wish you die, so that I can have some peace in my life”. Given the stress of the situation through highly active limbic system, your PFC loses its freedom to take the right decision and you burst out with foul language in front of your partner, that may ruin your relationship. In simple terms due to your mental instability, you lost your free will to make the right decision. But when the conversation is over, and you relax for a while, your stress hormone levels come down to normal, and you regain your usual cheerful state of mind. Immediately, your PFC starts analyzing the explosive conversation you had with your partner. Healthy activity of the entire frontal lobes, especially the PFC suddenly overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt. Your brain makes you realize, that you have done something devilish. As a result, now you find yourself making the willful decision of apologizing to your partner and making up to him or her, no matter how much effort it takes, because your PFC comes up the solution that it is the healthiest thing to do for your personal life. From this you can see, that what you call free will is something that is not consistent. It changes based on your mental health. Mental instability or illness, truly cripples your free will. And the healthier your frontal lobes are, the better you can take good decisions. And the most effective way to keep your frontal lobes healthy is to practice some kind of meditation.

True knowledge is that which consists in the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the Church throughout all the world, and the distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of the bishops, by which they have handed down that Church which exists in every place, and has come even unto us, being guarded and preserved without any forging of Scriptures, by a very complete system of doctrine, and neither receiving addition nor [suffering] curtailment [in the truths which she believes]; and [it consists in] reading [the word of God] without falsification, and a lawful and diligent exposition in harmony with the Scriptures, both without danger and without blasphemy; and [above all] it consists in] the pre-eminent gift of love, which is more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, and which excels all the other gifts [of God[.

There are many levels in the human mental structure-certainly it is a system which we do not understand very well yet. But there are hundreds of rival theories which tell why people act the way they do, each theory based on some underlying assumptions about how far down in this set of levels various kinds of psychological "forces" are found. Since at this time we use pretty much the same kind of language for all mental levels, this makes for much level-mixing and most certainly for hundreds of wrong theories. For instance, we talk of "drives"-for sex, for power, for fame, for love, etc., etc.-without knowing where these drives come from in the human mental structure. Without belaboring the point, I simply wish to say that our confusion about who we are is certainly related to the fact that we consist of a large set of levels, and we use overlapping language to describe ourselves on all of those levels.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them. Cutting the list down, however, makes a tiny dent in our denial systems, forcing us to acknowledge a sobering truth: Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive. [...] Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.”-Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, p.79, Lori Gottlieb “It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy. We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives. Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves.

Missy and her crew left, I was alone. Like really alone, like pre-Shay alone. It felt glorious. Well, maybe not. I didn’t feel right about Shay, but I’d see him in a day. We could sort out whatever happened on his street. Till then, I studied to my heart’s content. I made trips to my dorm’s computer lab, and I even got naughty. I stole some of the computer’s printing papers, stuffing them down the front of my shirt. My inner dork was coming out full-force. It was like I’d been around “cool” people too much for my system. It was rebelling. It needed an outlet, and I indulged. All of the colored highlighters came out. Not just the primary colors, all of them. I used pink for one textbook, and added purple on the next. All caution was thrown to the wind. It was only eight, but I went to the library. I really let my freak out. An energy drink. Coffee from the cart. My own Twizzlers this time. Even a bag of chocolate candies. I was going nuts on the caffeine and sugar, and then I found an empty study room on the top and most isolated floor in the library. I stayed until midnight. It was some of the best studying I’ve had. Ever. Mind-blowing.

I had a whole speech prepared, but I… well, I forgot all of it,” I admitted. “So forgive me is this doesn’t sound as pretty or polished as it should. But even though I don’t have the words to fully express what you mean to me, or how much I love you, I hope I’ve shown you how I feel through my actions every day we’ve been together. Our relationship started unconventionally, for lack of a better term. You came into my life at a time when my world revolved around football, and I couldn’t imagine anything or anyone changing that. Then I met you. I didn’t know who you were at the time, but I somehow knew you’d be an important part of my life. It was like the universe tapped me on the shoulder and told me to pay attention, yet I resisted. At least, I tried to. But as you may have noticed, I can never say no to you for long—not even when it comes to extremely important things like paint swatches and home shelving systems. You turned my world upside down, and I thank God for that every day. You’re not just one important part of my life. You’re the most important part, and I can’t imagine spending it without you. So, with that being said—Scarlett DuBois, will you marry me?

Sweetheart, you have to get some sleep. The doctor said you needed to rest, that your body was still flushing that drug out of your system.” Eli said nothing for a moment. “You called me ‘sweetheart.’” “I did?” “Did you mean it? Cause here’s the thing, sugar. You turned my world upside down. I’ve never been so scared in my life as when I realized Scarlett Group had taken you. I was afraid I wouldn’t have the chance to tell you how much I love you.” “Oh, Eli.” Tears filled her eyes. Her handsome Navy SEAL loved her enough that he was laying his heart on the line without having a clue she felt the same way about him.. An act of courage from the man staring at her with a wary gaze. “We haven’t known each other long. If it’s too soon for you to know how you feel about me, I’ll wait. Just know you own my heart, Brenna. I want to marry you and someday watch you rock my children.” She laid her hand over his mouth, stemming the tidal wave of words. “Eli, you don’t have to wait.” “I don’t?” “I’m a romance writer, my love. Happy endings are my stock in trade. Without you in my life, I wouldn’t have a happy ending because I love you, too, Eli. And, yes, I will marry you.” “Soon?” “The sooner, the better.

But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, you’re not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe it’s just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don’t think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, we’ve both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways—me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if you’ll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it. And now we have to content ourselves with trying not to let down our loved ones, trying not to use too much plastic, and in your case trying to write an interesting book once every few years.

Out of all green ends and correlated mystic blend underlying the wholesome beauty only one note could speak and flow when nothing else on the barren wet streets she laughed at my grin speaking of what I missed. How is the realm so lovely when the rain tells me how perfect the self organizing smooth system far less attracted so please the muse to the scene, swirling in utter beauty turn away from conversations of horrific overwhelming tension your sublime nature forces half naked bare legged bathing in geometrical arrangements; a future rebelled, tame and dominate your blessed frightened glass ceiling, breath or goodness spells glitter rains down on your laced chest, taking off your shades and notable note from off your written thoughts on the reality page of mirrored candy smile hair twisting, back alone chasing drinks with cheers toward all we saved in the red ashes; smiling how perfect we feel tonight, I could end any beings or spirit. A sucker for the matter found without presence in unlimited rising smoke you weep and invent forms, or nature reflection internality on how few nerves you leave me squirming producing works of utter biting beauty art works off afternoon body gasping at whatever is near or afar, look how smart you get when you cant always get what you dreamt of, on time naughty morning sun baking eyes in mine.

They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens? Paul and many of the employees at Crownsville remind me of a story I grew up hearing from the Caribbean side of my family. One of my aunts in particular loved the Starfish Story. Legend has it that a young Black boy—in Haiti or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, you choose—is walking along a beach that is littered with starfish. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have washed up onto the shore following a terrible storm and they are helpless, dehydrating in the sun. So the little boy begins picking the starfish up one by one and throwing them back into their home in the water. Other people at the beach look at the boy, laugh, and call him naive. One person approaches him and tells him bluntly, “Give up. It makes no difference. You’ll never be able to save all of these starfish.” The boy pauses for a second. He looks up, then leans back down to toss another starfish into the sea. “It makes a difference for that one.” Many of the people of Crownsville decided that it was better to throw as many starfish back into the ocean as they could rather than abandon them all on the shore.

What would have happened, I wondered, if Clover and Jotter never ran the river—if they had listened to the critics and doomsayers, or to their own doubts? They brought knowledge, energy, and passion to their botanical work, but also a new perspective. Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs. They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake. They knew every saltbush twig and stickery cactus was, in its own way, as much a marvel as Boulder Dam—shaped to survive against all the odds. In the United States, half of all bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics go to women, yet these women go on to earn only 74 percent of a man’s salary in those fields. A recent study found that it will be another two decades before women and men publish papers at equal rates in the field of botany, a field traditionally welcoming to women. It may take four decades for chemistry, and three centuries for physics. Stereotypes linger of scientists as white-coated, wild-haired men, and they limit the ways in which young people envision their futures. In a famous, oft-replicated study, 70 percent of six-year-old girls, asked to draw a picture of a scientist, draw a woman, but only 25 percent do so at the age of sixteen.

Picking up my spoon, I dip it into the broth, making sure to get pieces of the small, fatty meat. I close my eyes and eat my spoonful, marveling at the rich, savory flavors. It's like beef broth, only heartier, and the meat has this really interesting texture. Before I know it, I've devoured half the bowl. "You like Soup Number Five?" I look up to see Lola Simeona, the old woman from earlier, standing by my table, watching me. "Oh, yes," I say, patting my mouth with a napkin. "It's delicious! What is this meat? It's like nothing I've ever tasted. And I feel more... energetic already, sort of like I can take on anything." Like Prem. She smiles knowingly. "Yes, yes, Soup Number Five is magical." After a pause, during which her smile morphs into what I can only be described as a mischievous grin, she says, "The meat is bull testes." I stare at her for a long moment as her words filter into my brain. I set my spoon down carefully and take a sip of water. "Bull... testes?" I ask in the most neutral way I can. "Yes! It's an aphrodisiac!" She pats my shoulder and walks off to another table. I think I can hear her cackling. I look down into my bowl. I just ate a bunch of chopped-up bull balls. For a moment I wonder, in a very detached way (is this what being in medical shock feels like?), if I'm going to throw up. But then the moment passes, and I realize they're really delicious. And Soup No. 5 works. I can feel the potent mixture wending its way through my system, infusing my blood with confidence and desire. I eat another big spoonful.

As for the Economy, this new embodiment as I called it of Fate or the Gods, this global power that governs the lives of Chinese workers in village factories, Brazilian miners, children working cocoa plantations in West Africa, sex workers in Mumbai, real estate salesmen in Connecticut, sheep-farmers in Scotland or on the Darling Downs, disembodied voices in call centres in Bangalore, workers in the hospitality industry in Cancun or Venice or Fiji, keeping them fatefully interconnected, in its mysterious way, by laws that do exist, the experts assure us, though they cannot agree on what they are- it is too impersonal, too implacable for us to live comfortably with, or even to catch hold of and defy. When we were in the hands of the Gods, we had stories that made these distant beings human and brought them close. They got angry, they took our part or turned violently against us. They fell in love with us and behaved badly. They had their own problems and fought with one another, and like us were sometimes foolish. But their interest in us was personal. They watched over us and were concerned though in moments of willfulness or boredom they might also torment us as “wanton boys” do flies. We had our ways of obtaining their help as intermediaries. We could deal with them. The Economy is impersonal. It lacks manageable dimensions. We have discovered no mythology to account for its moods. Our only source of information about it, the Media and their swarm of commentators, bring us “reports,” but these do not help: a possible breakdown in the system, a new crisis, the descent of Greece, or Ireland or Portugal, like Jove’s eagle, of the IMF. We are kept in a state of permanent low-level anxiety broken only by outbreaks of alarm.

After dinner, as we had so many times during our months and months together, Marlboro Man and I adjourned to his porch. It was dark--we’d eaten late--and despite my silent five-minute battle with the reality of my reproductive system, there was definitely something special about the night. I stood at the railing, breathing in the dewy night air and taking in all the sounds of the countryside that would one day be my home. The pumping of a distant oil well, the symphony of crickets, the occasional moo of a mama cow, the manic yipping of coyotes…the din of country life was as present and reassuring as the cacophony of car horns, traffic sounds, and sirens had been in L.A. I loved everything about it. He appeared behind me; his strong arms wrapped around my waist. Oh, it was real, all right--he was real. As I touched his forearms and ran the palms of my hands from his elbows down to his wrists, I’d never been more sure of how very real he was. Here, grasping me in his arms, was the Adonis of all the romance-novel fantasies I clearly never realized I’d been having; they’d been playing themselves out in steamy detail under the surface of my consciousness, and I never even knew I’d been missing it. I closed my eyes and rested my head back on his chest, just as his impossibly soft lips and subtle whiskers rested on my neck. Romancewise, it was perfection--the night air was still--almost imperceptible. Physically, viscerally, it was almost more than I could stand. Six babies? Sure. How ’bout seven? Is that enough? Standing there that night, I would have said eight, nine, ten. And I could have gotten started right away. But getting started would have to wait. There’d be plenty of time for that. For that night, that dark, perfect night, we simply stayed on the porch and locked ourselves in kiss after beautiful, steamy kiss. And before too long, it was impossible to tell where his arms ended and where my body began.

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” … The word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error. But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? … Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you. Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame. So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming … But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.

