Awe

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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.

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• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  the rightness of their cause. The tribe is always right, and to say otherwise is to betray it, as Zongwei did. Mao had wanted to forge a unified Chinese citizenry, clear as to its goals, and instead the entire country descended into tribal battles completely disconnected from the original purpose of the Cultural Revolution. To make matters worse, the crime rate soared and the economy had ground to a halt, as hardly anyone felt compelled to work or manufacture anything. The masses had become even lazier and more resentful than under the old order. By the spring of 1968, Mao’s only recourse was to install a police state. Hundreds of thousands were thrown into prisons. The army virtually took over. To help restore order and respect for authority, Mao converted himself into a cult figure, his image to be worshipped and his words to be repeated like revolutionary prayers. It is interesting to note how Fangpu’s form of repression at YMS—the torture, the rewriting of history, the control of all media—mirrored what Mao was doing throughout the country. The new revolutionary society that Mao (and Fangpu) had wanted now actually resembled the most repressive, superstitious regimes of feudal China. As Jianhua’s father, a victim of the Cultural Revolution himself, kept telling his son, “A thing turns into its opposite if pushed too far.” Understand: We will tend to imagine that this story is an extreme example that has little relevance to our own lives and the groups we belong to. After all, we navigate through worlds full of sophisticated people in high-tech offices, where everyone is seemingly so polite and civilized. We see ourselves in a similar way: we have our progressive ideals and our independent thinking. But much of this is an illusion. If we looked at ourselves closely and honestly, we would have to admit that the moment we enter our workspace or any group, we undergo a change. We easily slip into more primitive modes of thinking and behaving, without realizing it. Around others, we naturally tend to feel insecure as to what they think of us. We feel pressure to fit in, and to do so, we begin to shape our thoughts and beliefs to the group orthodoxies. We unconsciously imitate others in the group—in appearances, verbal expressions, and ideas. We tend to worry a lot about our status and where we rank in the hierarchy: “Am I getting as much respect as my colleagues?” This is the primate part of our nature, as we share this obsession with status with our chimpanzee relatives. Depending on patterns from early childhood, in the group setting we become more passive or more aggressive than usual, revealing the less developed sides of our character. When it comes to leaders, we generally don’t see them as ordinary people. We tend to feel somewhat awed and intimidated in their presence, as if they possessed some mythical extra powers. When we contemplate our group’s main rival or enemy, we can’t help

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  and effort, we are reexperiencing what the Romantic movements of the eighteenth century first introduced into our psychology. We are not aware of all this, but we in the present are motley products of all the accumulated changes in human thinking and psychology. By making the past into something dead, we are merely denying who we are. We become rootless and barbaric, disconnected from our nature. You must radically alter your own relationship to history, bringing it back to life within you. Begin by taking some era in the past, one that particularly excites you for whatever reason. Try to re-create the spirit of those times, to get inside the subjective experience of the actors you are reading about, using your active imagination. See the world through their eyes. Make use of the excellent books written in the last hundred years to help you gain a feel for daily life in particular periods (for example, Everyday Life in Ancient Rome by Lionel Casson or The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga). In the literature of the time you can detect the prevailing spirit. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald will give you a much livelier connection to the Jazz Age than any scholarly book on the subject. Drop any tendencies to judge or moralize. People were experiencing their present moment within a context that made sense to them. You want to understand that from the inside out. In this way you will feel differently about yourself. Your concept of time will expand and you will realize that if the past lives on in you, what you are doing today, the world you live in, will live on and affect the future, connecting you to the larger human spirit that moves through us all. You in this moment are a part of that unbroken chain. And this can be an intoxicating experience, a strange intimation of immortality. The future: We can understand our effect on the future most clearly in our relationship to our children, or to those young people we influence in some way as teachers or mentors. This influence will last years after we are gone. But our work, what we create and contribute to society, can exert even greater power and can become part of a conscious strategy to communicate with those of the future and influence them. Thinking in this way can actually alter what we say or what we do. Certainly Leonardo da Vinci followed such a strategy. He continually tried to envision what the future might be like, to live in it through his imagination. We can see the evidence of this in his drawings of possible inventions that might exist in the future, some of which, like flying machines, he actually attempted to create. He also thought deeply about the values people might hold in the future that did not yet exist in the times that he lived through. For instance, he

