Unaware Image Quotes

I am aware that I am less than some people prefer me to be, but most people are unaware that I am so much more than what they see.

Hardly unaware of his image, Bradlee even cultivated it. He delighted in displaying his street savvy, telling a reporter to get his ass moving and talk to some real cops, not lieutenants and captains behind a desk; then rising to greet some visiting dignitary from Le Monde or L'Express in formal, flawless French, complete with a peck on each cheek. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

I was convinced that I was the problem in the relationship; that if I were to do something different, things would get better. I was unaware at the time that this was simply a manifestation of my crucial need for control. That by convincing myself that it was me, I was convincing myself that I still had the power to fix it. If it was me that needed to change, I could do that! Absolutely! No problem! I could absolutely fix this.

Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment — the observing consciousness — cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists — all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm — and yet all worlds are ultimately one.

We live in a world of illusions. We think we’re aware of everything going on around us. We look out and see an uninterrupted, complete picture of the visual world, composed of thousands of little detailed images. We may know that each of us has a blind spot, but we go on day to day blissfully unaware of where it actually is because our occipital cortex does such a good job of filling in the missing information and hence hiding it from us. Laboratory demonstrations of inattentional blindness (like the gorilla video of the last chapter) underscore how little of the world we actually perceive, in spite of the overwhelming feeling that we’re getting it all.

Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real. Then there’s the mind, half-focused on the TV, the settee, the clock. This ghostly knot of memory, idea and feeling that we call ourself also exists, though not within the measurable world our science may describe. Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas. Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we, like Faust, might better know them; deal with them; become them. Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably ezdst, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love’s name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred? The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven’t called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.

The price of freedom is eternal mindfulness. This is a book about restoring connection. It is the experience of being in connection that fulfills the longing we have to feel fully alive. An impaired capacity for connection to self and others, and the ensuing diminished aliveness, are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems. Unfortunately, we are often unaware of the internal roadblocks that keep us from experiencing the connection and aliveness we yearn for. These roadblocks develop in reaction to developmental and shock trauma and the related nervous system dysregulation, disruptions in attachment, and distortions of identity. The goal of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is to work with these dysregulations, disruptions, and distortions while never losing sight of supporting the development of a healthy capacity for connection and aliveness. In this book we address conflicts around the capacity for connection and explore how deeper connection and aliveness can be supported in the process of healing developmental trauma.

His likeness? How can I trace it? I have seen Arsène Lupin a score of times, and each time a different being has stood before me… or rather the same being under twenty distorted images reflected by as many mirrors, each image having its special eyes, its particular facial outline, its own gestures, profile, and character. “I myself,” he once said to me, “have forgotten what I am really like. I no longer recognize myself in a glass.” A paradoxical whim of the imagination, no doubt; and yet true enough as regards those who come into contact with him, and who are unaware of his infinite resources, his patience, his unparalleled skill in make-up, and his prodigious faculty for changing even the proportions of his face and altering the relations of his features one to the other. “Why,” he asked, “should I have a definite, fixed appearance? Why not avoid the dangers attendant upon a personality that is always the same? My actions constitute my identity sufficiently.” And he added, with a touch of pride: “It is all the better if people are never able to say with certainty: ‘There goes Arsène Lupin.’ The great thing is that they should say without fear of being mistaken: ‘That action was performed by Arsène Lupin.

An image came unbidden to her mind: frozen foam flowers lifting off the tips of waves like dandelion seeds, brilliant crystal sparks in the wind and sun, barely glimpsed before being dashed to pieces on the beach. They huddled together, as though unaware of anything else in the grand universe, as though it was enough to have tinkled together, to have heard the music of one another's soul for a fraction of a moment.

So does TV watching create inner space? Does it cause you to be present? Unfortunately, it does not. Although for long periods your mind may not be generating any thoughts, it has linked into the thought activity of the television show. It has linked up with the TV version of the collective mind, and is thinking its thoughts. Your mind is inactive only in the sense that it is not producing thoughts. It is, however, continuously absorbing thoughts and images that come through the TV screen. This induces a trancelike passive state of heightened susceptibility, not unlike hypnosis. That is why it lends itself to manipulation of “public opinion,” as politicians and special-interest groups as well as advertisers know and will pay millions of dollars to catch you in that state of receptive unawareness. They want their thoughts to become your thoughts, and usually they succeed. So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality. You reach for the remote control to switch off and instead find yourself going through all the channels.

Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: Van Dyck's Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied--for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught, and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction--but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should.