Back in bed I listen to every sound. The plastic tarp over the table on the balcony crunching in the cold wind. the two short clicks in the walls before the heat comes on with a low whoosh. I hear a constant base hum all around, the nervous system of the building, carrying electricity and gas and phone conversations to all our respective little boxes. I listen to it all, the constant, the rhythmic, and the random. It's hard to measure the night by sound, but it can be done. I know that when the traffic noise is quietest, it's about 4:30 in the morning. I know that when the 'Times' hits the door, it's around 5. Now the clock says it's morning, 5:45, but the November sky still says midnight. I hear the elevator ding twenty yards down the hall outside our door. Seven seconds later, I hear his keys in our lock, then his heavy backpack hitting the floor. I hear the refrigerator door open, the unsealing vacuum wheezing as the cold inside air meets the dry heat in the apartment. The cupboard door. A glass. The crescendoing fizz of a new two-liter Diet Coke bottle opening. It's a one-sided conversation with no one actually talking. I lie in the dark, close my eyes, and try not to listen to his movements around apartment. these are the sounds of our life together before it got so messy. I want to say something back. Anything, anything that sounds like things sounded last summer. Even just to myself. Just something out loud. The inside of my eyelids turn pink. My door has been opened and the light from the hallway shines through them. I won't open them. There is no noise. Like an eclipse, the world behind my closed eyes goes dark again. For just one second, before I feel a kiss on my right eye. I keep them closed. A kiss on the left one. I open them. Jack looks down at me and closes his eyes. He leans forward and puts his forehead on my chest and goes limp. ''Blues Clues' is on,' he says softly into my tee shirt. His muffled voice vibrating only a half inch away from my heart.

Cassie,” I growl at the young brunette. “How’s the sobriety?” Alex brought the submissive to us. She’s an addict that he councils at Transcend. I don’t want to be mean to her right now, especially since my best friend brought her here, but I’m furious and she’s an outlet. She can’t strike back. “Ninety days sober,” she says with pride. “That’s awesome,” I say enthusiastically and smile at her. “I love how we have to give fuck ups a medal when they behave. I would think it should go to those who never fuck up. What’s the incentive to behave if all you have to do is get shit-faced and steal shit for years and then ninety days on the straight-and-narrow we have to pat you on the back for being a good girl,” I say in a saccharine voice. She gazes at me with huge, glassy brown eyes. I can see the tears forming. Cassie worries her full bottom lip between her teeth and tries not to blink. “But hey, what do I know. It just seems like the system is flawed. The good little boys and girls just don’t get the recognition that a crack-whore thief gets,” I shrug. Cassie blinks and the surface of her tears breaks and they finally slide down her cheeks in shame. “But go you!” I shout sarcastically. I give her a thumbs up and walk down the hall. “Cold… that was just cold, dude,” Alex chuckles at me. That was so bad that I have to laugh or I’d puke. I shake my head as my belly contracts from laughter. “Score on my newest asshattery?” I ask my partner in crime. If I didn’t have him I’d scream. I’ll owe Master Marcus forever. He stripped me bare until Font was naked in the impact room at Brownstone I trained in. Alex walked in and shook my hand- instant best friend. “Ah…” He taps his chin in thought and the bastard tucks his black hair behind his ear. I growl at him because he did it on purpose. He knows how much I miss the feel of my hair swinging at my jawline. Alex arches a perfect brow above his aqua eye and smirks. He runs his hands through his hair and groans in pleasure. “8.5. It was a decent attempt, but you pulled your hit. You’re too soft. I bet you were scared you’d make her relapse.” “Yeah,” I say bashfully. “Not happening, bud. I’m just that fucking good. I better go do some damage control. Don’t hurt any more subs. Pick on the big bastards. They may bite back, but their egos are delicate.

Space is cold and stiff, but Time is alive. Space divides, but Time brings everything to everything else. It does not course outside of you and you do not swim upon it like a drifting log. Time flows through you: you yourself are in flow. You are the river. Are you grieving? Trust Time: soon you will be laughing. Are you laughing? You cannot hold fast your laughing, for soon you will be weeping. You are blown from mood to mood, from one state to another, from waking to sleeping and from sleeping again to waking. You cannot go on wandering for long. You come to a halt, you are tired, you are hungry, you must sit down, you eat, you stand again, you begin anew to wander. You suffer: from the distance unattainable, you glimpse the Deed which you long. But the stream is constantly moving you and one morning the hour of action has arrived. You are a child, and never (so you think) will you escape the helplessness of childhood, which locks you into four windowless walls. But look: your wall itself movable and yielding, and your whole being becomes re-fashioned into a youth. From within yourself there rise hidden springs that leap up to yourself. Posibilities open up before you like flowers, and one day the world has grown all around you. Softly, Time transports you from one curve to another. New vistas and horizons unfold at your side as you pass by. You begin to love the change: you've discovered an extraordinary adventure is afoot. You sense a direction, you feel a new impulse, you can smell the sea. And you see that what changes in you changes also in everything around you. Every point you hurriedly pass by is itself in movement. Every point is being whirled in some direction: its own long history is following its course: but each point knows the ending of its history no more than you know that of yours. You glance up to heaven, Sublime is the rotation of its suns, but these are each heavily laden with their planetary systems as with grapes, and they dash away from one another into already-prepared distances and unfathomable spaces. You smash atoms and they swarm about in more confusion that if you had stamped your foot on an anthill. You seek a mainstay and a temperament law in the temperate mid-region of our earth, but here, too, there is nothing but constant event changing history, and no one can forecast for you even next week's clouds.

Over time, the active verbs of the Shema-recite, walk, talk, lie down, rise, bind, fix, write, all in the service of love-become too much for us to imagine, let alone perform. Our search for superpowers has created many of the most pressing problems of our time. The defining mental activity of our time is scrolling Our capacities of attention, memory, and concentration are diminishing; to compensate, we toggle back and forth between infinite feeds of news, posts, images, episodes - taking shallow hits of trivia, humor, and outrage to make up for the depths of learning, joy, and genuine lament that now feel beyond our reach. The defining illness of our time is metabolic syndrome, the chronic combination of high weight, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar that is the hallmark of an inactive life. Our strength is atrophying and our waistline expanding, and to compensate, we turn to the superpowers of the supermarket with the aisles of salt and fat convincing our bodies’ reward systems, one bite at a time, that we have never been better in our life. The defining emotional challenge of our time is anxiety, the fear of what might be instead of the courageous pursuit of what could be. Once, we lived with allness of heart, with a boldness of quest that was too in love with the good to call off the pursuit when we encountered risk. Now we live as voyeurs, pursuing shadowy vestiges of what we desire from behind the one-way mirror of a screen, invulnerable but alone. And, of course, the soul is the plane of human ex- istence that our technological age neglects most of all. Jesus asked whether it was worth gaining the whole world at the cost of losing one's soul. But in the era of superpowers, we have not only lost a great deal of our souls-we have lost much of the world as well. We are rarely overwhelmed by wind or rain or snow. We rarely see, let alone name, the stars. We have lost the sense that we are both at home and on a pilgrimage in the vast, mysterious cosmos, anchored in a rich reality beyond ourselves. We have lost our souls without even gaining the world. So it is no wonder that the defining condition of our time is a sense of loneliness and alienation. For if human flourishing requires us to love with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, what happens When nothing in our lives develops those capacities? With what, exactly, will we love?

The point of power is always in the present moment. This is where we begin to make changes. What a liberating idea. We can begin to let the old nonsense go. Right now. The smallest beginning will make a difference. When you were a tiny baby, you were pure joy and love. You knew how important you were; you felt that you were the center of the universe. You had such courage that you asked for what you wanted and you expressed all your feelings openly. You loved yourself totally—every part of your body, including your feces. You knew that you were perfect. And that is the truth of your being. All the rest is learned nonsense and can be unlearned. How often have we said, “That’s the way I am,” or “That’s the way it is.” What we’re really saying is that it is what we “believe to be true for us.” Usually what we believe is only someone else’s opinion that we’ve accepted and incorporated into our own belief system. It fits in with other things that we believe. If we were taught as a child that the world is a frightening place, then everything we hear that fits in with that belief we will accept as true for us—for example: “Don’t trust strangers,” “Don’t go out at night,” “People cheat you,” and so on. On the other hand, if we were taught early in life that the world is a safe and joyous place, then we would believe other things, such as: “Love is everywhere,” “People are so friendly,” and “Money comes to me easily.” Life experiences mirror our beliefs. We seldom sit down and question our beliefs. For instance, I could ask myself: “Why do I believe that it’s difficult for me to learn? Is that really true? Is it true for me now? Where did that belief come from? Do I still believe it simply because a first-grade teacher told me so over and over? Would I be better off if I dropped that belief?” Stop for a moment and catch your thought. What are you thinking right now? If thoughts shape your life and experiences, would you want this thought to become true for you? If it’s a thought of worry, anger, hurt, or revenge, how do you think that this thought will come back for you? If we want a joyous life, we must think joyous thoughts. Whatever we send out mentally or verbally will come back to us in like form. Take a little time to listen to the words you say. If you hear yourself saying something three times, write it down. It has become a pattern for you. At the end of a week, look at the list you’ve made and you’ll see how your words fit your experiences. Be willing to change your words and thoughts and watch your life change. The way to control your life is to control your choice of words and thoughts. No one thinks in your mind but you.

They're really going to mash the world up this time, the damn fools. When I read that description of the victims of Nagasaki I was sick: "And we saw what first looked like lizards crawling up the hill, croaking. It got lighter and we could see that it was humans, their skin burned off, and their bodies broken where they had been thrown against something." Sounds like something out of a horror story. God save us from doing that again. For the United States did that. Our guilt. My country. No, never again. And then one reads in the papers "Second bomb blast in Nevada bigger than the first! " What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled "enemy?" Weren't the Russians communists when they helped us slap down the Germans? And now. What could we do with the Russian nation if we bombed it to bits? How could we "rule" such a mass of foreign people - - - we, who don't even speak the Russian language? How could we control them under our "democratic" system, we, who even now are losing that precious commodity, freedom of speech? (Mr. Crockett," that dear man, was questioned by the town board. A supposedly "enlightened" community. All he is is a pacifist. That, it seems, is a crime.) Why do we send the pride of our young men overseas to be massacred for three dirty miles of nothing but earth? Korea was never divided into "North" and "South." They are one people; and our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it. When I think of that little girl on the farm talking about her brother - "And he said all they can think of over there is killing those God-damn Koreans." What does she know of war? Of lizard-like humans crawling up a hillside? All she knows is movies and school room gossip. Oh, America's young, strong. So is Russia. And how they can think of atom-bombing each other, I don't know. What will be left? War will come some day now, with all the hothead leaders and articles "What If Women are Drafted?" Hell, I'd sooner be a citizen of Africa than see America mashed and bloody and making a fool of herself. This country has a lot, but we're not always right and pure. And what of the veterans of the first and second world wars? The maimed, the crippled. What good their lives? Nothing. They rot in the hospitals, and we forget them. I could love a Russian boy - and live with him. It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual - but to kill off all the ones who could forge a strong nation? How foolish! Of what good - living and freedom without home, without family, without all that makes life?

We went to dinner that night and ordered steak and talked our usual dreamy talk, intentionally avoiding the larger, looming subject. When he brought me home, it was late, and the air was so perfect that I was unaware of the temperature. We stood outside my parents’ house, the same place we’d stood two weeks earlier, before the Linguine with Clam Sauce and J’s surprise visit; before the overcooked flank steak and my realization that I was hopelessly in love. The same place I’d almost wiped out on the sidewalk; the same place he’d kissed me for the first time and set my heart afire. Marlboro Man moved in for the kill. We stood there and kissed as if it was our last chance ever. Then we hugged tightly, burying our faces in each other’s necks. “What are you trying to do to me?” I asked rhetorically. He chuckled and touched his forehead to mine. “What do you mean?” Of course, I wasn’t able to answer. Marlboro Man took my hand. Then he took the reins. “So, what about Chicago?” I hugged him tighter. “Ugh,” I groaned. “I don’t know.” “Well…when are you going?” He hugged me tighter. “Are you going?” I hugged him even tighter, wondering how long we could keep this up and continue breathing. “I…I…ugh, I don’t know,” I said. Ms. Eloquence again. “I just don’t know.” He reached behind my head, cradling it in his hands. “Don’t…,” he whispered in my ear. He wasn’t beating around the bush. Don’t. What did that mean? How did this work? It was too early for plans, too early for promises. Way too early for a lasting commitment from either of us. Too early for anything but a plaintive, emotional appeal: Don’t. Don’t go. Don’t leave. Don’t let it end. Don’t move to Chicago. I didn’t know what to say. We’d been together every single day for the past two weeks. I’d fallen completely and unexpectedly in love with a cowboy. I’d ended a long-term relationship. I’d eaten beef. And I’d begun rethinking my months-long plans to move to Chicago. I was a little speechless. We kissed one more time, and when our lips finally parted, he said, softly, “Good night.” “Good night,” I answered as I opened the door and went inside. I walked into my bedroom, eyeing the mound of boxes and suitcases that sat by the door, and plopped down on my bed. Sleep eluded me that night. What if I just postponed my move to Chicago by, say, a month or so? Postponed, not canceled. A month surely wouldn’t hurt, would it? By then, I reasoned, I’d surely have him out of my system; I’d surely have gotten my fill. A month would give me all the time I needed to wrap up this whole silly business. I laughed out loud. Getting my fill of Marlboro Man? I couldn’t go five minutes after he dropped me off at night before smelling my shirt, searching for more of his scent. How much worse would my affliction be a month from now? Shaking my head in frustration, I stood up, walked to my closet, and began removing more clothes from their hangers. I folded sweaters and jackets and pajamas with one thing pulsating through my mind: no man--least of all some country bumpkin--was going to derail my move to the big city. And as I folded and placed each item in the open cardboard boxes by my door, I tried with all my might to beat back destiny with both hands. I had no idea how futile my efforts would be.

