University Sign Out Quotes

Snake Street is an area I should avoid. Yet that night I was drawn there as surely as if I had an appointment.  The Snake House is shabby on the outside to hide the wealth within. Everyone knows of the wealth, but facades, like the park’s wall, must be maintained. A lantern hung from the porch eaves. A sign, written in Utte, read ‘Kinship of the Serpent’. I stared at that sign, at that porch, at the door with its twisted handle, and wondered what the people inside would do if I entered. Would they remember me? Greet me as Kin? Or drive me out and curse me for faking my death?  Worse, would they expect me to redon the life I’ve shed? Staring at that sign, I pissed in the street like the Mearan savage I’ve become. As I started to leave, I saw a woman sitting in the gutter. Her lamp attracted me. A memsa’s lamp, three tiny flames to signify the Holy Trinity of Faith, Purity, and Knowledge.  The woman wasn’t a memsa. Her young face was bruised and a gash on her throat had bloodied her clothing. Had she not been calmly assessing me, I would have believed the wound to be mortal. I offered her a copper.  She refused, “I take naught for naught,” and began to remove trinkets from a cloth bag, displaying them for sale. Her Utte accent had been enough to earn my coin. But to assuage her pride I commented on each of her worthless treasures, fighting the urge to speak Utte. (I spoke Universal with the accent of an upper class Mearan though I wondered if she had seen me wetting the cobblestones like a shameless commoner.) After she had arranged her wares, she looked up at me. “What do you desire, O Noble Born?” I laughed, certain now that she had seen my act in front of the Snake House and, letting my accent match the coarseness of my dress, I again offered the copper.  “Nay, Noble One. You must choose.” She lifted a strand of red beads. “These to adorn your lady’s bosom?”             I shook my head. I wanted her lamp. But to steal the light from this woman ... I couldn’t ask for it. She reached into her bag once more and withdrew a book, leather-bound, the pages gilded on the edges. “Be this worthy of desire, Noble Born?”  I stood stunned a moment, then touched the crescent stamped into the leather and asked if she’d stolen the book. She denied it. I’ve had the Training; she spoke truth. Yet how could she have come by a book bearing the Royal Seal of the Haesyl Line? I opened it. The pages were blank. “Take it,” she urged. “Record your deeds for study. Lo, the steps of your life mark the journey of your soul.”   I told her I couldn’t afford the book, but she smiled as if poverty were a blessing and said, “The price be one copper. Tis a wee price for salvation, Noble One.”   So I bought this journal. I hide it under my mattress. When I lie awake at night, I feel the journal beneath my back and think of the woman who sold it to me. Damn her. She plagues my soul. I promised to return the next night, but I didn’t. I promised to record my deeds. But I can’t. The price is too high.

Love is universal migraine, A bright stain on the vision Blotting out reason. Symptoms of true love Are leanness, jealousy, Laggard dawns; Are omens and nightmares - Listening for a knock, Waiting for a sign: For a touch of her fingers In a darkened room, For a searching look. Take courage, lover! Could you endure such pain At any hand but hers?

While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)

It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that life and the love of your real friends and family is more than enough to make life worth living. Isn't it much sadder to feel that there is a more important love required than the love of the people who have chosen to spend their limited time with you?

What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania. “She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—” “Where did she get it from?” “Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.” Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut. Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.” Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound. He was barely breathing. “The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure, told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage, to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?

My space chums think reality was once a primitive method of crowd control that got out of hand. In my view, it’s absurdity dressed up in a three-piece business suit.

I worry whoever thought up the term 'quality control' thought if we didn't control it, it would get out of hand.

Whispers, that’s what she calls them. They’re signs, small sounds, or little reminders, letting you know that there’s something bigger than us out there. That there’s a force working hard to make things right in the universe.

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship—he merely left his office late one morning, and has never returned since. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the Guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a sandwich and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work. Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr., have therefore been designated acting editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign that says LIG LURY, JR., EDITOR, MISSING, PRESUMED FED.

We are the memory keepers and the trappers of time; stealers of stolen glances and breathless lungs from all that have been taken away. We are the noticers of subtle signs hidden in plain sight by a benevolent universe bigger than we'd ever believe...We are the directionless wanderers and the destinationless travelers and we are the crumpled map that never got packed to join us. We are the cinematic lovers and the translucent curtains saturated in light. The soundtrack to the moments without sounds and the swiftness that two bodies can become one in the stillness of a second. We, says the last string pulled out, the final string that kept it all together, balled up tight, filling us after all this time, We, are the chasers of the light.

There is in certain ancient things a trace Of some dim essence -- More than form or weight; A tenuous aether, indeterminate, Yet linked with all the laws of time and space. A faint, veiled sign of continuities That outward eyes can never quite descry; Of locked dimensions harboring years gone by, And out of reach except for hidden keys.

At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet. I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.

Interdimensional travel is full of dangers that can be difficult to predict, but there are signs to watch out for. Owls are especially helpful for savvy explorers. In our own universe, they ask, “Who?” You can tell a parallel world is perilous when you hear an owl ask, “Why?

If we keep trying to obtain something yet our attempts are blocked from every angle, and we can’t figure out why, consider that it might not be the right path for us. Sometimes, surrendering it to the universe and moving on is the most powerful thing we can do—our highest and best path.

Anais: ‘I made a note to ask you why I am obsessed with a few persons only. Why are my devotions so concentrated on a few people? I do not spread out as Henry does.’ Dr. Allendy: 'Yes, exactly, it is a bad sign. You do not really confide in many people, then they do not know you, and then you quickly surmise they do not understand and love you. On the few people you feel connected with, you pour a lavish devotion. This must cease. In love, too, one must relinquish to really love. You cannot admit rivalry. The more broadly and expansively you love, without exclusiveness, the more you reach the mystic whole, the larger sense of love, the less individualistic, the more universal love.

I'm...um...I've got guests in my studio. I don't know how they undid my secure barricade made of cardboard signs that said KEEP OUT! and SECRET ROOM! in all caps with an exclamation point, but it's my program director, Lauren, and some man I've never seen bef - but no, I have seen him before.

The convert will understand. How do they translate ºyw in your English interpretation?” “Atom,” said the convert. “You don’t find that strange, considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?” The convert chewed her lip. “I never thought of that,” she said. “You’re right. There’s no way atom is the original meaning of that word.” “Ah.” Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction. He looked, Alif thought, like some demonic caricature of a saint. “But it is. In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ºyw, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man. Then man split the atom. Today, the original meaning might be hadron. But why stop there? Tomorrow, it might be quark. In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name. Each of those will be the original meaning of ºyw.” Alif snorted. “That’s impossible. ºyw must refer to some fundamental thing. It’s attached to an object.” “Yes it is. The smallest indivisible particle. That is the meaning packaged in the word. No part of it lifts out—it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once. Thus, in man’s infancy, ºyw was a grain of sand. Then a mote of dust. Then a cell. Then a molecule. Then an atom. And so on. Man’s knowledge of the universe may grow, but ºyw does not change.” “That’s . . .” The convert trailed off, looking lost. “Miraculous. Indeed.

So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.

In answer to modern requests for signs and wonders, Our Lord might say, 'You repeat Satan's temptation, whenever you admire the wonders of science, and forget that I am the Author of the Universe and its science. Your scientists are the proofreaders, but not the authors of the Book of Nature; they can see and examine My handiwork, but they cannot create one atom themselves. You would tempt Me to prove Myself omnipotent by meaningless tests...You tempt Me after you have willfully destroyed your own cities with bombs by shrieking out, "Why does God not stop this war?" You tempt Me, saying that I have no power, unless I show it at your beck and call. This, if you remember, is exactly how Satan tempted Me in the desert. I have never had many followers on the lofty heights of Divine truth, I know; for instance, I have hardly had the intelligentsia. I refuse to perform stunts to win them, for they would not really be won that way. It is only when I am seen on the Cross that I really draw men to Myself; it is by sacrifice, and not by marvels, that I must make My appeal. I must win followers not with test tubes, but with My blood; not with material power, but with love; not with celestial fireworks, but with the right use of reason and free will.

On my way out of rent-a-car row I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way to Paradise Road. I thought that everybody needed a sign like that. I wished that it was that easy.

...in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifing as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination.

The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. But what if you could? Think for a second — what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because listen — we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open anymore, the last sign before the bridge — so listen: What exactly do you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories, juxtapositions — even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking — that flash through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these? Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the respicem watch hanging from the rearview and seeing the time, 9:17? What are you looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?* The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole. So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

Sexuality is the only drive that is in itself hindered, perverted: simultaneously insufficient and excessive, with the excess as the form of appearance of the lack. On the one hand, sexuality is characterized by the universal capacity to provide the metaphorical meaning or innuendo of any activity or object–any element, including the most abstract reflection can be experienced as ‘alluding to that‘ (suffice it to recall the proverbial example of the adolescent who, in order to forget his sexual obsessions, takes refuge in pure mathematics and physics–whatever he does here again reminds him of ‘that’: how much volume is needed to fill out an empty cylinder? How much energy is discharged when two bodies collide?…). The universal surplus–this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience…is not the sign of preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outwards and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal.

DEATH IS NOTHING AT ALL Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again! —HENRY SCOTT-HOLLAND

Ghafari points out that when an online guru uses too much “absolutist language,” that’s New Age scammer red flag number one. “Anyone who talks about the concept of feeling our past, our inner trauma, in a universal, oversimplified way,” she clarifies. “For example, statements like, ‘All of us are traumatized as kids, which is why we need to x, y, z,’ or, ‘All of us are from the cosmos and we’re just floating in a quantum field, blah blah blah.’” If simple quantifiers and qualifiers are absent from a guru’s messaging, that’s a sign they are likely unqualified to speak as a mental health authority, and are less interested in actually helping people than they are in convincing as many followers as possible to invest in their prophetic gifts.

