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 70 of 217 · 20 per page

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  The noun semnotēs also occurs three times in the Pastoral Epistles. Prayer is to be made for kings and those in authority that we may live a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and in all honesty (I Tim. 2.2). Semnotēs, gravity, is the quality which should be the outstanding quality of a good father (I Tim. 3.4), and of a good teacher (Titus 2.7). Clearly this quality of gravity and dignity was meant to be the characteristic of the Christian life. These words have a most notable background and atmosphere in secular Greek. It may truly be said that there are no more majestic words in the whole Greek language. Let us study their usage in ordinary Greek that we may see just what they demand of the Christian, and that we may understand the quality in which the Christian life is to be clothed. (i) The word semnos is particularly connected with the gods. It means revered, august, holy. Apollo is called by Aeschylus the august commander (The Seven against Thebes 800). Poseidon is called awful Poseidon by Sophocles (Oedipus Coloneus 55). The sacrifices of the gods are holy sacrifices (Pindar, Olymp. 7.42); the temple of Apollo is a holy house (Pindar, Nem. 1.72). In every case the word used is semnos, for semnos is a word with the majesty of divinity in it. (ii) But there were certain gods of whom this word was specially used. It was specially used of the Erinyes, the Furies whose duty and task it was to avenge sin. So much so was this the case that these Furies were actually called the semnai (the feminine plural of the adjective). There were three of these grim goddesses, Allecto, ‘she who never rests’, Tisiphone, ‘the avenger of murder’, and Megaera, ‘the jealous one’, and once a man had sinned they were on his heels, and neither in this world or the next did they let him go. ‘They are the avengers of every transgression of natural order, and especially of offences which touch the foundation of human society. They punish, without mercy, all violations of filial duty, or the claims of kinship, or the rites of hospitality; murder, perjury and like offences.... The punishment begins on earth and is continued after death.’ The Erinyes, the Furies, the semnai were nothing less than the custodians of divine justice. There is much about them in Greek tragedy. Sophocles calls them ‘majestic swift-footed hounds of vengeance’ (Ajax 837). Euripides says of them: ‘They are the dread ones; wise art thou to name them not.’ The most terrible description of the semnai is in Aeschylus’ play, The Eumenides.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  democratic empire, the Periclean golden age were now and forever over. The man who had curbed their most dangerous emotions— aggression, greed, hubris, selfishness—had been gone from the scene for too long, his wisdom long forgotten. • • • Interpretation: As Pericles surveyed the political scene early in his career, he noticed the following phenomenon: Every Athenian political figure believed he was rational, had realistic goals, and plans on how to get there. They all worked hard for their political factions and tried to increase their power. They led Athenian armies into battle and often came out ahead. They strove to expand the empire and bring in more money. And when their political maneuvering suddenly backfired, or the wars turned out badly, they had excellent reasons for why this had happened. They could always blame the opposition or, if need be, the gods. And yet, if all these men were so rational, why did their policies add up to so much chaos and self-destructiveness? Why was Athens such a mess and the democracy itself so fragile? Why was there so much corruption and turbulence? The answer was simple: his fellow Athenians were not rational at all, merely selfish and shrewd. What guided their decisions was their base emotions—hunger for power, attention, and money. And for those purposes they could be very tactical and clever, but none of their maneuvers led to anything that lasted or served the overall interests of the democracy. What consumed Pericles as a thinker and a public figure was how to get out of this trap, how to be truly rational in an arena dominated by emotions. The solution he came up with is unique in history and devastatingly powerful in its results. It should serve as our ideal. In his conception, the human mind has to worship something, has to have its attention directed to something it values above all else. For most people, it is their ego; for some it is their family, their clan, their god, or their nation. For Pericles it would be nous , the ancient Greek word for “mind” or “intelligence.” Nous is a force that permeates the universe, creating meaning and order. The human mind is naturally attracted to this order; this is the source of our intelligence. For Pericles, the nous that he worshipped was embodied in the figure of the goddess Athena. Athena was literally born from the head of Zeus, her name itself reflecting this—a combination of “god” ( theos ) and “mind” ( nous ). But Athena came to represent a very particular form of nous — eminently practical, feminine, and earthy. She is the voice that comes to heroes in times of need, instilling in them a calm spirit, orienting their minds toward the perfect idea for victory and success, then giving them the energy to achieve this. To be visited by Athena was the highest blessing of them all, and it was her spirit that guided