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

Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.

I put my hand on his forearm, I don't know why I do this, and it's not exactly natural, although it's not unnatural, except that I really want to touch his skin. It's smooth and tan just a little bit and feels like summer, like something familiar and warm and good, like my skin did on the first days aboard 'Fishful Thinking' before it salted and burned and peeled. 'We broke up three years after that.' I sit back in my chair and give a sly smile. Relationships are complex and sometimes you can't really explain them to an outside party. 'I can't believe I just told you that' 'YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!' A third time. I am not imagining it. 'There you are.' This time my heart does skip a beat. I look down at his arm, and we are still touching, and he has made no attempt to retract his arm or retreat. All my surroundings, the red formica table top, the pink yogurt, the blue sky, the green vegetables in the market, they all come alive in vibrant technicolor as the sun peers from behind a cloud. I am living my full life. 'Honesty in all things,' Byron adds, lifting his cup of yogurt for a toast of sorts. I pull my hand away from him and the instant my hand is back by his side, I miss the warmth of his arm, the warmth of him. Honesty in all things. I should put my hand back, that's where it wants to be, that's Lily's lesson to me. Be present in the moment, give spontaneous affection. I'm suddenly aware I haven't spoken in a bit. 'Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?' As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I realize I sound like that kid from 'Jerry McGuire.' 'Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?' I hope my question comes off almost a fraction as endearing. 'No,' Byron says with a glint in his eye that reads as curiosity, at least I hope that it does, but even if it doesn't I'm too into the inertia of the trivia to stop it. 'It's true, one heart called the systemic heart that functions much like the left side of the human heart, distributing blood throughout the heart, then two smaller branchial heart with gills that act like the right side of our hearts to pump the blood back.' 'What made you think of that?' I smile. It may be entirely inappropriate first date conversation, but at least it doesn't bore me in the telling. I look up at the winsome August sky, marred only by the contrails of a passing jet, and a vaguely dachshund shaped cloud above the horizon. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in love at first site. I don't believe in angels. I don't believe in heaven and that our loved ones are looking down on us, but the sun is so warm and the breeze is so cool and the company is so perfect and the whole afternoon so intoxicating, ti's hard not to hear Lily's voice dancing in the gentle wind, 'one! month! is Long! Enough TO! BE! SAD!' ... 'I recently lost someone close to me....I don't know, I feel her here today with us, you, me, her, three hearts, like an octopus,' I shrug. If I were him, I would run. What a ridiculously creepy thing to say. I would run and I would not stop until I was home in my bed with a gallon of ice cream deleting my profile from every dating site I belonged to. Maybe it's because it's not rehearsed, maybe it's because it's as weird a thing to say as it is genuine, maybe it's because this is finally the man for me. Byron stands and offers me his hand, 'Let's take a walk and you can tell me about her.' The gentle untying of a shoe lace. It takes me a minute to decide if I can do this, and I decide that I can, and I throw our yogurt dishes away, and I put my hand in his, and it's soft and warm, and instead of awkward fumbling, our hands clasp together like magnets and metal, like we've been hand-in-hand all along, and we are touching again. ...

Reader's Digest (Reader's Digest USA) - Clip This Article on Location 56 | Added on Friday, May 16, 2014 12:06:55 AM Words of Lasting Interest Looking Out for The Lonely One teacher’s strategy to stop violence at its root BY GLENNON DOYLE MELTON  FROM MOMASTERY.COM PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN WINTERS A few weeks ago, I went into my son Chase’s class for tutoring. I’d e-mailed Chase’s teacher one evening and said, “Chase keeps telling me that this stuff you’re sending home is math—but I’m not sure I believe him. Help, please.” She e-mailed right back and said, “No problem! I can tutor Chase after school anytime.” And I said, “No, not him. Me. He gets it. Help me.” And that’s how I ended up standing at a chalkboard in an empty fifth-grade classroom while Chase’s teacher sat behind me, using a soothing voice to try to help me understand the “new way we teach long division.” Luckily for me, I didn’t have to unlearn much because I’d never really understood the “old way we taught long division.” It took me a solid hour to complete one problem, but I could tell that Chase’s teacher liked me anyway. She used to work with NASA, so obviously we have a whole lot in common. Afterward, we sat for a few minutes and talked about teaching children and what a sacred trust and responsibility it is. We agreed that subjects like math and reading are not the most important things that are learned in a classroom. We talked about shaping little hearts to become contributors to a larger community—and we discussed our mutual dream that those communities might be made up of individuals who are kind and brave above all. And then she told me this. Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her. And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them. She looks for patterns. Who is not getting requested by anyone else? Who can’t think of anyone to request? Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated? Who had a million friends last week and none this week? You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down—right away—who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying. As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children, I think this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students. It is like mining for gold—the gold being those children who need a little help, who need adults to step in and teach them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to join a group, or how to share their gifts. And it’s a bully deterrent because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside her eyeshot and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share. But, as she said, the truth comes out on those safe, private, little sheets of paper. As Chase’s teacher explained this simple, ingenious idea, I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “How long have you been using this system?” I said. Ever since Columbine, she said. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine. Good Lord. This brilliant woman watched Columbine knowing that all violence begins with disconnection. All

Jungle came about because there were so many of us out there who loved reggae, loved hip hop and were on the edges of the rave scene and liked a lot of it. But moving forward into what became jungle and drum’n’bass, it was a sound-system thing, because in that situation what separates you from the next man is your beats and how you lay them down – you’ve got to know when to shift.

Jack’s secret is not just to reward people for their profit contribution in the “great game of business.” It’s to put real numbers right in workers’ faces so they make better decisions every minute, every day, for every customer. I would go one step further, and maybe Jack already has. I would give employees a minor share in the overall company, but I would also then use software to measure each individual’s or team’s contributions after fair overhead allocations and direct costs. This would mean the back-line “servers” have fair revenue recognition of their efforts on behalf of the front-line “browsers” who actually serve the end customers. Is this not possible in a light-speed world of software and business metrics? We need more real business leaders and visionaries like Jack Stack, not BS Wall Street leverage artists or old-line corporate managers who merely streamline their top-down management systems while their workers wait for their unfunded retirement and death. And we need real educators, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who can make science understandable to everyday people. Most of all, we need people to love what they do so much that they won’t even think of retiring at age 63 or 65 or even 75. They’re so productive and happy that they don’t worry about a retirement that doesn’t make sense to them anymore, though it’s there if they have health challenges. They’re too busy satisfying their customers and creating new businesses to contemplate life without that fulfillment. They’re so focused on what they do that they’re like the champion basketball player who’s totally “in state” and one with his process. They’re certainly not bored or waiting to retire and do nothing!

Someone should politely explain to antifa [that] the most violent Americans, the most violent and willing Americans, haven’t even left the couch yet. The most violent and ready to go, the most tactically trained, haven’t even got off the couch yet. So you better pray to God, and I mean this literally—or whoever the fuck it is you pray to—that Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, and Attorney General Barr clean this up lawfully. If for any reason the president of the United States feels that it’s not getting done the way it should and decides to put out the tweet that says, ‘My fellow Americans, my fellow 2A-loving Americans, it’s time to take up arms against these assholes,’ you are all fucked in under an hour,” he continued. “[We’re] waiting for that one tweet, that one emergency text message from the fucking president of the United States that gives us the green light to finish this entire thing in under an hour. It will not be law enforcement. It will not be one of these slow, bureaucratic, justice system wheels of justice turning. It’ll be a group of people you didn’t even know fucking existed because we were at our houses, we got off work, we were with our families, but we were ready for that call. And if that call ever does come, you will be fucked seven ways from Sunday. So I suggest you back down.

There’s no such thing as making love, damn it—love isn’t something you make. Love crashes down on us fully formed; we don’t control it—that’s why our systems get so tired of replacing it with sex, a graphic, seemingly moldable thing.

Ojih Odutola’s radical visual reversals function like thought experiments that take us beyond the merely hierarchical. By positioning the unexpected figure of the black woman as master, as oppressor, she suspends, for a moment, our focus on the individual sins of people—the Mississippi overseer, the British slave merchant, the West African slave raider—and turns it back upon enabling systems. It was a racist global system of capital and exploitation—coupled with a perverse and asymmetric understanding of human resource and value—that allowed the trade in humans to occur, and although that trade no longer exists in its previous form, many of its habits of mind persist. In “A Countervailing Theory,” the habit of thought that recognizes some beings and ignores others is presented to us as an element of a physical landscape, the better to emphasize its all-encompassing nature. That system is the air Akanke and Aldo breathe, the bodies they’re in, the land they walk on. For Ojih Odutola, it is expressed by one unending, unfurling charcoal line: The purpose of beginning the story from the perspective of Aldo, one who is subjugated, is intentional: to show how easily one can be indoctrinated into a systemic predicament. Between Aldo and Akanke, there isn’t a clear demarcation of good or bad with regard to their respective worlds and who they are. The system in which they coexist is illustrated through the striated systems in place—with literal motifs of lines throughout the pictures—representing how the system is ever present and felt, but not explicitly stated. The system is fact. How can such systems be dismantled? Surely, as Audre Lorde knew, it is not by using the master’s tools. “A Countervailing Theory” offers some alternative possibilities. Here love is radical—between women, between men, between women and men, between human and nonhuman—because it forces us into a fuller recognition of the other. And cunnilingus is radical, and seeing is radical, and listening is radical, for the same reason. We know we don’t want to be victims of history. We know we refuse to be slaves. But do we want to be masters—to behave like masters? To expect as they expect? To be as tranquil and entitled as they are? To claim as righteous our decision not to include them in our human considerations? Are we content that all our attacks on them be ad hominem, as they once spoke of us? If our first response to these portraits of black, female masters is some variation on #bowdownbitches or #girlboss, well, no one can deny the profound pleasures of role reversal, of the flipped script, but when we speak thus we must acknowledge that we can make no simultaneous claim to having put down the master’s tools. Akanke is in these images—but so is Aldo. He must be recognized. The dream of Frantz Fanon was not the replacement of one unjust power with another unjust power; it was a revolutionary humanism, neither assimilationist nor supremacist, in which the Manichaean logic of dominant/submissive as it applies to people is finally and completely dismantled, and the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonization. - from "Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Visions of Power

Saeed, he relished the whole game, the way the country flexed his wits and rewarded him; he charmed it, cajoled it, cheated it, felt great tenderness and loyalty toward it. When it came time, he who had jigged open every back door, he who had, with photocopier, Wite-Out, and paper cutter, spectacularly sabotaged the system (one skilled person at the photocopy machine, he assured Biju, could bring America to its knees), he would pledge emotional allegiance to the flag with tears in his eyes and conviction in his voice. The country recognized something in Saeed, he in it, and it was a mutual love affair. Ups and downs, sometimes more sour than sweet, maybe, but nonetheless,

If you’ve ever found yourself snapping at someone you dearly love, or sitting down to complete a work project only to spend five hours shopping for home tattoo kits online, it’s probably because you’re internally divided. You’re trying to act in ways that don’t feel right to you at the deepest level. Whenever we do this, our lives begin to go pear-shaped. Emotionally, we feel grumpy, sad, or numb. Physically, our immune systems and muscles weaken; we might get sick, and even if we don’t, our energy flattens. Mentally, we lose focus and clarity. That’s how it feels to be out of integrity.

Children know. They breathe it in early, for there's no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. From a young age their loyalties are torn, betrayal of both inevitable, colluding in complaints with gossip passing each way, upstairs and down...love that nanny, au pair, housekeeper or any paid employee - but never forever. Never equally. Tiny hands steeped young in the essence of class and caste.

Jules, are you okay?” “I’m fine.” Sera wrapped her fingers around my bicep. “Are you sure? You don’t—” “I’m fine, Sera. Leave it.” The bones in my knee rubbed together the faster I walked down the sidewalk, sucking away what little air I had left in my lungs. I needed to be in my room, silent and dark. If I could just get there, clear this panic out of my system, I’d be good. “Julien, I’m worried. You can talk to me. Tell me what’s going on and I—” When I snapped, I wasn’t in the driver’s seat anymore. Fuck, I loved Sera’s voice, but in this moment, when I wasn’t sure I wanted to take another step, let alone wake up in the morning, I couldn’t take it. Her concern for me was like an ice pick in my ear. “Holy shit, can you not hear me? I said I’m fine. That means you need to stop asking. Preferably—stop speaking altogether. I’m not your fucking boyfriend or your sad little project. You keep pecking and pecking at me, and I’m going out of my mind. Leave me the hell alone. Just… God, can’t you see I don’t want you around me? Can’t you see that?” She shoved away from me. And when our connection was shattered, she shoved me again. I fell back a step, then another, barely catching myself from falling on my ass. “What is wrong with you?” she cried. “Why would you—?

