Confusion

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 10 of 112 · 20 per page

• From Cultish (2021)

  In cultish scenarios, however, it’s often a deliberate method of undermining the fundamentals of truth so followers will come to depend wholly on the leader for what to believe. The term “gaslight” originates from a 1938 British play of the same name, in which an abusive husband convinces his wife she’s gone mad. He does this in part by dimming the gaslights in their house and insisting that she’s delusional every time she points out the change. Since the 1960s, “gaslighting” has been used in everyday conversation to describe one person’s attempts at tricking another into mistrusting their entirely valid experiences.* “Gaslighting sometimes happens when words are used so people can’t quite understand,” explains sociologist Eileen Barker. “They become confused, made to feel fools. Words can sometimes mean the exact opposite of what you think they mean. Satanic groups do this, where evil means good and good means evil.” Loaded language and thought-terminating clichés (like Shambhala’s “why don’t you sit with that”) can prompt followers to disregard their own instincts. “Words,” says Barker, “can make it so you don’t quite know where you are.” In Scientology, by far the most exotic form of gaslighting shows up in a process called Word Clearing. I could not believe my eyes the first time I read about this dizzying ex ercise, through which a follower strips their vocabulary of what the church calls misunderstood words, or MUs. “According to church doctrine, the reason all of you reading this essay aren’t sitting in a Scientology course room right this minute is because you have MUs,” wrote ex-Scientologist Mike Rinder for his blo g. “LRH’s tech is flawless and not to be questioned—everything he wrote is easy to understand and makes perfect sense. If something can’t be grasped, it’s simply because a person bypassed an MU.” While reading Scientology literature during a course or auditing session, a member must demonstrate that they’ve fully understood every word in the text by the church’s standards. You do this by grabbing a Scientology-approved dictionary (they endorse a select few publishers) and looking up each MU you cross. If any new MUs appear in the original MU’s entry, you have to look those up, too—a dreaded process called a word chain—before you can continue reading. From the most obscure polysyllabic term down to the tiniest preposition,* every MU must be word-cleared. If you look up an MU and still can’t word-clear it, you must track down its derivation, use it in a sentence, then sculpt a physical demo of the sentence using Play-Doh. These wearisome steps are all part of Hubbard’s teaching methodology, Study Tech. How does an auditor decide you’ve misunderstood a word? Telltale signs might include displaying disinterest or fatigue (yawning, perhaps), and certainly disputing something you’ve read. Once, Cathy descended into a Word Clearing nightmare while reading a book called Science of Survival . In it, there was a chapter condemning homosexuality.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Milking the limited authority available to her, the wife would revel in making worker bees like Abbie perform menial tasks, like handwashing napkins or repeating tedious rituals in front of her. But whenever Abbie tried to bring up the wife’s actions to a shastri (a low-ranking teacher), she was delivered the same thought- terminating cliché: “Why don’t you sit with that?” This was a bastardization of a key Buddhist teaching, which says to “drive all blames into one.” Essentially, it means that if you’re experiencing something negative, you can’t change the outside world, so you have to look inward to solve the conflict. (So many shady New Age gurus—ranging from NXIVM’s Keith Raniere to Teal Swan–type self-help guides—warp similar teachings to fault followers for their own mistreatment under the guise of “internal work” and “overcoming fears.”) “What people struggle with,” Abbie continued, “and it’s a huge philosophy question in Buddhism, is how do you challenge social injustice?” How do you address external problems that are so clearly not rooted in your own baggage, while still following Buddhism’s principles? “There are a lot of really interesting answers,” said Abbie, “but in Shambhala, we didn’t get any.” In Vermont, the presented “solution” was always the same: Why don’t you sit with that? Shambhala’s use of cultish language was manipulative in an eerily passive way . . . totally unlike Scientology, whose founder wasn’t one for subtlety. L. Ron Hubbard got his start less as a spiritual leader and more as a sci-fi buff who took his fandom way too far. Hubbard was obsessed with space fantasy and George Orwell, and he authored hundreds of science fiction stories, which served as precursors to Scientology’s texts. In the style of conlangs (constructed languages) like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth tongues, Hubbard published not one but two unique Scientology dictionaries: the Technical Dictionary and the Admin Dictionary. Together, these volumes contain over three thousand entries. As of this writing, you can look up portions of the Technical Dictionary online and go absolutely cross-eyed combing through entries from A through X. Hubbard filled these books with existing English words (“dynamic,” “audit,” “clear,” etc.) charged with new Scientology-specific meanings, as well as made- up neologisms—Dianetics and thetans are among the most recognizable. Hubbard liked the technical sound of jargon from fields like psychology and software engineering, so he co-opted and redefined dozens of technical terms to create the impression that Scientology’s belief system was rooted in real science. The word “valence,” for example, has several definitions across linguistics, chemistry, and math, and generally refers to the value of something.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I check the calendar on my phone and glance through my email to make sure I’ve arrived on the correct day. As far as I can tell, I have. “How about Wingman?” I say. Wingman is Cranium’s sidekick, a thirty-one-year-old director of something or other. I’ve met Wingman, and he’s nice enough. I don’t really know what he does, but basically he seems to be a mini-Cranium. Wingman actually looks like Cranium—round-faced, with short hair—and dresses like him, wearing a “business casual” uniform of jeans, sport coat, open-collar oxford shirt and white T-shirt. Penny makes some calls. Wingman, too, is nowhere to be found. “Maybe you should take a seat,” she says. I sit down on an orange couch and gaze up at a big flat-screen TV that shows TED talks on a loop. Orange is the official color of HubSpot, and it’s everywhere: orange walls, orange ductwork, orange desks. HubSpotters wear orange shoes, orange T-shirts, and goofy orange sunglasses. They carry orange journals and write in them with orange pens. They put orange stickers on their laptops. HubSpot’s logo is an orange sprocket, a circle with three little arms sticking out, each with a knob on the end. Sometimes the word HubSpot is rendered with the sprocket where the O should go. I have no idea what the sprocket is meant to convey, nor do I know if anyone realizes that the three arms with bulbous tips look like three little orange dicks. Those orange cocks are all over the place, including on the hoodies, hats, and other pieces of HubSpot apparel and swag that are on display nearby, available for purchase either in person or through the company’s online store, the HubShop. I’m still waiting on the couch, and now it’s nine on a Monday morning and HubSpotters are streaming into the office, many wearing HubSpot clothing, like members of a sports team. Most are in their twenties. Attire for the guys skews toward bro-wear—shorts and flip-flops, untucked button-down oxford shirts, backward-facing baseball caps—while the women cultivate a look that a friend of mine calls “New England college girl going on a date,” meaning jeans, boots, sweaters. A woman shows up and reports to the reception desk. She’s wearing a suit—here for an interview, no doubt. Penny tells her to take a seat. The woman sits down next to me but then, in a minute, gets scooped up and called to her meeting. Meanwhile, I sit. And sit. Penny looks at me. “I’m still checking,” she says. I smile and tell her it’s no problem. Penny keeps making calls, glancing up at me and then glancing away, trying to figure out what to do with this gray-haired guy who just showed up claiming to be an employee. Finally, a few phone calls later, a guy named Zack arrives. He’s sorry that Wingman and Cranium aren’t here today, but he wants to give me a tour around the offices. Zack is in his twenties.