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Cottage in WashingtonMany years later, I wrote part of this book in a cottage on an island off the coast of Washington State. If I could choose one word to describe the island, that word would be: wet. Or maybe: elemental. Slick, meaty slugs littered the grass, the path, my porch. When I hiked to the ocean, I watched falcons dive into the water and pull up writhing fish. When I crossed a saltwater lagoon, clouds of gnats followed me as if I were the queen of the damned. At night I slept with the windows open, and I heard so many creatures: owls, frogs, and once, something that sounded like a slide whistle. Once I picked up a snail to observe it and dropped it by accident. When I picked it up again the shell was cracked, and a white foam was frothing from the site of the injury. I was horrified at the monstrosity of my mistake—the pure, unbridled thoughtlessness of it. I’d come all the way to this island to write a book about suffering, and you did something terrible to a resident of the island who’d done no harm. One day I was chatting with a fellow writer while viewing Mount Rainier when we both heard a scream of terror. We stopped talking and stared at each other; when it happened again, we ran off into the forest, yelling the names of the others. Except for our panting, there was only silence. “Maybe it was an animal?” I said, though I doubted it. The night before everyone had to leave, we were all gathered around a campfire when we heard it again—three howls that crescendoed into the unmistakable sound of a woman screaming. We started, and then agreed that it must have been an animal, a bobcat or something. But that didn’t stifle the chill that accompanied the sound, the grievous and undeniable sound of fear. Dream House as 9 Thornton SquareBefore it was a verb, gaslight was a noun. A lamp. Then there was a play called Angel Street in 1938, and then a film, Gaslight, in 1940, and then a second film in 1944, directed by George Cukor and featuring an iconic, disheveled, unraveling performance from Ingrid Bergman.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  These gestures often appeared at moments of significant therapeutic movement and frequently indicated pleasingly unforeseen resources and shifts toward flow and wholeness. Moreover, I became fascinated by the similarity of these involuntary gestures to those of the sacred dances that I had seen at various cultural performances presented at University of California–Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. These hand/finger/arm movements, called mudras, are all-embracing and inclusive, across the spectrum of the human experience and throughout the world. Particularly in Asia, the way one’s hands and fingers are poised communicates very deep and universal meanings, ones that are related more than just personally to dancer or audience member. c When the therapist observes such spontaneous mudras, then pauses, taking the time to bring them to the client’s attention, the client can then use that information to explore how his “outside” posture feels on the “inside.” It is not surprising, at this juncture, for the client to contact a treasure chest of powerful resources of connection, empowerment, flow, goodness and wholeness. I believe that these archetypal movements arise at unique moments when the instinctual is seamlessly wedded with one’s conscious awareness—when the primitive brain stem and the highest neocortical functions integrate. In summary, Behavior is the only category that the therapist is directly aware of. As clients become aware—at first only marginally—of their own behaviors, they may incorporate these perceptions into an observer role where they are reminding themselves to note sensations associated with those behaviors. When linked with thoughts, this is a powerful tool to dissolve compulsions and addictions. The Affect Channel The two subtypes in the fourth channel are the categorical emotions and the felt sense, or contours of sensation-based feeling. Emotions Emotions include the categorical ones described by Darwin and refined in extensive laboratory studies by Paul Ekman. These distinct emotions include fear, anger, sadness, joy and disgust. Again, these are feelings that the client is experiencing internally and that the therapist can deduce from the client’s face and posture even when the client is unaware of them. Contours of Feeling Another level of affect—the registration of contours of feeling—is, perhaps, even more important to the quality and conduct of our lives than are the categorical emotions. Eugene Gendlin extensively studied and described these softer affects and coined the term felt sense. 95 When you see dew on a blade of grass in the morning light or visit a museum and delight in a beautiful painting, you’re usually not experiencing a categorical emotion. Or when meeting a good friend you haven’t seen for months, you’re probably not feeling fear, sorrow, disgust or even joy. Contours are the sensation-based feelings of attraction and avoidance, of “goodness” and “badness.” You experience these nuances countless times throughout the day. While it’s easy to imagine a day without perceiving any of the categorical emotions, try for a moment to conjure up a day without any felt sense affects.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  because you have come so far with your improved skills and actual achievements. If you have taken the time to properly work through the other principles, you will naturally return back down to earth after a few days or hours of grandiose exuberance. — Finally, at the source of our infantile grandiosity was a feeling of intense connection to the mother. This was so complete and satisfying that we spend much of our time trying to recapture that feeling in some way. It is the source of our desire to transcend our banal existence, to want something so large we cannot express what it is. We have glimmers of that original connection in intimate relationships and in moments of unconditional love, but these are rare and fleeting. Entering a state of flow with our work or cultivating deeper levels of empathy with people (see chapter 2) will give us more such moments and satisfy the urge. We feel oneness with the work or with other people. We can take this even further by experiencing a deeper connection to life itself, what Sigmund Freud called “the oceanic feeling.” Consider this in the following way: The formation of life itself on the planet Earth so many billions of years ago required a concatenation of events that were highly improbable. The beginning of life was a tenuous experiment that could have expired at any moment early on. The evolution since then of so many forms of life is astounding, and at the end point of that evolution is the only animal we know to be conscious of this entire process, the human. Your being alive is an equally unlikely and uncanny event. It required a very particular chain of events leading to the meeting of your parents and your birth, all of which could have gone very differently. At this moment, as you read this, you are conscious of life along with billions of others, and only for a brief time, until you die. Fully taking in this reality is what we shall call the Sublime. (For more on this, see chapter 18.) It cannot be put into words. It is too awesome. Feeling a part of that tenuous experiment of life is a kind of reverse grandiosity—you are not disturbed by your relative smallness but rather ecstatic at the sense of being a drop in this ocean. Then, overwhelmed by the afflictions I suffered in connection with my sons, I sent again and inquired of the god what I should do to pass the rest of my life most happily; and he answered me: “Knowing thyself, O Croesus—thus shal you live and be happy.” . . . [But] spoiled by the wealth I had and by those who were begging me to become their leader, by the gifts they gave me and by the people who flattered me, saying that if I would consent to take command they would al obey me and I should be the

