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.

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• 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.

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

  I was enamored of the verve, torque, and tone of the pastor’s voice, his sermon on Noah’s Ark inflected with hesitations, rhetorical questions amplified by long silences that intensified the story’s effect. I loved the way the pastor’s hands moved, flowed, as if his sentences had to be shaken off him in order to reach us. It was, to me, a new kind of embodiment, one akin to magic, one I’d glimpsed only partially in Lan’s own storytelling. But that day, it was the song that offered me a new angle of seeing the world, which is to say, seeing you. Once the piano and organ roared into the first thick chords of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” everyone in the congregation rose, shuffling, and let their arms fly out above them, some turning in circles. Hundreds of boots and heels hammered the wooden floors. In the blurred gyrations, the twirling coats and scarfs, I felt a pinch on my wrist. Your fingernails were white as they dug into my skin. Your face—eyes closed—lifted toward the ceiling, you were saying something to the fresco of angels above us. At first I couldn’t hear through the sound of clapping and shouting. It was all a kaleidoscope of color and movement as fat organ and trumpet notes boomed through the pews from the brass band. I wrested my arm from your grip. When I leaned in, I heard your words underneath the song—you were speaking to your father. Your real one. Cheeks wet with tears, you nearly shouted. “Where are you, Ba?” you demanded in Vietnamese, shifting from foot to foot. “Where the hell are you? Come get me! Get me out of here! Come back and get me.” It might have been the first time Vietnamese was ever spoken in that church. But no one glared at you with questions in their eyes. No one made a double take at the yellow-white woman speaking her own tongue. Throughout the pews other people were also shouting, in excitement, joy, anger, or exasperation. It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong. I stared at the toddler-sized plaster of Jesus hanging to the side of the pulpit. His skin seemed to throb from the stamping feet. He was regarding his petrified toes with an expression of fatigued bewilderment, as if he had just woken from a deep sleep only to find himself nailed red and forever to this world. I studied him for so long that when I turned to your white sneakers I half expected a pool of blood under your feet.

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

  RABANUS. But nothing hinders our supposing that the sun and moon with the other stars shall for a time lose their light, as we know did the sun at the time of the Lord’s passion; as Joel also says, The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and manifest day of the Lord come. (Joel 2:31.) But when the day of judgment is passed, and the life of future glory shall dawn, and there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, then shall that come to pass of which Isaiah speaks, The light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold. (Is. 30:26.) The stars shall fall from heaven, is expressed in Mark; There shall be stars falling from heaven, (Mark. 13:25.) that is, lacking their proper light. JEROME. By the powers of heaven, we understand the bands of the Angels. CHRYSOSTOM. Very fitly shall they be shaken and dismayed, seeing so mighty a change being wrought, their fellow-servants punished, and the universe standing before a terrible tribunal. ORIGEN. But as, at the dispensation of the Cross, the sun was eclipsed, and darkness was spread over the earth; so when the sign of the Son of Man appears in heaven, the light of the sun, moon, and stars, shall fail, as though waning before the might of that sign. This we understand to be the sign of the cross, that the Jews may see, as Zacharias and John speak, Him whom they have pierced, (Zech. 12:10. John 19:37.) and the sign of victory. CHRYSOSTOM. But because the sun will be darkened, the cross would not be seen, if it were not far brighter than the rays of the sun. That the disciples might not be ashamed, and grieve over the cross, He speaks of it as a sign, with a kind of distinction. The sign of the cross will appear to overthrow the shamelessness of the Jews, when Christ shall appear in the judgment, shewing not only His wounds, but His most ignominious death, And then all the tribes of the earth shall mourn. For when they shall see the cross, they shall bethink them how they have gained nought by His death, and that they have crucified Him whom they ought to have worshipped. JEROME. Rightly does He say, the tribes of the earth, for they shall mourn who have no citizenship in heaven, but are written in earth. (Jer. 17:13.)

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

  AMBROSE. The work of divine healing commenced on the sabbath, signifying thereby that he began anew where the old creation ceased, in order that He might declare at the very beginning that the Son of God was not under the Law, but above the Law. Rightly also He began on the sabbath, that He might shew Himself the Creator, who interweaves His works one within another, and follows up that which He had before begun; just as a builder determining to reconstruct a house, begins to pull down the old one, not from the foundation, but from the top, so as to apply his hand first to that part, where he had before left off. Holy men may through the word of God deliver from evil spirits, but to bid the dead rise again, is the work of Divine power alone. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. But the Jews spoke falsely of the glory of Christ, saying, He casteth out devils by Beelzebub the prince of the devils. To remove this charge, when the devils came beneath His invincible power, and endured not the Divine Presence, they sent forth a savage cry, as it follows: And he cried with a loud voice, saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, &c. BEDE. As if he said, Abstain a while from troubling me, thou who hast no fellowship with our designs. AMBROSE. It ought not to shock any one that the devil is mentioned in this book as the first to have spoken the name of Jesus of Nazareth. For Christ received not from him that name which an Angel brought down from heaven to the Virgin. The devil is of such effrontery, that he is the first to use a thing among men and bring it as something new to them, that he may strike people with terror at his power. Hence it follows: For I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. ATHANASIUS. (ad Epise. Æg. et Lib.) He spoke of Him not as a Holy One of God, as if He were like to the other saints, but as being in a remarkable manner the Holy One, with the addition of the article. For He is by nature holy by partaking of whom all others are called holy. Nor again did He speak this as if He knew it, but He pretended to know it. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. (et Tit. Bost.) For the devils thought by praises of this sort to make Him a lover of vainglory, that He might be induced to abstain from opposing or destroying them by way of grateful return. CHRYSOSTOM. The devil wished also to disturb the order of things, and to deprive the Apostles of their dignity, and to incline the many to obey Him.

• 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.