• From Cultish (2021)

  This second guy, a spray-tanned D-list actor I thought I recognized, proceeded to pitch us a series of self-improvement courses—books and workshops—nothing religious, just “tools” to help us live better lives. For us, hardworking students with so much promise, they’d cost just $35 a class. If we committed today, he could take us to another wing of the building and show us a preview of what we’d learn right now. “They get you with the small basic courses,” Cathy explained to me, eight years after my Scientology tryst. “That’s the bait and switch of it all. They start you out with these courses on ‘communication’ or ‘ups and downs in life,’ and you go, ‘Wow, this really helps.’” Unlike me, Cathy didn’t grow up with a father who openly talked about the cult he was forced into; she was open-minded and optimistic, and, most important, she didn’t know anything about Scientology before she got involved. “It was 1991, before Google, so it’s not like I could look it up,” she contextualized. “I was just basing it on this actress I liked who was in it.” After Cathy started paying for courses and further intertwining her life with Scientology, she certainly didn’t do any independent digging, because the rules explicitly forbid it. “I was told not to look on the internet, the newspaper, or any ‘black PR’ on Scientology,” Cathy said. “All of those people and journalists were just trying to destroy Scientology because they know it’s the only hope for mankind.” Now, every time Cathy entered a counseling session (always prepaid, of course), the first questions asked were: Did you look at the internet? Has anyone said anything bad to you about Scientology? Have you had an affair? Have you been taking drugs? Have you talked to a journalist? Are you connected to someone in an embassy or the government, or politics, or a lawyer? “It was madness,” Cathy says in retrospect—though at the time, these just seemed like routine precautions. Very quickly, Cathy’s new circle started using us-versus-them verbiage to isolate her from those on the outside. “They had ways of making you look at people who weren’t in Scientology as less-than,” she remembers. Any criticisms of the organization were labeled “hidden crimes.” A person or behavior that threatened Scientology in some way—like associating with an SP (suppressive person: a bad influence, like a journalist or skeptical family member)—was instantly labeled PTS, potential trouble source. There is a long list of PTS Types in Scientology. These classifications—Types 1–3 and Types A–J—all refer to different enemies of the church: doubters, criminals, people who’ve publicly denounced or sued Scientology, people too closely connected with an SP, people who’ve undergone a “psychotic break.”