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I’ve killed her, and I’m now on the way to kill myself. Goodbye.” He spent the whole day on this strange farewell tour, until finally one of his cousins called him out. “You need to man up,” the cousin said. “This is the coward’s way. You need to turn yourself in. If you were man enough to do this, you have to be man enough to face the consequences.” Abel broke down and handed his gun over to the cousin, the cousin drove him to the police station, and Abel turned himself in. He spent a couple of weeks in jail, waiting for a bail hearing. We filed a motion opposing bail because he’d shown that he was a threat. Since Andrew and Isaac were still minors, social workers started getting involved. We felt like the case was open-and-shut, but then one day, after a month or so, we got a call that he’d made bail. The great irony was that he got bail because he told the judge that if he was in jail, he couldn’t earn money to support his kids. But he wasn’t supporting his kids—my mom was supporting the kids. So Abel was out. The case slowly ground its way through the legal system, and everything went against us. Because of my mother’s miraculous recovery, the charge was only attempted murder. And because no domestic violence charges had ever been filed in all the times my mother had called the police to report him, Abel had no criminal record. He got a good lawyer, who continued to lean on the court about the fact that he had children at home who needed him. The case never went to trial. Abel pled guilty to attempted murder. He was given three years’ probation. He didn’t serve a single day in prison. He kept joint custody of his sons. He’s walking around Johannesburg today, completely free. The last I heard he still lives somewhere around Highlands North, not too far from my mom. — The final piece of the story came from my mom, who could only tell us her side after she woke up. She remembered Abel pulling up and pointing the gun at Andrew. She remembered falling to the ground after getting shot in the ass. Then Abel came and stood over her and pointed his gun at her head. She looked up and looked at him straight down the barrel of the gun. Then she started to pray, and that’s when the gun misfired. Then it misfired again. Then it misfired again, and again. She jumped up, shoved him away, and ran for the car. Andrew leapt in beside her and she turned the ignition and then her memory went blank. To this day, nobody can explain what happened. Even the police didn’t understand. Because it wasn’t like the gun didn’t work.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  thoughts, but feeling that you are destined for something great or important will give you a degree of resilience when people oppose or resist you. You will not internalize the doubts that come from such moments. You will have an enterprising spirit. You will continually try new things, even taking risks, confident in your ability to bounce back from failures and feeling destined to succeed. When Chekhov had the epiphany about the ultimate freedom he could create for himself, he had what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience.” These are moments in which you are lifted out of the daily grind and you sense that there is something larger and more sublime in life that you have been missing. In the case of Chekhov it was sparked by a crisis, by loneliness, and it led to the sensation of complete acceptance of people and the world around him. These moments can come from exerting yourself past what you thought were your limits; they can come from overcoming great obstacles, climbing a mountain, taking a trip to a very different culture, or the deep bonding that comes from any form of love. You want to deliberately go in search of such moments, stimulate them if you can. They have the effect, as they did with Chekhov, of altering your attitude for good. They expand what you think about your possibilities and about life itself, and the memory is something you will always return to for supreme inspiration. In general, this way of looking at yourself runs counter to the cool, ironic attitude that many people like to assume in the postmodern world—never too ambitious, never too positive about things or life, always affecting a nonchalant and very false humility. Such types see the positive, expansive attitude as Pollyannaish and simpleminded. But really their cool attitude is a clever mask for their great fears—of embarrassing themselves, of failing, of showing too much emotion. As with all such trends in culture, the cool attitude will eventually fade away, a remnant of the early twenty-first century. Moving in the opposite direction, you are much more progressive. How to view your energy and health: Although we are all mortal and subject to illnesses beyond our control, we must recognize the role that willpower plays in our health. We have all felt this to some degree or another. When we fall in love or feel excited by our work, suddenly we have more energy and recover quickly from any illnesses. When we are depressed or unusually stressed, we become prey to all kinds of ailments. Our attitude plays an enormous role in our health, one that science has begun to explore and will examine in more depth in the coming decades. In general, you can safely push yourself beyond what you think are your physical limits by feeling excited and challenged by a project or endeavor. People get old and prematurely age by accepting physical

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  of adrenaline, the blood pumping extra hard to the brain and through the nervous system. This focuses the mind to a much higher level and we notice new details, see people’s faces in a new light, and sense the impermanence in everything around us, deepening our emotional responses. This effect can linger for years, even decades. We cannot reproduce that experience without risking our lives, but we can gain some of the effect through smaller doses. We must begin by meditating on our death and seeking to convert it into something more real and physical. For Japanese samurai warriors, the center of our most sensitive nerves and our connection to life was in the gut, the viscera; it was also the center of our connection to death, and they meditated on this sensation as deeply as possible, to create physical death awareness. But beyond the gut, we can also feel something similar in our bones when we are weary. We can often sense its physicality in those moments before we fall asleep—for a few seconds we feel ourselves passing from one form of consciousness to another, and that slip has a deathlike sensation. There is nothing to be afraid of in this; in fact, in moving in this direction, we make major advancements in diminishing our chronic anxiety. We can use our imagination in this as well, by envisioning the day our death arrives, where we might be, how it might come. We must make this as vivid as possible. It could be tomorrow. We can also try to look at the world as if we were seeing things for the last time—the people around us, the everyday sights and sounds, the hum of the traffic, the sound of the birds, the view outside our window. Let us imagine these things still going on without us, then suddenly feel ourselves brought back to life—those same details will now appear in a new light, not taken for granted or half perceived. Let the impermanence of all life forms sink in. The stability and solidity of the things we see are mere illusions. We must not be afraid of the pangs of sadness that ensue from this perception. The tightness of our emotions, usually so wound up around our own needs and concerns, is now opening up to the world and to the poignancy of life itself, and we should welcome this. As the fourteenth-century Japanese writer Kenko noted, “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” Awaken to the shortness of life. When we unconsciously disconnect ourselves from the awareness of death, we forge a particular relationship to time—one that is rather loose and distended. We come to imagine that we always have more time than is the reality.