My son is the man who is handing his passport to the policeman. My son is the policeman who is receiving the passport. My son is the old man in front of me in the queue, here, in the air-port, in Beijing. Over the last twelve months, I have been seeing the face of my son in the faces of all the Chinese people I have happened to meet. I was walking in Milan, Italy, when Laura called me and told me that our application had been finally sent to China. We would be receivinga son or a daughter from China. I was excited. I put my phone into my jacket pocket and slowed down in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele gallery. There was a multitude of people around me, but I was totally unaware of their existence. I was trying to picture my son’s, or my daughter’s face and hands. I wondered what age he or she was. For a while I kept imagining and reviewing all the possibilities, and all the hypotheses, but I was not able to create an image which would bring an end to my seeking. Then, suddenly, I found him. He was walking in front of me with his wife and little daughter. I was not sure about his origin, if he were truly Chinese or not, but it was definitely him. He was a little younger than I. I was happy to see he was so distinguished, with his gold-rimmed glasses and nicely ironed, blue shirt.

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish. Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how to live but of how to die. And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness (I hear the two thin trumpet calls that announce the closing of the gates) is similarly preoccupied. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in the water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not his then his son's or unborn grandson's) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal domination, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air.

The images of communal survival and flourishing our culture feeds us all to easily blur our vision of God‘s new creation – for instance, we think America is a Christian nation, and democracy the only truly Christian political arrangement. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture. In order to keep our allegiance to Jesus Christ pure, we need to nurture commitment to the multicultural community of Christian churches. We need to see ourselves and our own understanding of God’s future with the eyes of Christians from other cultures, listen to voices of Christians from other cultures so as to make sure that the voice of our culture has not drowned out the voice of Jesus Christ.

Of people that hold an opinion that is popular and that makes them look good: I cannot take your opinions seriously. If you are of a persuasion that is popular and that makes you look like a better person, then you hold that persuasion as a result of no inner convictions of your own; rather, you hold that persuasion as a result of self-consciousness. It takes courage and inner strength to hold convictions that go against popular opinion and that go against what would make you feel accepted in the eyes of most. There are three levels to this sort of consciousness: the first level dictates that you are simply unaware and you go about with daily life with no presumptions, simply going with the flow of everything. The second level is the one that the current generation mostly belongs to: the level of those who believe themselves to be enlightened, awakened. This second level belongs to those who would call those belonging to the first level as "sheep". This second level belongs to those who would believe that there are only two levels: one belonging to sheep and another belonging to them. They are unaware of the third level. But the third level of consciousness is the level that belongs not to what those on the lesser level would call as "sheep" and also not belonging to the second level of those who believe themselves to be free thinkers. At this third level, are those who see plainly that the free thinkers of today are simply a different herd of sheep, who all hold a shared opinion of what it means to be a better person, what it means to be an enlightened individual, what it means to be free. They are the herd that believe themselves to be free. At least the first herd at the first level do not care to go about with such thoughts in their minds: they are the ones who care only of working honestly, living honestly, and doing good deeds. Those on the second level, however, upon believing themselves to be set free of former persuasions, are convinced of their mental and spiritual superiority. But, alas, such individuals would not dare hold any personal conviction if it meant they would be seen in an unfavourable light by their peers, friends, by the masses. Their inner compasses are controlled not by the image they wish to see in the mirror; rather, their inner compasses are controlled by the image they wish others to see when looking at them. Now, at the third level, nothing controls these minds except for the desire to see in the mirror what is true, what is pure, what is better; regardless if anybody else can see it or not. At the third level of consciousness, we find those who have transcended the pleasures provided by the feelings of other people's acceptance, praise, and opinion of them. To be good, and to believe good, not because it is popular, but because it is true and good. At the third level, we will find those whose inner compasses are controlled by their reflections in the mirror, not by their peers, their friends, or the masses.

Base your understanding of the world on data, rather than journalism. Journalism is a highly non random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period. It is an availability machine, in the sense of Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic; namely - our sense of risk, danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes, images and narratives that are available in memory. A lot of good things are either things that "don't happen" (like a country at peace, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news), or things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year, and then compound (like the decline of extreme poverty). We can be unaware, out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many (although not all) things have gone better (not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general a lot better... and that paradoxically, as I've cheekily put it, progressives hate progress), but also that the best possible case for progress - that is, for striving for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive - is not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past; and that means: why should it stop now?

