Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 139 of 217 · 20 per page

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  Scope: Our goal in this lecture is also the goal of the entire course, to move to the final lines of the poem, where the pilgrim Dante has the experience of seeing God face to face. The last two cantos of the poem prepare for this encounter. After a brief look at the way in which the heavenly rose is structured, and a look at who we find there, we move to the final canto, which begins with Saint Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin. The paradoxes that are apparent in this prayer prepare the reader for the paradoxes of the two most important Christian mysteries, the Incarnation and the Trinity, which are two of the key parts of the final vision. The final vision attempts to show how the entire universe, and Dante’s part in it, are bound together as though parts of a single book. It also attempts to tie together the entire poem Dante has constructed and to prepare the reader for a return to the world of space and time. As part of this “return,” we end the course with a few minutes of reflection about the importance that Dante continues to have in the present. Outline I. The pilgrim’s final guide takes over in Canto 31 of the Paradiso. He is Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, an appropriate choice for many reasons. A. Bernard is both a mystic and a writer on mysticism, in many ways the most important in the Middle Ages. B. He is an ardent Church reformer. C. He is a “crusader,” having preached the Second Crusade. D. He is a poet and preacher. E. All these functions resonate with the pilgrim and his journey. F. Bernard will take Dante to God. II. After handing Dante over to Bernard, Beatrice takes her place in the mystical rose of blessed souls. A. Dante is able to see her there.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  I had a futon bed at the time and had to assemble it in the room because there was no way I could have gotten it in otherwise. The room was about one foot wider than the bed itself and about half a foot longer and had a low ceiling. It was like sleeping in a very small cave. Despite its idiosyncrasies, it was home and I would live there for almost three years. One night, as I lay in bed, I experienced what I would describe as my first (of only three) truly mystical, inexplicable, mind-bending spiritual experience. It occurred apropos of nothing. I had had what I would describe as a fairly normal, boring day: I’d walked the dog before breakfast, after work and before bed, as always. I’d worked at the library, checking books in for people and checking them out for other people. It wasn’t a Wednesday so I hadn’t been to the meditation circle. I may not have spoken to anyone from the group, although I don’t remember clearly if I had or not. What is crystal clear is what happened after I crawled under the sheets. I lay on my back, my eyes open, perhaps mulling over what the next day might hold, with Patches there on the end of the bed, snuggled in for the night. Suddenly there was a noise, as loud as someone abruptly closing a book in a quiet room, a cross between a pop and a whoosh. It was loud enough that it startled me out of my reverie and immediately my eyes opened wider, because the ceiling above me became a shimmering mass of light. From corner to corner to corner, every square inch turned into a clear, white light that was thick, almost gelatinous, and filled, filled, with additional lights that sparkled and shined like the Milky Way on overdrive. As I watched this happen, with awe and wonder, the light flowed downward, absolutely evenly, until it filled the entire bedroom. It was like a cup was filling up, only from the top down. Well, colour me surprised. It was so extraordinary and so real, and I was so aware that I was conscious and not yet sleeping, that all I could do was lie there and gawp, breathless. I wasn’t afraid, just curious and interested. In fact, I had a pervading sense that, although this radically bizarre thing was happening, I was completely safe. I didn’t feel awash with bliss or anything, but I did feel perfectly at peace, safe and calm. As soon as the light had completely filled the room, so that I was lying in the middle of a cube of thick, clear, but infinitely sparkly light, I had what I can only describe as a vision. Suddenly, I felt and saw myself standing before a large, unidentifiable figure. I had that recognizable dream feeling of being me-but-not-me.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  We must be willing to give up everything for the good fight and commit to surrendering any part of ourselves that did not serve God’s will and God’s plan. “Those who do not surrender will be left behind.” Limori’s voice echoed a little in this damp chamber. “Those who are willing to surrender will be carried forth with God’s armies of light. Will you surrender?” Her voice rose. “Will you? Look around at those who serve here with you, at these souls who are willing to offer all of themselves for God.” I opened my eyes and looked around the group and saw each of them doing the same. Limori was standing with her arms at a 45-degree angle from her body, palms facing out, eyes closed, head tilted slightly back in full channelling mode. Alice stood beside her in exactly the same pose, like a Mini-Me version of our guru. “Those of you who do surrender to God, who are willing to offer all of yourselves to His purpose, will bow down before me. By doing so you will show that your pride and your ego will not stand against your service to the Light and to God.” She opened her eyes and looked around the group, meeting each person’s gaze. “If you serve me, you will bow down, on your knees, arms outstretched in submission.” There was a slight pause, while we each grasped what Limori was saying, and then shuffling noises began as we each knelt down on the rocky floor of the cave and bowed forward, arms outstretched, somewhat like the child pose in yoga. It took some time and there was some small effort, as some of the older members of the group had difficulty getting to their knees on such a rocky and uneven surface, but eventually we were all prostrate in front of Limori. Except for one lone figure. I had my forehead on the floor of the cave and my eyes closed, so it was only when Limori began speaking again that I realized there was one holdout. “Will you not bow down and surrender to My light, My child? It is not to this woman [Limori meant herself] that you are bowing. It is to Me and to the forces of good in the universe.” I snuck a quick peek to my left under my arm and saw one person standing tall among a circle of people on their knees. It was Brenda, a friend of Karen’s. She had never been to Limori’s drop-in Wednesday night meditation circle and, as far as I could tell, this trip to Kauai was her first encounter with Limori. Until now she must have simply heard the glowing propaganda about Limori from Karen and decided to join us on this trip.