Here are a few of the defenses that many people carry inside, sometimes for the rest of their lives: AVOIDANCE. Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships. People who are avoidant feel most comfortable when the conversation stays superficial. They often overintellectualize life. They retreat to work. They try to be self-sufficient and pretend they don’t have needs. Often, they have not had close relationships as kids and have lowered their expectations about future relationships. A person who fears intimacy in this way may be always on the move, preferring not to be rooted or pinned down; they are sometimes relentlessly positive so as not to display vulnerability; they engineer things so they are the strong one others turn to but never the one who turns to others. DEPRIVATION. Some children are raised around people so self-centered that the needs of the child are ignored. The child naturally learns the lesson “My needs won’t be met.” It is a short step from that to “I’m not worthy.” A person haunted by a deprivation schema can experience feelings of worthlessness throughout life no matter how many amazing successes they achieve. They often carry the idea that there is some flaw deep within themselves, that if other people knew it, it would cause them to run away. When they are treated badly, they are likely to blame themselves. (Of course he had an affair; I’m a pathetic wife.) They sometimes grapple with a fierce inner critic. OVERREACTIVITY. Children who are abused and threatened grow up in a dangerous world. The person afflicted in this way often has, deep in their nervous system, a hyperactive threat-detection system. Such people interpret ambivalent situations as menacing situations, neutral faces as angry faces. They are trapped in a hyperactive mind theater in which the world is dangerous. They overreact to things and fail to understand why they did so. PASSIVE AGGRESSION. Passive aggression is the indirect expression of anger. It is a way to sidestep direct communication by a person who fears conflict, who has trouble dealing with negative emotions. It’s possible such a person grew up in a home where anger was terrifying, where emotions were not addressed, or where love was conditional and the lesson was that direct communication would lead to the withdrawal of affection. Passive aggression is thus a form of emotional manipulation, a subtle power play to extract guilt and affection. A husband with passive-aggressive tendencies may encourage his wife to go on a weekend outing with her friends, feeling himself to be a selfless martyr, but then get angry with her in the days before the outing and through the weekend. He’ll let her know by various acts of withdrawal and self-pity that she’s a selfish person and he’s an innocent victim. —

The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is another human." Synching with other people can log us in to their bad vibes as well as their good ones. this is why we need to self-regulate, comforting ourselves, calming ourselves down, or pepping ourselves up. If we're always turning toward others to help us tune how we feel, we'll stay more like that infant who is incapable of self-soothing and self-supporting.

When you align Earth with God, when you stand between the Below and the Above and encourage yourself to accept each, embrace both and become both, you begin to reach a deeper layer of conscious consciousness. Let yourself be curious about this moment and remember where you're juggling the Above and Below inside. Tell where you are most associated with Source energies. How do you respond to every manifestation? How do you build equilibrium in your body and in your work, externally? •       Just imagine. You are practically straddling these two universes even when you're reading those words. Within one glorious shape you are the above and below. Now let yourself feel that strength, that connection. Let your hands open and imagine the blinding stream of eternal white light streaming through all the entities flowing through and into the bottom of your feet, from the middle of the Moon, through Gaia and the great Earth Star, through the Rot and residual chakras, through the Crown to the Soul Star and beyond, to the farthest worlds. •       Then see the very top of your head open to the sky, causing the bright stream of celestial light energy to return from the farthest reaches of the universe through the star systems and constellations, down through the Earth's atmosphere and into the chakras of your Soul Star and Earth Star, through the central column, down through the lower chakras and back... here. Here in the womb of the Mother; here in the uppermost realms of Gaia; here, where mortals live, know, grow, love, laugh, lose and discover. In this place energy becomes matter. •       Ye are here. This is. You can relax here, be free, linked and be able to release no energy in your holy service any more. Say, "Guardian Angels, bless us as we combine the beauty and wisdom of the upper and lower worlds, softly or openly. Bring us peace as we stand among the worlds and broaden our consciousness to reflect universal love and unity. Amen, A'ho, So it is. "• Take a deep breath to finish this induction. Imagine, on the exhale, lowering a huge golden anchor down behind you into the Earth. Feel the foundation like you do, as it reinforces and encourages you. Let yourself rest here, knowing you're safe, whole and fine. Those are the Root Chakra presents. May they still do you well.

Basically, the conscious mind is like the hardware of your computer. The subconscious mind is its operating system. It’s composed of code—or all those underlying patterns and connections that were laid down during your childhood. You can’t see that code, but it runs the show. It’s the engine that determines how you react to the world at large versus how you respond to it.

I would argue that “bureaucratic leadership,” with its reliance on certainty, decisiveness, and positional power, is detrimental because it ramps up people’s fear systems, shuts down positive emotions, and stifles the drive to experiment and learn. This so-called executive disease is common because power changes how leaders view other people—research shows that power causes people to see others as a means to their ends rather than as intelligent humans with ideas and emotions.

Heart Center. (Thoracic segment including hands, arms, and shoulders) Positive position seat. Relationship confidence, and sensitivity developed. Empathy, honesty, trust and love of self and of others. Kindness, openness and generosity. Adaptability and flexibility. To reach out and to accept. Positive aspects: self-love, compassion, trust, empathy, optimism, generosity, high levels of excitement and joyful excitement accessed and supported by the hara (abdominal segment) and the Speed Bump unhindered. With inner strength and creative compassion, understanding, compassion, wholeness balanced. You're wondering what you want.  Healthy aggression when the second and third segments are supported.  Negative aspects: Constant sorrow, guilt, indignity, desire, remorse, isolation, a heart of "blindness." Often accompanied by arms and hands holding down, rounding or locking shoulders blocking an expression reaching out or wanting. External Negative Aspects. Shoulders bent, stooped, or rounded, flat chest, general breathing problems, lung and skin diseases. Segment of the solar plexus/diaphragm. A central release point for all body stresses. The marionette's hand that tightens or loosens the cords, including legs, attached to the pelvis, waist, neck, arms, shoulders, mouth, ears, jaw, and head. The fulcrum or balance point of sympathetic high chest/parasympathetic abdominal response; the balance point with the (upper) caring, sincere, trustworthy, empathetic self with our "lower" rooted, erotic, arrogant, imaginative selves; They meet and balance, or complement each other as required or desired. Positive aspects: it supports the balance of brain hemispheres when eliminated.  Capacity to communicate or regulate strong emotions, whether negative or positive, either instinctively or willingly; faith in improvement, concentration, desire to transcend physical and mental challenges, ability to resolve disputes, more in tune with emotions. Contentment and a sense of lightness, understanding, fulfillment and recognition of oneself. Firm digestion. Powerful, energetic performance. Physical symptoms: Fatigue, agitation, frustration, fatigue, muscle tension, stomach problems, digestive and lower back issues. Negative aspects: Defense, insecurity, a lot of boredom, chronic sadness.  Less able to secure peace of mind from passion, or vice versa. Being stuck in emotions, fear, or anger, whether negative or positive (power hunger or zealotism). Expressive inhibition; sexuality with little or no joy; Selfishness, and unrefined emotionality. Physical Negative Aspects. Rigidity and rigidity. Little lung capacity. Distress of the heart. Body acid / alkaline acid imbalanced. Miserable circulatory system.

autonomic nervous system. For example, your heart speeds up a little when you inhale (SNS activation) and slows down when you exhale (PNS arousal).

Lack of groundedness due to spiritual “highs.” When you work through and into the depths of your rebirth, you may occasionally find yourself "strong" emotionally, and you will be much less rooted in your earthen body whenever this occurs. This "danger," as mentioned in the introduction paragraph to this section, is more like a symptom. Most people will experience that groundlessness through the kundalini awakening excitement. Your higher chakras will be wide open, and you'll have the ability to be overwhelmed by what you can now experience. Whenever you feel like this–dreamy, disturbed, floaty, almost cloud-like–start a deep breath. Make one hand into your navel's fist and imagine you could drop a cord straight down into the earth from this spot in your body. Felt grounded and affirmed with your human body as this cord drops and connects with nature. This simulation will relieve these "high" symptoms as they occur. • Jerkiness & muscle spasms As with the argument just above, jerkiness and muscle spasms are signs of kundalini awakening that will undergo much (if not all) of their systems. It is only coded as a "risk" or "danger" because the individual may not think that these actions are linked to his or her awakening and are scared of his or her own well-being. If you ever have occasional spasms or unwanted jerks, take a deep breath and try to feel at ease. These are normal and will pass, "growing pains" synonymous with awakening. Ultimately, you will no longer have them at all, but for now, breathe deeply, and accept them. They're, believe it or not, a good sign. • Finding yourself alone in the “dark night of the soul.” Another symptom of awakening is the "dark night of the soul" experience. This period of time will come to pass for anyone involved in kundalini awakening, and it's not necessarily a fun time, which is why it's coded as a "danger" or "risk." Essentially, the "dark night of the soul" is when you feel like you've hit the lowest low. It's the time you confront all the defects within yourself and know that you can only step upwards, which is an overwhelming task. You may lose someone near you, like a mentor, a friend, or someone you love. You may feel directionless or doubt everything you thought you knew was true, real and nice. If you feel these things, you have not failed to wake up; know that to your core's depths. You didn't fail; you are on the right track. Keep close tabs on that person for those who know someone very emotionally sensitive that is trying to awaken kundalini. The emotionally vulnerable among us are at great risk because, alone, they go through these times. If they're too dejected and directionless, it can mean their lives, but we can always guard against it. Together we are stronger as a community, and each of us with that backing force will make it through this dark night.

IN THE DREAM OF the Planet there are two powerful forces that shape all our agreements, attachments, and domestication. In the Toltec tradition, we call these forces the two types of love: unconditional love and conditional love. When unconditional love flows from our hearts, we move through life and engage other living beings with compassion. Unconditional love is recognizing the divinity in every human being we meet, regardless of his or her role in life or agreement with our particular way of thinking. A Master of Self sees all beings through the eyes of unconditional love, without any projected image or distortion. Conditional love, on the other hand, is the linchpin of domestication and attachment. It only allows you to see what you want to see and to domesticate anyone who doesn't fit your projected image. It's the primary tool used to subjugate those around us and ourselves. Every form of domestication can be boiled down to “If you do this, then I will give you my love” and “If you do not do this, then I will withhold my love.” Every form of attachment starts with “If this happens, then I will be happy and feel love” and “If this does not happen, then I will suffer.” The key word in all of these statements is if, which, as you will see, has no place in unconditional love. As we construct the Dream of the Planet, we have a choice to love each other unconditionally or conditionally. When we love each other unconditionally, our mirror is clean; we see others and ourselves as we really are: beautiful expressions of the Divine. But when the fog of attachment and domestication clouds our perception and we put conditions on our love, we are no longer able to see the divinity in others and ourselves. We are now competing for a commodity that we have mistaken as love. At its core, domestication is a system of control, and conditional love is its primary tool. Consequently, the moment you start trying to control others is the same moment you place conditions on your love and acceptance of them. Because you can only give what you have, the conditions you try to impose on others are the same conditions that you impose upon yourself. When you self-domesticate, you are attempting to control your own actions based on shame, guilt, or perceived reward rather than unconditional self-love.

IN THE DREAM OF the Planet there are two powerful forces that shape all our agreements, attachments, and domestication. In the Toltec tradition, we call these forces the two types of love: unconditional love and conditional love. When unconditional love flows from our hearts, we move through life and engage other living beings with compassion. Unconditional love is recognizing the divinity in every human being we meet, regardless of his or her role in life or agreement with our particular way of thinking. A Master of Self sees all beings through the eyes of unconditional love, without any projected image or distortion. Conditional love, on the other hand, is the linchpin of domestication and attachment. It only allows you to see what you want to see and to domesticate anyone who doesn't fit your projected image. It's the primary tool used to subjugate those around us and ourselves. Every form of domestication can be boiled down to “If you do this, then I will give you my love” and “If you do not do this, then I will withhold my love.” Every form of attachment starts with “If this happens, then I will be happy and feel love” and “If this does not happen, then I will suffer.” The key word in all of these statements is if, which, as you will see, has no place in unconditional love. As we construct the Dream of the Planet, we have a choice to love each other unconditionally or conditionally. When we love each other unconditionally, our mirror is clean; we see others and ourselves as we really are: beautiful expressions of the Divine. But when the fog of attachment and domestication clouds our perception and we put conditions on our love, we are no longer able to see the divinity in others and ourselves. We are now competing for a commodity that we have mistaken as love. At its core, domestication is a system of control, and conditional love is its primary tool. Consequently, the moment you start trying to control others is the same moment you place conditions on your love and acceptance of them. Because you can only give what you have, the conditions you try to impose on others are the same conditions that you impose upon yourself. When you self-domesticate, you are attempting to control your own actions based on shame, guilt, or perceived reward rather than unconditional self-love. As we saw in the example with the man who continues to eat even after he is full, this is neither a healthy nor happy way to live. Unconditional love is the antidote to domestication and attachment, and tapping into its power is a key step in becoming a Master of Self. In this chapter we will look at the practice of having unconditional love for ourselves first and foremost, as you cannot give to others what you don't have for yourself.

The aphorism “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps” comes ironically to mind because it’s so inapplicable: if you can’t afford boots, don’t have any power and barely any resources, if there’s no way to hoist yourself up, then when you need something (say, food or tuition for your kids) the choices are either to ask for it or take it. Or suffer quietly. Or throw rocks at a tap-tap or hit your wife. So are good, brilliant, powerful people working somewhere to find systemic economic and political solutions to the problems we see crushing down on our neighbors? And will the good guys win? Because too often they don’t.