I stepped somewhat apprehensively into 2020, unaware of what was to happen, of course, thinking little about the newly-emerged coronavirus, but knowing myself to be at a tipping point in my life. I had come so very far over the years, the decades, from my birthplace in the United Kingdom, to Thailand, Japan and then back to Thailand to arrive at an age—how had I clocked up so many turns under the sun?—at which most people ask for nothing more than comfort, security and love, or at least loving kindness. Instead, I was slowly extricating myself, physically and emotionally, from a marriage that had, over the course of more than a decade, slowly, almost imperceptibly, deteriorated from complacency to conflict, from apathy to antagonism, from diversity to divergence as our respective outlooks on life first shifted and then conflicted. Instrumental in exacerbating this had been my decision to travel as and where I could after witnessing my mother’s devastating and terminal descent into dementia. For reasons which even now I cannot recall with any accuracy, the first destination for this reborn, more daring me was Tibet, thus initiating a new love affair, this time with the culture and majesty of the Himalayan swathe, and the awakening within me of a quest for the spiritual. I had, over the years, been a teacher, a lecturer, a consultant and an advisor, but I now wanted to inspire and release my verbal and photographic creativity, to capture the places I visited and the experiences I had in words and images—and if possible to have the wherewithal of sharing them with like-minded people.

When my best friend came to say goodbye the day before I went into exile—we embraced thinking we would never see each other again because I would never be allowed to return to Romania and she would never be able to leave the country—we couldn't bear to let go of each other. She walked out of the door three times and returned each time. Only after the third time did she leave me, walking straight down the street. I could see her pale jacket getting smaller and smaller and, in a strange way, brighter and brighter the more distant it became. I don't know if it was the winter sunshine of that February day, or the tears making my eyes glisten, or perhaps her jacket was made of some shiny fabric, but one thing I know for sure: as I watched her walk away her back glittered like a silver spoon. In this way, intuitively, I was able to put our parting into words. And that is also the best description of that moment. But what does a silver spoon have to do with a jacket? Nothing at all. Nor does it have anything to do with parting. Yet as a poetic image the spoon and the jacket need one another. That is why I am mistrustful of language. I know from my own experience that to be accurate, language must always usurp something that doesn't belong to it. I keep asking myself what makes verbal images such thieves, why the most apt comparison appropriates qualities that don't belong to it. To get closer to reality we need to catch the imagination unawares. Only when one perception plunders another, when an object snatches material that belongs to another and starts to exploit it—only when things that in reality are mutually exclusive become plausible in a sentence can the sentence hold its own against reality. I am happy when I succeed in doing that.

You, Joelle, are fucking goddamn mind-blowingly beautiful. I have no idea how you don't see it. Those glasses that you think made you look nerdy? If they're nerdy, then nerdy is so incredibly hot. Because when you wear your glasses, you look smart and sexy. Your hair that you think is unruly and messy? It's not. It's wild. And wild is so fucking hot, I can't even begin to tell you." He presses his eyes shut and shakes his head, like he can barely contain the thought. "I can't take my eyes off it. Every time you brush past me and I feel your hair on my skin, I get goose bumps. And your skin is so soft that every time I've touched you, I've almost lost my damn mind. Like when you were on my lap kissing me, I honest to god thought I was going to pass out. I mean, did you not feel my boner against you? You felt so fucking good I could barely take it." My eyes are wide as I soak in every word he says. "When we started working in the same space together, I overheard you mention how big your ass is when you were joking with your mom and aunt. Why? Your ass is a fucking national treasure. Why do you think I spent so much time grabbing it while we were fooling around?" Against his palm, I let out a muffled "oh" sound. It's the sound I make when I've figured out an especially challenging crossword puzzle clue. These are some damn good points he's making. Shaking his head, he looks away for a split second, like he's so frustrated, so hell-bent on getting these words out that he needs a moment to collect himself. His eyes cut back to me. "Do you have any idea the way people look at you? Everywhere you go, people can't take their eyes off you. Nonstop. And you don't even notice it because you're too focused on others. Do you have any clue how sexy it is? Everyone else is so concerned with their image and what people think of them. But you don't give it a second thought. Even if you don't realize it, you come off so sure of yourself. It's the hottest thing ever.