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  As we all nestled down under the blankets and our chatter quieted down, I could hear the loons calling to one another on the lake that was one hundred feet from the cabin door. In the middle of the night, when I got up to use the outhouse, the flashlight beam bounced ahead of me, illuminating a tiny patch of ground in front of my feet. The darkness of the night was so thick it felt like a velvet blanket around my shoulders. Other than my flashlight there was not a single manmade source of light to be seen. On my way back to the cabin, I stopped briefly, turned off the light, and rolled my neck back to look heavenward. The abundance of stars seemed almost unreal, they were so crowded onto the patch of sky I could see through the tops of the trees. When viewed from Vancouver, the night sky looked nothing like this. The morning came soon enough and, as instructed, the group was at breakfast by 8:00 a.m. Limori ate with us in the living room, and not for the first time I observed, perhaps unconsciously, the strange dynamic that accompanied her. She seemed to be trying to blend into the crowd and have small, casual conversations with those seated near her, but she also appeared to be highly attuned to whatever was going on anywhere else in the room. Midsentence, she’d interrupt herself and call across the room to the kitchen to correct Alice about the way she was doing something. Or she’d seem to be engrossed in one conversation but then interject herself into another conversation going on elsewhere in the room and correct someone about a point they’d made. It was like witnessing omnipresence, first hand. Her energy, for lack of a better word, was in every corner, in every conversation and in every head in the room. And this peculiar dynamic wasn’t one sided. Although we were all sitting and chatting in small groups of two or three and eating breakfast off our laps, we all had our antennae pointed toward Limori. I would strain to stay present with those I was talking to, all the while making sure I didn’t miss anything Limori said, for every word from her was, I felt, a blessing, a message from God and a gem not to be wasted. I could see that others were doing the same; I’d stop in midsentence and realize that the person I was talking to was looking at me but that his or her attention was with Limori, wherever she was in the room. There was a pull on her at all times. Wherever she went we were like hungry orphans grabbing at her skirts: “Please, Miss, feed my soul.” When breakfast was complete we each took a seat on the couches and chairs that encircled the room.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I find myself thinking: Every orgasm is different. Then I must instantly amend myself, because every sexual event is different. Every point of arousal, every plateau, every intersection of desire with the desired is unique. The memory of sexual passion often feels as though it had been dreamed rather than done. As if it had happened to someone else, been told us, or, more accurately, been witnessed. You, the other, catch me when I fall. I, the other, catch you. To take one’s clothes off at the beginning of the sex act is “a form of role removal,” in Murray Davis’s words. (And putting on certain kinds of clothing at the beginning of sex is similar, a matter of putting on a role that isn’t really yours.) By taking off our clothes in front of each other, we consciously take off our other selves, our relations to other people, the limits of our relations to each other. We become just a body, outside the normal strictures and plans of daily life. To be naked means to be seen, but below that, to be naked is to be emptied—blank. Taking off clothes is revolutionary, proletarian; stripping reduces and removes whatever status we rely on. And it makes us both more human and more like objects at the same time. In this sense all sex is masturbation—the other person’s body is an object by which we have intense but wholly internal pleasure, and our orgasm is a self-created and unshared universe. As arousal increases, we imagine things not in the quotidian sphere of concern; we say and do things that seem then to be perfectly logical, correct—even necessary—but that are not planned, not even imaginable, in any other state. In fact, reason and logic are completely absent from this state. This was Thomas Aquinas’s main objection to sex. If what distinguishes humans from animals is their ability to reason, then what could be more destructive to humanity than a force that steals reason away? Afterward, the next day, the morning after, when desire has been sated, there remains the shocked memory: “Oh, God, did I say that? Did I do that?” Yes, you did. In passion, the body abstracts itself, is abstracted. Damp labia loom enormous, the wrinkled apricot bundles of the scrotum grow in stature, a pearly drop of semen expands into a bell. The shapes turn alien and impressionistic, barely discerned in the chaos of color and line. They expand and ripple into something else, like a word said over and over for the sound of it until all meaning is lost and the syllables become foreign and new.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The social anthropologist Shirley Ardener has done research on a practice of the Bakweri women called “titi ikoli.” “Titi ikoli” is what women do to men who have impugned their genitals. “These insults may take various forms but that most typically envisaged is the accusation that the sexual parts of women smell. A Bakweri woman so insulted before a witness must call out all the other women of the village. Converging upon the offender dressed in vines, they demand immediate recantation and a recompense of a pig, plus something extra for the woman who has been directly insulted. The women then surround him and sing songs which are often obscene by allusion, and accompany them by vulgar gestures. An example of another kind of song is ‘Titi ikoli is not a thing for insults, beautiful, beautiful.’ All the men beat a hasty retreat (since they will be ashamed to stay and watch while their wives, sisters, sisters-in-law, and old women join the dance) except the culprit, but he will try to hide his eyes. Finally the women share the pig between themselves.” Many versions of “titi ikoli” punishment occur in tribal cultures. They include women stripping naked as a group in front of the offender, or dancing in wild, inappropriate ways. Ardener, who calls the cooperative effort of all women on behalf of any one insulted this way a form of “corporate action,” notes that the punishments usually involve the deliberate violation of sexual taboos that might otherwise be upheld strenuously. Their indignities, and their offender’s embarrassment, are a public statement of how such insults violate the dignity of all women. Even infants participate. Not only do I not live in a culture with this wondrous ritual, I live in a world of douches and chemical sprays, in a world made mortally afraid of bodily fluids long before there was anything to fear. “Titi ikoli” says more than no to the lie of female ugliness; it celebrates sexual beauty, the natural inherent beauty of their genitals. And beautiful they are, infinitely variable and perfumed. Thighs spread and the scalloped edges part and blossom. The darkness inside beckons, alien, bigger than life. The vagina is a mouth, “a devouring mouth,” in Norman O. Brown’s words. A man who risks intercourse risks castration, because no one really knows what’s inside. The image of vagina dentata, the vagina ringed with teeth, is ancient; it’s a shivery nightmare of men, a ghost story for the men’s circle long after dark, when the women have retired. In Arab tales, to look into the vagina’s maw was to risk blindness. The vagina is the scene of original generation, the cleaving of the world into heaven and earth, the scene we all repeat, ontogeny perpetually recapitulating phylogeny.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  We parked the cars and traipsed over some low dunes to the beach and then bore right, with the sea on our left, until we came to a rocky area set perhaps a hundred yards away from the oceanfront. There were scrubby, twisted trees that reminded me of the arbutus trees in BC growing up through the rocky outcroppings and shallow tidal pools at our feet. Limori and Alice led the way. The trees became a little thicker as we picked our way over the rocks. We began chatting among ourselves as we went, but were soon admonished to keep quiet. This was serious spiritual business and we needed to be respectful of the nearby spirits and of the work that Limori herself was doing by bringing us here. It soon became apparent that we were headed toward a small cliff face, perhaps as high as a two-storey building. There were openings in the rock face; Limori and Alice moved toward a particular one and, crouching slightly, went inside. We followed, as good sheep do, and found ourselves in a cave as big as a one-bedroom apartment. The cave was not completely enclosed; there were a couple of openings to the sky and it was easy to see the damp cave walls that surrounded us and more tidal pools at our feet. Limori had us stand in a circle. We were all silent and reverential and after a few minutes Limori began to channel. I closed my eyes and listened to her voice amid the drips from the cave walls and, further away, the white-noise whoosh of the ocean outside. This cave, on this holy island, was a spiritually significant place, we were told. And we were spiritually significant people, because we were here and, more specifically, were here with this spiritually important woman. Our work was vastly important to the well-being of the Earth and its people, and even more so to the millions of souls and spirits and angels, who, unseen by us but ever-present in the universe, were praying for our devotion so that Light might reign in God’s universe instead of the Darkness that we were fighting. It was a precarious business, as we well knew, and the ceremony that would take place this week (Michael and Jessica’s wedding) was so pleasing to the Great Kahunas for all the good it would do in this “battle of Light and Dark.” Much Aloha spirit was flowing this week because of our work here and because the gods were so pleased with us. But beware: ego and temptation are always on the lookout for a weak soul who wishes to place his or her own needs before God’s desires. Vigilance was always required, especially now when so much good work was being done. The Dark was enraged at all the progress the Light was making, simply by us being here, and so it would redouble its efforts to trap us into ego positions and mind games.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  If I imagine some of these old books written by anonymous country women, they take on a whole new meaning. So many of them take female lust as their driving force. Forbidden Fruit, published in 1898, creates a world of oral sex, spanking, orgies, and incest out of that monster, the lustful mother. A year earlier School Life in Paris was published, consisting of letters from seventeen-year-old Blanche to her cousin Ethel, describing the adventures of lesbian schoolgirls. They use strap-on dildos, named—in order of size—the Baby, the School-boy, the Captain, and the Giant. The girls even invent fake ejaculate. A short while later Female Lust was published. The plot is a roller coaster of lesbian wantonness, female ejaculation, and dildos. Old aunts fuck young maids, friends fuck friends and strangers, nuns spank schoolgirls and then fuck each other. A woman butt-fucks a boy of fifteen with her clitoris. All this and more in the first forty pages. In the world of pornography, female lust has usually been constructed as a force of great power, and the consequences of unleashing it is a dominant theme. Erotica—and not coincidentally, much of religious thought on sex—has through the ages concerned itself either directly or indirectly with what women want, what women do, what women are. A Chinese monk once said, “Females are demons. If there were no women, every man would be a Bodhisattva.” Homosexuality among Tibetan monks was seen as a good thing because it helped the monks get over their desire for women. One of the common themes of dirty jokes in China is that of the woman who is always aroused and ready for sex, who tries to hide behind a screen of decorum but can’t. Whether jokes focus on the act of intercourse itself, or adultery, or the secret sex lives of priests and nuns, the theme is often that of a lack of control, indiscreet and wild sex behind the extremes of etiquette in Chinese society. The bride who can’t get enough sex, who goes so far as to prevent her husband from having a concubine, might even disguise herself as his concubine, is the taboo source of humor here. The Orientalist Howard Levy, who has made a study of erotic jokes, tells this one: “On the first night the groom embraced the bride and said, ‘Because of the wedding your father was extremely bothered but finally we’re here.’ And having said this right away he did it once with her. ‘Your mother too was extremely bothered but finally we’re here.’ And he did it with her a second time. ‘Your elder brother didn’t do a thing on our behalf but now we’re here.’ And he did it with her a third time. As soon as they finished, the bride spoke and said, ‘My sister-in-law didn’t say anything good about us either!’ ”

• From Mystical Tradition: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (2008)

  Lecture Eleven The Ba’al Shem Tov and the New Hasidism Scope: In the 18th century, a new form of Jewish Mysticism arose in Eastern Europe, beginning with the charismatic career of Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (“Master of the Good Name”), around whom were collected many tales of wisdom and wonder-working. This New Hasidism was a more popular form of mysticism. It pervaded the community as a whole rather than just a small group of scholars and was focused on the spirit-filled tzaddik, the popular leader and center of the community, more so than the learned rabbi. The basic conceptions of this Hasidism remained similar to those of Kabbalism, but the ideas were rendered in more popular form. This lecture considers the life of the founder of the New Hasidism, the progression of the movement, and the character of its literature and piety. Outline I. The rise and fall of Sabbatai Zevi, the mystical Messiah, created a severe crisis for Jewish Mysticism. A. The Lurianic form of Kabbalism that had spread so widely across the synagogues of Europe now appeared as potentially dangerous. Nonetheless, mysticism did not disappear entirely, and in this lecture, we consider the last great development in Jewish Mysticism with the Ba’al Shem Tov and the New Hasidism. B. Hasidism arose in Eastern Europe in the 18th century amid both new and old challenges for Jews. For example, the persecution of Jews through pogroms continued sporadically during this period. C. Jewish traditional observance was also threatened by the Haskalah, the Enlightenment, which was taking place in Europe at this time and called into question the entire symbolic world of Torah. 1. Baruch Spinoza (1632(cid:16)1677) was one of the first influential critics of the Bible. He tested the stories in the Bible against the measure of the Enlightenment and found those stories to be either historically or scientifically impossible. For Spinoza, the Bible was not true, but it was still meaningful. 46 ©2008 The Teaching Company.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  At Linden Labs he adapted easily from text to 3D visuals. He worked on both sexual and non-sexual products there, including an (unrelated) exercise bike that allowed players to cycle their avatars around, and teledildonic products that were compatible with Second Life animations. Today, he is gainfully employed as an engineer at a (non-dildo-related) California robotics firm, but continues to be a teledildonics guru in his spare time. “I seem to have taken the lead in this sort of underground building group. There’s just tons of garage builders out there,” he said. His own research is focusing less on the actual machinery at the moment. “I’ve been looking at software development. There’s hardware out there, but most of the software for it is pretty bad. It’s not cross-platform, it’s not really user friendly. The user interfaces for them are laughable.” Often, when people really start thinking about user interfaces, it is an indicator that the technology is getting ready for a wider audience. People have talked about teledildonics since 1993, but this technology—and the haptic virtual environment it portends—is only now starting to pack its bags for the first leg of its journey to the mainstream. The main challenge to developing an intuitive user interface is the sheer complexity of the devices. Machulis is convinced that the solution will demand attention to both simplification and intuitiveness. And for him, intuitiveness goes hand in hand with personalization. Nothing is more personal than one’s own body. “Right now my focus is mainly on biometrics,” he said. “If you tap into the numbers that are coming off your body, you have as intimate a physical interface as you’re going to get with a computer. There’s no typing, there’s no button pushing. You are taking your pulse or taking a galvanic skin response reading and it becomes a natural interface. And then the question then becomes, how we actually turn that [data] into something that, when sent to someone else, will do something interesting for them. That’s the part that I’m working on now.” Results thus far have been intriguing for the teledildonics crowd, though possibly frustrating for the test subjects. “I created an interesting teasing technology. It is just a simple feedback loop of pulse and a vibrator. To make the speed of the vibrator go up, you have to keep your pulse below a certain level. It’s very simple feedback loop, but there’s so much going on in the physicality of that feedback loop that it actually becomes an interesting system.” Even a man of science like Machulis describes some of his own work as “scary as hell.” He knows he’s playing with power, and he knows that, although people’s comfort limits have changed over time, they have not disappeared. He says that virtual worlds in their current form represent the “maximum immersion” the real world can handle right now, but that sex might change where people draw the line.