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

  I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can’t tell the difference between a sunset and a sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me—and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn’t so much surprised by its effect—how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves—but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted. — I hear her call again, convinced now that it’s a heifer. Ranchers often sell off the calves at night, ferrying them away on truck beds while the mothers slept in their stalls so they wouldn’t wake up screaming for their babies. Some would wail so hard their throats would swell shut and a balloon had to be placed inside and inflated to expand the neck muscles. I get closer. The tobacco stands high. When she wails again, the sound parts the stalks and the leaves shiver. I approach the small clearing where she is. The light froths blue over the plant tips. I hear her huge lungs working for air, soft but clear as wind. I part the thick-packed plants and step forward. “Ma? Tell me the story again.” “I’m too tired, baby. Tomorrow. Back to sleep.” “I wasn’t sleeping.” It’s past ten and you’re just back from the salon. You have a towel wrapped around your hair, your skin still warm from the shower. “Come on, real quick. The one about the monkey.” You sigh, slipping under the blanket. “Alright. But get me a cigarette.” I take one from the carton on the nightstand, place it between your lips and light. You puff once, twice. I take it out, watch you. “Okay, let’s see. Once upon a time there was a Monkey King who—” “No, Ma. The real one. Come on. Tell the real-life story.” I put the cigarette back in your mouth, let you puff. “Okay.” Your eyes search the room. “Once upon a time—scoot closer, you wanna hear it or not? Once upon a time, in the old country, there were men who would eat the brains of monkeys.” “You were born in the Year of the Monkey. So you’re a monkey.” “Yeah, I guess so,” you whisper, staring far away. “I’m a monkey.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  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 felt a deep affinity for animals and saw them as possessing souls, a belief that was virtually unheard of at the time. This impelled him to become a vegetarian and to go around freeing caged birds in the marketplace. He saw all nature as one, including humans, and he imagined a future in which that belief would be shared. The great feminist, philosopher, and novelist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) believed that we humans can actually create the future by how we imagine it in the present. For her, in her short life, much of this came in her imagining a future in which the rights of women and, most important, their reasoning powers were given equal weight to men. Her thinking in these terms in fact did have a profound influence on the future. Perhaps one of the most uncanny examples of this is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a scientist, novelist, and philosopher. He aspired to a kind of universal knowledge, similar to Leonardo’s, in which he tried to master all forms of human intelligence, steep himself in all periods of history, and through this be able to not only see the future but commune with its inhabitants.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as EpilogueI wrote a large part of this book in rural eastern Oregon.53 I stayed in a cabin at the edge of a playa, a lake that had mostly dried up during the summer. That part of the world is high desert country; the weather was cold at night and hot during the day. The air was so bone-dry I drank water every hour but still felt unquenchably thirsty. One morning a drop of blood plopped wetly onto my desk, and I went to the bathroom and used toilet paper to stanch the nosebleed. When I walked back I realized I’d left a pat-pat-pat trail of blood across the floor. All day I sat and watched dust devils kick up at the far edge of the once-lake.54 I was told there was still a bit of water out there, but it would take four miles of walking to reach it. It was like an alien landscape; it made me think of the salt flats of Utah or old episodes of Star Trek. I hiked to some caves where eagles roosted and the earth below their nests was littered with a mulch of fur and bone. An owl left half a rabbit on my doorstep; in the morning, something else had dragged it away and left a streak of gore. After dinner I went out on the playa with the other residents. First we waded through a soft, undulating field of dry grasses that reached our shoulders. Then there was a rim of soil fine as confectioner’s sugar; it felt as if we were tromping through moondust. Then the soil solidified and broke into thousands, millions of pieces, beautiful, geometric patterns. As we continued to walk, the earth began to crunch in a satisfying way beneath our feet. When we had hiked out far enough, the soil got looser and softer, like the cushy rubber mulch underneath a jungle gym. After a while, the smell changed: it was a little like sulfur and a little like bleach, the scent of a linden tree, the unmistakable scent of—as I said to the other residents, regretting it even as the word was slipping from my mouth—semen. No one else agreed with me, or if they did, they didn’t admit it. I reached down and picked up a chunk of dried earth and the soil underneath was damp: the memory of the lake. A forest fire broke out on a minor mountain near our horizon. I drove past it one afternoon, watched as impossibly orange flames licked their way up the incline, leaving behind glossy, burnt sage and sticks of trees and still-flaming fence posts and, inexplicably, patches of unburnt space, where chance let something live. A helicopter dipped around like a dragonfly and dropped shimmering sheets of water down to the earth.