• From Cultish (2021)

  In part 5 of this book, we’ll learn about all sorts of woo-woo chants and hymns used in “cult fitness” studios that may sound extremist to skeptical outsiders, but aren’t actually all that destructive when you take a closer listen. Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members of a community on the same ideological page. To help them feel like they belong to something big. “Language provides a culture of shared understanding,” said Eileen Barker, a sociologist who studies new religious movements at the London School of Economics. But wherever there are fanatically worshipped leaders and belief-bound cliques, some level of psychological pressure is at play. This could be as quotidian as your average case of FOMO, or as treacherous as being coerced to commit violent crimes. “Quite frankly, the language is everything,” one ex-Scientologist told me in a hushed tone during an interview. “It’s what insulates you. It makes you feel special, like you’re in the know, because you have this other language to communicate with.” Before we can get into the nuts and bolts of cultish language, however, we must focus on a key definition: What does the word “cult” even mean, exactly? As it turns out, coming up with one conclusive definition is tricky at best. Over the course of researching and writing this book, my understanding of the word has only become hazier and more fluid. I’m not the only one flummoxed by how to pin down “cult.” I recently conducted a small street survey near my home in Los Angeles, where I asked a couple dozen strangers what they thought the word meant; answers ranged from “A small group of believers led by a deceptive figure with too much power” to “Any group of people who are really passionate about something” all the way to “Well, a cult could be anything, couldn’t it? You could have a coffee cult, or a surfing cult.” And not a single response was delivered with certainty. There’s a reason for this semantic murkiness. It’s connected to the fact that the fascinating etymology of “cult” (which I’ll chronicle shortly) corresponds precisely to our society’s ever-changing relationship to spirituality, community, meaning, and identity—a relationship that’s gotten rather . . . weird. Language change is always reflective of social change, and over the decades, as our sources of connection and existential purpose have shifted due to phenomena like social media, increased globalization, and withdrawal from traditional religion, we’ve seen the rise of more alternative subgroups—some dangerous, some not so much. “Cult” has evolved to describe them all.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  There is still a further condition for learning by the whole person, which is especially important in education: the students must, to some extent, perceive that these attitudinal elements exist in the teacher. Students are even more suspicious than clients in therapy. Students have been “conned” for so long that a teacher who is real with them is usually seen for a time as simply exhibiting a new brand of phoniness. To have a teacher prize students in a nonjudgmental way arouses the deepest disbelief. To have a teacher truly and warmly understand each student’s private world is so unbelievable that the students are certain they must not have heard correctly. Yet, the empathic response is probably the first element to get through, the first reaction that begins to convince the students that this is a new experience.

• From Cultish (2021)

  A recent college graduate from California who’d relocated to New York City for a job in PR, Abbie missed the co-ops she’d lived in as a student at UC Santa Cruz. By her mid-twenties, Abbie was looking to press a spiritual reset button. That’s when she dropped into a Tibetan mindfulness class and quickly fell in love with its teachings of “basic goodness”—the idea that all beings are born whole and worthy, but become lost along the way. That’s why we meditate: to get our basic goodness back. Abbie was hungry to learn more, but extended meditation retreats were expensive. So when an instructor told her about the opportunity to spend three months with Shambhala for free, working and living in a small pastoral town, it seemed like just the “journey” she was looking for. Shambhala had dozens of meditation centers and retreats all over the world; Vermont was one of their largest. Abbie couldn’t wait to get out of the city. She booked her ticket. Right away, there was a lot to love about Shambhala—the camaraderie, the teachings of generosity and acceptance, even the trees seemed too good to be true. “I remember when I first landed in Vermont, I had never seen so many shades of green,” Abbie told me over coffee, two years after defecting. Shambhala was founded in the 1970s by Tibetan monk and meditation guru Chögyam Trungp a. Largely responsible for bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West, Trungpa had studied comparative religion at Oxford and earned a reputation, even among many non-Shambhalans, as an enlightened genius. He counted among his pupils the poet Allen Ginsberg, author John Steinbeck, David Bowie, and Joni Mitchell. “I’m confused now how to feel about him because his books are amazing,” Abbie confessed. “He was a master of language. A poet.” But Trungpa also had a raging alcohol problem, which everyone knew and quietly accepted. Complications from alcohol abuse are what ultimately led to his death in 1987 at the age of forty-eight, after which his son, known as the Sakyong, took his place. Trungpa didn’t try to hide his addiction; in fact, he found ways to work it into his teachings. Notoriously, Shambhala celebrations overflowed with booze and debauchery. “In the Buddhism world, the Shambhalas are known as the party Buddhists,” Abbie recounted with ambivalence. Trungpa also famously slept with many of his students, some of whom became Abbie’s teachers. “There was no way that stuff was all consensual,” she winced. “But everyone was just like, ‘Oh, it was the seventies.’” Trungpa was the nucleus of the Shambhala “mandala.” This was the organization’s chain of command: a sea of plebeian practitioners and a pecking order of teachers above them.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  1. This is possible, but the “thirty pieces of silver” is a reference to a fulfillment of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible (Zech. 11:12); that is, the tradition doesn’t pass the criterion of dissimilarity. 2. Some argue that Judas grew disillusioned when he realized that Jesus had no intention of becoming a political-military messiah. 3. Others have reasoned that he wanted to force Jesus’ hand, thinking that if he were arrested he would call out for support and start an uprising that would overthrow the Romans. B. Each of these explanations has merit, but in the end, we’ll never know. 1. Judas cast the money back at the Jewish leaders. Because priests were not allowed to use “blood money,” they bought a potter’s field with the silver. 2. Judas died, either by suicide or some other cause. 44 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership IV. The early sources all agree that after a last meal with his disciples, Jesus was arrested by Jewish authorities (multiply attested in Mark 14:43 and John 18:3) who conducted a preliminary investigation against him. A. As local aristocrats, the Jewish high priests were allowed by the Romans to conduct and control their own internal affairs. 1. The head of the group would have been the high priest, who during this time (AD 26-36), was a man named Caiaphas. 2 . There is nothing implausible in a local offender being brought before local authorities. In Jesus’ case, the authorities were Caiaphas and his ruling “council,” called the Sanhedrin (this also explains why Jewish police arrested Jesus, rather than Roman). B. Unfortunately, we have no reliable way of knowing what happened when Jesus appeared before Caiaphas. 1. In part, we are hampered by our sources. According to the accounts, the only persons present were Jesus and the Jewish rulers. Apparently, none of Jesus’ disciples was present. 2 . The real problem, though, is that it is difficult to understand the trial proceeding, if it actually happened as narrated, because the charge of “blasphemy” leveled against Jesus cannot be rooted in anything he is actually claimed to have said (Mark 14:61-62). 3 . It wasn’t blasphemous to call oneself the messiah (as Jesus allegedly did) — this simply meant that you understood yourself to be the deliverer/ruler of your people. Nor was it blasphemous to say that the Son of Man was soon to arrive — this was simply to acknowledge that the Book of Daniel had predicted something that would happen in your own day.