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  170 The History of Christianity II ORIGINS õ The Mormon organization is formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the LDS Church. As the name indicates, Mormons consider themselves to be Christians, but some other Christians and scholars argue that Mormonism is not a kind of Christianity, but a brand new religion. õ The Mormon faith emerged from the spiritual hothouse of the 19 th century: the Second Great Awakening. Its founder, Joseph Smith Jr., was born in 1805 in Vermont to a poor farming family. They moved all over but ended up living in Palmyra, NY, in the heart of a region hot with the flames of religious revival. õ Joseph’s parents were interested in dreams and folk magic. They were always searching for a religion that felt right but were not finding it. Joseph Smith Jr. carried on this tradition. In the spring of 1820, when he was 14, Smith went into the woods where he could be alone, and there he had a vision. He saw a pillar of light, and God and Jesus spoke to him, mourning the state of the world and religious disagreement. õ Smith didn’t immediately tell his family about his vision. He did tell a Methodist minister, who was aghast and told him there was no such thing as visions. In 1823, when he was 17, he went to his room and prayed that God would forgive his sins. Suddenly his room was filled with a bright light, and beside his bed stood an angel dressed in a white robe. This was the angel Moroni, who told Smith that God had “a work” for him to do. 171Lecture 18—The Mormons: A True American Faith õ Moroni led him to uncover a book of golden plates buried in a hill near his home. Deposited with the plates were two stones fastened to a breastplate, called Urim and Thummim, described as “two smooth three cornered diamonds set in glass, and the glasses were set in silver bows.” Imagine them as a pair spectacles fastened to a knight’s chest armour. These served as seer stones that God had prepared to aid Joseph in his translation of the book. 172 The History of Christianity II õ Moroni didn’t actually allow Smith to remove the plates, and made him keep coming back to the same spot once a year every year for more teaching. Finally, four years later, he was allowed to borrow them.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  where people seem to have their own way of relating to one another, with a secret language of sorts. Or we walk through a neighborhood of a much different social class than what we’re used to—much wealthier or poorer. In these moments, we are aware that we don’t belong, that others are looking at us as outsiders, and from deep within we feel uneasy and unusually alert, although in fact we may have nothing really to fear. We can observe several interesting elements to the social force: First, it exists inside us and outside us at the same time . When we experience the bodily sensations mentioned above, we are almost certain that others on our side are feeling the same. We feel the force within, but we think of it as outside ourselves as well. This is an unusual sensation, perhaps equivalent to what we feel when we are in love and experience a shared energy that passes between ourselves and the love object. We can also say this force differs, depending on the size and chemistry of the particular group . In general, the larger the group, the more intense is the effect. When we are among a very large group of people who seem to share our ideas or values, we feel quite a rush of increased strength and vitality, as well as a communal warmth or heat that comes from feeling that we belong. There is something awesome and sublime about this force multiplied in a large crowd. This increase in energy and excitement can easily shift to anger and violence in the presence of an enemy. The particular mix of people shapes the effect as well. If the leader is charismatic and bursting with energy, it filters through the group or gathered masses. If a large number of individuals have a particular emotional tendency toward anger or joy, that will alter the collective mood. And finally, we are drawn to this force . We feel attracted to numbers—a stadium full of partisan supporters of a team, choirs of people singing, parades, carnivals, concerts, religious assemblies, and political conventions. In these situations, we are reliving what our ancestors invented and refined—the gathering of the clan, massed soldiers parading in columns before the city walls, early theatrical and gladiatorial spectacles. Subtracting the minority who feel frightened by such gatherings, we generally have a love of partisan crowds for their own sake. They make us feel alive and vital. This can become an addiction—we feel compelled to expose ourselves to this energy again and again. Music and dance epitomize this aspect of the social force. The group experiences the rhythm and melody as one, and music and dance are among the earliest forms we created to satisfy this urge, to externalize the force. We can observe one other aspect to the social force, in its reverse form: when we experience a prolonged period of isolation. We know from the accounts of prisoners in solitary confinement and