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The poet laureate T. S. Elliot seems to have grasped the paradox of such evolving consciousness in “Little Gidding,” the fourth quartet of his epic poem Four Quartets: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Embodiment and Creativity It is well known that Albert Einstein thought in images. His theories reflect this processing, as do his own metaphors. For example, pictures of elevators and trains moving past each other are indelibly etched in our understanding of the theory of relativity. It is much less known that he also thought with his body. He reveals, in his biography, how some of his greatest discoveries appeared to come first from his body in the form of tingling, vibrating and other enlivening physical sensations. In a process that appears to have been mysterious, even to him, his bodily sensations informed the images and insights that led him to his great discoveries. Decades later, when Einstein’s brain was dissected and studied for medical research, the only distinguishing feature was the size and structure of his parietal lobes, the region of the brain where information from the body is integrated for orientation in space and time. ‡ There is another revealing story about this great man. When asked by a reporter what he thought would be the next great breakthrough in science, Einstein pondered for a moment and then replied, “To prove that the universe is friendly.” He did not mean, I believe, that there would not ever be pain and suffering in life, but that the universe was, well ... playful, wonderful and fascinating. Such was his delight in the inner universe of his body. The Tibetan lama Dr. Tsamp Ngawang taught that “the body is a mandala. If you look inside it is an endless source of revelation.” I do not mean to give the impression that Einstein was the exemplar of a fully embodied man. Certainly, this was not the case. However, in this particular way, I believe he was. And it was this attunement that (arguably) allowed him to think outside of the box—far beyond its perimeters. Clearly, this is a mark of genius. Partaking in great intellectual discovery and engaging with the sensations of the body are not mutually exclusive experiences. In fact, for the human animal, this may be what “wholeness” is all about. In the philosopher Nietzsche’s words, “I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something in the body.”

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  By doing this he become, today, an even more feared incarnation of what Kinsey represented more than half a century ago in his reports to puritan America. A throwback to the Scopes trial, the visceral fight against Darwinism by the American “religious right,” is about the deeply rooted negation and fear of our animal nature. Such a disavowal reflects a fundamental disconnect between “higher man” (reason and morality) and “lower (sexual) animals.” This denial of the instinctual life is also shared by strange bedfellows, many modern behavioral scientists. The rejection of our animal nature is understandable as we have become (overly) socialized. This denial and its dehumanizing consequence, however, are summarized by the physician Max Plowman in his Introduction to the Study of Blake: In all cultivation, native instinct is the most difficult force to remember and take into account. Just because our civilization is old, our distance from the primal centers is as the distance of twigs upon an oak from the farthest contributory roots. We have become so cultivated that we do not know we have drains until they smell. We have become so confident in the mechanical use of intelligence that we take for granted the functioning of our instincts, even to the point of thinking it immaterial whether they can find true and natural expression or not. In time the instincts rebel against our want of care for them ... then there is consternation. It seems that as we distance ourselves farther and farther from our instinctual roots, we have grown to be a species hell-bent on becoming better and better at making life worse and worse. We have been quite “successful” in distancing ourselves from our vital core. Instinct’s role in guiding and informing that which makes us both animal and, in the finest way, most human is illustrated by the following vignette. A nature photographer stood by in abject horror as he watched a wild elephant kicking, again and again, the lifeless body of its stillborn calf. As he continued observing and photographing this gruesome scene for three hours, something truly unexpected happened. The infant stirred. Remarkably, the mother had resuscitated the calf, bringing him back to life by stimulating his heart. It was instinct and instinct alone that accomplished this miraculous task; the mind would have been quite useless. Swan Lake Even in “lower” species, we are taken by the apparent intelligence of instincts in guiding complex behaviors we associate with mammals. Sitting by the edge of the emerald Vierwaldstättersee (the clear, glacial Lake Lucerne in Switzerland), the ducks and swans “proudly” parade their young chicks past the table where I am seated eating breakfast.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The great American bard Ralph Waldo Emerson sums this all up: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” In a more psychological vein, Eugene Gendlin remarks that “the door into the bodily living of our situations is right in the center of our very ordinary body.” However, this “ordinary” is also the extraordinary. As the Kum Nye tradition of Tibetan Buddhism teaches, “the space outside the body though vast is finite, while the space inside of the body is infinite.” This application ignites a wonder and delight that delivers enlightenment in Tantric Buddhism. 