This, to be sure, is not the entire truth. For there were individuals in Germany who from the very beginning of the regime and without ever wavering were opposed to Hitler; no one knows how many there were of them—perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard. They could be found everywhere, in all strata of society, among the simple people as well as among the educated, in all parties, perhaps even in the ranks of the N.S.D.A.P. Very few of them were known publicly, as were the aforementioned Reck-Malleczewen or the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Some of them were truly and deeply pious, like an artisan of whom I know, who preferred having his independent existence destroyed and becoming a simple worker in a factory to taking upon himself the “little formality” of entering the Nazi Party. A few still took an oath seriously and preferred, for example, to renounce an academic career rather than swear by Hitler’s name. A more numerous group were the workers, especially in Berlin, and Socialist intellectuals who tried to aid the Jews they knew. There were finally, the two peasant boys whose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand (1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war and refused to sign; they were sentenced to death, and on the day of their execution they wrote in their last letter to their families: “We two would rather die than burden our conscience with such terrible things. We know what the S.S. must carry out.” The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing, was altogether different from that of the conspirators. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remained intact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.” There may also have been such persons among the members of the resistance, but they were hardly more numerous in the ranks of the conspirators than among the people at large. They were neither heroes nor saints, and they remained completely silent. Only on one occasion, in a single desperate gesture, did this wholly isolated and mute element manifest itself publicly: this was when the Scholls, two students at Munich University, brother and sister, under the influence of their teacher Kurt Huber distributed the famous leaflets in which Hitler was finally called what he was—a “mass murderer.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

See this sign. It is red. Red is the universal color to stop. Are you color blind? No? Well, even if you were, there are four large, bright white letters on this sign that spell out the word 'stop'. Let's go over them, shall we?" "S." Bang! "T." Bang! "O." Bang! "P." Bang!

The desert frightens me, I think. It looks too much like the seventh circle of hell. I'm afraid of damnation." "Why?" "Why?" Evelyn repeated, peering at Ann from behind her hand. She lay back again and closed her eyes. "I don't know. I've always supposed everyone is." "Well, they're not. I, for instance, am a hell of a lot more frightened of being saved." Evelyn chuckled. "I'm serious," Ann protested. "Virtue smells to me of rotting vegetation. Here you burn or freeze. Either way it's clean." "Sterile," Evelyn said and felt the word a laceration of her own flesh. "I wonder. It's fertility that's a dirty word for me." "Is it?" "Yes, I'm terrified of giving in, of justifying my own existence by means of simple reproduction. So many people do or try to. And there are the children, so unfulfilling after all. And they grow up to do nothing but reproduce children who will reproduce, everyone so busy reproducing that there's no time to produce anything. But it's such a temptation. It seems so natural — another dirty word for me. What's the point?" "You'd have the human race die out?" "No. We'll multiply in spite of ourselves always. We'll populate the desert. One day there will be little houses and docks all along this shore, signs of our salvation." "What would you have us do instead?" Evelyn asked. "Accept damnation," Ann said. "It has its power and its charm. And it's real." "So we should all get jobs in gambling casinos." "We all do," Ann said, her voice amused. "What do you think the University of California is? It's just a minor branch of the Establishment. The only difference is that it has to be subsidized." "Are you talking nonsense on purpose?" "No, I'm serious." "You think nothing has any value?" "No, I think everything has value, absolute value, a child, a house, a day's work, the sky. But nothing will save us. We were never meant to be saved." "What were we meant for then?" "To love the whole damned world," Ann said… "I live in the desert of the heart," Evelyn said quietly, "I can't love the whole damned world." 'Love me, Evelyn.' 'I do.

The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement was played out in lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. (When Clarence Thomas described his successful but contentious 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching,” it was the epitome of tastelessness but also a sign of how far we have come.) The oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and confine their wives; today it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a fifty-fifty ratio of male and female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment. It’s just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed. These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it.' We understand the aversion most of us have to ‘dwilling on it.’ Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. ‘A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,’ Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. ‘But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.’ We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn’t I see that, why am I so selfish.) The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self0pity is thumb-sucking, self0pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow. Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given…In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

What do you mean, words whose meanings evolved?" asked Alif. "That doesn't make sense. The Quran is the Quran." Vikram folded his legs-Alif did not watch this operation closely-and smiled at his audience. "The convert will understand. How do they translate ذرة in your English interpretation?" "Atom," said the convert. You don't find that strange, considering atoms were unknown in the sixth century?" The convert chewed her lip. "I never thought of that," she said. "You're right. There's no way atom is the original meaning of that word." "Ah." Vikram held up two fingers in a sign of benediction. He looked, Alif thought, like some demonic caricature of a saint. "But it is. In the twentieth century, atom became the original meaning of ذرة, because an atom was the tiniest object known to man. Then man split the atom. Today, the original meaning might be hadron. But why stop there? Tomorrow, it might be quark. In a hundred years, some vanishingly small object so foreign to the human mind that only Adam remembers its name. Each of those will be the original meaning of ذرة. Alif snorted. "That's impossible. ذرة must refer to some fundamental thing. It's attached to an object." "Yes it is. The smallest indivisible particle. That is the meaning packaged in the word. No part of it lifts out-it does not mean smallest, nor indivisible, nor particle, but all those things at once. Thus, in man's infancy, ذرة was a grain of sand. Then a mote of dust. Then a cell. Then a molecule. Then an atom. And so on. Man's knowledge of the universe may grow, but ذرة does not change." "That's..."The convert trailed off, looking lost. "Miraculous. Indeed.

Homesickness Standing under a million stars screaming up at them, PLEASE JUST TAKE ME HOME, with a voice rusty like the underside of boats, feeling it scratch at a throat like swallowed fish-bones. Making petitions to get the universe to care more, signing our names on any scrap of paper passed along like a single name could change the whole wide world. Could change galaxies. Tearing clothes, ripping skin, pleading, TAKE ME BACK, JUST TAKE ME BACK, I’m not willing to be a person any more. Science says I was part of a star once and I just— I want to be back there, always burning. These atoms could have been a lioness but here I am instead, these fragile limbs, and I never found out the returns policy. Take me back, take me back, I want to go home. Broken glass catching at my feet and the air too hot in my lungs. If I could have been anything why am I this?

This is the perfect time to discuss the common deception that, “Everything God does must be found in Scripture.” I understand the good intention behind this belief—trying to protect oneself from being deceived by making sure that everything must be found in Scripture. But by believing everything must be found in Scripture, you can actually find yourself falling into deception and limiting what God can do through your own life. It is absurd to think that the God of all the universe and creation can be limited in His performance and deeds to one small, carved-out section of eternity compiled into one book. The Bible, on the other hand, is by all means the complete and all-sufficient source for salvation and walking out a relationship with God. But if you’re going to actually fall under the limited, deceptive mindset that everything God has done and will ever do by supernatural performance must be already recorded in Scripture, you are sadly mistaken, my friend. The

There I was, in black and white. My entire being of weirdness, easily explained with bullet points listed under both “Signs of Adult AD(H)D” and “Signs of Adult Giftedness.” Double trouble. Twice fucked, as I like to say. Getting diagnosed was definitely a mixed blessing for me. On one hand there was a nicely packaged reason for all of the things I felt were wrong with me. On the other hand, it was comparable to a mental-health death sentence. I used to say to my mom, “It shouldn’t be this hard…it isn’t this hard for other people…this isn’t normal.” I used to think I could just fix myself away with my little self-improvement plans. I still do, actually—a different one every week, but getting that diagnosis meant I could do all of the self-improvement plans available in the universe, and I would still come out as messed up as I went in. No improvements for me. Sorry, Charlie. Shit out of luck, my friend. I’ve always felt misunderstood. Though I was never at a loss for friends, I was always told I was weird, which I was totally OK with. Weird

The unmistaken identity of the persons in the Tiberiast du-plex came to light in the most devious of ways. The original document was in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctua — tion of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument.

Sometimes organizations get confused about this, sending out messages that backfire. I was once in a dining hall at the University of Chicago and saw a sign: 'Do you realize that more than 1,000 dishes and utensils are taken from this dining commons each quarter?' Presumably the intention of the sign was the shock the students into compliance—that's terrible, I didn't know it was so bad, I'd never do that!—but for me, at least, the effect was to make me want to slip a knife and fork into my jacket pocket. If you want people to stop doing something, don't tell them that everyone does it.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed. And the work doesn’t stop once legislation is passed. One must keep winning elections to defend the gains that social movements have contributed to. If the steady advance of a radicalized Republican Party, over many years and in every branch and at every level of government, should teach liberals anything, it is the absolute priority of winning elections today. Given the Republicans’ rage for destruction, it is the only way to guarantee that newly won protections for African-Americans, other minorities, women, and gay Americans remain in place. Workshops and university seminars will not do it. Online mobilizing and flash mobs will not do it. Protesting, acting up, and acting out will not do it. The age of movement politics is over, at least for now. We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress . .

It was a calm summer evening, with no wind in the air. The endless chirping of the crickets and the light pouring out from the numberless stars into the dark and deep blue sky enhanced the sheikh’s state of Hurufi intoxication. Life and meaning, signs and objects, darkness and absence, made up the universe of clues. Light and Soul, Loneliness and Beauty, Strength and Illusion, composed the poetry of the heart. And so the union of Love and God followed a trail of ink winding through the stars, the branches, the scent of flowers, the sound of birds (owls and crows), and the scuttling march of the hedgehogs in the plague-struck night.