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Inserting the variable between two invariable and like intervals greatly facilitated judgment, which between two unlike terms is far less accurate."[526] Three observers in these experiments made no error when the middle interval varied 1/60 from the extremes. When it varied 1/120, errors occurred, but were few. This would make the minimum absolute difference perceived as large as 0.355." This minimum absolute difference, of course, increases as the times compared grow long. Attempts have been made to ascertain what ratio it bears to the times themselves. According to Fechner's 'Psychophysic Law' it ought always to bear the same ratio. Various observers, however, have found this not to be the case.[527] On the contrary, very interesting oscillations in the accuracy of judgment and in the direction of the error—oscillations dependent upon the absolute amount of the times compared—have been noticed by all who have experimented with the question. Of these a brief account may be given. In the first place, in every list of intervals experimented with there will be found what Vierordt calls an 'indifference-point ;' that is to say, an interval which we judge with maximum accuracy, a time which we tend to estimate as neither longer or shorter than it really is, and away from which, in both directions, errors increase their size.[528] This time varies from one observer to another, but its average is remarkably constant, as the following table shows.[529] The times, noted by the ear, and the average indifference-points (given in seconds) were, for— [image "Description: chart 3" file=Image00054.jpg] The odd thing about these figures is the recurrence they show in so many men of about three fourths of a second, as the interval of time most easy to catch and reproduce. Odder still, both Estel and Mehner found that multiples of this time were more accurately reproduced than the time-intervals of intermediary length;[530] and Glass found a certain periodicity, with the constant increment of 1.25 sec., in his observations. There would seem thus to exist something like a periodic or rhythmic sharpening of our time-sense, of which the period differs somewhat from one observer to the next. Our sense of time , like other senses, seems subject to the law of contrast . It appeared pretty plainly in Estel's observations that an interval sounded shorter if a long one had immediately preceded it, and longer when the opposite was the case. Like other senses, too, our sense of time is sharpened by practice . Mehner ascribes almost all the discrepancies between other observers and himself to this cause alone.[531] Tracts of time filled (with clicks of sound) seem longer than vacant ones of the same duration, when the latter does not exceed a second or two.[532] This, which reminds one of what happens with spaces seen by the eye, becomes reversed when longer times are taken. It is, perhaps, in accordance with this law that a loud sound, limiting a short interval of time, makes it appear longer, a slight sound shorter.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Only when these are altered is a man said to be alienatus a se . Now this spiritual self may be considered in various ways. We may divide it into faculties, as just instanced, isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselves with either in turn. This is an abstract way of dealing with consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously found; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present 'segment' or 'section' of that stream, according as we take a broader or a narrower view—both the stream and the section being concrete existences in time, and each being a unity after its own peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly or concretely, our considering the spiritual self at all is a reflective process, is the result of our abandoning the outward-looking point of view, and of our having become able to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers . This attention to thought as such, and the identification of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a rather mysterious operation, of which we need here only say that as a matter of fact it exists; and that in everyone, at an early age, the distinction between thought as such, and what it is 'of' or 'about,' has become familiar to the mind. The deeper grounds for this discrimination may possibly be hard to find; but superficial grounds are plenty and near at hand. Almost anyone will tell us that thought is a different sort of existence from things, because many sorts of thought are of no things—e.g., pleasures, pains, and emotions; others are of non-existent things—errors and fictions; others again of existent things, but in a form that is symbolic and does not resemble them—abstract ideas and concepts; whilst in the thoughts that do resemble the things they are 'of' (percepts, sensations), we can feel, alongside of the thing known, the thought of it going on as an altogether separate act and operation in the mind.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  great works of other achievers. We want to have more encounters with the Sublime. Nothing is more awe-inspiring than the human brain itself—its complexity, its untapped potential. We want to realize some of that potential in our lives, not wallow in the cynical slacker attitude. We see a purpose behind everything that we experience and see. In the end, what we want is to fuse the curiosity and excitement we had toward the world as children, when almost everything seemed enchanting, with our adult intelligence. The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they wil not live and wil die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite are as necessary for man as the smal planet he inhabits. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky 14 Resist the Downward Pull of the Group The Law of Conformity We have a side to our character that we are generally unaware of—our social personality, the different person we become when we operate in groups of people. In the group setting, we unconsciously imitate what others are saying and doing. We think differently, more concerned with fitting in and believing what others believe. We feel different emotions, infected by the group mood. We are more prone to taking risks, to acting irrationally, because everyone else is. This social personality can come to dominate who we are. Listening so much to others and conforming our behavior to them, we slowly lose a sense of our uniqueness and the ability to think for ourselves. The only solution is to develop self-awareness and a superior understanding of the changes that occur in us in groups. With such intelligence, we can become superior social actors, able to outwardly fit in and cooperate with others on a high level, while retaining our independence and rationality. An Experiment in Human Nature As a young boy growing up in communist China, Gao Jianhua (b. 1952) dreamed of becoming a great writer. He loved literature, and his teachers commended him for his essays and poems. In 1964 he gained admittance to the Yizhen Middle School (YMS), not far from where his family lived. Located in the town of Yizhen, several hundred miles north of Beijing, YMS was labeled a “key school”— over 90 percent of its students went on to college. It was difficult to get into and quite prestigious. At YMS, Jianhua was a quiet and studious boy; he had ambitions of graduating in six years with a top record, good enough to get into Beijing University, from where he would launch the writing career he dreamed about. Students at YMS lived on campus, and life there could be rather dull, since the Communist Party regulated almost every aspect of life in China, including education. There were daily military drills, propaganda classes, manual labor duty, and regular classes, which could be rigorous. At YMS, Jianhua developed a close friendship with a classmate