133 This is not just an “Eastern” notion. Dr. Daniel Brown, Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, adds that “focusing helps to cultivate a kind of internal bodily awareness that is so much the foundation of spiritual practice.” R. D. Laing adds that “without the inner world the outer loses its meaning, and without the outer the inner loses its substance.” We have all had the experience, at some time in our lives, of just “knowing something in our guts.” Without it making “logical” sense, and often to the contrary of “logic,” we just “knew it was right.” And when we did not follow this gut instinct, there were often harsh consequences. We label this kind of precognition as “intuition.” I believe intuition emerges from the seamless joining of instinctual bodily reactions with thoughts, inner pictures and perceptions. How this holistic “thinking” works remains somewhat of a mystery (though speculation abounds), as is evidenced by the writings of the homeopathic physician, Dr. Rajan Sankaran: “Sensation is the connecting point between the mind and the body, the point at which physical and mental phenomena are spoken in the same language, where the boundaries between these two realms disappear and one can actually perceive what is true for the whole being.” Such is the essence of deep intuition. Intuition is an example of bottom-up processing. This is in contrast to the top-down processing reflected in Descartes’ “I think; therefore I am.” Bottom-up processing is more potent than top-down processing in altering our basic perceptions of the world. This potency derives from the fact that we are first and foremost motor creatures. Secondarily, we employ and engage our observing/perceiving/thinking minds. We think because we are, rather than existing because we think. When asked in a pub whether he wanted another beer, Descartes responded, “I think not.” But did he disappear? Descartes’ theorem might be updated to reflect bottom-up processing as follows: “I sense, I act, I feel, I perceive, I reflect, I think and I reason; therefore I know I am.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  This will animate your gestures and give you greater charisma. If you are a leader and your group is facing difficulties or a crisis, let yourself feel unusually grandiose and confident in the success of your mission, to lift up and inspire the troops. That was the kind of grandiosity that made Winston Churchill such an effective leader during World War II. In any event, you can allow yourself to feel ever so godlike because you have come so far with your improved skills and actual achievements. If you have taken the time to properly work through the other principles, you will naturally return back down to earth after a few days or hours of grandiose exuberance. — Finally, at the source of our infantile grandiosity was a feeling of intense connection to the mother. This was so complete and satisfying that we spend much of our time trying to recapture that feeling in some way. It is the source of our desire to transcend our banal existence, to want something so large we cannot express what it is. We have glimmers of that original connection in intimate relationships and in moments of unconditional love, but these are rare and fleeting. Entering a state of flow with our work or cultivating deeper levels of empathy with people (see chapter 2) will give us more such moments and satisfy the urge. We feel oneness with the work or with other people. We can take this even further by experiencing a deeper connection to life itself, what Sigmund Freud called “the oceanic feeling.” Consider this in the following way: The formation of life itself on the planet Earth so many billions of years ago required a concatenation of events that were highly improbable. The beginning of life was a tenuous experiment that could have expired at any moment early on. The evolution since then of so many forms of life is astounding, and at the end point of that evolution is the only animal we know to be conscious of this entire process, the human. Your being alive is an equally unlikely and uncanny event. It required a very particular chain of events leading to the meeting of your parents and your birth, all of which could have gone very differently. At this moment, as you read this, you are conscious of life along with billions of others, and only for a brief time, until you die. Fully taking in this reality is what we shall call the Sublime. (For more on this, see chapter 18.) It cannot be put into words. It is too awesome.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  As you’ll recall, participants making the second ($10 million) allocation as a fresh decision gave $3.7 million to the product that received the earlier funds, compared with just over $5 million by participants who made that earlier, losing choice. We already know that asking the participants to do a fresh analysis of the pros and cons looking forward didn’t change behavior. But another strategy that did work was having one group set benchmarks in the form of minimum targets for sales and profits in advance of the first decision. Those participants, after getting the data about the poor performance, allocated just $3.9 million to the same product they chose earlier. Their allocation now looked the same as those of participants who were actually fresh to the decision. And it was a big reduction compared with others who made both allocations but hadn’t set benchmarks. This is in line with lots of subsequent work that’s been done on all sorts of precommitment contracts. Whether it comes to following through with diet plans or work plans or study plans, these types of precommitment contracts get people to act more rationally. Essentially, kill criteria create a precommitment contract to quit. Funnel VisionYou can likely imagine lots of applications of kill criteria in your personal life. When you start dating someone, think ahead. What could be happening that would make you think that it was time to end the relationship? Or, in the case of a single date, what would make you want to end the date? You could do that with going to a particular college, picking a major, starting a career, or taking a job. An obvious and high-value application of kill criteria has to do with funnel management for a business’s sales function. A big problem for sellers is managing all the opportunities at the top of the funnel: Which do you pursue? And, once you’ve started pursuing a lead, when do you give up on it? It’s in a company’s interest to make sure its sellers are spending their time pursuing the highest-value opportunities, based on a combination of the probability of closing and the potential size of the contract. Of course, a lot of these challenges aren’t unique to sales. Once you start to pursue a sales lead, you’re putting time and effort into it. That time and effort makes it hard for you to abandon the lead, making it harder and harder for you, as you dump more resources into it, to give up and cut your losses. In addition to costing yourself the investment of resources on losing or lower value leads, there are also opportunity costs. You have limited resources. Every minute you spend on something with a low expected value is a minute you don’t have for other opportunities of greater value. These problems are even bigger when you have sellers who, by temperament, don’t like to let go of a possible sale until the bitter end. Sellers are gritty by nature.