We're in her bedroom,and she's helping me write an essay about my guniea pig for French class. She's wearing soccer shorts with a cashmere sweater, and even though it's silly-looking, it's endearingly Meredith-appropriate. She's also doing crunches. For fun. "Good,but that's present tense," she says. "You aren't feeding Captain Jack carrot sticks right now." "Oh. Right." I jot something down, but I'm not thinking about verbs. I'm trying to figure out how to casually bring up Etienne. "Read it to me again. Ooo,and do your funny voice! That faux-French one your ordered cafe creme in the other day, at that new place with St. Clair." My bad French accent wasn't on purpose, but I jump on the opening. "You know, there's something,um,I've been wondering." I'm conscious of the illuminated sign above my head, flashing the obvious-I! LOVE! ETIENNE!-but push ahead anyway. "Why are he and Ellie still together? I mean they hardly see each other anymore. Right?" Mer pauses, mid-crunch,and...I'm caught. She knows I'm in love with him, too. But then I see her struggling to reply, and I realize she's as trapped in the drama as I am. She didn't even notice my odd tone of voice. "Yeah." She lowers herself slwoly back to the floor. "But it's not that simple. They've been together forever. They're practically an old married couple. And besides,they're both really...cautious." "Cautious?" "Yeah.You know.St. Clair doesn't rock the boat. And Ellie's the same way. It took her ages to choose a university, and then she still picked one that's only a few neighborhoods away. I mean, Parsons is a prestigious school and everything,but she chose it because it was familiar.And now with St. Clair's mom,I think he's afraid to lose anyone else.Meanwhile,she's not gonna break up with him,not while his mom has cancer. Even if it isn't a healthy relationship anymore." I click the clicky-button on top of my pen. Clickclickclickclick. "So you think they're unhappy?" She sighs. "Not unhappy,but...not happy either. Happy enough,I guess. Does that make sense?" And it does.Which I hate. Clickclickclickclick. It means I can't say anything to him, because I'd be risking our friendship. I have to keep acting like nothing has changed,that I don't feel anything ore for him than I feel for Josh.

One should have in mind that forgetting is a particularly important thing in life. And a great, mysterious art. Memories return to a person in cycles. Each decade of memories reappears in the sky of remembrance after it has passed like a comet through its own section of a universe. So also does forgetting run in cycles. Whenever you forget something it means that someone from the other side is calling out to you. Someone from the other world is sending you a sign that he wants to communicate with you. When you remember the forgotten thing, the message is there! But be aware that the thing you forgot is always slightly changed when you finally recall it; the recollection is always slightly different from what escaped your memory… And in that difference lies the message.

...Love is a lie. It’s not some deep and meaningful connection between two people built over stolen moments and awkward glances and hot chocolates. It’s not a holy expression of the profound understanding you have for another person or a sign from the universe that you’ve found the one human being in the world that you’re fated to spend the rest of your life with. “Love is chemical warfare. It’s your body responding to their pheromones by juicing you with feel-good hormones and then spraying your own cocktail of pheromones into the air. It’s serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin. You can get the same high from eating a bag of chocolates, did you know that? And the longer you spend with someone, the more addicted to them you become. Your body craves the chemicals their body churns out. Love turns us into junkies.

Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, warned about the dangers of stress for a full decade before she realized that maybe it was her advice, rather than stress itself, that was sending people to their graves faster. “I’m converting a stimulus [stress] that could be strengthening people into a source of disease.” With a breakthrough in her thinking, and some powerful new research, McGonigal made a complete turnaround. Turns out, stress might just be our friend. Just as you put stress on a muscle to make it stronger (by lifting weights or running), emotional stress can make us physically and psychologically stronger too. McGonigal now highlights new research showing that when you change your mind about stress, you can literally change your body’s physical reaction to it. In an eight-year study, adults who experienced a “lot of stress” and who believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. (That sure stressed me out.) However, people who experienced an equal amount of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die! McGonigal says that physical signs of stress (a pounding heart, faster breathing, breaking out in a sweat) aren’t necessarily physical evidence of anxiety or signs that we aren’t coping well with pressure. Instead, we can interpret them as indications that our body is energized and preparing us to meet the next challenge. The bottom line is, science has now proven that how you think about stress matters—the story you attach to stress. Telling yourself it’s good for you instead of harmful could mean the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at 50 or living well into your 90s.

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.

A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility. In this sense, church gives us the chance to riff on Jesus’ description of the kingdom, to add a few new metaphors of our own. We might say the kingdom is like St. Lydia’s in Brooklyn where strangers come together and remember Jesus when they eat. The kingdom is like the Refuge in Denver, where addicts and academics, single moms and suburban housewives come together to tell each other the truth. The kingdom is like Thistle Farms where women heal from abuse by helping to heal others. The kingdom is like the church that would rather die than cast two of its own out the doors because they are gay. The kingdom is like St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee, where you are loved just for showing up. And even still, the kingdom remains a mystery just beyond our grasp. It is here, and not yet, present and still to come. Consummation, whatever that means, awaits us. Until then, all we have are metaphors. All we have are almosts and not quites and wayside shrines. All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way. All we have is this church—this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church—which, by God’s grace, is enough.

But this is not where the true corruption lies. The secret vice, already pointed out by Umberto Eco, lies in the way the media become self-referring and speak only among themselves. The multimedium is becoming the intermedium. This already problematic situation is aggravated when it is a single hypermedium — television — eyeing itself. All the more so as this tele-centrism is combined with a very severe implicit moral and political judgement: it implies that the masses basically neither need nor desire meaning or information — that all they ask for is signs and images. Television provides them with these in great quantities, returning to the real world, with utter - though well-cammouflaged — contempt , in the form of'reality shows' or vox-pops — that is to say, in the form of universal self-commentary and mocked-up scenarios, where both the questions and the answers are 'fixed'.

The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ... Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short. Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state. Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ... Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively. Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room. There's often a brilliant overfocussing. ("Introduction")

The driest argument has its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions, and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of what will be—the more comprehensive massive life feeding theory with new material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations which science explains and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the contrary are not to be trusted. We must be patient with the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the separate minds that have made the sum.

Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”; why she’d played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

Hang on,” Keefe interrupted, sliding off his bed and tiptoeing across his room. He paused near the door, pressing his finger to his lips in the universal shhhhh sign before he grabbed the handle and shoved his shoulder against the wood as hard as he could. A startled yelp echoed from the hallway, followed by a thud that could only be the sound of a body hitting the floor. “You have ten seconds before I let Ro unleash some of her new little bacteria buddies on you,” Keefe warned as he slammed the door hard enough to rattle the wall. “I hear they leave a gnarly rash!” He waited until the sound of footsteps had retreated down the hall before he turned back to Sophie and lowered his voice. “That won’t keep him away for long, so better spill it quick, Foster. Tell me why you have that cute little crease between your eyebrows. And why I’m feeling”—he waved his hands through the air—“hmm. Feels like the usual mix of worry, anger, and panic—though there’s something underneath that’s a little… I can’t figure out how to describe it. Fluttery?” “Oooh, let’s focus on that one!” Ro jumped in. “It’ll be much more interesting than all the blah-blah-blah-the-Neverseen-are-trying-to-kill-everybody-blah-blah.

Among much else, Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggested that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. But Einstein was not a cosmologist, and he accepted the prevailing wisdom that the universe was fixed and eternal. More or less reflexively, he dropped into his equations something called the cosmological constant, which arbitrarily counterbalanced the effects of gravity, serving as a kind of mathematical pause button. Books on the history of science always forgive Einstein this lapse, but it was actually a fairly appalling piece of science and he knew it. He called it “the biggest blunder of my life.” Coincidentally, at about the time that Einstein was affixing a cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name of Vesto Slipher (who was in fact from Indiana) was taking spectrographic readings of distant stars and discovering that they appeared to be moving away from us. The universe wasn’t static. The stars Slipher looked at showed unmistakable signs of a Doppler shift‖—the same mechanism behind that distinctive stretched-out yee-yummm sound cars make as they flash past on a racetrack. The phenomenon also applies to light, and in the case of receding galaxies it is known as a red shift (because

Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe--that's all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker? But what if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there's a mystery. People would sit up and take notice. I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me. In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn't that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God's existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God! I'm serious. When was the last time you saw a sin? Oh, you've seen quite a few? Well, I haven't, not lately. I mean a pure unadulterated sin. You're not going to tell me that some poor miserable slob of a man who beats up his own child has committed a sin? You don't look impressed. Yes, you know me too well. I was only joking. Well, half joking.

Muriah approached him with a new pair of khakis and a couple of T-shirts. “I guessed at the size so you might want to go try these on first.” He took the clothes and slid his arm around her waist, maneuvering her toward the fitting room. “Hey, I didn’t sign on to be your dresser.” She grumbled, but didn’t struggle. He pulled the door closed and turned to meet her eyes. “It’s light in here and full of people. Apep will not be able to surprise us, and his serpents cannot spy. We need to talk.” *** He stripped off the wet shirt, exposing his chiseled torso. She did her best not to choke on her tongue. His tanned skin and taut muscles tempted her, luring her to touch him. Turning around to give him privacy seemed like the right thing to do, but there wasn’t a hint of modesty in this Mayan god, and if he could handle getting this personal, then she could, too. When he unzipped the wet pants, she held her breath. Would an ancient guy wear underwear? She was about to find out. He bent over to lower the wet slacks. When he straightened up, she realized he’d been talking, but she didn’t have a clue what he had said. Instead, all her attention was focused on a fine trail of dark hair leading from just below his navel and disappearing under the low-slung elastic band of his boxer briefs. “Muriah?” Her gaze snapped up to meet his. Thank the universe he couldn’t read her thoughts. “Yeah?” “Did you hear my question?” He stood two feet from her in only his underwear, and he thought she was listening? He was either completely unaware of his sex appeal, or he was way too accustomed to being obeyed. Probably both. She cleared her throat. “I must’ve missed it.” A spark lit his eyes that told her he might have more than a clue to his sex appeal. He picked up the T-shirt and pulled it on. “I asked if you knew of another hotel closer to the airport so we can get out of New York as soon as the sun sets tomorrow.” “I’m sure I can find one.” She pulled out her phone, grateful to have something to pretend to focus on besides him tucking his package into the new khakis she pulled off the rack for him. “I probably should’ve grabbed some dry underwear, too.” “They are nearly dry now. I will be fine.” He popped the tags off, and she glanced up from her hotel search. “They’re not going to like you taking the tags off before you pay.” The corner of his mouth curved up. “They will be honored to take my money.” She groaned and rolled her eyes. “Do you ever not get your way?” He stepped closer to her, his chest an inch from hers until her back pressed against the modular wall of the fitting room. “Rarely.” His dark gaze held hers, and the deep rumble of his voice sent heat through her body. “But some things are worth the extra effort.