• From Cultish (2021)

  I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life.” Following a guru who provides an identity template—from one’s politics to one’s hairstyle—eases that chooser’s paradox. This concept can be applied to spiritual extremists like Scientologists and 3HO members, but also to loyalists of social media celebrities and “cult brands” like Lululemon or Glossier. Just being able to say “I’m a Glossier girl” or “I follow Dr. Joe Dispenza” (a dubious self-help star we’ll meet in part 6 ) softens the burden and responsibility of having to make so many independent choices about what you think and who you are. It cuts the overwhelming number of answers you need to have down to a manageable few. You can simply ask, “What would a Glossier girl do?” And base your day’s decisions—your perfume, your news sources, all of it—on that framework. The tide of change away from mainstream establishments and toward nontraditional groups is not at all new. It’s something we’ve seen all over the world at several different junctures in human history. Society’s attraction to so-called cults (both the propensity to join them and the anthropological fascination with them) tends to thrive during periods of broader existential questioning. Most alternative religious leaders come to power not to exploit their followers, but instead to guide them through social and political turbulence. Jesus of Nazareth (you may be familiar) arose during what is said to be the most fraught time in Middle Eastern history (a fact which speaks for itself). The violent, encroaching Roman Empir e left people searching for a nonestablishment guide who could inspire and protect them. Fifteen hundred years later, during the tempestuous European Renaissance, dozens of “cults” cropped up in rebellion against the Catholic Church. In seventeenth-century India, fringe groups grew out of the social discord that resulted from the shift to agriculture, and then as a reaction to British imperialism. Compared to other developed nations, the US boasts a particularly consistent relationship with “cults,” which speaks to our brand of distinctly American tumult. Across the world, levels of religiosity tend to be lowest in countries with the highest standards of living (strong education levels, long life expectancies), but the US is exceptiona l in that it’s both highly developed and full of believers—even with all our “Nones” and “Remixed.” This inconsistency can be explained in part because while citizens of other advanced nations, like Japan and Sweden, enjoy a bevy of top-down resources, including universal healthcare and all sorts of social safety nets, the US is more of a free-for-all. “The Japanese and the Europeans know their governments will come to their aid in their hour of need,” wrote Dr. David Ludden, a language psychologist at Georgia Gwinnett College, for Psychology Today . But America’s laissez-faire atmosphere makes people feel all on their own. Generation after generation, this lack of institutional support paves the way for alternative, supernaturally minded groups to surge.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “It made you feel superior, because you had these words that other people didn’t, and you did the work to understand them.” It’s not just religious cult leaders who use language to imbue followers with a false sense of elitism; I’ve noticed similar us-versus-them rhetoric in cultier areas of my own life. For a few years, I was employed as a writer at a cliquey online fashion magazine, and one of the first things I noticed about my chic new colleagues was how they spoke almost entirely in inscrutable abbreviations (or “abbrevs”). They even made up abbreviations that took exactly as long to say as the full-length words (for instance, they always referred to this one website called “The Ritual” as “T. Ritual”), simply because it sounded more exclusive—harder for “uncool people” to understand. To me, it was clear that this language served as a detection system to identify insiders and outsiders. And it was a way of gaining control, of coaxing underlings to learn the lingo, to conform, which they did eagerly, in hopes of being “chosen” for special opportunities and promotions. In Scientology, it was hard to see how a few fun acronyms could cause much harm. But under the surface, these word shortenings were deliberately working to obscure understanding. In any given professional field, specialized jargon is often necessary in order to exchange information more succinctly and specifically; it makes communication clearer. But in a cultish atmosphere, jargon does just the opposite: Instead, it causes speakers to feel confused and intellectually deficient. That way, they’ll comply. This confusion is part of the big trick. Feeling so disoriented that you doubt the very language you’ve been speaking your whole life can make you commit even more strongly to a charismatic leader who promises to show you the way. “We want to make sense of reality, and we use words to explain to ourselves what’s happening,” Steven Hassan explained. When your means of narration are threatened, it’s distressing. By nature, people are averse to such high levels of internal conflict. In states of bamboozlement, we defer to authority figures to tell us what’s true and what we need to do to feel safe. When language works to make you question your own perceptions, whether at work or at church, that’s a form of gaslighting. I first came across the term “gaslighting” in the context of abusive romantic partners, but it shows up in larger-scale relationships, too, like those between bosses and their employees, politicians and their supporters, spiritual leaders and their devotees. Across the board, gaslighting is a way of psychologically manipulating someone (or many people) such that they doubt their own reality, as a way to gain and maintain control. Psychologists agree that while gaslighters appear self-assured, they are typically motivated by extreme insecurity—an inability to self-regulate their own thoughts and emotions. Sometimes gaslighters aren’t even 100% aware that what they’re doing is manipulative.