Given the scientific investigation, the only causal machine in human existence, in the ultimate end, is the brain, which seems to be mainly out of control: The sensation, perception and imagination of the external world are automatically determined by the interpretation of input signals receiving through sense organs; making a choice and decision are automatically realized on the base of this interpretation, which, In later period, regulate the behavior patterns in a social environment. The only causal and interpretation machine, as described above, the brain is thought to be automatically shaped by various external factors, such as genetic programming that determines the design of a brain – various proportions among the various circuits in such a way that if your brain devotes more space for aggression and anxiety centre, for example, then it is very high probability that you are a ‘wild beast’ inside. As you cannot pick out your brain when you are born, because at least the genetic inheritance is out of your control, it is nearly impossible for you to avoid the very fact that your internal world is so. Maybe, your inner wildness doesn’t reveal itself in the everyday world, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have conscious control over it. Because of being hidden mainly in your unconsciousness, even your conscious mind can be unaware of the very fact of its existence. From scientific perspective, it can be stated, in this case, that the censor system of your brain is quite active to make sufficiently well-considered selection among desires that unintentionally emerge in aggression and anxiety circuits, and to hide most of them, which involve an extreme violence and destruction, in hidden consciousness in order to protect the ‘perfect’ image of your personality in social system, or simply to avoid to be punished on the grounds of these implausible, unfavorable desires in that system. If this is so, where is your freedom – free choice? Doesn’t it seem that the naked truth is that your brain, instead of you, makes a choice, decides, controls, regulates of almost everything in your life, leaving for you a room for being just a ‘perfect’ bio-social robot that lives in his or her illusion of free will?

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment.1 Although we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are. I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.2 Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made.3 More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.4 These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it. The distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "nonlocality. " The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays (see fig. 8).

He came through the door howling, an axe arched high over his head. His eyes danced in madness, stuck fast on the two of them kissing, caught in their embrace and unaware of him. For a moment they went on, oblivious, untouched by the madman soon to come. It was a bright bubble of illusion on the eve of utter and complete madness. She was the first to see. The image of her stepfather captured in Mateo’s eyes, the furious glee of the Nazi’s vengeance, sharp and mirrored in their emerald beauty. Soon those eyes were wide with terror and sorrow in a moment of unbidden regret caught at the end of such happiness.

She fell asleep within minutes, unaware that the rain that had been falling since evening had turned to sleet, or that the roads were becoming impassable. As she slept, she began to dream, but instead of a continuous scene, it consisted of images flashing through her mind, like looking at old pictures in an album. Cat was sitting at the kitchen table. Her mother was standing beside her, laughing as she set a birthday cake in front of her. There were four candles on her cake, and her daddy was taking a picture. “Smile,” he’d said. She looked up just as the flash went off. She was still blinking from the flash when the image shifted. It was cold. The blowing wind burned her skin. She was at a cemetery, staring down at a small, flat marker. Cat couldn’t read, but somehow she knew it bore hermother’s name. She could hear her father crying. It scared her worse than the fact that her mother had gone away. “Daddy…where did she go?” “Heaven.” “Is it far?” “Yes.” “Can we go, too?” She never heard his answer, because the image shifted again. This time, she was being led through a long series of hallways. The smell of orange oil from wood polish burned her nose. The sound of her footsteps echoed on the tiled floors. Yesterday she’d been in the hospital. She’d asked to go home. But someone had told her she couldn’t go home because there was no one left to take care of her. The horror of that knowledge had frightened her so much that she’d been afraid to ask what came next. She walked through an open door as a woman said her name. The woman took her by the hand, and they walked away. She couldn’t see the woman’s face. She never remembered the faces, and it didn’t matter, because they never stayed the same.

The more you are able to completely withdraw all your powers and forget all things―along with whatever images they have left in you―the farther you will travel away from created things and their images, and the closer and more receptive you will be to this birth. Were you to forget everything completely and be unaware of them, you would lose even the awareness of your own body, just as it occurred with St. Paul when he said, ". . . whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth. . ." (2 Corinthians 12:2)

But the kinesis of beauty (as opposed to the stasis of the idea of beauty)—res aptus studendo-is, indeed, often nothing but a blocking agent to the continuity of love, annulling it by either change or alteration. It is this that so often surprises and saddens a lover when it is revealed that beauty does not necessarily imply morality in the object of love; one, in fact, often feels that the nature of the offense is actually increased by the conjunction of beauty and depravity, unaware, perhaps, that up to that time the woman in question only seemed beautiful to him because he still loved her. All aesthetics are created by ethics; and beauty, more often than not, is a bodily image in which morality is archetypally felt to be represented. The less transcendental the beauty is, the less permanent we are usually convinced it will be, in direct proportion, for our faith resides here, that we love what we esteem, a usufruct of heaven beckoning us to the bettermost, and so to preserve in spirit what we've captured in nature it often falls out that love and desire are sometimes two unalike, mutually exclusive conditions.

The façades on the Grand-Place in Brussels, Belgium, look amazing. In the past, they were literally the images of the guilds of Brussels, representing some of the finest crafts in the country. Nowadays, the former guildhalls offer expensive Belgian chocolates to naïve tourists, who are unaware that the really good chocolatiers are situated on the Grand Sablon elsewhere in the city.