It is often said that the separation of the present reality from transcendence, so commonplace today, is pernicious in that it undermines the universe of fixed values. Because life on Earth is the only thing that exists, because it is only in this life that we can seek fulfillment, the only kind of happiness that can be offered to us is purely carnal. Heavens have not revealed anything to us; there are no signs that would indicate the need to devote ourselves to some higher, nonmaterial goals. We furnish our lives ever more comfortably; we build ever more beautiful buildings; we invent ever more ephemeral trends, dances, one-season stars; we enjoy ourselves. Entertainment derived from a nineteenth-century funfair is today becoming an industry underpinned by an ever more perfect technology. We are celebrating a cult of machines—which are replacing us at work, in the kitchen, in the field—as if we were pursuing the idealized ambience of the royal court (with its bustling yet idle courtiers) and wished to extend it across the whole world. In fifty years, or at most a hundred, four to five billion people will become such courtiers. At the same time, a feeling of emptiness, superficiality, and sham sets in, one that is particularly dominant in civilizations that have left the majority of primitive troubles, such as hunger and poverty, behind them. Surrounded by underwater-lit swimming pools and chrome and plastic surfaces, we are suddenly struck by the thought that the last remaining beggar, having accepted his fate willingly, thus turning it into an ascetic act, was incomparably richer than man is today, with his mind fed TV nonsense and his stomach feasting on delicatessen from exotic lands. The beggar believed in eternal happiness, the arrival of which he awaited during his short-term dwelling in this vale of tears, looking as he did into the vast transcendence ahead of him. Free time is now becoming a space that needs to be filled in, but it is actually a vacuum, because dreams can be divided into those that can be realized immediately—which is when they stop being dreams—and those that cannot be realized by any means. Our own body, with its youth, is the last remaining god on the ever-emptying altars; no one else needs to be obeyed and served. Unless something changes, our numerous Western intellectuals say, man is going to drown in the hedonism of consumption. If only it was accompanied by some deep pleasure! Yet there is none: submerged into this slavish comfort, man is more and more bored and empty. Through inertia, the obsession with the accumulation of money and shiny objects is still with us, yet even those wonders of civilization turn out to be of no use. Nothing shows him what to do, what to aim for, what to dream about, what hope to have. What is man left with then? The fear of old age and illness and the pills that restore mental balance—which he is losing, inbeing irrevocably separated from transcendence.

In Shelley’s time at university, she had contributed a regular book review to the English department’s student magazine, and whenever she had run out of time before the deadline, or whenever the book in question had been too difficult or too politically contentious for her to know how to describe her own response to it not only truthfully, but responsibly as well, she had always taken refuge in excessive praise. People were always quick to criticise an act of criticism, and anybody could dismiss as lazy what professed to be lukewarm, but nobody tended to ask any questions of a gush. Even people who’d despised whatever book she happened to be praising never quarrelled with her if she really, truly rhapsodised about it; they simply wrote her off as a person with poor taste and stopped engaging with her critically, and that was that. The stakes had never been particularly high, of course; but even so, she still felt pained sometimes when she leafed through the back issues of the magazine and saw that all her most lavishly complimentary reviews had been of books whose authors frightened her, books she never finished, or books she’d been too cowardly to admit she didn’t understand. With typical self-deprecation, she had been sure that she was quite alone in giving rein to this particular form of intellectual dishonesty, and so she had been surprised, several years into her time at Birnam Wood, to realise that one of the clearest signs that Mira was practising deception of some kind was when she began agreeing with everything that Shelley said.

I was lucky to receive it. Most rogue interns never get a second chance. And here it’s worth mentioning that I benefited from what was known in 2009 as being fortunate, and is now more commonly called privilege. It’s not like I flashed an Ivy League gang sign and was handed a career. If I had stood on a street corner yelling, “I’m white and male, and the world owes me something!” it’s unlikely doors would have opened. What I did receive, however, was a string of conveniences, do-overs, and encouragements. My parents could help me pay rent for a few months out of school. I went to a university lousy with successful D.C. alumni. No less significantly, I avoided the barriers that would have loomed had I belonged to a different gender or race. Put another way, I had access to a network whether I was bullshit or not. A friend’s older brother worked as a speechwriter for John Kerry. When my Crisis Hut term expired, he helped me find an internship at West Wing Writers, a firm founded by former speechwriters for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. In the summer of 2009, my new bosses upgraded me to full-time employee. Without meaning to, I had stumbled upon the chance to learn a skill. The firm’s partners were four of the best writers in Washington, and each taught me something different. Vinca LaFleur helped me understand the benefits of subtle but well-timed alliteration. Paul Orzulak showed me how to coax speakers into revealing the main idea they hope to express. From Jeff Shesol, I learned that while speechwriting is as much art as craft, and no two sets of remarks are alike, there’s a reason most speechwriters punctuate long, flowy sentences with short, punchy ones. It works.

It is the story of God.” God’s real name is Charlie, he told us. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1776, in the summer of the signing, when temperatures were high as rockets and humid as seas. Charlie was the son of a poor miller, a mean man with a gammy leg and a spray of powder burns over his right temple from the war. When Charlie was just becoming something more than a boy, he went out into the creaking, old-growth forest to collect firewood. He came upon a stream that fell away, suddenly, into the earth. Charlie wanted to see where the water went. He leaned down and peered in. A spark. An alien pulse of light. He stared, transfixed, as every star, every galaxy in the universe flicked across his vision. The rings of Jupiter. The broken, sunburned back of Mars. Sights no human had ever captured with their eyes. And, just as suddenly, the feeling of every cell of every living organism hovering just beneath his fingertips, like piano keys. He could touch each one, if he wanted. He could control them. There are some who insist Charlie was simply lucky. That anyone who happened to walk by that stream on that morning, curious enough to lean over the odd water gushing into the ground, would be made God. They are wrong. Charlie was God before he was even born. It was only a matter of him finding out. Charlie lives in every generation. When he dies, he is reborn nine months later, a baby God. At any moment, you might meet him. He has been a Confederate soldier. He has been a bank teller. He has sat behind an oak desk in wire-rimmed glasses and a day’s growth of beard graying his cheeks. He has cooked dinner for his mother. He has driven to the ocean. He has fallen in love.

I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied on some dark official business, and in which party slogans and symbols disfigured every building. The staircase of the apartment building was also deserted. Everywhere the same expectant silence hung in the air, as when an air raid has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent destruction. Outside the apartment, however, I encountered two policemen, who seized me as I rang the bell and demanded my papers. Dr Tomin came out, and an altercation ensued, during which I was pushed down the stairs. But the argument continued and I was able to push my way up again, past the guards and into the apartment. I found a room full of people, and the same expectant silence. I realized that there really was going to be an air raid, and that the air raid was me. In that room was a battered remnant of Prague’s intelligentsia – old professors in their shabby waistcoats; long-haired poets; fresh-faced students who had been denied admission to university for their parents’ political ‘crimes’; priests and religious in plain clothes; novelists and theologians; a would-be rabbi; and even a psychoanalyst. And in all of them I saw the same marks of suffering, tempered by hope; and the same eager desire for the sign that someone cared enough to help them. They all belonged, I discovered, to the same profession: that of stoker. Some stoked boilers in hospitals; others in apartment blocks; one stoked at a railway station, another in a school. Some stoked where there were no boilers to stoke, and these imaginary boilers came to be, for me, a fitting symbol of the communist economy.