Intentions born from our Self possess a natural flow and spaciousness, unfettered by the urgency and strain that can arise from parts weighed down by burdens. These Self-sourced intentions often emerge when we embody Self energy, experiencing an openness and vibrant fullness within our hearts. Such intentions are fluid and unbound, free from attachment to rigid, measurable goals. Instead, they invite a co-creative dance with the universe itself, emphasizing compassion, rather than fixating on tangible outcomes.

[She Stoops to Conquer] seems to be a comedy of pure plot; yet there is also psychological acuity under the mathematical ingenuity. This is seen most clearly in the character of Marlow, who is painted as a palpable victim of the English class system. His dilemma is that he is a tongue-tied wreck amongst women of his own class but brimming with sexual bravura with a barmaid or college bedmaker. He himself expresses his dilemma with painful clarity: MARLOW: My life has been chiefly spent in a college or an inn, in seclusion from that lovely part of the creation that chiefly teach men confidence. I don't know that I was ever familiarly acquainted with a single modest woman except my mother. But among females of another class, you know - HASTINGS: Ay, among them you are impudent enough of all conscience. Marlow himself rightly calls this 'the English malady': a paralysing fear, resulting from a monastic education, of women of his own class and an ability to be at ease only with social inferiors whom he can bully, dominate or treat as purchasable commodities. It took an observant Irishman to pin down the damage done to the English male psyche by a punitive educational system. [...] And there is further evidence of Marlow's split personality when Kate accosts him in the guise of a household drudge. Marlow the psychological wreck turns into a brazen lech who, within seconds, is asking to taste the nectar of Kate's lips. Not only that. He is soon bragging of his sexual exploits at a louche London club attended by the likes of Mrs Mantrap, Lady Betty Blackleg, the Countess of Sligo, Mrs Langhorns and old Miss Biddy Buckskin.

Manisha is a nagin, her people hunted as monsters and rebels by the kingdom. To stay alive, Manisha must pretend to be a human orphan. She enters the service of the kingdom’s great temple, where she hides her true identity and tries to rise in rank, going deep “undercover” in the hopes that she may someday bring down the system from the inside. Pratyush is the last slayer, a hero born with epic strength and skill, who has his own reasons for disliking the kingdom, but who sees no choice except to honor his debt to the King and protect the kingdom from monsters. When Manisha and Pratyush meet, the chemistry between them is immediate, but love between them would be strictly forbidden.

Candida is a yeast that loves the intestinal environment. It puts down rootlike tendrils, which, like a weed flourishing in a sidewalk crack, can pry open the spaces between gut cells and cause systemic damage.

Despite being extremely isolated inside, these childlike parts of the husbands were addicted to the little affection from their wives that was allowed to trickle down to these exiles through the walls of protection. The exiles knew that this trickle was all that kept them from a return to utter love-starvation and worthlessness. This phenomenon also explains why some men who seem so detached from their spouses are simultaneously so possessive and jealous, to the point of stalking and threatening them when they try to leave.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us. Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance. There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him. Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action. "The king's heart is in the hands of the Lord." A king is history's slave. History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes. Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples *—as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him—he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive life—that is to say, for history—whatever had to be performed. * "To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples." The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg's wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia—undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the French Emperor's love and habit of war coinciding with his people's inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of contemporaries, were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace, but which only wounded the self-love of both sides, and millions of other causes that adapted themselves

Our systems, our countries, our faith groups, our tribes, and our organizations are not the kingdom of God. He resides in the hearts of his people, who are called to love and obey him even when our structures, institutions, and systems fall down around us.

When stuck in bad anxiety, this activation can trigger a host of feelings: nervousness, fear, discomfort, pain—the negative emotions that pull down our moods, distract us, and make us withdraw and isolate ourselves. On the other side of these negative emotions are the wonderful, uplifting positive emotions: joy, love, humor, excitement, curiosity, wonder, gratitude, serenity, inspiration—the list goes on and on. These positive feelings drive our connection to ourselves and others; they ward off illness and keep us healthy by strengthening our immune system; they reward enjoyment and pleasurable behaviors so that we will continue to seek them out.

Globally, most women have babies, and it seems that a high percentage of them are still suffering postpartum injuries long after their births. Urine leakage starts with the pelvic floor. One doctor told me that families commonly give up on caring for their aging loved ones when they lose bladder control. Kids don't want to change their parents' diapers. Urinary incontinence is a leading cause of nursing home admissions for women. This means that whether or not you can live your final days independently may come down to what's unresolved from giving birth, in a part of your body you don't really understand or might not even know is there. The healthcare system isn't just failing postpartum women. It's failing women of all ages for their entire lives.

These entities, angelic, or of other nature and origins have been called forth through deep resonance in your soul. They are here to support and honor your specific makeup and the particular life missions and themes you came to experience and alchemize within your system. Opening to them may be likened unto you purchasing a car which is designed specifically to hug and support every curve of your body, and it being designed in a way that every switch or control in the vehicle is in the very place which works best for you. The smell of the interior is specifically enlivening to your senses, the headlights offer different unique clarity and views, the tires adjust for all weather patterns and conditions. You feel held and have the tools to go on any adventure and explore. In saying this, we are not implying that knowing your guides will remove all pain or suffering from this experience of life, for there are specific pains and sufferings that we have chosen to step into for our highest understanding and maturation. Under the nurturance and care of our guides, we may be held and lovingly nudged down the path to our own reconciliation and joy.

A Moral Compass. Like it or not, we at SoulBoom are all in favor of figuring out what’s right and wrong. We would love to have a belief system that allowed followers to simply “do what feels right.” But a core moral code that doesn’t bend with the ups and downs of social trends is crucial. Here’s how ours will differ, though. We will establish a SoulBoom council of wise folks who peruse the divinely inspired universal moral codes that have been passed down for eons from both the Eastern (karmic) and Western (Abrahamic) faith traditions to decide, through long, loving, and frank consultation, the collective moral parameters for SoulBoomers. Your personal relationship with this new SoulBoom moral code will ultimately be between you, your conscience, and the Creative Cosmic Force (a.k.a. G.O.D.). That is, you won’t get kicked out for failing to follow the guidelines.

The system works because men think they are passing it down out of love, when of course denying boys the full experience of their humanity is what truly loving them would look like.

We have seen that stress is the result of an interaction between a stressor and a processing system. That processing apparatus is the human nervous system, operating under the influence of the brain’s emotional centres. The biology of belief inculcated in that processing apparatus early in life crucially influences our stress responses throughout our lives. Do we recognize stressors? Do we magnify or minimize potential threats to our well-being? Do we perceive ourselves as alone? As helpless? As never needing help? As never deserving help? As being loved? As having to work to deserve love? As hopelessly unlovable? These are unconscious beliefs, embedded at the cellular level. They “control” our behaviours no matter what we may think on the conscious level. They keep us in shut-down defensive modes or allow us to open to growth and to health. We look now at some of these viscerally held perceptions more closely.

The message is clear: slow is bad; fast is good. But in the upside-down kingdom, our value system is turned on its head: hurry is of the devil; slow is of Jesus, because Jesus is what love looks like in flesh and blood.

False religions will always be in the world, Dusty. It’s our job as Christians to show that faith in Jesus is the only valid belief system worth having. The best way to shut down lies is by living out the truth. There’s nothing like Christ’s love that can shine on hearts to discourage people from chasing after empty religious promises or false gods.

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It took him about twenty minutes to make it to his grandmother’s home. He knocked before using his key to let himself in. “It’s me!” he yelled, not wanting her to be alarmed by the sound of her security system going off. “Stay down there. I’m not decent.

A starting point in conversations about sufficiency might be to decouple it from the idea of “austerity” and instead reframe it as “simplicity.” Let’s take a leaf out of nature’s book and slow things down. As Lao Tzu reminds us, “Nature does not hurry, yet all is accomplished.” When we slow down, we relax and become more present. Calmer nervous systems allow us to enjoy the simple things in life, which means we are less likely to search for happiness outside of ourselves by accumulating more “stuff.” When we feel peaceful in the moment, we can find joy in smallest of things like the warm sun on our face, the scent of a flower, or the sound of a child laughing. A litmus test of personal growth is our ability to enjoy these little things because simplicity can lead to an abiding sense of contentment that has nothing to do with material wealth and everything to do with a sense of inner abundance. When we have an abundance mindset, our benchmark of success is no longer confined to our income bracket or the size of our house. Instead it is about intangible things like vibrant health, psychological well-being, loving relationships, community spirit, and our connectedness with nature and the cosmos.

I didn't just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I'll play it back plus ten for the pastardthat caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I'll wet the concrete with their brain mattter. I'll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of their capillaries. I'll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I'll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They'll digest their own organs. I'll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I'll make their own breath soun d like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I'll fill their longs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I'll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They'll pray to gods they don't belive in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mough and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites they immune system usually fights off.

Fair enough." She lowered her knees, stared down as she buttoned her shirt again. "Ty, I'm really sorry. I'd never do anything to upset Eli, or to cause trouble between the two of you." "I know." He pushed to his feet and after a brief hesitation held out his hand to help her up. "I want to make love with you." His already jangled system suffered. "I think what we both want's pretty clear. I just don't know what we're going to do about it. I have to go after him." "Yes.

someone who is not in the same place you are at the moment use his or her guidance system (from where they are) to help you navigate your way to your destination? Especially when you have a perfectly reliable guidance system of your own the whole time? Yet people do it all of the time! They want to know what their friends and family think they should do regarding love, money, and career. They ask for their advice and opinions on everything. For some reason people think other people have a more reliable guidance system than they have themselves. But it really all comes down to trust.

Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Matt?” I ask. And I really want to know, because it’s unfathomable to me that he’s single. He’s handsome, and he’s so kind. He shakes a finger at me. “There’s a story there,” he says. I settle into the sofa a little deeper and turn so that my feet are pointed toward him, my legs extended. My toes almost touch his thigh. But then he lifts my feet and slides under them, scooting closer to me. “I was in love with a girl. For a long time.” “What happened to her?” I ask. He starts to tickle across my toes, and then his fingertips drag down the top of my foot. It’s a gentle sweep, and it feels so good that I don’t want him to stop. His fingers play absently as he starts to talk. “When I got the diagnosis,” he says, “she couldn’t deal with it.” “Cancer?” I ask. He nods. His fingers drag up and down my shin, and he slides around to stroke the back of my knee. I don’t stop him when his hand slides beneath my skirt, although I do tense up. He smiles when he finds the top of my thigh-highs, and he unclips the little fastener that attaches them to my garters. He repeats the action on the other side, his hands teasing the sensitive skin of my inner thigh as he frees the stocking and rolls it down. He pulls it all the way over my foot, and does the same with the other side. I am suddenly really glad I shaved my legs this morning. I wiggle my toes at him, and he starts to stroke me again. I don’t ever want him to stop. “This okay?” he asks. But he’s not looking at my face. He’s looking at my legs. “Yeah,” I breathe. “Keep talking. You got diagnosed…” “I got diagnosed, and the prognosis wasn’t good. I went through chemo and got a little better. But then I needed a second round. Things didn’t look good, and we were flat broke. I couldn’t work at the tattoo parlor anymore because my immune system was too weak, so I had no money coming in. I was poor and sick, and she didn’t love me enough to walk the path with me.” He shrugs, but I can tell he’s serious. “She cheated with my best friend.” He shrugs again. “And that’s the end of that sad story.” “You still love her?” I ask. I don’t breathe, waiting for his answer. He shakes his head and looks up. “I did love her for a long time. And I haven’t been looking for a relationship. I haven’t dated anyone since her. But I’m not in love with her anymore. I know that now.” “Why now?” I ask. He looks directly into my eyes and says, “Because I met you, and I feel really hopeful that you’ll want to go after something real with me. I know we just met and all, but I was serious about making you fall in love with me.” He laughs. “Then you hit me in the nose tonight, and I knew it was meant to be.” “What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about. “When my brother Logan met Emily, she punched him in the face. And when Pete and Reagan first started dating, she hit him in the nose.” He reaches up and touches his nose gently. “So, when you hit me tonight, I just knew it was meant to be.” He grins. “I hope you feel the same way, because I really want to see where this thing is going to go.” “So the women your brothers fell in love with, they committed bodily harm to them and that’s how you guys knew it was real?” “We kind of have a rule. If a woman punches you in the face, you have to marry her.” He laughs. “I didn’t punch you.” “Same difference,” he says. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember being so confused. When she is with Roger it's all love, but at any distance- any at all, Jack- she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming there's only room for Roger, Roger, oh love to the end of breath. But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates "the System," gripes endlessly, says he'll emigrate when the War's over, stays inside his paper cynic's cave hating himself... and does she want to bring him out, really? Isn't it safer with Jeremy? She tried not to allow this question to often, but it's there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well be married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches and easings. She's worn old Beaver's bathrobes, brewed his tea and coffee, sought his eye across lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields when all the day's mean, dismal losses could be rescued in the one look- familiar, full of trust, in a season where the word is invoked for quaintness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for this erratic, self-centered- boy, really. Weepers, he supposed to be pas thirty, he's years older than she. He ought to've learned something, surely? A man of experience? /// If the rockets don't get her there's still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy IS the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made- that we are meant work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the sense and the second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day... Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she did not make... Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on- how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskins to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love. /// Jessica steps away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to him as a bird's song, ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the hankerchief comes away..."Oh sooper dooper," she says, "think I'm catching a cold." You're catching the War. It's infecting you and I don't know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me,,,,

Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she? She can't remember being so confused. When she is with Roger it's all love, but at any distance- any at all, Jack- she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming there's only room for Roger, Roger, oh love to the end of breath. But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates "the System," gripes endlessly, says he'll emigrate when the War's over, stays inside his paper cynic's cave hating himself... and does she want to bring him out, really? Isn't it safer with Jeremy? She tried not to allow this question to often, but it's there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well be married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches and easings. She's worn old Beaver's bathrobes, brewed his tea and coffee, sought his eye across lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields when all the day's mean, dismal losses could be rescued in the one look- familiar, full of trust, in a season where the word is invoked for quaintness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for this erratic, self-centered- boy, really. Weepers, he supposed to be past thirty, he's years older than she. He ought to've learned something, surely? A man of experience? /// If the rockets don't get her there's still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy IS the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made- that we are meant work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day... Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she did not make... Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on- how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskins to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love. /// Jessica steps away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to him as a bird's song, ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the hankerchief comes away..."Oh sooper dooper," she says, "think I'm catching a cold." You're catching the War. It's infecting you and I don't know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me....