It was Lippmann who gave us the concept of the “stereotype” (1922), which was basically a continuation of the Jungian concept of the archetype (1919) by other means. To Lippmann, the world outside our borders exists in a different space, consciously, from our own. We develop notions about life in those countries, their cultures, attitudes, and values, without ever go­ing there. Yet, their political situation affects our own; they exert a political influence—either through trade, communications, or transportation—on life in our own country even though we live in a constant state of unawareness of those countries, cultures, politics. The effect of these forces on us is invis­ible, but real. We then develop mental images—stereotypes—of the citizens of these countries, and it is upon the stereotypes that we act. The stereotypes determine our actions and reactions; like the stereotypes of the Islamic fun­damentalist, the Vietcong revolutionary, the Red Peril, they are easy targets, and the stereotype communicates a specific message, is, in terms familiar to the deconstructionism of Derrida, a text. Stereotypes can be created, and manipulated, by the gurus of mass com­munication and psychological warfare. Stereotypes are culturally-loaded and therefore not “value neutral.” We make snap judgments based on the nature of the stereotype; in the hands of the psy-war expert, a stereotype does not contain much complexity or depth. The idea is not to make the target think too clearly or too profoundly about the “text” but instead to react, in a Pav­lovian manner, to the stimulus it provides.

MT: That's Régis Debray's thesis: the incarnation of Christ and the defeat of the iconoclasts gave the West mastery of images and thus of innovation. Here's a question that may be absurd: does a phrase like “if someone hits you on one cheek, turn the other” have anything to do with imitation? RG: Of course it does, since it's directed against “adversarial” imitation, and is one and the same thing as the imitation of Christ. In the Gospels, everything is imitation, since Christ himself seeks to imitate and be imitated. Unlike the modern gurus who claim to be imitating nobody, but who want to be imitated on that basis, Christ says: “Imitate me as I imitate the Father.” The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival. You nip rivalry in the bud. We're not talking about a political program, this is a lot simpler and more fundamental. If someone is making excessive demands on you, he's already involved in mimetic rivalry, he expects you to participate in the escalation. So, to put a stop to it, the only means is to do the opposite of what escalation calls for: meet the excessive demand twice over. If you've been told to walk a mile, walk two; if you've been hit on the left cheek, offer up the right. The Kingdom of God is nothing but this, but that doesn't mean it's easily accessible. There is also a pretty strong unwritten tradition that states that “Satan is the ape of God.” Satan is extremely paradoxical in the Gospels. First he is mimetic disorder, but he is also order because he is the prince of this world. When the Pharisees accuse him of freeing the possessed from their demons by the power of “Beelzebub,” Jesus replies: “Now if Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself; so how can his kingdom last? […] But if it is through the Spirit of God that I drive out devils, then be sure that the kingdom of God has caught you unawares.” This means that Satan's order is the order of the scapegoat. Satan is the whole mimetic system in the Gospels. That Satan is temptation, that Satan is rivalry that turns against itself—all the traditions see this; succumbing to temptation always means tempting others. What the Gospel adds, and what is unique to it, I think, is that Satan is order. The order of this world is not divine, it's sacrificial, it's satanic in a certain sense. That doesn't mean that religions are satanic, it means that the mimetic system, in its eternal return, enslaves humanity. Satan's transcendence is precisely that violence temporarily masters itself in the scapegoat phenomenon: Satan never expels himself once and for all—only the Spirit of God can do that—but he more or less “chains himself” by means of the sacrificial order. All medieval legends tell you: the devil asks for but one victim, but as for that victim, he can't do without it. If you don't obey the rules of the Kingdom of God, you are necessarily dependent on Satan. Satan means “the Accuser.” And the Spirit of God is called Paraclete, that is to say “the Defender of Victims,” it's all there. The defender of victims reveals the inanity of Satan by showing that his accusations are untruthful. Oedipus's parricide and incest, which give the plague to a whole community—they're a joke, a very bad joke that helps cause quite a bit of damage among us when we take it seriously, as, in the final analysis, is the case with…the psychoanalysts: they take the lie of the Accuser seriously. Our whole culture is dominated by mythical accusation to the extent that it does not denounce it. Psychoanalysis endorses the accusation.

This is a book about restoring connection. It is the experience of being in connection that fulfills the longing we have to feel fully alive. An impaired capacity for connection to self and others, and the ensuing diminished aliveness, are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems. Unfortunately, we are often unaware of the internal roadblocks that keep us from experiencing the connection and aliveness we yearn for. These roadblocks develop in reaction to developmental and shock trauma and the related nervous system dysregulation, disruptions in attachment, and distortions of identity.