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  trivia, being lost in, 168 –69 troubadours, 559 Truman, Harry, 175 truth, 138 , 142 Truth Seeker, 463 –64 Tydings, Mil ard, 175 –76 Tyrone, Hugh O’Neil , Earl of, 447 ubiquity, il usion of, 138 –39 unconscious, 258 uniqueness, 373 –74, 378 , 388 , 411 , 470 –71, 516 unintended consequences, 162 –65 Ursuline nuns, 59 –62 utopia, 140 , 306 Valentino, Rudolph, 549 validation, 184 , 186 nonverbal, 410 see also self-opinion Vidal, Gore, 272 Vietnam War, 107 , 234 , 235 , 365 , 366 , 369 , 417 , 425 , 548 vision, of leaders, 458 –59, 465 –66 Visionary Artist, 463 visual system, 140 Voltaire, 532 von Sternberg, Josef, 106 Voting Rights Act, 365 voyeurism, 146 Wagner, Richard, 221 –22, 246 warfare, 501 –3 Washington Post, 235 , 236 Watergate scandal, 96 , 236 –38, 425 , 548 Watson, Thomas, 433 Watzlawick, Paul, 197 Wayne, John, 106 , 107 Weakland, John H., 197 Wel s, Frank, 293 –97, 300 Whitman, Walt, 71 Wilde, Oscar, 201 Wilder, Bil y, 192 Wil iams, Edward, 262 –67, 269 Wil iams, Jane, 262 –71, 274 –76, 286 Wilson, Woodrow, 233 Wise Blood (O’Connor), 565 , 568 , 59 Wol stonecraft, Mary, 262 , 560 Woman to Worship Him, 347 –48 women niceness and, 260 successful, envy of, 284 –85 see also gender roles and masculine and feminine traits Wonderful World of Disney, The, 294 Woods, Tiger, 378 work world, 371 –72, 494 , 548 world, viewing with expansive attitude, 225 World War II, 104 , 175 , 318 , 417 , 545 , 548 , 554 , 560 Chanel and, 135 –36 Pearl Harbor attack, 163 –64 Wren, Christopher, 279 –80 wu-wei, 352 Xenophon, 319 , 454 , 465 Yahoo!, 298 Yamamoto, Kajiro, 379 Yizhen Middle School (YMS), 391 –92, 394 , 396 , 398 –401, 403 –5 youth culture, 541 , 543 , 576 –77 zao fan, 394 zeitgeist, 518 , 543 , 547 , 550 , 551 , 554 , 558 Zeus, 19 Zhuge Liang, 162 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z About the Author Robert Greene, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power , The 33 Strategies of War , The Art of Seduction , and Mastery, is an internationally renowned expert on power strategies. He lives in Los Angeles. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. Document Outline Also by Robert Greene Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction 1. Master Your Emotional Self (The Law of Irrationality) The Inner Athena Step One: Recognize the Biases Step Two: Beware the Inflaming Factors Step Three: Strategies Toward Bringing Out the Rational Self 2. Transform Self-love into Empathy (The Law of Narcissism) The Narcissistic Spectrum Four Examples of Narcissistic Types

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, rapture denotes violence of some kind. But God rules us not by violence or force, as Damascene says [*De Fide Orth. ii, 30]. Therefore man’s soul is not carried away to things divine. On the contrary, The Apostle says (2 Cor. 12:2): “I know a man in Christ . . . rapt even to the third heaven.” On which words a gloss says: “Rapt, that is to say, uplifted contrary to nature.” I answer that, Rapture denotes violence of a kind as stated above (OBJ[3]); and “the violent is that which has its principle without, and in which he that suffers violence concurs not at all” (Ethic. iii, 1). Now everything concurs in that to which it tends in accordance with its proper inclination, whether voluntary or natural. Wherefore he who is carried away by some external agent, must be carried to something different from that to which his inclination tends. This difference arises in two ways: in one way from the end of the inclination—for instance a stone, which is naturally inclined to be borne downwards, may be thrown upwards; in another way from the manner of tending—for instance a stone may be thrown downwards with greater velocity than consistent with its natural movement. Accordingly man’s soul also is said to be carried away, in a twofold manner, to that which is contrary to its nature: in one way, as regards the term of transport—as when it is carried away to punishment, according to Ps. 49:22, “Lest He snatch you away, and there be none to deliver you”; in another way, as regards the manner connatural to man, which is that he should understand the truth through sensible things. Hence when he is withdrawn from the apprehension of sensibles, he is said to be carried away, even though he be uplifted to things whereunto he is directed naturally: provided this be not done intentionally, as when a man betakes himself to sleep which is in accordance with nature, wherefore sleep cannot be called rapture, properly speaking. This withdrawal, whatever its term may be, may arise from a threefold cause. First, from a bodily cause, as happens to those who suffer abstraction from the senses through weakness: secondly, by the power of the demons, as in those who are possessed: thirdly, by the power of God. In this last sense we are now speaking of rapture, whereby a man is uplifted by the spirit of God to things supernatural, and withdrawn from his senses, according to Ezech. 8:3, “The spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the vision of God into Jerusalem.” It must be observed, however, that sometimes a person is said to be carried away, not only through being withdrawn from his senses, but also through being withdrawn from the things to which he was attending, as when a person’s mind wanders contrary to his purpose. But this is to use the expression in a less proper signification.