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  At such museums, one finds no shortage of examples of drawn, painted, printed, etched, written, carved, photographed, filmed and computer-generated representations of human sexuality drawn from every known culture and depicting every theme and variation of the subject matter itself. The Kama Sutra, a classic Indian book that contains advice on life goals, prosperity and mate selection, is almost exclusively known as a sexual instruction manual. The Kama Sutra has become a metaphor for sexual variety, but it doesn’t come close to representing the truly astounding variety of multicultural sexual representation. So many art forms, so many modes of communication shaped by their intimate relationship with sexuality. The most striking thing about the display at the Delta was the level of craftsmanship and artistry so evident in the work. The fine detail in the pottery illustrations, the delicate brush strokes in the paintings. These were not the work of amateurs or hacks. Here was a room full of sexual artworks created with the highest-quality techniques and technologies of the day. It made me wonder whether those who attained such skill then chose to apply it to erotic ends, or whether it was the desire to create erotic work that drove them to master the techniques. Either way, the ballroom had become a warehouse of examples of the nexus between creativity and sexual imagery. In many earlier cultures, the modern Western taxonomy that divides art, literature and entertainment into erotic and non-erotic forms did not exist. This both complicates and simplifies the process of winnowing out examples where sexual representation drove the technologies and techniques of communications tools. The argument is more complicated in that there is simply no way to isolate sexual content as a discrete force of innovation. The task is made much simpler, though, as the very ubiquity of sexual themes speaks to a near-universal motivation not only to depict sexuality but also to find as many different ways as possible to do so. China has an unbroken tradition of erotica dating back more than five thousand years. They are in good company: South Asia is dotted with ancient erotic paintings, sculptures and entire temples covered with images of Hindus frozen in the act. Africans, Native Americans, Europeans and Middle Easterners all have millennia-old artistic and literary traditions centred around sexual representation. Despite such ubiquity, even those like James Miller who work in the field never seem to quite get used to it. Miller began his talk at the Chinese Sex Relics show by saying just how difficult it was to give his presentation when a two-and-a-half-foot stone penis loomed at him just a few feet away.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  We were saying then: If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth, and waters, and air, hushed also the pole of heaven, yea the very soul be hushed to herself, and by not thinking on self surmount self, hushed all dreams and imaginary revelations, every tongue and every sign, and whatsoever exists only in transition, since if any could hear, all these say, We made not ourselves, but He made us that abideth for ever—If then having uttered this, they too should be hushed, having roused only our ears to Him who made them, and He alone speak, not by them but by Himself, that we may hear His Word, not through any tongue of flesh, nor Angel’s voice, nor sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of a similitude, but might hear Whom in these things we love, might hear His Very Self without these (as we two now strained ourselves, and in swift thought touched on that Eternal Wisdom which abideth over all);—could this be continued on, and other visions of kind far unlike be withdrawn, and this one ravish, and absorb, and wrap up its beholder amid these inward joys, so that life might be for ever like that one moment of understanding which now we sighed after; were not this, Enter into thy Master’s joy? And when shall that be? When we shall all rise again, though we shall not all be changed? Such things was I speaking, and even if not in this very manner, and these same words, yet, Lord, Thou knowest that in that day when we were speaking of these things, and this world with all its delights became, as we spake, contemptible to us, my mother said, “Son, for mine own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life. What I do here any longer, and to what I am here, I know not, now that my hopes in this world are accomplished. One thing there was for which I desired to linger for a while in this life, that I might see thee a Catholic Christian before I died. My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become His servant: what do I here?”

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature am I? A life various and manifold, and exceeding immense. Behold in the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things, either through images, as all bodies; or by actual presence, as the arts; or by certain notions or impressions, as the affections of the mind, which, even when the mind doth not feel, the memory retaineth, while yet whatsoever is in the memory is also in the mind—over all these do I run, I fly; I dive on this side and on that, as far as I can, and there is no end. So great is the force of memory, so great the force of life, even in the mortal life of man. What shall I do then, O Thou my true life, my God? I will pass even beyond this power of mine which is called memory: yea, I will pass beyond it, that I may approach unto Thee, O sweet Light. What sayest Thou to me? See, I am mounting up through my mind towards Thee who abidest above me. Yea, I now will pass beyond this power of mine which is called memory, desirous to arrive at Thee, whence Thou mayest be arrived at; and to cleave unto Thee, whence one may cleave unto Thee. For even beasts and birds have memory; else could they not return to their dens and nests, nor many other things they are used unto: nor indeed could they be used to any thing, but by memory. I will pass then beyond memory also, that I may arrive at Him who hath separated me from the four-footed beasts and made me wiser than the fowls of the air, I will pass beyond memory also, and where shall I find Thee, Thou truly good and certain sweetness? And where shall I find Thee? If I find Thee without my memory, then do I not retain Thee in my memory. And how shall I find Thee, if I remember Thee not?