Materialism is, really, a system of belief or behavior which considers material things and in particular the control and possession of material things as more important than human values such as connection, love, or spiritual values such as "recognizing the unity of everything". And that's the kind of culture we live in. Interestingly enough, the religious right in their opposition to the very idea of climate change or to the idea that the environment is important to look at, they will quote the old testament where "man is given stewardship over the earth and all of the creatures", but when they talk about stewardship they mean control and dominance. There's another way to look at stewardship, which is caring and nurturing for it, looking after it. And, in the materialistic sense it's that control and ownership that we look at. And that means that the culture itself, quite apart from the physical toxins that we spill into the environment and the way in which we are altering the very air that we breathe or the very sun that shines down on us, we're actually also affected by the toxicity of human relationships or the lack of human relationships that this kind of society - that emphasizes material values - teaches us to pursue.

True knowledge is [that which consists in] the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the Church throughout all the world, and the distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of the bishops, by which they have handed down that Church which exists in every place, and has come even unto us, being guarded and preserved without any forging of Scriptures, by a very complete system of doctrine, and neither receiving addition nor [suffering] curtailment [in the truths which she believes]; and [it consists in] reading [the word of God] without falsification, and a lawful and diligent exposition in harmony with the Scriptures, both without danger and without blasphemy; and [above all, it consists in] the pre-eminent gift of love, which is more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, and which excels all the other gifts [of God].

There’s no distinction here between what a saint would describe and a Patrick who discovers love for the first time. He and Fran didn’t last as a couple beyond a year. Like everyone who has passed through the stage of infatuation, they had ego needs that weren’t the same. Settling down to love while negotiating the demands of “I, me, and mine” poses its own challenges. But Patrick learned the most valuable lesson of his life, that he was lovable and, along with this, that he could love.

This idea that women will “change the culture” of any given industry is an easy lie to buy into. Even if women go in with good intentions, good intentions are nothing against the system. The system is older than you. It has absorbed more venom than you can ever hope to emit. You will not even slow it down. In order to gain entry, you will have to exhibit the characteristics of the patriarchs who built it. In order to advance, you will have to mimic their behavior, take on their values. Their values are power, the love of power, and the display of power. By then, you are part of their culture.

But she could make one decision- to change her environment. And if she could change her environment, she would be subject to a whole different set of cues and unconscious cultural influences. It's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment and then let the new cues do the work. She spent the first part of eighth grade learning about the Academy, talking to students, asking her mother, and quizzing her teachers. One day in February, she heard that the board of the school had arrived for a meeting, and she decided in her own junior-warrior manner that she'd demand that they let her in. She snuck into the school when a group of kids came out the back door for gym class, and she made her way to the conference room. She knocked, and entered the room. There was a group of tables pushed toward the middle of the room, with about twenty-five adults sitting around the outside of them. The two Academy founders were sitting in the middle on the far side of the tables. "I would like to come to your school," she said loud enough for the whole room to hear. "How did you get in here?" somebody at the table barked. "May I please come to your school next year?" One of the founders smiled. "You see, we have a lottery system. If you enter your name, there is a drawing in April-" "I would like to come to your school," Erica interrupted, launching into the speech she had rehearsed in her head for months. "I tried to get into New Hope when I was ten, and they wouldn't let me. I went down to the agency and I told the lady, but she wouldn't let me. It took them three cops to get me out of there, but I'm thirteen now, and I've worked hard. I get good grades. I know appropriate behavior. I feel I deserve to go to your school. You can ask anyone. I have references." She held out a piece of binder paper with teachers' names on it. "What's your name?" the founder asked. "Erica." "You see, we have rules about this. Many people would like to come to the Academy, so we decided the fairest thing to do is to have a lottery each spring." "That's just a way of saying no." "You'll have as fair a chance as anyone." "That's just a way of saying no. I need to go to the Academy. I need to go to college." Erica had nothing more to say. She just stood there silently. She decided it would take some more cops to take her away. Sitting across from the founders was a great fat man. He was a hedge-fund manager who had made billions of dollars and largely funded the school. He was brilliant, but had the social graces of a gnat. He took a pen from his pocket and wrote something on a piece of paper. He looked at Erica one more time, folded the paper, and slid it across the table to the founders. They opened it up and read the note. It said, "Rig the fucking lottery." The founders were silent for a moment and looked at each other. Finally, one of them looked up and said in a low voice. "What did you say your name was?" "Erica." "Listen, Erica, at the Academy we have rules. We have one set of rules for everybody. Those rules we follow to the letter. We demand discipline. Total discipline. So I'm only going to say this to you once. If you ever tell anybody about bursting in here and talking to us like that, I will personally kick you out of our school. Are we clear about that?" "Yes, sir." "The write your name and address on a piece of paper. Put it on the table and I will see you in September".

Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.

As history proves time and time again, and like the fate of the Roman Empire, tyrannical rule is always brought down. Perhaps not as quickly as we would hope, but when people are brought to their knees, becoming slaves to the very system that’s promising their freedom, it’s inevitable for change to occur

Do you ever think about it, about nothingness? I do, I think about it all the time. Because of course it's nothingness that awaits us. *Of course* it is. If it weren't, why would our hearts keep pumping any longer than they had to? Why wouldn't we all emerge into the world, pure and innocent, and then, before we had a chance to get into any trouble - before we even had a chance to take out first, oily shit - just immediately shut down our systems and head straight to the hereafter? If there were a better life after death, why bother getting fitter for survival's sake? Why would evolution even be a thing? Why fight for something second best? If death was *really* awesome, in a life-or-death situation, our bodies wouldn't muscle up with epinephrine and cortisol, our brains would hit us up instead with sloppy sleepy happy love. Hannibal Lecter would be our Mickey Mouse. No. There's fuck-all to look forward to. Our bodies understand this. The real problem is, it's unbearable to *know* this.

Do you ever think about it, about nothingness? I do, I think about it all the time. Because of course it's nothingness that awaits us. *Of course* it is. If it weren't, why would our hearts keep pumping any longer than they had to? Why wouldn't we all emerge into the world, pure and innocent, and then, before we had a chance to get into any trouble - before we even had a chance to take our first, oily shit - just immediately shut down our systems and head straight to the hereafter? If there were a better life after death, why bother getting fitter for survival's sake? Why would evolution even be a thing? Why fight for something second best? If death was *really* awesome, in a life-or-death situation, our bodies wouldn't muscle up with epinephrine and cortisol, our brains would hit us up instead with sloppy sleepy happy love. Hannibal Lecter would be our Mickey Mouse. No. There's fuck-all to look forward to. Our bodies understand this. The real problem is, it's unbearable to *know* this.

How’s fake almost-married life treating you?” “I kissed her.” He chugged down a quarter of the mug. “Yeah, so? Engaged people do that sometimes.” “I kissed her after Cat left the room. I didn’t kiss her because we were pretending. I kissed her because…Hell, I don’t need to draw you a map.” “When did that happen?” Sean looked at his watch. “About a half hour ago.” Kevin gave a low whistle. “She still sleeping on the couch?” “Yes. And she’s staying there, too, goddammit.” “Did she punch you in the face? Knee you in the balls?” “No.” Kevin grinned. “So what’s the problem? You want her. She can at least tolerate you. Get it out of your system.” He was afraid sleeping with Emma wouldn’t get her out of his system, but get her a little further under his skin, instead. “Bad idea.” “Call it a fringe benefit.” “She’s already pretending she’s in love with me. Throwing real sex on top of that could get it all mixed up in her head.” “You worried about her mixing it up…or you?” That was ridiculous, so he snorted and swallowed some more beer. He had no interest in settling down—signing his life over to somebody else so soon after getting it back from Uncle Sam—and he sure as hell wasn’t planting flowers until retirement age. Assuming he didn’t lose his mind and suffocate himself in a mound of mulch before then.

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Beau followed the preacher from the back door of the sale barn to the platform. All five of his brothers walked slowly behind him. James, who was in charge of the music, put a tape into the stereo system and Conway Twitty’s gravelly voice came through singing “The Rose.” Three of his sisters-in-law, and both of Milli’s brothers’ wives, appeared at the front door of the barn. All of them had been bridesmaids several times and they floated down the aisle with grace and dignity even in their flannel shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Then Casey, who was standing in for Milli, appeared at the door on the arm of John Torres.

Damn Princess. You look …” He cleared his throat and finally met my eyes, “wow.” I blushed fiercely and crossed my arms over my chest. “I was uh, just coming to get more towels.” He reached into the closet and pulled out a few. Dropping all but one on the floor next to me, he shook out the one still in his hand and wrapped it around my shoulders. “How are you?” He brushed his fingers across my cheek and down my neck causing me to stifle a moan. “Huh?” Chase chuckled against my neck and lightly pressed his lips to my throat. “That good, huh?” I blinked a few times and pushed away from him, ignoring that smirk I loved so much, “Why do you keep doing this to me?” “What do you mean?” He went to wrap his arms around me, but I stepped out of his reach. “This!” I pointed to an outstretched arm, “You can’t keep doing this. I’m with Brandon now, you have to stop.” His face fell into an unreadable mask and he dropped his arms to his side. “No more notes, no more touches, no more putting your lips on me. This isn’t fair to me. Do you have any idea how crazy you’re making me?” Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have asked that, his eyes lit up and that stupid smirk was back. “Really now?” “Chase I’m serious, this has to stop.” “Give me one good reason why I should.” I huffed and wrapped the towel tighter around me, “I told you, I’m with Brandon now.” “I said a good reason Princess.” He deadpanned. “That’s a perfectly good reason! And it’s the only one you’re going to get.” I bent down and picked up the towels, when I stood back up he was right in front of me. “Harper.” “No Chase,” I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t get distracted again, “Please just – just don’t. I really like Brandon. Besides, you have plenty of girls who are fine with being treated like shit by you, I’m not one of them. Go find another brainless bimbo to screw and get out of your system.” I heard his sharp intake of breath, but kept my eyes closed until I was on my way back outside.

Of course, many of the fans who came to wait for us were women. You could count on that. There were certain women who would follow the group from city to city. Others would be local girls who liked Styx, or who liked the rock scene in general. In the beginning, the number of women (or girls, it was sometimes hard to tell their age) who turned out for our performances surprised me. In time, though, you just expected it. The faces began to blur together from city to city, and for all I knew, it could have been the same group of fifty or so scantily clad women who were transported and plopped down in front of the stage door in each different city. Most of them never made it beyond the back door. The lucky ones found a way to get backstage passes. But even the ones allowed backstage rarely got attention from any of the guys in the band. After a certain point, it just gets a little monotonous—even if you’re straight and single. If you’re married, or worse yet, gay, it gets old very quickly. This meant that our road crew got very lucky, very often. If the girls couldn’t get to anyone in the band, the roadies were the next best thing. And the roadies were never too busy or too tired to take one for the team. In exchange, the girls got access to hang out backstage while Styx performed. Everyone seemed happy enough with the system. While

The word is pure magic — the most powerful gift we have as humans — and we use it against ourselves. We plan revenge. We create chaos with the word. We use the word to create hate between different races, between different people, between families, between nations. We misuse the word so often, and this misuse is how we create and perpetuate the dream of hell. Misuse of the word is how we pull each other down and keep each other in a state of fear and doubt. Because the word is the magic that humans possess and misuse of the word is black magic, we are using black magic all the time without knowing that our word is magic at all. There was a woman, for example, who was intelligent and had a very good heart. She had a daughter whom she adored and loved very much. One night she came home from a very bad day at work, tired, full of emotional tension, and with a terrible headache. She wanted peace and quiet, but her daughter was singing and jumping happily. The daughter was unaware of how her mother was feeling; she was in her own world, in her own dream. She felt so wonderful, and she was jumping and singing louder and louder, expressing her joy and her love. She was singing so loud that it made her mother’s headache even worse, and at a certain moment, the mother lost control. Angrily she looked at her beautiful little girl and said, “Shut up! You have an ugly voice. Can you just shut up!” The truth is that the mother’s tolerance for any noise was nonexistent; it was not that the little girl’s voice was ugly. But the daughter believed what her mother said, and in that moment she made an agreement with herself. After that she no longer sang, because she believed her voice was ugly and would bother anyone who heard it. She became shy at school, and if she was asked to sing, she refused. Even speaking to others became difficult for her. Everything changed in the little girl because of this new agreement: She believed she must repress her emotions in order to be accepted and loved. Whenever we hear an opinion and believe it, we make an agreement, and it becomes part of our belief system. This little girl grew up, and even though she had a beautiful voice, she never sang again. She developed a whole complex from one spell. This spell was cast upon her by the one who loved her the most: her own mother. Her mother didn’t notice what she did with her word. She didn’t notice that she used black magic and put a spell on her daughter. She didn’t know the power of her word, and therefore she isn’t to blame. She did what her own mother, father, and others had done to her in many ways. They misused the word. How

The support of her family is matched by the encouragement of the small group of friends and counsellors who see the real Diana, not the glowing image presented for public consumption. They are under no illusions that, while the Princess is a woman of considerable virtues, her character is prone to pessimism and despair, qualities which increase the likelihood of her leaving the system. The departure of the Duchess of York from the royal scene has exacerbated that defeatist side of her personality. As she has admitted to friends: “Everyone said I was the Marilyn Monroe of the 1980s and I was adoring every minute of it. Actually I’ve never sat down and said: ‘Hooray how wonderful. Never.’ The day I do we’re in trouble. I am performing a duty as the Princess of Wales as long as my time is allocated but I don’t see it any longer than fifteen years.” While she has the right to feel sorry for herself, all too often this spills over into self-imposed martyrdom. As James Gilbey says: “When she is confident she extends herself and pushes out the barriers. As soon as there is a chink in the armour she immediately retreats away from the fray.” At times it is almost as though she wants to engineer a hurt or a rejection before she is deserted by those she trusts and loves. This has resulted in her blocking out her allies at crucial periods in her royal life when she has most needed support.