The streets of the poor quarter of great cities are, above all, a theatre and a battle ground. There unaware and unnoticed every human being is a poet, a marker, a warrior, a dancer and in his innocent artistry he projects against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence. (from an introduction to the film In the Street (1945–46) by James Agee, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb in the streets of Harlem, New York)

wonder what city the ‘Son of David’ is going to enter in triumph to claim his universal kingship? Why, Jerusalem of course, where he will claim the holy temple and demand eternal priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek. And there you have it. The Messiah as prophet, priest and king. But why wait? Let us go there right now.” The wind whipped up around Jesus. Sand got in his eyes. He closed them tight and stood up from the ground. When he opened his eyes, he found himself standing at the pinnacle of the holy temple in Jerusalem with Belial beside him smiling. Beneath this roof, the holy of holies resided, where the cherubim images guarded the ark of the covenant, the very royal throne and footstool of Yahweh Elohim on earth. And that throne room was a shadow, a mirror of reality of Yahweh’s true throne room in the heavens above the waters. Thus, the saying, “On earth as it is in heaven.” It was a good sixty feet drop to the bottom of this temple. He could see the priests going about their daily sacrifices in the court below. Beyond, in the women’s courtyard and in the outer court of the Gentiles, Jews were milling about engaging in temple duties, completely unaware of these two observers peering down from the golden trimmed roof. Belial’s previous sarcasm turned smooth and testy.

While this positive image and story are much closer to the truth, they carry some risks. The first is that the positive self-image is used to hide and repress the negative self-image and feelings that you don’t like. The beliefs of the negative self-image remain in your unconscious, obscured by the positive ones you laid over them. You haven’t reclaimed your faith from your negative self-image. Instead, you are now feeding two opposing self-images. It is quite possible to have faith in a positive and a negative self-image at the same time. The result is that you bounce from one belief bubble to another. In one moment, you might feel unworthy. In the next moment, your perspective and thoughts shift to defending yourself from this belief by holding up the positive image. The opposing beliefs may go back and forth like a debate in your mind. Since you have faith in both beliefs, both appear true. If you are unaware that this is occurring, the conflicting beliefs can be confusing and unsettling.

The dark traits would be the recessive, deceptive qualities of which we generally remain unaware and which alternatingly make their unexpected appearance. Because of their sheer unpredictability we find them irritating, especially when they get us into uncomfortable situations. Frequently, they are the very thing which calls into question the image we present for public consumption and which acts as the source of doubt of our own identity. The recessive traits are also the least adapted sides of our personalities, having finally a curious tendency to 'descend' into the body where they stubbornly clamor for our attention as disease syndromes. While the dominant, overvalued traits would lead us to view ourselves as the crown of creation, our recessive inferiorities provide us every reason to doubt such a conclusion.

The dark traits would be the recessive, deceptive qualities of which we generally remain unaware and which alternatingly make their unexpected appearance. Because of their sheer unpredictability we find them irritating, especially when they get us into uncomfortable situations. Frequently, they are the very thing which calls into question the image we present for public consumption and which acts as the source of doubt of our own identity. The recessive traits are also the least adapted sides of our personalities, having finally a curious tendency to 'descend' into the body where they stubbornly clamor for our attention as disease syndromes. While the dominant, overvalued traits would lead us to view ourselves as the crown of creation, our recessive inferiorities provide us every reason to doubt such a conclusion.

But the riddle of human nature was still unsolved. With the loss of the God-like nature God had given him, man had forfeited the destiny of his being, which was to be like God. In short, man had ceased to be man. He must live without the ability to live. Herein lies the paradox of human nature and the source of all our woe. Since that day, the sons of Adam in their pride have striven to recover the divine image by their own efforts. The more serious and devoted their attempt to regain the lost image and the more proud and convincing their apparent success, the greater their contradiction to God. Their misshapen form, modelled after the god they have invented for themselves, grows more and more like the image of Satan, though they are unaware of it. The divine image, which God in his grace had given to man, is lost for ever on this earth.

Most people associate the Nazis with book burning. Everyone has seen on television or the Internet the Dantesque images of students throwing hundreds of books into the fire in the streets and squares of German cities in the 1930s. True funeral pyres of Western civilization, they were a barbaric prelude to the burning of human beings, exactly as the German poet Heinrich Heine described in a visionary way. Much less well-known is the meticulous looting carried out by the Nazis in libraries throughout Europe. Prior to my conversation with Albert, I had heard something about it, but was unaware of both the reasons why this massive theft had taken place or of its size. While the theft of a work of art is usually done out of artistic passion or simple greed, what could have driven the Nazis to transport tons of books in train wagons across Europe? And it was not a selective exercise, no—the books were taken in bulk without any sorting. That is, they were removed without prior knowledge of their value. One particularly striking fact explains the Nazi regime’s interest in Jewish books. According to one of its most influential ideologues, Alfred Rosenberg, it was important for future generations to know the enemy after their final defeat. That is why public and private Jewish libraries were ransacked throughout Europe to fill the shelves of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. In the eyes and most delirious dreams of the Nazis, it was a research institute dedicated to studying a people that was doomed to extinction.