An Aside   To break with this routine I have written this manuscript in a way that challenges my reader to explore on the edge of language instead of drowning in devices intending to take for granted meanings and draw false assumptions burdened by planted biases. In your face are thrown one lie after another that defy what is actually seen and offer nothing of balance to either perspective or clarity on a daily basis... yet, it seems natural to you. Because there is no power to your sense of expectation. None. You are boxed into what is possible and what is not, even unsure of the shape of the earth. Led into debates over something as idiotic as that while you balk at having neighbors from elsewhere. So enormous is this Universe and yet you would limit its possibility to produce any of the wonders on some tiny grain of sand found on a beach in comparison. From written history anomalies have been spied and reported accomplishing what nothing today can. Trans Lunar Phenomena, recorded hundreds of years with thousands of reports demonstrate intelligent presence on the moon while nothing of this is factored into your narrow credulity. When one emerges who can answer resolution to so many anomaly, predicts events with accuracy, and offers what is needed to help you survive a planet crippled to the point of extinction, you cannot quit your routine of acquired preference for the mundane suited to a boxed-in comfort zone long enough to check him out. The few above this are too few. I feel quite privileged to have found four. Others are awakening yet still not shown to be at a point of no return to stifling group thought. If you are, then show me. Show me you are aware we near the point where nothing is left to lose. Where resolute action need not be possessed of fear. I will say this, unified consciousness would have no trouble with accepting this challenge I throw at your feet, but then conditions so favorable to enslavement here may be your problem and not that solely attributable to split consciousness. I am willing to engage with you to the very end of hope to find out. Wake up to the signs and ramifications of the trends set I have touched upon. Help awaits a world ready to receive it.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.

thepsychchic chips clips ii If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. … you will feel a whole lot happier … and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come … 134-135 W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure. 142 Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat. 147 Following up on Phil Galfond’s suggestion to be both a detective and a storyteller and figure out “what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes what they don’t mean.” [Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze” story.] 159 You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) 161-162 Erik: Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players (Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan strategy, jp). You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. 190 The more you learn, the harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. 191 An edge, even a tiny one, is an edge worth pursuing if you have the time and energy. 208 Blake Eastman: “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute.” … Streamlined decisions, no immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. 217 John Boyd’s OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. 224 Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. 237 [on folding] No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs and let it go. One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning.” Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. 257 Jared Tindler, psychologist, “It all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego.” 251 JT: “As far as hope in poker, f#¢k it. … You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just Do.” 252

believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual. Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners. (I’m talking about all ideas here—artistic, scientific, industrial, commercial, ethical, religious, political.) When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. Mostly, you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dramas, anxieties, distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration. You might miss the signal because you’re watching TV, or shopping, or brooding over how angry you are at somebody, or pondering your failures and mistakes, or just generally really busy. The idea will try to wave you down (perhaps for a few moments; perhaps for a few months; perhaps even for a few years), but when it finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else. But sometimes—rarely, but magnificently—there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defenses might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you toward the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention. And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, “Do you want to work with me?” At this point, you have two options for how to respond. What

Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the New York Times mailroom after the anthrax scare. The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the New York Times before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall. He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.

Today we look for man-made philosophical panaceas.  Discussions and debates go on in every center of learning in a search for ultimate wisdom and its resultant happiness ... We are searching for a way out of our dilemma, and the universal sign we see is "no exit".  But the cross presents itself in the midst of our dilemma as our only hope.  Here we find the justice of God in perfect satisfaction - the mercy of God extended to the sinner - the love of God covering every need - the power of God for every emergency - the glory of God for every occasion.

Husserl rediscovers sensible being as the universal form of brute being. Sensible being is not only things but also everything sketched out there, even virtually, everything which leaves its trace there, everything which figures there, even as divergence and a certain absence...This is what animalia and men are: absolutely present beings who have a wake of the negative. A perceiving body that I see is also a certain absence that is hollowed out and tactfully dealt with behind that body by its behavior. But absence is itself rooted in presence; it is through his body that the other person's soul is soul in my eyes. 'Negativities' also count in the sensible worid, which is decidedly the universal one.

I leaned back in my chair, pulling Roxy closer so that I could steal a moment with her for myself and brushing her hair away from her ear so that I could speak to her alone. She leaned in to listen to me and my grip on her waist shifted so that I could hold her even closer, the fingers of my other hand stroking against the bare skin of her shoulder where I'd smoothed her black hair aside. “Do you want to tell me about what happened in that alley?” I asked, wondering if I really should have been worrying about Nymphs or not. A shiver moved across her skin and I was filled with a protective kind of anger as I felt that echo of her fear. “Is this the part where you laugh at us for falling for some prank you set up?” she asked. “Was that one of your friends back there? Did you get someone to send the messages too?” I was tempted to push her for more information, but Lance and Francesca were already hunting for any signs of a Nymph and I didn't want to fall into the trap of arguing with her again while I was holding her like this. I just wanted to steal this moment from the universe and forget about all the shit that was hanging between us outside of right now. “I don’t need to recruit anyone to do my handy work,” I replied dismissively, dropping the subject. “Maybe I’m concerned for your wellbeing.” She snorted in disbelief, shifting away so that she wasn't pressed against my chest anymore and I fought a sigh at how quickly I'd managed to fuck that up. Though as she was currently still in my arms, I had to think it wasn't a total lost cause yet, not that I had any real idea what I was trying to achieve with her here. The bartender returned and I pulled a roll of auras from my pocket which was more than enough to cover our tab, pressing them into her hand as she finished laying the drinks out for us. We'd been planning to move on after this drink anyway and I was keen to get Roxy and her sister away from the place. Roxy reached out to claim her drink, my gaze moving to her mouth as she lifted the glass to it and tipped the whole thing back, swallowing over and over until every last drop was gone. “There you go,” she announced. “One drink.” She pushed out of my lap so suddenly that for a moment all I could do was blink up at her in confusion before my brain caught up to what was happening and I reached out to pull her back again. But she stepped aside, offering me a mocking smile which made it more than clear how much she disliked me. Darcy smirked as she got to her feet too, not even bothering to touch her drink. “See you later, guys,” she agreed and the two of them turned to walk away. Caleb shot into Roxy's way with his Vampire speed before she could actually escape and I was glad when she cut him a glare just as acidic as the one she'd offered me, even while he tried to throw the pretty boy charm on with his gleaming smile. “I guess your word means shit then?” she demanded as he gave her throat a look which said he was thinking about biting her. “No. I said I won’t bite you tonight and I meant it,” he promised, acting all alluring and pissing me the hell off as she hesitated. “I’m just wondering where you’re going now?” “Dancing,” Roxy replied moving to brush past him, her hands landing on his waist for a moment as she nudged him aside and irritation flared through me at the contact. “You can always join us if you think you can keep up.” My anger grew as she offered him that invitation and I scowled at the two of them openly, wondering why she was so much more willing to fall for his bullshit than she was for mine. Roxy gave Cal a flirtatious look and I ground my teeth before shoving to my feet the moment she was out of sight. My fist slammed into his bicep as he turned to look at me and he barked a laugh as he shoved me in return. "Come on, assholes, if the two of you waste time in a dick measuring contest then we'll lose them before you finish,” Max said.(Darius POV)

Meditation can generate several different kinds of altered states like strong emotional swings. Some of these states may be fun, but they are not the aim of exploring the whole universe of phenomena — seeing, listening, feeling, eating, touching, and thought — and of seeking our liberation amid the storm rather than demanding that the phenomenon match our desires. Practices of contemplation are powerful. When you work alone, and feel you're not free, please protect yourself. This dangerous feeling could include extreme fear, stress, uncertainty or even signs of the physical. Stay to speak with an instructor, a psychologist or a professional who can educate you about the procedure if something like this happens. Without wonder meditation is not a panacea. In fact when asked the spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti, "What good is all this contemplation doing?" It's no use at all," he responded. "Meditation isn't guaranteed to make you wealthy, gorgeous or famous. That's a mystery. You do want to achieve your goal, but you need to let go of the target-oriented, overachieving, task-centered way of doing and remain in the state of being that helps to incorporate your mind and body in your meditation. It is the paradox of the Zen instruction “Try not to try.” What to Do in an Emergency A professional teacher's guide is often required. A group called the Spiritual Emergence Network advises people suffering from a spiritual emergency and lets qualified psychologists and physicians discern between a psychological emergency and a mental breakdown. Another way to tell the difference is that the person who sees visions in a spiritual disaster realizes they are delusions, whereas in a psychotic breakdown the person believes the dreams are real. If you have feelings that are extremely unpleasant and no trainer is present, immediately stop the practice and concentrate on simple earthy stuff to get yourself focused. Dig into the yard, go out walking or jogging, get a workout, take a bath or a shower and eat heavy stuff. Slow down your spiritual awakening when you feel threatened by it.

In the autumn after his graduation, Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University but spent most of his time drinking and drunk. He rarely went to class and never completed assignments. He was kicked out of school after the first term. His father and he began to argue about his drinking and his father threatened to throw him out of the house. During one of their discussions, his father mentioned that the military might provide some direction to his life, thinking it would make a man out of him. Dahmer never wanted to become a soldier, but he loved his dad and wanted to please him; besides, he thought it would be an opportunity to see the world and maybe forget about the dismembered body in the woods. Jeff signed up for four years and received training as an army medic. Boot camp was difficult, but it challenged him mentally and physically. He began to feel good about himself and was too busy to think about his secret. He deployed to Germany and bunked with several other soldiers. After his shift, he had a lot of free time and began to frequent the beer gardens. His drinking soon accelerated and eventually got him into trouble.

Idealism is materialism upside down. It proposes that all that exists is pure consciousness. Everything in the physical world, all matter and energy, are emergent properties of consciousness. In its more radical form, it asserts that the entire physical world is a mind-generated illusion, somewhat like the virtual world in the movie The Matrix. Idealism runs into a miracle if it proposes that out of ephemeral nonphysical consciousness there emerges a hard, physical world. How does that happen? Once emerged, is it still connected to mind or does it go on its merry way? On the other hand, if it proposes that everything is an imaginary projection of consciousness, then the miracle is that everyone other than me is also a part of my imagination. Does that mean I still have to pay taxes? Panpsychism is the fourth main worldview. It acknowledges that mind and matter are quite real, but it also proposes that these elements of reality are inseparable and go all the way down to elementary particles and “below,” and also all the way up to the universe and beyond. The idea of a complementary relationship, where something is “both/and” rather than “either/or,” is a core concept within quantum theory. Light, for example, behaves both as a wave and as a particle, depending on how you look at it. The advantage of panpsychism is that no miracles are required to account for how matter can be sentient, or how mind can have physical consequences. It is both/and. But all is not completely rosy. The trouble with panpsychism is called the binding problem. This means that if all matter is already sentient, then every atom of your body, your cells, and your organs should also be sentient. Why then is your sense of self a unity and not a multitude? What binds it all together so that the “I” within you experiences just one self rather than trillions of tiny selves? Dealing with the New Story One of the more interesting takes on the developing new story of reality has been proposed by Rice University’s Jeffrey Kripal, who, as a scholar of comparative religion, has explored the core themes of his discipline—the sacred, the paranormal, the supernormal, the mystical, and the spiritual—in a direction that few academics have dared to tred.80 He views the intense popular interest in the paranormal as more than a mere fascination with fictional miracles, but rather as a sign of the original meaning of fascination—a bewitching accompanied simultaneously by awe and terror. He defines “psychic phenomena” as “the sacred in transit from a traditional religious register into a modern scientific one,” and the sacred as what the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto meant, that is, a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment.