• From Wild (2012)

  Is that not the most gorgeous thing? I can’t get over it. Do you not feel like you’re on that trail right now? Walking with her? That’s how I feel—as if I’m on that trail right now walking with her, and I can hear the clicking of the ski pole every time she puts it down. Click here to return to the text. There was the fact of the moon and the fact that I was sleeping out in the open on my tarp. There was the fact that I had woken because it seemed like small cool hands were gently patting me and the fact that small cool hands were gently patting me. And then there was the final fact of all, which was a fact more monumental than even the moon: the fact that those small cool hands were not hands, but hundreds of small cool black frogs. Small cool slimy black frogs jumping all over me. Oprah’s note: I think I could have handled the rattlesnake. I could have handled the bear. I would have been afraid, but I could have even handled men on the trail, if they hadn't bothered me. I would have been psychologically damaged forever—and I don’t say that lightly—but I would still need to be cared for because I would become a babbling crazy person if I’d felt the little black frogs. Click here to return to the text. “The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.” Oprah’s note: This was a big aha moment for me—if you don’t get that confidence, you’ve got to teach yourself, and if you don’t teach yourself, you can never win a battle. That’s why, into my forties and fifties, I was still having trouble with confrontation, because I was never taught that. Click here to return to the text. What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? …What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was? Oprah’s note: That’s the process of forgiving yourself. There can be no healing until that happens. Everybody has to do it one way or another. Love that. Click here to return to the text. These same flowers grew in the dirt where I’d spread her ashes. I reached out and touched the petals of one, feeling my anger drain out of my body. Oprah’s note:

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The reading rooms of the British Library are scenes of marvelous anachronism, and it’s hard to imagine a more interesting place to read a dirty book. There are horseshoes and rows of leather-covered tables, standing lamps, and wooden podiums, with studious, silent people reading and writing—only with pencils, as pens are forbidden here. There are tall white columns and books locked in glass cases and circles of soft yellow light falling at every reader’s place. I take my pile of old, dusty books to my seat, pick the largest one, and set it on the podium, and open to an eight by eleven drawing of a man with an enormous erection. I close it and open Cythera’s Hymnal, or, Flakes from the Foreskin, bawdy and scatological verse published in Oxford in 1870; most of them seem to be fart jokes. Then I skim through Amok, by Hank Janson, a pulp novel from 1954 once ordered destroyed, and get caught up in the heated story of a condemned man’s prison escape and brutal adventures, during one of which “two bodies pulsed in unison, pulsed and burned with a fierce, savage intensity.” The British Library is obliged by law to keep a copy of almost everything published in the United Kingdom. In addition to that voluminous intake, the library frequently receives bequests and donations from private libraries. The Private Case was conceived as a place to store under lock and key work that, by virtue of its obscene nature, was deemed inappropriate for the general collection. Note the word “obscene” as opposed to sexual. Works of particular violence and brutality, such as those of Aleister Crowley, have also been relegated to the Private Case, which is housed in a locked steel cage out of sight. Until 1981, when Patrick J. Kearney finished his several years of research and published one, the Private Case didn’t even have a bibliography. Kearney found its neglect to be fantastic in scope, many of the books in dusty, half-forgotten, unsorted piles. A lot of P.C. books, as they’re called, are frail and rare. I was put in mind of the concern of librarians everywhere over erotic material, that one’s duty as a librarian is not really to protect the reader from the book, but the book from the reader; too many Playboys stolen or ripped apart, too many copies of My Secret Life glued shut by surprise emissions. Every day, when I asked the librarians for my requests of the day before, they rummaged in the request files until I pointed them to a separate little box, since even the P.C. request slips are segregated. They would then take a set of keys and unlock the books from a special storage cupboard. Thus I was handed Flesh in the Ring, The Lascivious Abbot, The Platonic Blow, by poker-faced librarians, until they all finally realized I was one of those P.C. readers they get now and then, and I was never going to request anything else.