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  writer Jean-Paul Sartre, it was a childhood fascination with printed words on a page, and the possible magical meanings each word possessed. These moments of visceral attraction occurred suddenly and without any prodding from parents or friends. It would be hard to put into words why they occurred; they are signs of something beyond our personal control. The actress Ingrid Bergman expressed it best, when talking of the fascination she had with performing in front of her father’s movie camera at a very early age: “I didn’t choose acting. It chose me.” Sometimes these moments can come when we are older, as when Martin Luther King Jr. realized his mission in life as he got pulled into the Montgomery bus boycott. And sometimes they can occur while observing other people who are masters in their field. As a young man, the future Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa felt particularly aimless. He tried painting, then apprenticed as an assistant director on films, a job he hated. He was ready to quit when he got assigned to work for the director Kajiro Yamamoto in 1936. Watching this great master at work, suddenly his eyes were opened to the magical possibilities of film, and he realized his calling. As he later described this, “It was like the wind in a mountain pass blowing across my face. By this I mean that wonderfully refreshing wind you feel after a painfully hard climb. The breath of that wind tells you you are reaching the pass. Then you stand in the pass and look down over the panorama as it opens up. When I stood behind Yama-san in his director’s chair next to the camera, I felt my heart swell with that same feeling—‘I’ve made it at last.’” As another sign, examine moments in your life when certain tasks or activities felt natural and easy to you, similar to swimming with a current. In performing such activities, you have a greater tolerance for the tedium of practicing. People’s criticisms don’t discourage you so easily; you want to learn. You can contrast this with other subjects or tasks that you find deeply boring and unfulfilling, which frustrate you. Related to this, you will want to figure out the particular form of intelligence that your brain is wired for. In his book Frames of Mind , the psychologist Howard Gardner lists certain forms of intelligence for which people usually have one particular gift or affinity. This could be mathematics and logic, physical activity, words, images, or music. We could also add to this social intelligence, a superior sensitivity to people. When you are engaged in the activity that feels right, it will correspond to that form of intelligence for which your brain is most suited. From these various factors you should be able to spot the outline of your calling. In essence, in going through this process you are discovering yourself, what makes you different, what predates the opinions of others. You are reacquainting yourself with your natural

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  With our philosophy, we want to manufacture the cleansing effect that the plague has on our tribal tendencies and usual self- absorption. We want to begin this on a smaller scale, by looking first at those around us, in our home and our workplace, seeing and imagining their deaths and noting how this can suddenly alter our perception of them. As Schopenhauer wrote, “The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him or her alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and inextricably lost.” We want to see that uniqueness of the other person in the present, bringing out those qualities we have taken for granted. We want to experience their vulnerability to pain and death, not just our own. We can take this meditation further. Let us look at the pedestrians in any busy city and realize that in ninety years it is likely that none of them will be alive, including us. Think of the millions and billions who have already come and gone, buried and long forgotten, rich and poor alike. Such thoughts make it hard to maintain our own sense of grand importance, the feeling that we are special and that the pain we may suffer is not the same as others’. The more we can create this visceral connection to people through our common mortality, the better we are able to handle human nature in all its varieties with tolerance and grace. This does not mean we lose our alertness to those who are dangerous and difficult. In fact, seeing the mortality and vulnerability in even the nastiest individual can help us cut them down to size and deal with them from a more neutral and strategic space, not taking their nastiness personally. In general, we can say that the specter of death is what impels us toward our fellow humans and makes us avid for love. Death and love are inextricably interconnected. The ultimate separation and disintegration represented by death drive us to unite and integrate ourselves with others. Our unique consciousness of death has created our particular form of love. And through a deepening of our death awareness we will only strengthen this impulse, and rid ourselves of the divisions and lifeless separations that afflict humanity. Embrace all pain and adversity. Life by its nature involves pain and suffering. And the ultimate form of this is death itself.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  She pointed to the circle the ring cast on the ground. I nodded, acknowledging that the shadow was as real as the ring. She smiled and waved her hand in the space between the ring and its shadow. Isn't this distance also real? She indicated our circle. I looked at the faces around me. I followed the shadow of her hand against the wall of the hut, seeing for the first time the shadows surrounding us. She called me to the present. My mind slipped back to the past, forward to the future. Arent these connected? she asked wordlessly. I felt my whole life coming full circle. Growing up so different, coming out as a butch, passing as a man, and then back to the same question that had shaped my life: woman or man? Stone Butch Blues 329 The sound of a street argument, born of frustration, woke me from sleep. I didn’t want to come back to this world. I struggled to return to the dream, but I was wide awake. It was near dawn. I unlocked the bedroom window and crawled out on the fire escape. The cool air felt good. I closed my eyes. I recalled the night Theresa and I broke up, how I stared into the night sky, straining for a glimpse of my own future. If I could send a message back in time to that young butch sitting on a milk crate, it would be this: My neighbor, Ruth, asked me recently if I had my life to live all over again would I make the same decisions? “Yes,” I answered unequivocally, “ves.” I’m so sorry it’s had to be this hard. But if I hadn’t walked this path, who would I be? At the moment I felt at the center of my own life, the dream still braided like sweetgrass in my memory. I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. | closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soat. I heard the beating of wings nearby. I opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the dawn. 330 = Leslie Feinberg AUTHOR NOTES ON THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Leslie had hoped she would be able to write an introduction to this 20th anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues. But before she was able to do so, she went into hospice care at home. The notes below are a combination of material Leslie had already written and notes I typed sitting by her bedside as she continued to work. Leshe said of the Author Notes: “This was the best I could do.” Leslie died at home on November 15, 2014. For more details on Leshe’s health, go to “Casualty of an undeclared war,” her research notes on the Lyme/+ epidemic at: www. transgenderwarrior.org