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I found HubSpot through a job posting on LinkedIn, had two interviews, and finally met with Halligan and Shah, who offered me a job as a “marketing fellow.” The title was unusual, but also pleasing, with a quasi-academic ring to it and an implication that my role would be to serve as a kind of éminence grise at the company. My job description was vague, but I believed I would be writing articles for the HubSpot blog, advising executives on media strategy, writing speeches for the CEO, and attending conferences as a kind of brand evangelist. Penny makes some calls. Finally she tells me that Cranium is not in the office today. I check the calendar on my phone and glance through my email to make sure I’ve arrived on the correct day. As far as I can tell, I have. “How about Wingman?” I say. Wingman is Cranium’s sidekick, a thirty-one- year-old director of something or other. I’ve met Wingman, and he’s nice enough. I don’t really know what he does, but basically he seems to be a mini- Cranium. Wingman actually looks like Cranium—round-faced, with short hair— and dresses like him, wearing a “business casual” uniform of jeans, sport coat, open-collar oxford shirt and white T-shirt. Penny makes some calls. Wingman, too, is nowhere to be found. “Maybe you should take a seat,” she says. I sit down on an orange couch and gaze up at a big flat-screen TV that shows TED talks on a loop. Orange is the official color of HubSpot, and it’s everywhere: orange walls, orange ductwork, orange desks. HubSpotters wear orange shoes, orange T-shirts, and goofy orange sunglasses. They carry orange journals and write in them with orange pens. They put orange stickers on their laptops. HubSpot’s logo is an orange sprocket, a circle with three little arms sticking out, each with a knob on the end. Sometimes the word HubSpot is rendered with the sprocket where the O should go. I have no idea what the sprocket is meant to convey, nor do I know if anyone realizes that the three arms with bulbous tips look like three little orange dicks. Those orange cocks are all over the place, including on the hoodies, hats, and other pieces of HubSpot apparel and swag that are on display nearby, available for purchase either in person or through the company’s online store, the HubShop. I’m still waiting on the couch, and now it’s nine on a Monday morning and HubSpotters are streaming into the office, many wearing HubSpot clothing, like members of a sports team. Most are in their twenties. Attire for the guys skews toward bro-wear—shorts and flip-flops, untucked button-down oxford shirts, backward-facing baseball caps—while the women cultivate a look that a friend of mine calls “New England college girl going on a date,” meaning jeans, boots, sweaters. A woman shows up and reports to the reception desk. She’s wearing a suit— here for an interview, no doubt.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  process. There were persons who felt they had never learned so much in such a short time. There were the sharpest of differences. After one person blasted the staff for not answering questions, not taking control and giving evidence, the next person said, “But when, if ever, have we all felt so free to criticize, to express ourselves, to say anything?’ Finally, there was constructive discussion of what participants would do with their learnings in their back-home situations. After the first evening in São Paulo, when the session had been extremely chaotic and I was keenly aware that we had but six hours more with the group, I remember refusing to talk with anyone about that meeting. I was experiencing enormous confusion. Either I had helped launch an incredibly stupid experiment doomed to failure, or I had helped to innovate a whole new way of permitting eight hundred people to sense their own potentialities and to participate in forming their own learning experience. There was no way to predict which it would prove to be. Perhaps the greater the risk, the greater the satisfaction. In São Paulo, the second evening, there was a real sense of community, and persons were experiencing significant changes in themselves. Informal follow-up in the weeks and months since then bear out the worthwhileness of the experience for hundreds of people in each of the three cities. Never have I felt an extended trip to have been so valuable. I learned a great deal, and there is no doubt that we managed to create a facilitative climate in which all kinds of creative things—at personal, interpersonal, and group levels— happened. I believe we left a mark on Brazil, and certainly Brazil changed all of us. Certainly we have extended our vision of what can be done in very large groups. So those are some of the activities—all extremely profitable to me—into which I have been drawn during this period. Risk Taking In these activities there has been, in each case, an element of risk. Indeed it seems to me that the experiences I value most in my recent life all entail considerable risk. So I should like to pause for a moment and speculate as to the reasons behind my taking of chances. Why does it appeal to me to try the unknown, to gamble on something new, when I could easily settle for ways of doing things that I know from past experience would work very satisfactorily? I am not sure I understand fully, but I can see several factors that have made a difference.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  1. The common notion that Judas simply told the authorities where they could locate Jesus apart from the crowds may be right, but why would they need an insider for that kind of information? 2. Judas may have divulged something else, some information that the authorities could use to bring Jesus up on charges. 3. It is striking that in the reports of Jesus’ trials, he is charged with calling himself such things as the Messiah, the Son of God, and the King of the Jews (Mark 14:61, 15:2; John 18:33, 19:19). 4. In the public teachings of Jesus that we have established as historically reliable, Jesus never calls himself such things. In our earliest source, when someone does call him the messiah, he hushes it up (Mark 8:30). Where did the authorities get the idea that he called himself such things? 5. This may have been what Judas betrayed. We know that Jesus taught his disciples privately things that he didn’t say in public. 42 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 6. Did Judas betray insider information? If so, we might have a clue about what Jesus told his disciples about himself. We have several hints about what Jesus taught the disciples about himself that Judas may have divulged to the authorities. A. The hints come by way of several curious pieces of information that look to be historically reliable. 1. Almost certainly, the charge leveled against Jesus by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate was that he considered himself to be the King of the Jews (Mark 15:2; John 18:33, 19:19). 2 . Jesus never calls himself this in any of the Gospels. Why would he be executed for a claim he never made? 3 . In addition, during his hearing before the Jewish authorities, who held a kind of preliminary investigation before turning him over for prosecution, Jesus was evidently charged with calling himself the Messiah (Mark 14:62) — a figure of grandeur and power, widely thought to be the future ruler of the people Israel. B. Jesus spumed the title “Messiah” in reference to himself in public, but it is possible that in one sense he did think that he was the messiah? 1. Jesus taught that after the Son of Man executed judgment on the earth, the kingdom would arrive. 2 . Kingdoms, by their nature, have kings. Who would be the king? 3 . Ultimately, of course, it would be God — hence, Jesus’ common reference to the “Kingdom of God.” But he probably didn’t think that God would physically sit on the throne in Jerusalem. Who then would? 4. The earliest traditions also indicate that Jesus thought that he himself would be enthroned. For one thing, only those who accepted his message would be accepted into the kingdom.