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I do not mean to give the impression that Einstein was the exemplar of a fully embodied man. Certainly, this was not the case. However, in this particular way, I believe he was. And it was this attunement that (arguably) allowed him to think outside of the box—far beyond its perimeters. Clearly, this is a mark of genius. Partaking in great intellectual discovery and engaging with the sensations of the body are not mutually exclusive experiences. In fact, for the human animal, this may be what “wholeness” is all about. In the philosopher Nietzsche’s words, “I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something in the body.” The great American bard Ralph Waldo Emerson sums this all up: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” In a more psychological vein, Eugene Gendlin remarks that “the door into the bodily living of our situations is right in the center of our very ordinary body.” However, this “ordinary” is also the extraordinary. As the Kum Nye tradition of Tibetan Buddhism teaches, “the space outside the body though vast is finite, while the space inside of the body is infinite.” This application ignites a wonder and delight that delivers enlightenment in Tantric Buddhism.133 This is not just an “Eastern” notion. Dr. Daniel Brown, Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, adds that “focusing helps to cultivate a kind of internal bodily awareness that is so much the foundation of spiritual practice.” R. D. Laing adds that “without the inner world the outer loses its meaning, and without the outer the inner loses its substance.” We have all had the experience, at some time in our lives, of just “knowing something in our guts.” Without it making “logical” sense, and often to the contrary of “logic,” we just “knew it was right.” And when we did not follow this gut instinct, there were often harsh consequences. We label this kind of precognition as “intuition.” I believe intuition emerges from the seamless joining of instinctual bodily reactions with thoughts, inner pictures and perceptions. How this holistic “thinking” works remains somewhat of a mystery (though speculation abounds), as is evidenced by the writings of the homeopathic physician, Dr. Rajan Sankaran: “Sensation is the connecting point between the mind and the body, the point at which physical and mental phenomena are spoken in the same language, where the boundaries between these two realms disappear and one can actually perceive what is true for the whole being.” Such is the essence of deep intuition.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control? 108 Ironically, despite the creationists’ rejection of their animal roots, religious awe may be yet another confirmation of the Darwinian continuity of the species and of our profound instinctual heritage. To many reasonable scientists, the attribution of “religious awe” to nonhuman primates would seem a stretch at best. At the very worst, it could be seen as an extreme case of anthropomorphism gone amok. However, there is a solid, empirically based tradition of studying the behaviors and emotions in chimpanzees as evolutionary antecedents to human morality. Beginning with Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s seminal work, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns, 109 and recently culminating in Frans de Waal’s beautifully written Our Inner Ape, 110 a compelling case is made for certain social behaviors of monkeys and apes as precursors for various human moral behaviors, including highly refined deportment such as peacemaking. These forerunners include reciprocity of grooming, maintenance of social ranking and violence attenuation. Easy to appreciate are clear examples such as an adult chimp helping a juvenile climb a tree or zoo-confined chimps (who are known to be unable to swim) jumping into the moat in a futile attempt to rescue a drowning chimp. Such altruistic behaviors conjure images of fireman entering buildings engulfed in flames to rescue trapped families or soldiers running directly into the line of fire to rescue a fallen comrade. De Waal’s views are based on many decades of observing aggression in primate societies. He noticed that after fights between two chimps, other chimpanzees would appear to console the loser—a behavior requiring both the capacity for empathy and a significant level of self-awareness. De Waal also describes female chimpanzees poignantly removing stones from the hands of males readying to fight so as to head off the brawl or at least to prevent them from inflicting mortal harm. Such “reconciliation” efforts may preserve group solidarity, thus diminishing vulnerability from outside attackers. Human morality organizes around questions of right, wrong and justice. According to de Waal and others, 111 it originates with concern for others and in understanding and respecting social rules. This is seen in a multitude of mammalian groups. The orchestration of such premoral behaviors requires a highly sophisticated level of emotional and social functioning. Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University, has extended these notions and regards the brain as having genetically shaped mechanisms whose function is the acquisition of moral rules based in complex feeling states. 112 In the face of such robust observations, the social sciences often appear to manifest their distaste for the human-as-animal supposition, most notably by sanitizing their terminology around the concepts of instinctual behavior. In fact, the word instinct is rarely found in modern psychological literature.