Four months ago I might have come with you Touya. But I have been taught a lot since then. I have learned about friendship, and jokes..." He smiled, slightly starting Dabi. "Conspiracy theories, LGBTQ... memes, coffee, twerking... I was shown what love truly was..." Shoto turned to look into those icy blue eyes. "I have lived more in the last four months than I have in the rest of my life... and there is so much more to it than punishing our father. Izuku and I will take him down, and the corrupt system that allowed him to do what he did to me, and to you. But even if he somehow gets away from that... I will still stand by the people who love me... who got my heart beating again, who got me to laugh for the first time in so long-" He stopped when Dabi laughed and ruffled his hair. "What?" The older man grinned. "You've made my year Shoto... I know I'll never be able to make up for never coming back for you. But I am so happy you've found where you belong." Shoto swallowed, his eyes felt tingly but he blinked rapidly and it went away. "I have.

Cut down on dairy. While dairy products have become increasingly popular in Japan, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, the Japanese dairy intake is still considerably lower than that of other countries, particularly the UK and USA. Dairy has been known to cause sinus issues, as well as heightened cholesterol. Instead of drinking milk, I often drink soya milk. It took a while to get used to the difference in taste, but I now love it and have it with everything – from a cup of tea to my morning cereal! Eat smaller portions. One thing I noticed since coming back from Japan was the humungous size of meals in the UK. In Japanese culture, it's common to be presented with a variety of smaller dishes which you can help yourself to. That way, you can eat just the right amount for you without stuffing yourself silly – something we have a habit of doing in the Western world. Several studies have suggested that by eating smaller portions, you avoid bloating and give your digestive system a break – it can certainly help you lose a bit of weight as well! Eat

Cut down on dairy. While dairy products have become increasingly popular in Japan, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, the Japanese dairy intake is still considerably lower than that of other countries, particularly the UK and USA. Dairy has been known to cause sinus issues, as well as heightened cholesterol. Instead of drinking milk, I often drink soya milk. It took a while to get used to the difference in taste, but I now love it and have it with everything – from a cup of tea to my morning cereal! Eat smaller portions. One thing I noticed since coming back from Japan was the humungous size of meals in the UK. In Japanese culture, it's common to be presented with a variety of smaller dishes which you can help yourself to. That way, you can eat just the right amount for you without stuffing yourself silly – something we have a habit of doing in the Western world. Several studies have suggested that by eating smaller portions, you avoid bloating and give your digestive system a break – it can certainly help you lose a bit of weight as well! Eat a lot of fish! I know that several of you are allergic to fish or simply do not like the taste. That's fine – there are certainly alternatives, but numerous studies have shown the correlation between eating fish and one's mental health. In particular, oily fish such as mackerel, sardines, fresh (not canned) tuna and even salmon have a high reputation for being excellent ‘brain-boosters’. I

My Dear Benjamin Zander, You have just completed a presentation to the leadership of the North Shore–Long Island Jewish Health System. I “should” be immediately returning to my job as one of the System’s Vice Presidents (such a fancy title, no?), but not without first sitting down and briefly telling you of how your words, energy, and humour affected me this day. I am the man who approached you and told you of my emotional “reunion” with my father through your presentation. He was Swiss-German, and throughout my adult life I have struggled to explain to myself why, in the 25 years that he was with me, he could never, even once, say to me “I love you.” Oh, we did many things as a family, and I suppose his “teachings” in the form of admonishments have always remained with me, though softened, as I had the joy of becoming a father myself to 5 beautiful children. You told us, as you were about to play Chopin, to use the time to reflect on someone no longer in our lives. I thought about my father and again about that nagging question which I could never answer—why couldn’t he say “I love you”?

[How "magical charms" work for healing:] [It is Divine Love that heals and cures. But many people have difficulty accessing the full power of Divine Love. So magical charms can act as a permission slip to let Love and faith in, to do the healing.] Ignorant people in their blind faith would accept a piece of wood or stone as their Savior or Divinity in the external creation, for which their heart's natural love will develop till by its energetic tendency it will relieve them of all exciting causes, cool their system down to a normal state, and invograte their vital powers. The adepts, on the other hand, having full control over the whole material world, find their Divinity and Savior in Self and not outside in the external world.

Over the last few decades, in keeping with the way pretty much everything else in America has been driven into a corporate straitjacket, American politics has been drained of its juice and turned into a rationalistic, abstract intellectual exercise based more on economic than human imperatives and invested more in dumbing down than in uplifting the American people. Our government has become a system of legalized bribery, less concerned with deep issues of humanity’s purpose and more with shallow questions of money and power. This has put our politics squarely out of alignment with the evolutionary lure of this new century and the yearnings of the human heart.

Applying math to practical problems was another business altogether; it meant a deep understanding of the problem before writing the equations. But if you muster the strength to weight-lift a car to save a child, above your current abilities, the strength gained will stay after things calm down. So, unlike the drug addict who loses his resourcefulness, what you learn from the intensity and the focus you had when under the influence of risk stays with you. You may lose the sharpness, but nobody can take away what you’ve learned. This is the principal reason I am now fighting the conventional educational system, made by dweebs for dweebs. Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

Deep down, I find everything set out above to be very natural; and if I have highlighted it, it was merely the better to register the loving relationship between fascism and the ruling classes; to show that fascism is not a separate phenomenon discreet from all the other injustices in society, but is a direct consequence and emanation of these; that in fact it is the current political and economic system that really bears the responsibility for the civil war launched by fascism.

A peaceful, sweet, lovely, and significant Revolution neither authorizes, to overthrow and gun down the current rulers nor abolish whatever existing system. Factually, it comes from adopting and delivering the truth, respect, politeness, harmony, equal rights, fair and transparent justice strictly without distinctions.

A lot of things went into my decision to flush the pills down the toilet instead of swallowing them. Mainly, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to die. Would I be in pain? Would my lungs stop working first? Or would my throat close up? Would I be able to feel the drugs in my system? Or would I just…black out?

Upon the whole it must be said, that the first and most important step toward peace, is sincerely to desire it. They who once love peace in their hearts, will eagerly seize every opportunity of establishing or recovering it. All obstacles to it they will despise or remove, all hardships and difficulties they will bear with patience, so long as they keep this one great blessing (including as it does so many others) whole and entire. On the contrary, men, in our times, go out of their way to seek occasions of war; and whatever makes for peace, they run down in their sophistical speeches, or even basely conceal from the public; but whatever tends to promote their favorite war system, they industriously exaggerate and inflame, not scrupling to propagate lies of the most mischievous kind, false or garbled intelligence and the grossest misrepresentation of the enemy.

Despite Noetic Science’s use of cutting-edge technologies, the discoveries themselves were far more mystical than the cold, high-tech machines that were producing them. The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science—the untapped potential of the human mind. The overall thesis was simple: We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities. Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass. Their experiments were no “spoon-bending” parlor tricks, but rather highly controlled inquiries that all produced the same extraordinary result: our thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic realm. Mind over matter. In 2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven different Random Event Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. Somehow, the oneness of this shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing order from chaos. The shocking discovery, it seemed, paralleled the ancient spiritual belief in a “cosmic consciousness”—a vast coalescing of human intention that was actually capable of interacting with physical matter. Recently, studies in mass meditation and prayer had produced similar results in Random Event Generators, fueling the claim that human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body . . . a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study—theintentionexperiment.com—aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world. A handful of other progressive texts had also piqued Katherine’s interest. From this foundation, Katherine Solomon’s research had vaulted forward, proving that “focused thought” could affect literally anything—the growth rate of plants, the direction that fish swam in a bowl, the manner in which cells divided in a petri dish, the synchronization of separately automated systems, and the chemical reactions in one’s own body. Even the crystalline structure of a newly forming solid was rendered mutable by one’s mind; Katherine had created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze. Incredibly, the converse was also true: when she sent negative, polluting thoughts to the water, the ice crystals froze in chaotic, fractured forms. Human thought can literally transform the physical world.

Name: Nova Jay Age: 16 Godly Parent: Hestia Years at Camp: 6 Preferred Weapon (no guns guys): Knives or her powers of fire Appearance: (Please include a link or something) (view spoiler). Personality: She's hyper. She loves reading and drawing and longs for a love that only exists in books. She enjoys the outdoors, and is always willing to help out. She loves watching animals, but doesn't have a pet herself. But under all of her upbeat personality she has a temper. But she has a huge sweet tooth and will forgive you if you bring her something sweet. History: Nova Jay was found as an infant in the remains of a burned down cabin and was put into the foster care system. After running away from a particularly bad home at the age of 10 she found her way to camp half-blood by chance and there was where she found out who her mother was. She came to her powers at the age of 12 Family (Outside the gods): Crush/Bf/Gf: None yet Strongest Skill: Creativity Weakest Skill: Her emotions and mind are just as crazy as her personality can be

Stuck on "on": how to manage a Sympathetic response 1. Say to yourself, "I am having trauma response. This is a physiological process. I'm not crazy." 2. Make a list of people, places, and things that you love. Notice how your body feels as you think about hugging your best friend, sitting on a beach, or curling up with your favorite book. 3. Use your senses. Weighted blankets. Essential oils. Soft music. Warm tea. These can all help your nervous system come back down. 4. Count backward from the number 31. 5. Notice 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, and 1 thing you can taste. 6. Push as hard as you can against a door or a wall. Notice your muscles firing. Step back, take a break. Repeat three times. 7. Do simple math problems in your head. Simple thinking tasks will help your brain reorientate itself. 8. Name the sensations inside your body. Say to yourself out loud, "I feel tension in my neck. I feel tightness in my stomach. I feel he at in my face." Then look for one place in your body where you feel neutral or calm. Most people can access neutral by noticing random areas like their left knee cap or right ring finger. Focus your attention first on the neutral area, then on the tense area, then on the neutral area. Do this for four minutes. 9. Don't ask why you feel panic. Do ask who or what will help you feel safe. 10. If you have a dog or a cat, gently put your hand on their heart and count their heartbeat for three minutes. Stuck on "off": how to manage a high tone dorsal vagal state. 1. Remind yourself that you are not lazy or unmotivated. Tell yourself, "I am having a trauma response. This is a thing. I am not crazy." 2. Get cold. Splash ice-cold water on your face. Hold ice cubes in your hand. Put an ice pack on your neck. Or jump into the coldest possible shower you can stand. 3. Hum or sing. There's a reason people have changed "Ommm" since the 6th century. 4. Social connection is powerful medicine. Connect with a human over the phone: good. Over video chat: better: In person: best. 5. Don't ask why you're feeling frozen. Do ask who or what might help you feel safer. 6. Don't use hyperbolic exaggerated language like "I feel buried" or "I'm drowning." This language reinforces the stress response. Instead, get really specific." I need to call my son's teacher, pick up my prescription and finish a proposal for work." Write down the specific tasks. This will help your brain click back into solution mode. 7. Suck on a lemon. This sounds weird, but it can help suck your brain out of shutdown mode. 8. Open and close your mouth. Then move your head. Then stretch your arms and legs. 9. Grab both ends of a blanket and wring it out as you would if it was soaking wet. Notice your muscles firing as you do this. Take a break. Repeat three times. 10. If you have a safe and willing friend or partner, make eye contact with them for 2-3 minutes. It's super awkward, but you will get a bonus dose of energy if you both end up laughing.