Our fourth chakra is our heart chakra that gives pure love, compassion, good parent quality, self-confidence and detachment. Our spirit is most importantly in our heart, and the spirit is nothing but love. Its ruling planet is Venus, which represents the signs of Taurus and Libra as love, beauty, art and rule. A Venus which works well creates harmony and beauty wherever it is. It makes you feel nice to people. Strong Venus in a birth chart adds significant beauty to a male. The uniqueness stretches out from a person's inner nature and focuses on a person's behavior and attitude. Benevolence and sweetness encourage us to create positive emotions in people and help us transform them. When our heart opens, we become more connected with our subconscious. The spirit of pure love that is ignited in our heart naturally extends to our surroundings and also sparks similar emotions among the people around us. •       The Vishuddhi is called the fifth Chakra. This chakra located in our throat area helps us to feel that we are part and parcel of the whole. When this chakra is open we feel that we are a part of the whole. When this chakra is open, we experience the sensation of being one with the universe, with nature and with other humans. Saturn is the ruling planet for that center of energy. Saturn also rules the Capricorn and Aquarius signs. In our birth chart difficult aspects of Saturn make us feel lonely in life. Saturn is something of a disciplined teacher. Saturn's position in our birth chart offers us life field checks and lets us develop our shortcomings. It reveals the human character parts which need to be completed. It sometimes limits, creates hurdles and makes initiatives useless. Saturn is doing this so we are learning the lesson it is trying to teach. Once we learn our limitations and discover them, Saturn gives us stability, robustness and detachment. The fifth chakra also governs the ability within us to discern between right and wrong. During moments that Saturn is questioning us, with the aid of this chakra, we will use our power of judgment to realize what is right and wrong. This center of energy also gives us a state of witness. This allows us to enjoy life while playing our role and as a drama experience all the tragedy and difficulties. In this game the earth, the whole universe and planets play a role and put it on stage. Saturn creates a pessimistic personality when functioning badly, who cannot see the good things in life and feels sorry for himself.

The third chakra is in our area of the stomach, and is called the Nabhi. This chakra represents satisfaction, equilibrium, morality, generosity and evolving ability. The ruling planet is Jupiter-just like the Sagittarius sign. Jupiter has an aristocratic, generous, helpful and virtuous nature. This brings wealth and it improves all-good as well as evil. It is good luck planet. That planet governs our financial wealth. Our third chakra gives us both spiritual and material well-being. A good nabhi chakra makes us feel satisfied with what we have, and when necessary, helps us be very generous. The third chakra is like a two door house. Wealth enters through one door and spreads out from the other, thus the cycle continues. The universal energy gives us everything we need and we are not asking for more. Jupiter represents an imbalanced and unsure personality when it works poorly. The individual in his thoughts may engage in fanaticism and bigotry, to the point of tyranny. Before thought, he could incur debt and borrow. Such an energy would make a person look for luxury too. Jupiter governs justice, honesty, philosophy and religion. By birth it can make a human being moral, virtuous and honest. These qualities too are represented by our nabhi chakra. As this chakra develops, we manifest greater sense of justice and higher human virtues. They are looking for spiritual evolution, and ways of becoming better people.

In the fall of 1988, the eighteen-year-old Carmack reluctantly enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he signed up for an entire schedule of computer classes. It was a miserable time. He couldn’t relate to the students, didn’t care about keg parties and frat houses. Worse were the classes, based on memorizing information from textbooks. There was no challenge, no creativity. The tests weren’t just dull, they were insulting. "Why can’t you just give us a project and let us perform it?" Carmack scrawled on the back of one of his exams. "I can perform anything you want me to!" After enduring two semesters, he dropped out.

Everything we understand about the universe is currently built on two pillars; Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein’s theory of general relativity deals with the large, macro-level of the universe, and quantum mechanics deals with the micro-level. Currently, these two pillars work very well on their own but don’t often work very well together, and their unification is generally accepted as one of science and physics’ great contemporary issues. The accomplishment of which in the form of some unifying equation would be deemed, potentially, The Theory of Everything. Both of these pillars, however, appear to find themselves in a rather strange situation inside black holes, where neither seems to work. Based on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, black holes create a singularity, and that’s how we are able to form the conclusion of it being there. However, according to physics, that’s impossible. You can’t have an infinite density or infinite gravitational force or infinite anything in physics. Infinity, to our knowledge, cannot be real in a physical, measurable sense, and when it appears in equations, it’s essentially a sign of an error or impossibility. And thus, Einstein’s theory breaks down. At the minute scale of the singularity, typically quantum field theory would step in. But quantum field theory can’t work here either because it can’t yet explain gravity, and the functions of black holes and the singularity are primarily based on gravity. And so, it seems that somewhere between the edge and core of black holes is either the separate collapse of both theories, destroying much of our understanding of everything, or the unification of both theories, creating a supposed ultimate theory of everything. In this sense, the primary answer needed for the complete understanding of the universe happens to potentially be contained and hidden in a place that nothing can seem to ever enter and come out of. A potential final frontier of human knowledge guarded by a mammoth-sized galactic beast. Perhaps this beast is undefeatable. Or perhaps we simply lack the mathematical weaponry to properly fight it. In the past, for many of the greatest and most confusing paradoxes in history, even greater minds and greater efforts have come along, confronted, and beat them, dissolving such paradoxes away into the falsidical realm forever. And perhaps here, inside black holes, we will do the same again. Either that or perhaps we will be dissolved by the paradox first.

It has been contended, by Rudolf Carnap and others, that since we are unable to find in application an absolute standard by which the validity of a formal system may be tested we are free to choose what formalisation of mathematics we please, technical considerations alone leading us to prefer one system to another. If we accept this standpoint then the distinction between constructive and non- constructive systems is a distinction without a difference and the constructive system becomes little more than a poor relation of the non-constructive. I consider this view to be wholly mistaken. Even if we leave out of account the question of demonstrable freedom from contradiction, the Principia [Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell] and the Grundlagen[der Mathematik of Hilbert and Bernays] must be rejected as formalisations of mathematics for their failure to express adequately the concepts of universality and existence. Even though we do not discover a contradiction in a formal system by showing that the existential quantifier fails to express the notion of existence, for we have no right to pre-judge the meaning of the signs of the system—and to this extent Carnap is right—none-the-less when a mathematician seeks to establish the existence of a number with a certain property he will not, and should not, be satisfied to find that all he has proved is a formula in some formal system, which whatever it may affirm assuredly does not say that a number exists with the desired property.

It has been contended, by Rudolf Carnap and others, that since we are unable to find in application an absolute standard by which the validity of a formal system may be tested we are free to choose what formalisation of mathematics we please, technical considerations alone leading us to prefer one system to another. If we accept this standpoint then the distinction between constructive and non- constructive systems is a distinction without a difference and the constructive system becomes little more than a poor relation of the non-constructive. I consider this view to be wholly mistaken. Even if we leave out of account the question of demonstrable freedom from contradiction, the Principia [Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell] and the Grundlagen [der Mathematik of Hilbert and Bernays] must be rejected as formalisations of mathematics for their failure to express adequately the concepts of universality and existence. Even though we do not discover a contradiction in a formal system by showing that the existential quantifier fails to express the notion of existence, for we have no right to pre-judge the meaning of the signs of the system—and to this extent Carnap is right—nonetheless when a mathematician seeks to establish the existence of a number with a certain property he will not, and should not, be satisfied to find that all he has proved is a formula in some formal system, which whatever it may affirm assuredly does not say that a number exists with the desired property.

What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.

Telos Too many Alphas. Too much Alpha. Sunstruck With Alpha. Eye-sick, Head-sick, sick sick sick O Sick of Alpha. You kicked school it Collapsed in Alphas. You shook The lightning conductor between your teeth- All the sky-signs registered Alpha. ... You stamped and you stamped ... and the whole band Started up Alpha. The whole stadium Clapped Alpha, roared Alpha. ... bull's-eyed A straight row of Alphas. Won a huge Plastic Alpha...You smashed her With a kitchen stool and out fell Tick-tock Alpha. ...Signed the street-scene snowscape Alpha. ... The furies of Alpha you crawled under Or hurdled every letter in the Alphabet And hurling yourself beyond Omega fell Into a glittering Universe of Alpha.

No, the Dodgers took Piazza in the 62nd round as a personal favor to help him find a Division I college baseball program. See, out of high school, Piazza (with the help of Lasorda) signed with the University of Miami, but he was entirely overmatched there. He got nine plate appearances and one hit. Seeing his future, he quit school.

There is a moment for women – no more cacophonous than a petal falling from a dying flower – when politeness has cost them their life, and they know it. That moment, so brief it would barely register on any clock, stretches long into the coming void. Chloe Martin, stuck in her moment of eternal regret, stared at the foot separating her door from its frame as time stood still. You never knew when it was your turn, she thought. How could her day, her boring, run-of-the-mill day, have come to this? Where were the signs from the universe? Where was the sense of impending doom? It didn’t matter, now, that she always carried a rape alarm in her handbag, and it didn’t matter that she never walked home alone in the dark. It didn’t matter that she always put a lid over her drinks to prevent spiking, or that she never engaged in online dating. Because now she was in the thick of it, facing a shadowy figure at her door who had knocked and cried out for help, and she had rushed there so fast, so worried for the safety of a stranger, that she had failed to engage the chain.