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  In all ancient cosmologies, that of Genesis included, there are seven stages in the creative process, each with its own vibratory rate and each rate producing a different element—the planetary precedent of the seven divisions in the atomic table. Now creation implies action, and energy is the active agent. This being so, precreation implies energy not in action, that is, motionless and attenuate beyond our ken. This is the nature of nonmanifesting space, the ultimate source. In metaphysics it is called the Absolute, “inactive and asleep,” and in scripture “the deep,” “without form and void.” Space is the field of cosmic manifestation, suns, planets, moons, and these are the aforesaid “congealed energy.” The time and means of this congelation and condensation constitute the creative process of worlds, a matter not of solar days but of cosmic days. Primordial energy cannot become dense matter in time as we reckon it, hence the intermediate stages. In passing through these it becomes more and more substantial, and so we might call it primordial substance, evenutally the quantel and finally the chemical. This being the process, we might say that this earth is a precipitate of primordial substance and a congelation of cosmic energy. But energy of itself is neither constructive nor purposive. For it to become such it must have a guiding, directing intelligence, and as that intelligence here on earth is genetic, so is it in heaven, space—”. . . as below, so above.” One vast Nothing materially, all things potentially. This is the true beginning and therefore the beginning of truth. And such it was for all the ancient races, save one, for it is the Chaos of the Greeks, the Nox or night of the Romans, the Nir or nothing of the Egyptians, the Po of the Polynesians, the Parabrahm of the Hindus, and the Tao of the Chinese. Of the latter, the wise and enlightened Laotze said: “There is something chaotic yet complete which existed before heaven and earth. Oh how still it is and formless, standing alone without changing, reaching everywhere without suffering harm. Its name I know not. To designate it I call it Tao.” So with the Polynesians: “In the beginning,” said they, “there was no life, no light, no sound. A brooding night called Po enveloped all, over which Tanaoa (darkness) and Muti-Hei (silence) reigned supreme.” And from the Assyro-Babylonians: “Chaotic darkness brooding over a waste of waters (space). Naught existed save primordial ocean Mommu Tiawath or Tiamat.” But again this would not do for a religion, so the Hebrew priests personified, deified and endowed this silent waste with vocative wisdom, moral perfection and even self-consciousness—the greatest mistake mankind has ever made for it confused all human thought, divided the race into a thousand sects and sowed the seeds of unending warfare.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And so the serpent, Satan, the devil and the Creator are all one. According to the Kabbalah the true name of Satan is Yahveh reversed,1 the Deus inversus of the Romans. This is the all-explaining truth a cunning priesthood hid from us. In ancient Egypt, the symbol of the Creator was a snake, Kneph, encircling a water vase; the snake was breathing on the waters (space), and its breath, impregnating the water, produced matter and life. In the Mayan Naacl cosmology we find a seven-headed serpent called Naga, guarding its eggs beneath the ground—the germinal Life Principle, “the worm that never dies.” In the Orient we find this identical symbol, a seven-headed serpent there called Nârâyana, the seven heads representing the seven planes and elements. The Hebrew idea of God moving on the waters came from this story of Nârâyana, called by the Hindus “The Mover on the waters.” The name of these waters was Amriti, from which the Hebrews took the name of Jonah’s father. In the Buddhist version the serpent was called Naga, a name identical with that of the Mayans in America. This itself is a hint of the once universal knowledge. According to the myth, as Buddha (genetic consciousness) sat under the Bodhi tree, that is, “tree of life,” he attained enlightenment, “tree of knowledge,” and Naga, perceiving that a Savior had been born, arose from Amriti and surrounding him with seven coils, auras, covered and protected him with its seven heads. And for seven days and seven nights (evolution) he sat thus protected by the royal snake. The legend ends thus: “These fearful serpents by the influence of Buddha’s law (enlightenment) became the blessers of mankind.” These seven serpents are identical with “the seven angels,” “the seven spirits before the throne,” etc., all symbols of the seven energies. When, in Evolution, these are qualified by epigenetic consciousness, they become “blessers of mankind.” As the creative process is both downward and upward, the Greeks had a symbol of both. This is the Caduceus of Hermes, the messenger (active agent) of the gods. The serpent on the left hand is Involution; that on the right is Evolution. As the creative force returns to its source, the Hindus gave it another twist, a serpent swallowing its tail. And the zodiac, beginning with Aquarius2 and returning to Aquarius, embodies the same idea. Thus the whole creative process is symbolized by the serpent, or Satan, rather than Divinity creating by divine fiat, as the priest would have us believe. Satan, or a satanic power, whichever you like, is the Creator of this world; this alone explains its satanic nature and without which it cannot be explained. The devil is but this involutionary power in evolutionary forms, the planetary Satan biologized. Thus in religion, the devil is but the priestly alibi for the Creator’s diabolism. Such was the teaching of a rival sect in the Dark Ages, but the Church put an end to that.