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

  I answer that, As stated above [4534](A[2]), since Christ’s true body is in this sacrament, and since it does not begin to be there by local motion, nor is it contained therein as in a place, as is evident from what was stated above (A[1], ad 2), it must be said then that it begins to be there by conversion of the substance of bread into itself. Yet this change is not like natural changes, but is entirely supernatural, and effected by God’s power alone. Hence Ambrose says [(De Sacram. iv): “See how Christ’s word changes nature’s laws, as He wills: a man is not wont to be born save of man and woman: see therefore that against the established law and order a man is born of a Virgin”: and] [*The passage in the brackets is not in the Leonine edition] (De Myster. iv): “It is clear that a Virgin begot beyond the order of nature: and what we make is the body from the Virgin. Why, then, do you look for nature’s order in Christ’s body, since the Lord Jesus was Himself brought forth of a Virgin beyond nature?” Chrysostom likewise (Hom. xlvii), commenting on Jn. 6:64: “The words which I have spoken to you,” namely, of this sacrament, “are spirit and life,” says: i.e. “spiritual, having nothing carnal, nor natural consequence; but they are rent from all such necessity which exists upon earth, and from the laws here established.” For it is evident that every agent acts according as it is in act. But every created agent is limited in its act, as being of a determinate genus and species: and consequently the action of every created agent bears upon some determinate act. Now the determination of every thing in actual existence comes from its form. Consequently, no natural or created agent can act except by changing the form in something; and on this account every change made according to nature’s laws is a formal change. But God is infinite act, as stated in the [4535]FP, Q[7], A[1]; Q[26], A[2]; hence His action extends to the whole nature of being. Therefore He can work not only formal conversion, so that diverse forms succeed each other in the same subject; but also the change of all being, so that, to wit, the whole substance of one thing be changed into the whole substance of another. And this is done by Divine power in this sacrament; for the whole substance of the bread is changed into the whole substance of Christ’s body, and the whole substance of the wine into the whole substance of Christ’s blood. Hence this is not a formal, but a substantial conversion; nor is it a kind of natural movement: but, with a name of its own, it can be called “transubstantiation.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  From a distance, they were all like figures from another era, so different from anybody he had ever seen before. He waited patiently outside for the end of the ritual, at which point the king reemerged, now sporting a crown. For a brief moment he got a closer look at Louis’s face as he passed by, and he was surprised to find that the king seemed quite ordinary, despite the robes and jewels. The king then got into the most elaborate carriage imaginable, named the Sacre . It was like something out of a fairy tale. It was built for the coronation and designed to represent the chariot of Apollo, glistening like the sun (the sun being the symbol of the French king), and it was enormous. On all sides it featured gold statuettes of Roman gods. On the door panel facing Danton, he could see an elaborate painting of Louis XVI as a Roman emperor atop a cloud, beckoning the French people below him. Strangest of all, the carriage itself sported a large bronze crown. The Sacre was meant to serve as the very symbol of the monarchy, dazzling and mythical. It was quite a sight, but for some reason it seemed oddly out of place—too large, too bright, and when the king got in, it seemed to swallow him up. Was it magnificent or was it grotesque? Danton could not decide. Danton returned to school later that same day, his head spinning with all of these strange images. Inspired by what he had witnessed, he wrote his best essay yet and won the prize. In the years after graduating from the school in Troyes, Danton would make his mother proud. In 1780 he moved to Paris to clerk in the law courts. Within a few years, he passed the bar exam and became a practicing lawyer. In court, with his booming voice and oratorical skills, he naturally commanded attention and quickly rose through the ranks. And as he mingled with his fellow lawyers and read the newspapers, he detected something strange going on in France: a growing discontent with the king, the profligate queen, and the arrogant upper classes, whom the great thinkers of the day were ridiculing in their plays and books. The main problem was the country’s finances—France seemed perpetually on the brink of running out of money. At the root of this was France’s vastly antiquated financial structure. The French people were subject to all kinds of onerous taxes that dated back to feudal times, but the clergy and the nobility were largely exempt from any such burdens. Taxes on the French lower and middle classes could never bring in enough revenue, especially considering the lavish expenditures of the French court, which had only gotten worse with Queen Marie Antoinette’s elaborate parties and love of finery.