Name: Ava Mage Sign: Virgo Birthday: September 21st Pronouns: She/her Sexuality: Straight Appearance: [ Mackenzie Foy Net (hide spoiler)] Face Claim: Mackenzie Foy Personality: She's generally outgoing and somewhat hyper. She's quiet when she's upset and is a good listener. Because of her past she gets triggered by certain smells like stale alcohol or cigarette smoke. She loves being outside and in nature, especially camping. She is loyal to those she loves and will never let you down. History: Ava Mage was born on September 21st and put straight into the foster care system where she was her entire life until she emancipated at 16. Each household she was in got progressively worse as she got older. As soon as she got out of the system she learned self defense so she would never be taken advantage of again. She bounced around for a little while not really making any friends. She's found a place to settle down and is an event planner/photographer. Likes: Photography Cheesecake Camping Hiking Coffee Dancing Fall Animals Reading Dislikes: Green beans controlling people Love language: Words of affirmation/gift giving/ physical touch Style:[ Drink Coffee Read Books Be Happy Sweatshirt Book Shirt - Etsy (hide spoiler)

the brains of people with an anxious attachment style react more strongly to thoughts of loss and at the same time under-recruit regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions. This means that once your attachment system is activated, you will find it much harder to “turn it off” if you have an anxious attachment style.

He (Becker) then shows how a rather agreeable amorality has gained ground among our peasants, because they'd rather pursue their actual interests than the commandments of morality. Because the revolutionary priests and schoolmasters serve the hu man being, they cut off the head of human beings. The revolutionary laymen or the profane ones had no more inhibitions about cutting off heads, but were less concerned about human rights, i.e., the rights of man, than about their own. How does it come about, though, that the egoism of those who assert a personal interest, and inquire of it all the time, still always succumbs to a priestly or schoolmasterly, i.e., an ideal interest ? Their person seems to them too small, too insignificant, and in fact it is, to lay claim to everything and to be able to completely carry it through. There's a sure sign of this in the fact that they divide themselves into two persons, one eternal and one temporal, and every time care either only for the one or only for the other, on Sunday for the eternal, on the workday for the temporal, in prayer for the former, in work for the latter. They have the priest within themselves, and therefore don't get rid of him, and hear themselves getting a tongue-lashing inwardly every Sunday. How people have struggled and calculated to determine these dualistic essences ! Idea followed upon idea, principle upon principle, system upon system, and none were able to hold down the contradiction of the "worldly" person, the so-called "egoist;' for long. Doesn't this prove that all those ideas were too powerless to take up my whole will into themselves and satisfy it ? They were and remained hostile to me, even if the hostility lay concealed for a long time. Will it be like this with ownness? Is it also just an attempt at mediation ? Every principle to which I turned, such as to reason, I always had to turn away from again. Or can I always be rational, setting everything up in my life according to reason ? I can certainly strive for rationality, I can love it, just as I can also love God and every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love God. But what I love, what I strive for, is only in my idea, my conception, my thoughts; it is in my heart, in my head, it is in me like the heart, but it is not I, I am not it.

The good news, and the reason I’m not totally skeptical of AI’s potential, is that we still have the power to determine how these technologies are developed. And if we do it right, the results could be incredible. Designed and deployed correctly, AI could help us eliminate poverty, cure disease, solve climate change, and fight systemic racism. It could move work to the periphery of our lives, and give us back time to spend with the people we love, doing the things that give us joy and meaning. The bad news, and the reason I’m not as optimistic as many of my friends in Silicon Valley, is that many of the people leading the AI charge right now aren’t pursuing those kinds of goals. They’re not trying to free humans from toil and hardship; they’re trying to boost their app’s engagement metrics, or wring 30 percent more efficiency out of the accounting department. They are either unaware of or unconcerned with the ground-level consequences of their work, and although they might pledge to care about the responsible use of AI, they’re not doing anything to slow down or consider how the tools they build could enable harm. Trust me, I would love to be an AI optimist again. But right now, humans are getting in the way.

Keeping the secret of sexual abuse forces you to live in a continuous lie. You lie to the people around you and you also lie to yourself. Your entire belief system is turned upside down and you start to question everything you’ve ever known to be true, including the concepts of love, desire, and affection.

I have dreamed of ways to kill her repeatedly. Like this one, I would like to see her be impaled on a sharp wooden stick, starting through her butt hole, and then slowly have gravity have it go up into her delicious miniature body until it hits her brain, and she screams out my girl’s names, as we get what we need. I would love to see a Nevaeh- kabob! I would love to see her stoned out in the open with rocks! I would love to see my girls bite their nipples off with their teeth! I want to see my girl claw her up to head to toe. I hunger to see them scratch her sweet blue eyes that are so heavenly right out of her face! I want to see her gush that cobalt blood like a waterfall from her naked sliced-up body. Yes, I want us to torture her any way we can until she says yes to us. We are going to get at anything of hers we can until she comes with us! As we would, all dance around her, as we would light her up, cheerfully for the last time. How I would love to bleach and fry that perfect hair with chemicals. I and we all in our family want to fuck her up and down anyways we can! Mwah Ha, ha! Yes, Beforehand, we all would kiss, touch, lick, and stick her, and do what we want to get the life from her by sucking away. We would eat her soul away as it would come down from the heavens then through her body, and into ours, as we would drink it out, the way we do. Yes, yes, hell- yes, I can see it now! Yes, I want her soul! Besides, anything or everything I can get out of her to add to my shrine. We even have a voodoo doll of her with pins in it. I have a few things of hers like her hymen-damaged red blood tarnished pink polka-dotted gym underwear, and her indigo pantiliner she had on. That my girl ripped off of her in school, the more things we have the more we can control her mind, but I want more! We want more! We want and need it all! Just like the one girl Lily; I have her one hair ribbon; from Nevaeh, I have something far more personal than her underwear, and it is on display too, and that was her virginity! Who knows that she was a little cock sucker too? How do I have it, you ask? Tee- hee- Will I tell you- how! Now come to think of it, back then my idea was to drive her insane so that she will do it to herself… like she did; by not having anyone to confide in, I wanted that to kill her slowly, that was the plan. Just like I was the arranger of her first sexual partner. I told him to pound the shit out of her, and pop her cherry so hard and fast, that the next day she could not even walk; plus, bleed for many days; which is how I got what is on display… I did this so that it would take everything away from her. If my girls do not have it, then neither does she. I made the schooling system think that she has major problems, from kindergarten up through high school. I will do whatever it takes to have her fall! For the reason that I have to be triumphant! It was a promise that I made to her mother. If I cannot have her mind, body, and soul, no one can. Yeah, now I did not mind putting a bullet in her father's head, so I would have loved to put one on hers also. Yes, I should have gotten to her way back then, when she was just sitting in her playpens so defenseless. Then again, I thought what the hell… it would be better to torture her, and make everything in her life a living hell for her! Why should I play god, when I can send the devil to her bed every night! Let’s not forget to mention everybody showed up at her father's house right after the murder that took place. So, I did not have enough time to complete the job. Oh yes, her mother is a very good friend of mine, and I wanted to make sure that Nevaeh would have nothing. Nothing but pain, misery, and torture from me and my girls. Yes, without her ever knowing, that I was the one causing all the trouble in her life.

I have dreamed of ways to kill her repeatedly. Like this one, I would like to see her be impaled on a sharp wooden stick, starting through her butt hole, and then slowly have gravity have it go up into her delicious miniature body until it hits her brain, and she screams out my girl’s names, as we get what we need. I would love to see a Nevaeh- kabob! I would love to see her stoned out in the open with rocks! I would love to see my girls bite their nipples off with their teeth! I want to see my girl claw her up to head to toe. I hunger to see them scratch her sweet blue eyes that are so heavenly right out of her face! I want to see her gush that cobalt blood like a waterfall from her naked sliced-up body. Yes, I want us to torture her any way we can until she says yes to us. We are going to get at anything of hers we can until she comes with us! As we would, all dance around her, as we would light her up, cheerfully for the last time. How I would love to bleach and fry that perfect hair with chemicals. I and we all in our family want to fuck her up and down anyways we can! Mwah Ha, ha! Yes, Beforehand, we all would kiss, touch, lick, and stick her, and do what we want to get the life from her by sucking away. We would eat her soul away as it would come down from the heavens then through her body, and into ours, as we would drink it out, the way we do. Yes, yes, hell- yes, I can see it now! Yes, I want her soul! Besides, anything or everything I can get out of her to add to my shrine. We even have a voodoo doll of her with pins in it. I have a few things of hers like her hymen-damaged red blood tarnished pink polka-dotted gym underwear, and her indigo pantiliner she had on. That my girl ripped off of her in school, the more things we have the more we can control her mind, but I want more! We want more! We want and need it all! Just like the one girl Lily; I have her one hair ribbon; from Nevaeh, I have something far more personal than her underwear, and it is on display too, and that was her virginity! Who knows that she was a little cock sucker too? How do I have it, you ask? Tee- hee- Will I tell you- how! Now come to think of it, back then my idea was to drive her insane so that she will do it to herself… like she did; by not having anyone to confide in, I wanted that to kill her slowly, that was the plan. Just like I was the arranger of her first sexual partner. I told him to pound the shit out of her, and pop her cherry so hard and fast, that the next day she could not even walk; plus, bleed for many days; which is how I got what is on display… I did this so that it would take everything away from her. If my girls do not have it, then neither does she. I made the schooling system think that she has major problems, from kindergarten up through high school. I will do whatever it takes to have her fall! For the reason that I have to be triumphant! It was a promise that I made to her mother. If I cannot have her mind, body, and soul, no one can. Yeah, now I did not mind putting a bullet in her father's head, so I would have loved to put one on hers also. Yes, I should have gotten to her way back then, when she was just sitting in her playpens so defenseless. Then again, I thought what the hell… it would be better to torture her, and make everything in her life a living hell for her! Why should I play god, when I can send the devil to her bed every night! Let’s not forget to mention everybody showed up at her father's house right after the murder that took place. So, I did not have enough time to complete the job. Oh yes, her mother is a very good friend of mine, and I wanted to make sure that Nevaeh would have nothing. Nothing but pain, misery, and torture from me and my girls. Yes, without her ever knowing, that I was the one causing all the trouble in her life.

Megan was over at the Morgan brothers’ house, having a casual dinner with Drew and his brother, Alan. It was casual in the sense that there were only three courses and no ice sculpture. When Alan left the room to get dessert, Megan said, “If you don’t give me whatever’s in your pocket, I’m going to reach in there and grab it myself.” He got a devilish grin and threw his hands in the air. “Help yourself!” She reached in and found a ring. Not an engagement ring but a ring with a large stone in the middle. A cheap-looking stone. Megan frowned. “Is this plastic?” “It’s a mood ring,” he said. “I bought it at a carnival when I was a kid. I wore it to school once because I thought it was cool. I got my first black eye that day.” “You got bullied?” “Not exactly. The guy who punched me once got two right back.” She handed the ring back. “You can wear it now, if you want. You’re an adult. Nobody’s going to beat you up.” She made a fist and punched her palm. “Not if they don’t want me to tag in and finish the match.” He put the ring back in his pocket. “Never mind,” he said. She put her hand in his pocket and grabbed the ring back. “Don’t tell me to never mind. Why do you have this? Were you going to give it to me?” “I thought it would be funny,” he said. “You’re reading all those books Feather recommended, and you’re doing that thing where you name your emotions. I thought it would be funny if you had a mood ring to help you with that.” She tried on the ring. The only finger it fit was her ring finger, so she left it there. “I like it,” she said. “It’s not very funny, though. It’s actually kind of…” She was at a loss for words. It had been happening a lot lately. Coming up with words to describe feelings was much harder than being crass or sarcastic. “Romantic,” Drew said. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. It’s romantic.” She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Plus, now I know your ring size,” he said. They both looked down at her hand. She looked away. “For the future,” he said. “Relax. I don’t mean right now.” She looked at the ring again. It was changing colors. “It’s working,” she said. “It’s a heat-sensitive compound,” he said. “It doesn’t really tell you someone’s mood, just how warm their fingers are.” “But finger temperature means a lot,” she said. “I’ve been reading about the nervous system, and how everything works together in all these different feedback loops. When someone’s stressed, their hands get cold. Or when their hands get cold for some other reason, they might feel stressed and make up a story about why they feel that way. People make up a lot of stories to explain how they feel because it’s so confusing to not know, and sometimes we’d rather think it’s because of something bad than not know at all.” He looked down at the ring, which was still changing colors. “I had no idea.” “I’ll have to come into your clinic and give you some tips for putting your patients more at ease.” “You can’t do that,” he said. “It would really cut down on the screaming, which I have grown to love.” He gave her his mad scientist cackle. “You are so weird.” She kissed him again.

They allowed the group to learn and experiment without negative consequences. Because of this, the group’s seeking systems ramped up and their fear was tamped down.

Demand for Dealogic’s services had grown briskly over the last twenty years. To keep quality high in the face of growth, managers kept refining internal processes, which included quantifiable performance metrics. Ordinarily, process refinement sounds pretty good if you are a COO. But it can also present long-term problems, which I touched on in chapter 2: it can replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation. KPIs and the accompanying career implications lead the fear system to dominate the seeking system, taking creativity and enthusiasm down with it.1 The extrinsic rewards crowd out the intrinsic buzz.