The word the Anglo-Saxon poets of Dark Age England used for fate highlights this ironic, circling, swerving logic; they called it wyrd—a word related to a lot of other w-r words still existing in our language that connote twisting and turning (worm, wrap, writhe, wreath, wring, and so on—even word, which, as writers know, is made of bendy-twisty marks on paper or stone). Wyrd, or weird, is the bending force in our lives that, among other things, causes dark prophecies to be fulfilled not only despite but actually because of our best efforts at preventing them. It also warps our mind and induces a kind of compulsion around more appealing-sounding prophecies, as it did to Shakespeare’s Macbeth after hearing the Weird Sisters’ prophecy that he would become king. When we realize that the Minkowski block universe, in its resolute self-consistency, imposes a wyrd-like law upon us (a “law in the cosmos,” you might call it), then all those antique myths about prophecy and the ironic insistency of fate start to appear less like the superstitions of benighted folk in the Back When and start to seem remarkably, well, prescient. And not only prescient, but based on real-life experience with prescience. Divination was an important part of Greek culture, for instance; it was even the basis of their medicine. Sick patients went to temples and caves to have healing dreams in the presence of priests who could interpret their dreams’ signs. They were not strangers to this stuff, as we now are. As intrinsically precognitive beings who think of ourselves as freely willed, the logic of wyrd is our ruler. We can’t go anywhere that would prevent ourselves from existing, prevent ourselves from getting to the experiences and realizations ahead of us that will turn out to have retroinfluenced our lives now, and this imposes a kind of blindness on us. That blindness may keep us from going insane, reducing the level of prophecy to a manageable level. It is why our dreamlife only shows us the future as through a glass, darkly. It is also why the world seems so tricksterish to those who are really paying attention. That we are interfered with by an intelligence that is somehow within us but also Other is the human intuition that Freud theorized in such a radical new way. His focus was on how this Other inside could make us ill; the flip side is that it really does serve as our guide, especially when we let ourselves be led by our unreason. Research shows that “psi” is an unconscious, un-willed function or group of functions.2 The laboratory experiments by Daryl Bem, Dean Radin, and many others strongly support something like presentiment (future-feeling) operating outside of conscious awareness, and it could be a pervasive feature or even a basic underlying principle of our psychology.

You call out to Dr Ranee. To the angels of silence and absence. You ask them to take you to The Light, that you will sign any ola book they put before you. You pray like you have never prayed. To the Crow Man’s sorcery, to the gods you loathe, to the magic of electricity and to the hand that rolls the dice. And in answer, you receive the quiet hum at the edge of the universe, followed by that great silence.

Education was still considered a privilege in England. At Oxford you took responsibility for your efforts and for your performance. No one coddled, and no one uproariously encouraged. British respect for the individual, both learner and teacher, reigned. If you wanted to learn, you applied yourself and did it. Grades were posted publicly by your name after exams. People failed regularly. These realities never ceased to bewilder those used to “democracy” without any of the responsibility. For me, however, my expectations were rattled in another way. I arrived anticipating to be snubbed by a culture of privilege, but when looked at from a British angle, I actually found North American students owned a far greater sense of entitlement when it came to a college education. I did not realize just how much expectations fetter—these “mind-forged manacles,”2 as Blake wrote. Oxford upholds something larger than self as a reference point, embedded in the deep respect for all that a community of learning entails. At my very first tutorial, for instance, an American student entered wearing a baseball cap on backward. The professor quietly asked him to remove it. The student froze, stunned. In the United States such a request would be fodder for a laundry list of wrongs done against the student, followed by threatening the teacher’s job and suing the university. But Oxford sits unruffled: if you don’t like it, you can simply leave. A handy formula since, of course, no one wants to leave. “No caps in my classroom,” the professor repeated, adding, “Men and women have died for your education.” Instead of being disgruntled, the student nodded thoughtfully as he removed his hat and joined us. With its expanses of beautiful architecture, quads (or walled lawns) spilling into lush gardens, mist rising from rivers, cows lowing in meadows, spires reaching high into skies, Oxford remained unapologetically absolute. And did I mention? Practically every college within the university has its own pub. Pubs, as I came to learn, represented far more for the Brits than merely a place where alcohol was served. They were important gathering places, overflowing with good conversation over comforting food: vital humming hubs of community in communication. So faced with a thousand-year-old institution, I learned to pick my battles. Rather than resist, for instance, the archaic book-ordering system in the Bodleian Library with technological mortification, I discovered the treasure in embracing its seeming quirkiness. Often, when the wrong book came up from the annals after my order, I found it to be right in some way after all. Oxford often works such. After one particularly serendipitous day of research, I asked Robert, the usual morning porter on duty at the Bodleian Library, about the lack of any kind of sophisticated security system, especially in one of the world’s most famous libraries. The Bodleian was not a loaning library, though you were allowed to work freely amid priceless artifacts. Individual college libraries entrusted you to simply sign a book out and then return it when you were done. “It’s funny; Americans ask me about that all the time,” Robert said as he stirred his tea. “But then again, they’re not used to having u in honour,” he said with a shrug.

Mid June 2012 …Young, as time passed, I missed you more than ever. My exasperation with Toby festered with each passing day. When I finally could not tolerate our tempestuous relationship, I confronted the young man. After a heated emotional argument, Toby left our unfinished discussion in a state of vexation. I did not realize he was using the age-old psychological threat of overdosing himself to obtain my attention. I found him unconscious, foaming at the corner of his mouth from consuming an entire bottle of sleeping pills. He was rushed to hospital. I would not have been able to live with my guilt if Toby had died. He recovered from this ordeal, but my respect for him had plummeted. Instead of loving him, I felt sorry and pitied him. This was a malignant sign of what was to come. To appease him, we often kissed and made up after impassioned disputes. I made false promises that I had no intention of keeping. These desolate pledges soon dissolved into self-abhorrence. I had allowed myself to be trapped into a situation, and I could not figure out a solution. Throughout this ordeal, I threw myself into my engineering studies, channeling my unhappiness into what I enjoyed best. I could not give myself fully to the boy, and had little respect for him. When we made love, I shut him out. Instead, I saw you in our sexual liaisons. Toby was merely a vehicle to satisfy my sexual desires to be with you. Throughout the years we were together, it was you I made love to, not Toby or anyone else. I could not and would not release you from my mind. The pain of losing you was too oppressive, until the fateful day I suffered a nervous breakdown. I ended up in a hospital, in the psychiatric ward. Aria and Ari came to nurse me back to health. Aria stayed for two weeks until I could commence classes again. I knew I had to get away from this toxic relationship. The day I graduated I enrolled in a postgraduate program in Alberta, Canada. I desired to be as far away from New Zealand as possible; I needed to be away from Toby and to find myself again. I finally had a solid and legitimate excuse to separate from the boy. I was glad when Toby’s parents demanded their son’s return to the Philippines after his graduation so that he could take over his father’s business. Toby did not wish to return to Manila, but had no choice. His father threatened to cut off his financial support if he did not return. Thanks to universal intervention, my freedom was restored. I began a new life in Canada. That, my dearest Young, was the beginning of a new chapter in my life. The rest will be revealed to you in our next correspondence. For now, be happy, be well, and most importantly, be you at all times: the Young whom I love and cherish. Andy, Xoxoxo

People, says Tarantoga, believe what they want to believe. Take astrology for instance. Astronomers, who after all should know more than anyone about the stars, tell us that they are giant balls of incandescent gas spinning since the world began and that their influence on our fate is considerably less than the influence of a banana peel, on which you can slip and break your leg. But there is no interest in banana peels, whereas serious periodicals include horoscopes and there are even pocket computers you can consult before you invest in the stock market to find out if the stars are favorable. Anyone who says that the skin of a fruit can have more effect on a person’s future than all the planets and stars combined won’t be listened to. An individual comes into the world because his father, say, didn’t withdraw in time, thereby becoming a father. The mother-to-be, seeing what happened, took quinine and jumped from the top of the dresser to the floor but that didn’t help. So the individual is born and he finishes school and works in a store selling suspenders, or in a post office. Then suddenly he learns that that’s not the way it was at all. The planets came into conjunction, the signs of the zodiac arranged themselves carefully into a special pattern, half the sky cooperated with the other half so that he could come into being and stand behind this counter or sit behind this desk. It lifts his spirits. The whole universe revolves around him, and even if things aren’t going well, even if the stars are lined up in such a way that the suspenders manufacturer loses his shirt and the individual consequently loses his job, it’s still more comforting than to know that the stars don’t really give a damn. Knock astrology out of his head, and the belief too that the cactus on his windowsill cares about him, and what is left? Barefoot, naked despair. So says Professor Tarantoga, but I see I am digressing.