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We can take this further: Several million years ago, the human experiment began as we branched off from our primate ancestors. But because of our weak physical nature and small numbers, we faced the continual threat of extinction. If that more-than-likely event had happened—as it had occurred for so many species, including other varieties of humans—the world would have taken a much different turn. In fact, the meeting of our own parents and our birth hung on a series of chance encounters that were equally unlikely. This causes us to view our present existence as an individual, something we take for granted, as a most improbable occurrence, considering all of the fortuitous elements that had to fall into place. We can experience the Sublime by contemplating other forms of life. We have our own belief about what is real based on our nervous and perceptual systems, but the reality of bats, which perceive through echolocation, is of a different order. They sense things 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.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Wilkinson’s story demonstrates how ownership can interfere with our ability to walk away, especially when the thing we own, we created. An Oenophile among Economists When we own something, we value it more highly than an identical item that we do not own. Richard Thaler was the first to name this cognitive illusion, calling it the endowment effect. In fact, he introduced the endowment effect in that same 1980 paper where he coined the term “sunk cost.” He described the endowment effect as “the fact that people often demand more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.” Thaler offered the example of a distinguished economist friend who bought a case of good wine in the late fifties for $5 a bottle. A few years later, the wine had greatly appreciated in value. His wine merchant offered to buy the wine for $100 a bottle. Despite having never paid more than $35 for a bottle of wine, he declined to sell any bottles for $100. Yet, he also declined to buy any additional bottles at that price. This is very odd behavior. His refusal to sell communicated that anybody buying his bottles would be paying less than what the bottles were worth. Yet having determined it was too much of a bargain to sell any of the wine, he refused to take advantage of that bargain himself and buy an identical bottle at the same price. The bull market for bottles of Bordeaux continued. In 1991, eleven years later, Thaler, along with Daniel Kahneman and fellow economist Jack Knetsch, updated the situation of their friend and his wine. The wine was now selling at auction for $200 a bottle. Their friend would occasionally drink some of the Bordeaux, but he was still neither “willing to sell the wine at the auction price nor buy an additional bottle at that price.” The story gave them all a good laugh, but they found it puzzling from an economic standpoint. Because he had the opportunity to sell the bottles at a profit, the sunk cost effect didn’t explain this behavior. Instead, Thaler hypothesized that it had something to do with the wines being in his possession, the fact of ownership. That ownership caused him to value his bottles more highly than bottles not in his possession.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  ham Noah had grandiose plans to save the world. Noah, it should be remembered, was a disreputable man who heard a voice. The villagers, his neighbors, laughed. Noah, a bit of a drunk, was not taken seriously. The voice said, By what you make you will save the world . And so, reluctantly at first, Noah began his life’s work, an impossible project, something much larger than himself. But at night Noah was again filled with doubt, and he drank to quiet the voices. The people in his village spoke behind their hands as he passed, touched their caps, smiled. The village was miles from the ocean and Noah was spending his days building a boat— Made it out of hic-kory barky-barky . Noah had three sons—Shem, Ham and Japheth. Ham came upon his father one day, naked and ranting, building his impossible boat in a blackout. God had spoken, God kept speaking, God wouldn’t stop speaking. For witnessing his father naked and drunk, Ham and all his offspring became accursed forever, to the end of time. My father may not hear voices but he also has an impossible project, he’s also filled with a force larger than himself. In nearly every letter my father has sent me for the last twenty-five years he tells me his writing is going very, very well. His novel, such as it is, if it is at all, written in blackout and prison, is his ark, the thing that will save him, that will save the world. His single-mindedness impresses most, his fathomless belief in his own greatness, in his powers to transform a failed world, to make it whole again by a word, by a story. That if you stick with your vision long enough you will be redeemed. All this in the face of near-constant evidence to the contrary. The actual circumstances of his life—his alcoholism, the crimes he’s committed, his homelessness and decades of poverty—these are mere tests, and what is a faith not tested? Noah needed to gather nails, to sort the animals, to convince his sons. He planed his timber and laid out the ribs. His ark would be bigger than the temple. We all need to create the story that will make sense of our lives, to make sense of the daily tasks. Yet each night the doubts returned, howling through him. Without doubt there can be no faith. At daybreak Noah looked to the darkening sky and vowed to work faster. My father cannot die, he tells me, will not, until his work is completed. But is there a deadline inside him for when he must finish, a day, like Noah, when the rains begin? When the boat, finished or not, begins to rise from the cradle?