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  beyond our perceptual system. What are the other elements we cannot perceive, the other realities invisible to us? (The latest discoveries in most branches of science will have this eye-opening effect, and reading articles in any popular scientific journal will generally yield a few sublime thoughts.) We can also expose ourselves to places on the planet where all our normal compass points are scrambled—a vastly different culture or certain landscapes where the human element seems particularly puny, such as the open sea, a vast expanse of snow, a particularly enormous mountain. Physically confronted with what dwarfs us, we are forced to reverse our normal perception, in which we are the center and measure of everything. In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver, a foretaste of death itself, something too large for our minds to encompass. And for a moment it shakes us out of our smugness and releases us from the deathlike grip of habit and banality. — In the end, think of this philosophy in the following terms: Since the beginning of human consciousness, our awareness of death has terrified us. This terror has shaped our beliefs, our religions, our institutions, and so much of our behavior in ways we cannot see or understand. We humans have become the slaves to our fears and our evasions. When we turn this around, becoming more aware of our mortality, we experience a taste of true freedom. We no longer feel the need to restrict what we think and do, in order to make life predictable. We can be more daring without feeling afraid of the consequences. We can cut loose from all the illusions and addictions that we employ to numb our anxiety. We can commit fully to our work, to our relationships, to all our actions. And once we experience some of this freedom, we will want to explore further and expand our possibilities as far as time will allow us. Let us rid death of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in al its aspects. . . . It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. . . . He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from al subjection and constraint. —Michel de Montaigne Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank Anna Biller for her assistance on so many aspects of this book—including her deft editing, the endless insightful ideas she supplied me during our discussions, and all the love and support during the writing. This book would not be possible without her many contributions, and I am eternally grateful. I would like to thank my agent, Michael Carlisle of Inkwell Management, master of human nature, for all his invaluable advice

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ After the white authorities executed Turner, his lawyer, a white man named Thomas Gray, published a pamphlet called The Confessions of Nat Turner. It’s unclear if these were actually the words of Turner or if Gray modified them. But even if Gray shaped the text, it gives a sense of how Turner claimed divine inspiration to rally his followers. Take this passage: While laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn … And now the Holy Ghost had revealed itself to me, and made plain the miracles it had shown me; for as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners, [it] was now returning to earth in the form of dew. õ Turner said that he told a white man about these miracles, and nasty, bloody sores immediately appeared all over the man’s body. Consider the power that story would have on other slaves listening to Turner: It was likely an appealing message of divine justice. SLAVE WORSHIP õ Until the early 19th century, evangelical groups allowed blacks to preach to people of their own race. The Baptists licensed and ordained black men, and Methodists allowed black lay preachers until state legislatures started outlawing it in the 1810s. õ As the years passed, the slave codes in the South restricting slave behavior became more and more oppressive. The codes made it illegal for blacks to gather in meetings for worship or education. õ By the 1820s, most black Christians in the South had to be under the authority of white congregations and denominations. In theory, black Christians in the South always had a white pastor and were under the discipline of a white church. Lecture 19—Slave Religion in the Americas 187

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name—Lan—in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. From that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son. All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it. — Paul is behind me by the gate, clipping a bushel of mint leaves to garnish the pesto. His scissors snap at the stems. A squirrel hurries down from a nearby sycamore, stops at the base, sniffs the air, then doubles back, vanishing up the branches. You’re just ahead as I approach; my shadow touches your heels. “Little Dog,” you say, without turning, the sun long gone from the garden, “come here and look at this.” You point to the ground at your feet, your voice a whisper-shout. “Isn’t this crazy?” I remember the room. How it burned because Lan sung of fire, surrounded by her daughters. Smoke rising and collecting in the corners. The table in the middle a bright blaze. The women with their eyes closed and the words relentless. The walls a moving screen of images flashing as each verse descended to the next: a sunlit intersection in a city no longer there. A city with no name. A white man standing beside a tank with his black-haired daughter in his arms. A family sleeping in a bomb crater. A family hiding underneath a table. Do you understand? All I was given was a table. A table in lieu of a house. A