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

  Now we may postulate at the outset that all these forms of thought have a natural origin, if we could only get at it. That assumption must be made at the outset of every scientific investigation, or there is no temptation to proceed. But the first account of their origin which we are likely to hit upon is a snare. All these mental affections are ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowadays believe that the objects first, in some natural way, engendered a brain from out of their midst, and then imprinted these various cognitive affections upon it. But how? The ordinary evolutionist answer to this question is exceedingly simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to be that, since it suffices now for us to become acquainted with a complex object, that it should be simply present to us often enough, so it must be fair to assume universally that, with time enough given, the mere presence of the various objects and relations to be known must end by bringing about the latter's cognition, and that in this way all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience of blue objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and hard objects got it to feel hardness, so the presence of large and small objects in the world gave it the notion of size, moving objects made it aware of motion, and objective successions taught it time. Similarly in a world with different impressing things, the mind had to acquire a sense of difference, whilst the like parts of the world as they fell upon it kindled in it the perception of similarity. Outward sequences which sometimes held good, and sometimes failed, naturally engendered in it doubtful and uncertain forms of expectation, and ultimately gave rise to the disjunctive forms of judgment; whilst the hypothetic form, 'if a, then b,' was sure to ensue from sequences that were invariable in the outer world. On this view, if the outer order suddenly were to change its elements and modes, we should have no faculties to cognize the new order by. At most we should feel a sort of frustration and confusion. But little by little the new presence would work on us as the old one did; and in course of time another set of psychic categories would arise, fitted to take cognizance of the altered world.