• From Wild (2012)

  Not that I was a photographer. I’d gone to an outdoor store in Minneapolis called REI about a dozen times over the previous months to purchase a good portion of these items. Seldom was this a straightforward affair. To buy even a water bottle without first thoroughly considering the latest water bottle technology was folly, I quickly learned. There were the pros and cons of various materials to take into account, not to mention the research that had been done regarding design. And this was only the smallest, least complex of the purchases I had to make. The rest of the gear I would need was ever more complex, I realized after consulting with the men and women of REI, who inquired hopefully if they could help me whenever they spotted me before displays of ultralight stoves or strolling among the tents. These employees ranged in age and manner and area of wilderness adventure proclivity, but what they had in common was that every last one of them could talk about gear, with interest and nuance, for a length of time that was so dumbfounding that I was ultimately bedazzled by it. They cared if my sleeping bag had snag-free zipper guards and a face muff that allowed the hood to be cinched snug without obstructing my breathing. They took pleasure in the fact that my water purifier had a pleated glass-fiber element for increased surface area. And their knowledge had a way of rubbing off on me. By the time I made the decision about which backpack to purchase—a top-of-the-line Gregory hybrid external frame that claimed to have the balance and agility of an internal—I felt as if I’d become a backpacking expert. It was only as I stood gazing at that pile of meticulously chosen gear on the bed in my Mojave motel room that I knew with profound humility that I was not. I worked my way through the mountain of things, wedging and cramming and forcing them into every available space of my pack until nothing more could possibly fit. I had planned to use the bungee cords to attach my food bag, tent, tarp, clothing sack, and camp chair that doubled as a sleeping pad to the outside of my pack—in the places on the external frame meant for that purpose—but now it was apparent that there were other things that would have to go on the outside too. I pulled the bungee cords around all the things I’d planned to and then looped a few extra things through them as well: the straps of my sandals and the camera case and the handles of the insulated mug and the candle lantern. I clipped the metal trowel in its U-Dig-It sheath to my backpack’s belt and attached the keychain that was a thermometer to one of my pack’s zippers.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  When Christianity took firm foothold on earth, the pagan civilization and the Roman empire had reached their zenith. The reign of Augustus was the golden age of Roman literature; his successors added Britain and Dacia to the conquests of the Republic; internal organization was perfected by Trajan and the Antonines. The fairest countries of Europe, and a considerable part of Asia and Africa stood under one imperial government with republican forms, and enjoyed a well-ordered jurisdiction. Piracy on the seas was abolished; life and property were secure. Military roads, canals, and the Mediterranean Sea facilitated commerce and travel; agriculture was improved, and all branches of industry flourished. Temples, theatres, aqueducts, public baths, and magnificent buildings of every kind adorned the great cities; institutions of learning disseminated culture; two languages with a classic literature were current in the empire, the Greek in the East, the Latin in the West; the book trade, with the manufacture of paper, was a craft of no small importance, and a library belonged to every respectable house. The book stores and public libraries were in the most lively streets of Rome, and resorted to by literary people. Hundreds of slaves were employed as scribes, who wrote simultaneously at the dictation of one author or reader, and multiplied copies almost as fast as the modern printing press.564 The excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum reveal a high degree of convenience and taste in domestic life even in provincial towns; and no one can look without amazement at the sublime and eloquent ruins of Rome, the palaces of the Caesars, the Mausoleum of Hadrian, the Baths of Caracalla, the Aqueducts, the triumphal arches and columns, above all the Colosseum, built by Vespasian, to a height of one hundred and fifty feet, and for more than eighty thousand spectators. The period of eighty-four years from the accession of Nerva to the death of Marcus Aurelius has been pronounced by high authority "the most happy and prosperous period in the history of the world."565

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Gnosticism, with its syncretistic tendency, is no isolated fact. It struck its roots deep in the mighty revolution of ideas induced by the fall of the old religions and the triumph of the new. Philo, of Alexandria, who was a contemporary of Christ, but wholly ignorant of him, endeavored to combine the Jewish religion, by allegorical exposition, or rather imposition, with Platonic philosophy; and this system, according as it might be prosecuted under the Christian or the heathen influence, would prepare the way either for the speculative theology of the Alexandrian church fathers, or for the heretical Gnosis. Still more nearly akin to Gnosticism is Neo-Platonism, which arose a little later than Philo’s system, but ignored Judaism, and derived its ideas exclusively from eastern and western heathenism. The Gnostic syncretism, however, differs materially from both the Philonic and the Neo-Platonic by taking up Christianity, which the Neo-Platonists directly or indirectly opposed. This the Gnostics regarded as the highest stage of the development of religion, though they so corrupted it by the admixture of foreign matter, as to destroy its identity. Gnosticism is, therefore, the grandest and most comprehensive form of speculative religious syncretism known to history. It consists of Oriental mysticism, Greek philosophy, Alexandrian, Philonic, and Cabbalistic Judaism, and Christian ideas of salvation, not merely mechanically compiled, but, as it were, chemically combined. At least, in its fairly developed form in the Valentinian system, it is, in its way, a wonderful structure of speculative or rather imaginative thought, and at the same time all artistic work of the creative fancy, a Christian mythological epic. The old world here rallied all its energies, to make out of its diverse elements some new thing, and to oppose to the real, substantial universalism of the catholic church an ideal, shadowy universalism of speculation. But this fusion of all systems served in the end only to hasten the dissolution of eastern and western heathenism, while the Christian element came forth purified and strengthened from the crucible. The Gnostic speculation, like most speculative religions, failed to establish a safe basis for practical morals. On the one side, a spiritual pride obscured the sense of sin, and engendered a frivolous antinomianism, which often ended in sensuality and debaucheries. On the other side, an over-strained sense of sin often led the Gnostics, in gIaring contrast with the pagan deification of nature, to ascribe nature to the devil, to abhor the body as the seat of evil, and to practice extreme austerities upon themselves. This ascetic feature is made prominent by Möhler, the Roman Catholic divine. But he goes quite too far, when he derives the whole phenomenon of Gnosticism (which he wrongly views as a forerunner of Protestantism) directly and immediately from Christianity. He represents it as a hyper-Christianity, an exaggerated contempt for the world,803 which, when seeking for itself a speculative basis, gathered from older philosophemes, theosophies, and mythologies, all that it could use for its purpose.