Patients with eating disorders typically report little power to stop their eating disordered behaviors (i.e., reversibility), are often unaware of the thoughts and feelings they have when engaging in them (i.e., self-observation), and, by definition, their behaviors are self-defeating and fail to forward their development in constructive ways (i.e., appropriateness).

Now what does this pretty little—” and before he could finish his sentence, Annie unleashed a shrill, glass-shattering wail that seemed conjured by the dark arts, the image of the tiny baby and the sound emanating from her so incongruous that Caleb at first seemed unaware that his own child was the source of the chaos that enveloped Santa Land. “Good Lord,” Santa shouted, his leg spasming as if trying to shake the baby off his person. Camille was shocked by the seismic shift in emotion that crossed Annie’s face, her mouth open so wide it seemed possible that a horde of demons might fly out.

We know from Glenn Milne's inundation data that Gozo and Malta were indeed one big island during the Ice Age, down to approximately 13,500 years ago, and that they did not take on their present form as an archipelago of three islands (with little Comino in between) until around 11,000 years ago. Accordingly, if the medieval tradition of Malta and Gozo as one big island is not a complete invention -- and why should it be? -- then, 'fantastic' though it may seem, it somehow preserves a memory of Malta as it appeared more than 11,000 years ago. It is well known that most medieval mapmakers were only copyists reproducing older maps and [...] I believe we cannot exclude the possibility that the single large island called Gaulometin of Galonia leta that has somehow survived on certain medieval maps may indeed be a representation of Malta in a much earlier time. A mental leap is required in order even to consider such a possibility. It is necessary to set aside all preconceptions about the past, and all unexamined notions of how societies evolve. Above all, we have to rid ourselves of the ingrained conviction that (despite some setbacks) the basic story of human civilization has been steadily and reassuringly onwards and upwards from the very beginning. It may not have been so. There may be tremendous gaps, of which we are blissfully unaware, in the evidence presently available to us concerning the origins and progress of civilization. In particular, there has been no sustained or serious search for very ancient underwater ruins along the millions of square kilometres of continental shelves flooded at the end of the Ice Age. So it is possible, and within the bounds of reason, that a civilization of some sort might have flourished during the closing millennia of the Ice Age and might not yet have been detected by archaeologists. A civilization not necessarily at all like our own but still advanced enough to have mastered complex skills such as seafaring and navigation (that do not call for a large material or industrial base) and to have left behind memories of the world as it looked before the flood and at various stages during the rising of the seas. The sort of civilization, perhaps, that would have built with megaliths and aligned them with navigational precision to the path of the sun. Maybe even a civilization that measured the earth, mapped it and netted it with a latitude and longitude grid. Until such a lost civilization has been entirely ruled out -- and we are far from that -- it is rational to keep our minds open to the possibility, however extraordinary it may seem, that certain ancient maps have indeed carried down to us broken images of the antediluvian world.

Given the scientific investigation, the only causal machine in human existence, in the ultimate end, is the brain, which seems to be mainly out of control: The sensation, perception and imagination of the external world are automatically determined by the interpretation of input signals receiving through sense organs; making a choice and decision are automatically realized on the base of this interpretation, which, In later period, regulate the behavior patterns in a social environment. The only causal and interpretation machine, as described above, the brain is thought to be automatically shaped by various external factors, such as genetic programming that determines the design of a brain – various proportions among the various circuits in such a way that if your brain devotes more space for aggression and anxiety center, for example, then it is very high probability that you are a ‘wild beast’ inside. As you cannot pick out your brain when you are born, because at least the genetic inheritance is out of your control, it is nearly impossible for you to avoid the very fact that your internal world is so. Maybe, your inner wildness doesn’t reveal itself in the everyday world, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have conscious control over it. Because of being hidden mainly in your unconsciousness, even your conscious mind can be unaware of the very fact of its existence. From scientific perspective, it can be stated, in this case, that the censor system of your brain is quite active to make sufficiently well-considered selection among desires that unintentionally emerge in aggression and anxiety circuits, and to hide most of them, which involve an extreme violence and destruction, in hidden consciousness in order to protect the ‘perfect’ image of your personality in social system, or simply to avoid to be punished on the grounds of these implausible, unfavorable desires in that system. If this is so, where is your freedom – free choice? Doesn’t it seem that the naked truth is that your brain, instead of you, makes a choice, decides, controls, regulates of almost everything in your life, leaving for you a room for being just a ‘perfect’ bio-social robot that lives in his or her illusion of free will?