At that point in time, Gokul Rajaram was a legendary éminence grise in the ad-tech world. The so-called godfather of AdSense, Google’s secondary gold mine after AdWords, Gokul was a constant presence on the conference circuit, and an omnipresent adviser or investor in just about every advertising technology company worth talking about. He too had come to Facebook via a small acqui-hire, though really that had been just a career breather between his time at Google and his hiring at Facebook. University at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), followed by an American MBA, he was your standard-issue Indian techie, and probably that country’s most valuable export after steel and Tata Motors. “What’s the first thing you would change about Facebook Ads if we hired you?” There was about as much polish and prologue to Gokul as that of a North Korean diplomat. “I’d build a conversion-tracking system. It’s unbelievable you don’t have one yet.” A conversion-tracking system is software that tells you if an advertisement has worked in driving a conversion (or “sale” in marketing-speak), and lets you retweak your marketing campaigns based on performance. An ads system without conversion tracking is like a car without rearview mirrors; nay, it’s like a car without even rear or side windows. All you can see is forward, merrily driving along, not even understanding what’s behind you or what you just ran over. It’s a danger to yourself and others, and it was a sign of just how out-of-touch Facebook Ads management was that this somehow never got prioritized. From Gokul’s smile the conclusion was clearly . . . right answer! And so the conversation went, traversing various potential aspects of the Facebook Ads system, and what the company needed to build. It was a giddy Gokul—I’d soon learn he was almost always giddy—who escorted me out the door. The boys and I had arrived separately, assuming we’d get out at different times, and separately did we go back to the GrokPad. There, we compared notes. MRM and Argyris weren’t exactly rousing in their reviews of the experience. In fact, it was clear that the fascist vibe the company gave off had very much rubbed them the wrong way. They had never really liked Facebook, as either product or company, going back to our visits to their developer events. The daylong hazing had done nothing to charm them.

A real patriot wont pretend everything is fine Sit back in an arm chair and blissfully recline While the streets burn I’ll point out the signs And maybe we’ll fix this country of mine.

The energy of the vacuumin the universe presents us with a dilemma: We know, on the one hand, that this energy must be miniscule, since, as we have discussed, we would otherwise be unable to look straight ahead. All possible contributions to the energy of the vacuum must (almost) cancel out. The dilemma is that we know of many sources of vacuum energy that, to the best of our knowledge, are independent of each other; it would be hard to understand why their contributions should cancel. While the contributions of different sources to the total energy of the vacuum have positive as well as negative signs, such that they might cancel, at the same time each of them is huge compared with the experimental limit on their sum. This is the problem of the cosmological constant.

He leaned forward slowly and embraced me again. “Jesus entered our iniquity by submitting to our insanity. Our blessed Lord made his way inside Adam’s broken eyes; that is why he cried out, and as he did his Father held him in his arms, even as I do you now—yet from the inside. Union with his Father and with us in darkness. ‘It is finished,’” he whispered in triumph, holding me as if he wanted me to feel the truth. My mind swirled like one of Ezekiel’s wheels. I understood what the apostle was saying, but this was so foreign to all that I knew. Then the universe inside me slowed, and I could see a single neon sign flashing before my eyes. It was the title of Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” My guts wrenched. But I heard the song of light and knew to watch carefully. As I looked the words Sinners and God changed places in the sign. I gasped as “God in the Hands of Angry Sinners” appeared, pulsating with the rhythm of the song. “Oh, God! What have we done?” At

She traced the dragon’s body on his biceps where it transitioned into rope. “I just thought it would be more difficult. After all this time, the heartache, the waiting, the despairing and giving up, the pure pissed-offness of dealing with near misses…" She blew out a breath. “And there it is. With you, easy as breathing. ‘I’m in love with you.’ You said it and meant it. It changes the universe, but the way throwing a stone in a pond does. All those ripples. It's…amazing.” She frowned and cocked her head. “There should at least be dramatic music.” "I can retract it if you want. Brood for a while, play commitment paranoia games, alienate you so we break up, sort of, and then I chase you down before you make some monumental decision, like moving back to New York, or signing up for a three year stint in the merchant marines. Then we can have a big makeup scene.“ She pursed her lips. "Complete with dramatic music.” "Absolutely. If I could afford it, I’d hire John Williams to come up with the score.“ "You’d do all that for me?” "Hell, no.” He snorted, puffing a short, playful breath against her. “I’d tie you up and keep you in my basement until you contracted Stockholm syndrome and couldn’t breathe without me.“ She tipped her head back, sobering. "Sometimes, it feels like I can’t. Crazy, right?” He put his mouth on hers and took her air in the best kind of way, all while giving it back to her. at her, boyishly appealing, but then sobered. "We’re normal, extraordinary people,” he said. “It took us a while, but we always knew what it would look like when it happened. The simplicity of it is what makes it extraordinary. A tadpole gets legs and walks on land, and evolution begins. All in a simple blink, the whole world changes.

An unwillingness to associate with blacks has long been considered a sign of lower-class closed-mindedness, but a 2006 study by Michael Emerson and David Sikkink of Rice University found that the more education white parents had, the more likely they were to rule out schools for their children simply because of the number of blacks.

On August 12, 1933, President Machado fled Cuba with ABC terrorists shooting at his laden airplane as it prepared to take off from the long hot runway. He left Cuba without any continuity of leadership and a smooth transfer of authority to the next administration became impossible in Havana. American envoy, Sumner Welles stepped into the vacuum and encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada to accept the office of Provisional President of Cuba. Céspedes was a Cuban writer and politician, born in New York City, son of Carlos Manual de Céspedes del Castillo who was a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. Wearing a spotlessly clean, crisp white suit, Céspedes was installed as the Provisional President of Cuba, on what was his 62nd birthday. This expedient political move failed to prevent the violence that broke out in the streets. Mobs looted and behaved with viciousness that lasted for six long hours and created a mayhem not witnessed since Cuba’s Independence from Spain. Students from the university ransacked the previously pro-Machado newspaper “Heraldo de Cuba.” The Presidential Palace was stormed and severely damaged, with the culprits leaving a “For Rent” sign hanging on the front gate. The temperament of the mob that rallied against the Machado supporters, including the hated Porristas who had been left behind, was ferocious. They wounded over 200 hapless souls and cost 21 people their lives. Five members of the Porristas as well as Colonel Antonio Jimenez, the head of Machado’s secret police, were summarily shot to death and trampled upon. The rioters then tied the mutilated body of Jimenez to the top of a car and paraded his bullet-riddled carcass through the streets of Havana, showing it off as a trophy. When the howling throng of incensed people finally dumped him in front of the hospital, it was determined that he had been shot 40 times. Students hammered away at an imposing bronze statue of Machado, until piece by piece it was totally destroyed. Shops owned by the dictator’s friends were looted and smashed, as were the homes of Cabinet members living in the affluent suburbs.

The Castro rebellion had its start on July 26, 1953, with an attack on the Moncada Barracks, in Santiago de Cuba. The military success of this raid was limited, but other skirmishes followed, brought on primarily by young people and university students. A strategy of terror on the part of the Batista régime followed, but this brutal behavior backfired and led to the signing by forty-five organizations, in an open letter supporting the revolutionary July 26 Movement. From his encampment high in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, on the eastern end of the island, Fidel Castro and his rebel troops dug in and began a campaign that would eventually lead to Batista’s defeat. For a time the United States continued to supply Batista with ships, planes, tanks and equipment. Napalm was used against the rebels and bodies filled the streets outside the Cuban capital. In March of 1958 the United States stopped the sales of arms to the Cuban government; however bodies continued to appear in increasing numbers until December 31, 1958. On December 11, 1958, the U.S. Ambassador Earl Smith informed Batista that the United States would no longer support his régime. Once again, Batista wore out his political welcome. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba by air, for the Dominican Republic. Repeating his performance of 1944, he again raided the Cuban treasury and absconded with about $300 million of personal wealth, and an estimated $700 million in art and cash. One hundred and eighty supporters accompanied him to Ciudad Trujillo. A week later on January 8, 1959, Castro and his army of revolutionaries rolled into Havana….

he was eligible to sign up for lessons on an instrument of his choosing. Uncharacteristically for Rabbit, he didn’t worry that no such instrument existed. He trusted that it was out there, and that he would find it when it was ready to be found, and that through it, Rabbit Hatmaker would be able to talk. To his family, to his teachers, to people he’d never met. To animals. To the universe. Maybe to God.

Combining Free Will with Intention In mathematics, two angles that are said to coincide fit together perfectly. The word coincidence does not describe luck or mistakes. It describes that which fits together perfectly. By combining free will with intention, you harmonize with the universal mind. Rather than operating in your own mind outside of this force called intention, your goal may very well be, as you read this book, to work at being in harmony at all times with intention. When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you’re out of harmony with intention. You can and will reconnect in a way that will bring you into alignment with your own purpose.

I assume you’re familiar with quantum entanglement. Everything in the universe is connected in some way with every other thing. Drove Einstein crazy. And quantum physics suggests that the universe is shaped by consciousness rather than the other way around. Another point that can make even the most rational physicist spiritual. The state of the universe only comes into being when it’s observed. Einstein himself tried for decades to poke holes in this interpretation of experimental data and couldn’t do it, although his efforts were brilliant and helped strengthen the field. There are those who theorize consciousness makes use of these quantum effects. So who’s to say that your intelligence enhancement doesn’t stand out like a neon sign against the quantum background of the cosmos—for those who know how to look for it?

Stop for moment... an event has happen (Think on this, how did it happen, why it happen? Is there something like sign from the universe for your question? How positive will use this which have happen (Focus on the positive not on the negative) )... continue... now stop on this quotes (Again to the same process), find out why, how and everything else... Use this process to all stuff, it's important to show that you think!

If you are walking the path, the universe is walking the path with you. Often, things will just work out perfectly with little effort. It’s like the universe is continuously reorganizing the world you live in so as to send the right people to you at the right time. All we have to do is be set on the path and open enough to receive these gifts.

By denying feelings of anger, withdrawing from direct communication, casting themselves in the role of victim, and sabotaging others’ success, passive aggressive persons create feelings in others of being on an emotional roller coaster. ...exacting hidden revenge, the passive aggressive individual gets others to act out their hidden anger for them. This ability to control someone else’s emotional response makes the passive aggressive person feel powerful. He/she becomes the puppeteer—the master of someone else’s universe and the controller of their behavior.