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

  The confusion, which reigned among the Church authorities concerning the sectaries, and also the differences which existed among the sectaries themselves, appear from the many names by which they were known. The most elaborate list is given in the code of Frederick II. 1238,961 and enumerates nineteen different sects, among which the most familiar are Cathari, Patarenes, Beguines, Arnoldists, and Waldenses. But the code did not regard this enumeration as exhaustive, and adds to the names "all heretics of both sexes, whatever be the term used to designate them." And in fact the list is not exhaustive, for it does not include the respectable group of Northern Italy known as the Humiliati, or the Ortlibenses of Strassburg, or the Apostolicals of Belgium. One document speaks of no less than seventy-two, and Salimbene of one hundred and thirty different sects.962 The council of Verona, 1183, condemned, "first of all the Cathari and Patarenes and those who falsely called themselves Humiliati or Poor Men of Lyons, also the Passagini, Josephini, and Arnoldists, whom we put under perpetual Anathema." The lack of compact organization explains in part the number of these names, some of which were taken from localities or towns and did not indicate any differences of belief or practice from other sectaries. The numbers of the heretics must be largely a matter of conjecture. A panic took hold of the Church authorities, and some of the statements, like those of Innocent III., must be regarded as exaggerations, as are often the rumors about a hostile army in a panic-stricken country, awaiting its arrival. Innocent pronounced the number of heretics in Southern France innumerable.963 According to the statement of Neumeister, a heretical bishop who was burnt, the number of Waldensian heretics in Austria about 1300 was eighty thousand.964 The writer, usually designated "the Passau Anonymous," writing about 1315, said there was scarcely a land in which the Waldenses had not spread. The Cathari in Southern France mustered large armies and were massacred by the thousands. Of all these sects, the only one which has survived is the very honorable body, still known as the Waldenses.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  the horizon moved upward into clear view. A brilliant planet moved with the same slow, majestic speed from directly above me to a point well on my right. The star and the planet were accompanied in their movement by the Milky Way and all the other constellations. Obviously, I was the center of the universe, and the heavens were slowly revolving about me. It was a humbling experience (How small I am!) and an uplifting one (How marvelous to be such a focal point!). I was looking at the real world. Yet, in another corner of my mind, I knew that I, and the earth beneath me, and the atmosphere surrounding me were moving at a breathless speed—faster than a modern jet plane—in the direction I called east, and that the stars and planets were, relative to the earth, comparatively motionless. Although I could not see what I’ve just described, I knew that this—not the more obvious perception—was really the real world. At some other level, I was aware that I was an infinitesimal speck on an insignificant planet in one of the minor galaxies (of which there are millions) in the universe. I knew that each of these galaxies was moving at an incredible speed, often exploding away from the others. Was this reality, too? I was confused. But at least there was one reality of which I could be sure: the hard wooden chair on which I sat, the solid earth on which the deck rested, the stainless steel pen I held in my hand. This was a reality that could not only be seen, but also felt and touched. These objects could sustain weight and pressure. They were solid. But no, I knew enough of science to challenge all this. The chair is made up of formerly living cells, intricate in their composition, composed more of space than of matter. The earth is a slowly moving fluid mass, which shudders very frequently as it shrinks and cracks and crinkles. The road over which I drove yesterday had been a part of one of those shudders. One day in 1906, the earth shrugged a little and the road cracked, and the western side of the crack was carried twenty feet north of its continuation on the other side. Solid earth indeed! And what about the reassuring hardness of my metal pen? They tell me it is composed of invisible atoms, moving at great speed. Each atom has a nucleus, and recent years have brought discoveries of more and more particles in those nuclei. Each particle is endowed with fantastically unbelievable characteristics; it moves in possibly random, possibly orderly trajectories in the great inner space of each atom. My pen is hardly the firm solid object that I so clearly feel and hold. The “real world” seems to be dissolving. I am reassured, but also perplexed, by the statement of the great physical scientist, Sir James Jeans. He says: “The stream of human knowledge is

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  He throws down the little whip, glances down at the grass where the knife was. I hide my hand behind my back. “Where ...” He looks up, fearful. He sees me in the light, small pale, big breasted and nude. “What are you?” He jumps to his feet, stumbling backwards. “What are you? Who sent you here?” “I smelled your blood.” As I say that, there is a new puff of fear from him, and his wounds bleed a little faster. The smell is confusing me and filling me with light and my head with noise. The winds of the Holy Ghost are roaring in my ears. Above me enraged angels are descending blowing trumpets. “Why did you do that?” I point at his wounds. “Who sent you? God? Satan? Why are you like that?” Pointing at my nakedness. “Are you tempting me? Jesus has forgiven me for what happened in the motel.” I want to cry. I want to kill. I want to die. I don’t know what I want. “Why are you like that?” I wave at his bloody cuts and welts. “Are you trying to tempt me?” “T know you. You were the girl with the devil.” “T know you,” I say. “I’m the girl with the devil.” I begin clawing at my face. I want to tear the flesh off my skull and show him my grinning skull, but he steps forward and takes my hands away from me. “What happened to you?” he says. I’m still holding his knife, hidden in my hand. I should maybe give it to him, I think. But not yet. “When you die, sir, what will happen to your” “What is your name? Tell me your name.” “Nixie.” “You want to know what will happen when we die? Where will you spend eternity, Nixie? Where?” “in Helt?: “No, Nixie, no. You’re saved by the blood of Jesus—” “No!” I yell at him. “I’m going to Hell. No matter what.” My shoulders are shaking and my head is bowed. His arms are around me and he draws me close. “Where will you go when you die?” “Heaven,” he says. His hands pass gently down my back and he holds me tighter. “When Jesus shouts and the rapture comes I’ll go straight up to Heaven to be with Jesus. Won’t you?” The Lady and the Unicorn 525 “No.” “Haven’t you accepted Jesus as your savior?” His hands are moving gently down my arms to my waist. I can hear his heart now, which I could not hear before. “T tried.” His hand is lifting my breast. “Then you'll be with the Lord, together with me. You’ll be in Heaven, Nixie. You will be with me together in Heaven as Jesus promised.” Now his other hand is at my other breast, touching me. His man smell is strong. “But, I want to be with Daniel.” I feel so confused. ‘Then I remember the blood. “Why did you do that to yourself?”