The Time of the Lime Trees There are lime trees lining the Highway leading from Jeszkotle to the Kielce road. They looked the same at the beginning, and they will look the same at the end. They have thick trunks and roots that reach deep into the earth, where they meet the foundations of everything that lives. In winter their mighty boughs cast sharp shadows onto the snow and measure the hours of the short day. In spring the lime trees put out millions of green leaves that bring sunlight down to the earth. In summer their fragrant flowers attract swarms of insects. In autumn the lime trees add red and brown to the whole of Primeval. Like all plants, the lime trees live an eternal dream, whose origin lies in the tree's seeds. The dream does not grow or develop along with it, but is always exactly the same. The trees are trapped in space, but not in time. They are liberated from time by their dream, which is eternal. Feelings do not grow in it, as they do in animals' dreams, nor do images appear in it, as they do in people's dreams. Trees lives thanks to matter, by absorbing juices that flow from deep in the ground and by turning their leaves to the sunlight. The tree's soul rests after going through many existences. The tree only experiences the world thanks to matter. For a tree, a storm is a warm-and-cold, idle-and-violent stream. When it gathers, the whole world becomes a storm. For the tree there is no world before or after the storm. In the fourfold changes of the seasons the tree is unaware that time exists and that the seasons come in succession. For the tree all four qualities exist at once. Winter is part of summer, and autumn is part of spring. Cold is part of hot, and death is part of birth. Fire is part of water, and earth is part of air. To trees people seem eternal -- they have always been walking through the shade of the lime trees on the Highway, neither frozen still nor in motion. For trees people exist eternally, but that means just the same as if they had never existed. The crash of axes and the rumble of thunder disturb the trees' eternal dream. What people call their death is just a temporary disruption of the dream. What people call the death of trees involves coming closer to the anxious existence of animals. For the clearer and stronger consciousness becomes, the more fear there is in it. But the trees never reach the kingdom of anxiety occupied by animals and people. When a tree dies, its dream that has no meaning or impression is taken over by another tree. That is why trees never die. IN ignorance of their own existence, they are liberated from time and death.

I’ve learned to write on trains and in hotels and waiting rooms. On the tray tables on planes. I take notes at lunch, under the table, or in the bathroom. I write in museum stairwells, in cafés, in the car on the shoulder of the motorway. I jot things down on scraps of paper, in notebooks, on postcards, on my other hand, on napkins, in the margins of books. Usually they’re short sentences, little images, but sometimes I copy out quotes from the papers. Sometimes a figure carves itself out of the crowd, and then I deviate from my itinerary to follow it for a moment, start on its story. It’s a good method; I excel at it. With the years, time has become my ally, as it does for every woman—I’ve become invisible, see-through. I am able to move around like a ghost, look over people’s shoulders, listen in on their arguments and watch them sleep with their heads on their backpacks or talking to themselves, unaware of my presence, moving just their lips, forming words that I will soon pronounce for them.

It’s vital to uncover the difference between our “professed” images of God—the things we say we believe about him—and our “default” pictures of God—the ideas we hold deep down, perhaps unaware, that are profoundly shaping us.

It is possible, then, that the countries of Eastern Europe will pass on to us this model of viral collapse, of a virulence deconstructive of power. In exchange, we might pass on to them our liberal virus, our compulsion for objects and images, media and communication, a virus, in our case, which devastates civil society. One virus for another. At bottom, this could be seen as the last episode in the Cold War, a kind of reciprocal contamination between the two blocs formerly shielded from one another by the existence of the Wall. Behind the apparent victory of the West, it is clear, on the contrary, that the strategic initiative came from the East, not by aggression this time, but by disintegration, by a kind of offensive self-liquidation, catching the whole of the West unawares. In the eternal state of deterrence between the two blocs, a situation from which there was no apparent issue, the advantage could be gained only by the side which, one way or another, ended up disarmed. By force of circumstance, which may have equated with a perception of his own weakness, Gorbachev was able to take this strategic tack of disarmament, the real deconstruction of his own bloc, and thereby of the entire world order. This was, in a way, dying communism's witty parting shot, since the quasi-voluntary destabilization of the Eastern bloc, with the complicity of its peoples, is also a destabilization of the West.