table in lieu of history. “There was a house in Saigon,” you told me. “One night, your father, drunk, came home and beat me for the first time at the kitchen table. You were not born yet.” — But I remember the table anyway. It exists and does not exist. An inheritance assembled with bare mouths. And nouns. And ash. I remember the table as a shard embedded in the brain. How some will call it shrapnel. And some will call it art. I am at your side now as you point at the ground where, just beyond your toes, a colony of ants pours across the dirt patch, a flood of black animation so thick it resembles the shadow of a person that won’t materialize. I can’t make out the individuals—their bodies linked to one another in an incessant surge of touch, each six-legged letter dark blue in the dusk—fractals of a timeworn alphabet. No, these are not monarchs. They are the ones who, come winter, will stay, will turn their flesh into seeds and burrow deeper—only to break through the warm spring loam, ravenous.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  As children, our minds were much more fluid and open. We would make the most surprising and creative associations between ideas. But as we get older, we tend to tighten this down. We live in a sophisticated, high-tech world dominated by statistics and ideas gleaned from big data. Free associations between ideas, images from dreams, hunches, and intuitions seem irrational and subjective. But this leads to the most sterile forms of thinking. The unconscious, the Shadow side of the mind, has powers we must learn to tap into. And in fact some of the most creative people in our midst actively engage this side of thinking. Albert Einstein based one of his theories of relativity on an image from a dream. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard made his most important discoveries while boarding a bus or taking a shower —hunches that came out of nowhere, or what he claimed to be his unconscious. Louis Pasteur made his great discovery about immunization based on a rather free association of ideas after an accident in his laboratory. Steve Jobs claimed that his most effective ideas came from intuitions, moments when his mind roamed most freely. Understand: The conscious thinking we depend on is quite limited. We can hold on to only so much information in short- and long-term memory. But the unconscious contains an almost limitless amount of material from memories, experiences, and information absorbed in study. After prolonged research or work on a problem, when we relax our minds in dreams or while we are performing unrelated banal activities, the unconscious begins to go to work and associate all sorts of random ideas, some of the more interesting ones bubbling to the surface. We all have dreams, intuitions, and free associations of ideas, but we often refuse to pay attention to them or take them seriously. Instead you want to develop the habit of using this form of thought more often by having unstructured time in which you can play with ideas, widen the options you consider, and pay serious attention to what comes to you in less conscious states of mind. In a similar vein, you want to explore from within your own darkest impulses, even those that might seem criminal, and find a way to express them in your work or externalize them in some fashion, in a journal for instance. We all have aggressive and antisocial desires, even toward those we love. We also have traumas from our earliest years that are associated with emotions we prefer to forget. The greatest art in all media somehow expresses these depths, which causes a powerful reaction in us all because they are so repressed. Such is the power of the films of Ingmar Bergman or the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and you can have the same power by externalizing your dark side. Show the Shadow.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Depending on patterns from early childhood, in the group setting we become more passive or more aggressive than usual, revealing the less developed sides of our character. When it comes to leaders, we generally don’t see them as ordinary people. We tend to feel somewhat awed and intimidated in their presence, as if they possessed some mythical extra powers. When we contemplate our group’s main rival or enemy, we can’t help but get a little heated and angry and exaggerate any negative qualities. If others in the group are feeling anxious or outraged by something, we often get swept up in the group mood. All of these are subtle indications that we are under the influence of the group. If we are experiencing the above transformations, we can be sure the same is going on with our colleagues. Now imagine some outside threat to our group’s well-being or stability, a crisis of sorts. All of the above reactions would be intensified by the stress, and our apparently civilized, sophisticated group could become quite volatile. We would feel greater pressure to prove our loyalty and go along with anything the group advocated. Our thinking about the rival/enemy would become even more simplistic and heated. We would be subject to more powerful waves of viral emotions, including panic or hatred or grandiosity. Our group could split up into factions with tribal dynamics. Charismatic leaders could easily emerge to exploit this volatility. If pushed far enough, the potential for aggression lies under the surface of almost any group. But even if we hold back from overt violence, the primitive dynamic that takes over can have grave consequences, as the group overreacts and makes decisions based on exaggerated fears or uncontrollable excitement. To resist this downward pull that groups inevitably exert on us, we must conduct a very different experiment in human nature from Mao’s, with a simple goal in mind—to develop the ability to detach ourselves from the group and create some mental space for true independent thinking. We begin this experiment by accepting the reality of the powerful effect that the group has on us. We are brutally honest with ourselves, aware of how our need to fit in can shape and warp our thinking. Does that anxiety or sense of outrage that we feel come completely from within, or is it inspired by the group? We must observe our tendency to demonize the enemy and control it. We must train ourselves to not blindly venerate our leaders; we respect them for their accomplishments without feeling the need to deify them. We must be especially careful around those who have charismatic appeal, and try to demystify and pull them down to earth. With such awareness, we can begin to resist and detach.