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  I pull away my jacket, drop it by the old pine tree. I pull off my ‘Fshirt and throw it on the ground, standing with my fists at my side, daring him, waiting for him to undress the rest of me. Already he is nude, his sex standing up hard as nails for me. He seizes the straps of my bra and pulls it up and over violently, snapping the little buckle off into the grass. My breasts fall free, and his eyes — does he see as I do? His eyes are on me. I am an ordinary girl, only a woman, but his eyes claim me. I am his woman. Off with my jeans and then all the rest, pulling and taking me forcefully. His lips on my face; his hands smoothing over my breasts, spinning me roughly in his arms and pressing me backwards against his chest while his rough forearms hug me hard from behind, palms hoisting my breasts, pulling me fiercely to him. His fingers pinching my nipples so that I have to crouch down from the pleasure as fierce as pain. “Pig’s blood,” he whispers in my ear and drags me down roughly to the ground. I feel such doubt now. His words frighten me. I am not that demon, but only a clumsy relic, an ignorant Hessian girl who doesn’t even know how to drive a car. Maybe he was the right person for me before as I was, but maybe that has changed too. Maybe he is wrong now that I’m not evil anymore. Maybe he is a man who must love an evil thing to be excited, and I am only a girl like any other girl he might have for himself. I will not be bound by death and dark anymore. Will we still want each other? He will be the sacrifice of my liberation from sin. I am alive. I might have anyone too, but I want him. I must fight for him. Laying on my back, like every woman has from the beginning of days. My man laying on top of me, dropping his weight on me, kissing me and moving his palms over my chest, burying his face in “my neck. He meanly nips my neck. He has never done this before. It hurts a little, not so fun. Why did he do that? I want to ask him, but he is sliding down my belly, hands slipping under my breasts 518 C. Sanchez-Garcia from underneath their swell, hoisting them up as he breathes in my curled hairs, exploring my netherlands with his lips. I am lost in him. I don’t want him to stop. If he were to kill me now in my happiness, I would let him.

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

  Some of this incapacity is unquestionably due to general mental confusion at the new experience, and to the excessively unfavorable conditions for perception which an eye with its lens just extirpated affords. That the analogy of inner nature between the retinal and tactile sensations goes beyond mere extensity is proved by the cases where tile patients were the most intelligent, as in the young man operated on by Dr Franz, who named circular, triangular, and quadrangular figures at first sight. [216] VISUAL SPACE. It is when we come to analyze minutely the conditions of visual perception that difficulties arise which have made psychologists appeal to new and quasi-mythical mental powers. But I firmly believe that even here exact investigation will yield the same verdict as in the cases studied hitherto. This subject will close our survey of the facts; and if it give the result I foretell, we shall be in the best of positions for a few banal pages of critically historical review. If a common person is asked how he is enabled to see things as they are, he will simply reply, by opening his eyes and looking. This innocent answer has, however, long since been impossible for science. There are various paradoxes and irregularities about what we appear to perceive under seemingly identical optical conditions, which immediately raise questions. To say nothing now of the time-honored conundrums of why we see upright with an inverted retinal picture, and why we do not see double; and to leave aside the whole field of color-contrasts and ambiguities, as not directly relevant to the space-problem,—it is certain that the same retinal image makes us see quite differently-sized and differently-shaped objects at different times, and it is equally certain that the same ocular movement varies in its perceptive import. It ought to be possible, were the act of perception completely and simply intelligible, to assign for every distinct judgment of size, shape, and position a distinct optical modification of some kind as its occasion. And the connection between the two ought to be so constant that, given the same modification, we should always have the same judgment. But if we study the facts closely we soon and no such constant connection between either judgment and retinal modification, or judgment and muscular modification, to exist.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  He is sitting back in the shadows under a tree. His skin is bare, naked like me. The smell of the blood on his back and on his shoulder, is shaped in streaks, cuts and welts. He is on his knees and he is whispering in the silly baaa baaa baaa language and his arm moves, crossing his chest. His hand rises — slap! Leather cords across his back. Blood on steel balls. Is it Jesus whipping himself? If this is Jesus Pll punish him for lying to me. He is hurting himself. P’'ve seen these things before. But it is only the preacher man. In the grass near his knee, the bitter smell of blood on steel again. That must be a knife. Yes, on his bare thighs there is a row of cuts. As I move in close behind him a man smell, the smell of his cum. It’s different from the smell of Daniel, drying sticky on my thighs. But there is no woman here, only himself. I remember sometimes meeting men like this in the past. Angry, dangerous men. ‘They are fun to kill. r “Hallelujah ... Oh my Lord Jesus, deliver me... Abba abba hey yeah ... yeah, reprove me, oh my Lord. Reprove my flesh from lust ... Abba Eloi Adonai...” His eyes are closed and he doesn’t see as I reach down and pick up his knife. His blood is on the blade. I lick the blade and taste his blood which is already a little stale. This is a lonely tasting man. If it had been any man but this one, I would have his head dripping from a tree by now to comfort me. But I am curious about him and I am terribly confused and I want to kill every creature in the world so that I can be alone but there so many things that must be killed and ...and ...and he must tell me why I am not saved anymore which I think might have become a good thing and God has abandoned me instead and I must keep killing people now and... and... and — why? I shut the blade and let him hear the sound so he will notice me. At the sound, he turns suddenly and stinks of shame. He is looking at me wide eyed, but he can’t see me the way I can see him. There is a bloody lash in his hand, and his legs and belly are covered in sweet smelling cuts. I want to tear him into food for owls and crows. But I want to lick his body and weep in his lap. I feel so confused. “Who’s there?” 524 C. Sanchez-Garcia “Help me, sir.” I step around into the small patch of moonlight between the tree shadows and let him look at me. His knees are apart and his sex is erect and making the man smell.