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.

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• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  What does self-affirmation have to do with erotic transitions? Just about everything! With few exceptions, blockages and distortions of your deepest inclinations lie at the root of self-defeating turn-ons. The alternative is to listen carefully for the guidance that comes only from within. STEP 3:NAVIGATE THE GRAY ZONEOnce a significant transition is under way, it’s only a matter of time until you enter a period of awkward uncertainty when you’re no longer where you’ve been, but you haven’t arrived at where you’re going. Welcome to the gray zone, which, of course, is not a location but a state of mind distinguished by a distressing absence of clear pathways and landmarks. For a time you feel as though you’re wandering aimlessly, disoriented, lost without a clue about how to regain your bearings. The more important and challenging the changes you seek, the more prolonged will be your stay in the gray zone. For some, being in the gray zone feels like standing at the edge of an abyss. But if you can tolerate its ambiguities, the gray zone holds unparalleled opportunities for self-discovery. Gradually, you will notice that the gray zone is not at all the featureless desert it first appears to be. It’s more like a blank canvas on which you can experiment with new shapes and colors. STUMBLING INTO THE GRAY ZONESometimes the first hint that you are entering the gray zone is a realization that partners, situations, or fantasies that have reliably turned you on in the past are losing their allure. If you aren’t prepared for the surprises that await you in the gray zone you might misinterpret your waning interest as a sign of trouble rather than a harbinger of positive change. Men find it especially difficult to handle this temporary reduction in desire because it is usually reflected in less reliable, softer, or nonexistent erections. When old turn-ons begin to lose their effectiveness, some people embark on a search for more intense forms of stimulation to prove to themselves that everything still works. Unfortunately, their first impulse is often to repeat—with even more single-minded determination—the very patterns that are losing their grip. One man could no longer ignore the fact that he wasn’t responding to his porn collection featuring leather-clad dominatrixes. So he went on a frantic search for new porn with even more exaggerated images of dominance and submission. Only later did he realize that these purchases were completely useless because his eroticism was evolving away from the imagery of power and toward—well, he didn’t know yet. But once he accepted the fact that his old arousal patterns were crumbling to make room for something new, yet undefined, he was better able to accept the flux and uncertainty of the gray zone. Maggie Revisited: Turning away from longing

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  For the affirmation of ordinary life, while necessarily denou n cin g certain distinctions, itself amounts to one; else it has no meanin g at all. The notion that there is a certain di gn ity a nd wor th in this life requires a contrast; no longer, indeed, between this life and s om e "h igh er" activity like eontemplation , war, active citizenship, or heroic a s ce tic i s m , bu t now ly i ng bet ween di ffer ent w a y s of li vin g the lif e of pr o du ctio n a nd r ep ro duc ti on. The no ti o n is never that whatever we do is a c cep ta ble . This would b e unint ell ig ibl e as the bas is for a notion of di g nit y. Ra t her the k e y po i nt is that the higher is to be foun d not outside of b ut a s a m an n er of living or din ary lif e. For the Reformers this manner was defined t h eo l o g ica ll y ; for cl as sical util it arians, in ter ms of (inst ru me nt al ) ration al i ty . Fo r M a rxis ts, the ex p ressivist element of free sel f-cre ation is add ed to En li gh ten men t rat ional it y. But in all cases, some di st inct i on is maintain ed b e tw een the hi gher, the ad mirab l e li fe and the lowe r lif e of s l oth, ir ration ality, s la v ery, or ali e nation. O nce one sets aside the n atu r alist illusion, however, what remains is an e x t rem el y important fact about modern moral consciousness: a tensio n b e tw een the affi r mat ion o f ordinar y life, to which we moderns are strongl y dr aw n, a nd so me of our mos t important moral distinctions. Indeed, it is too 24 · IDENTITY AND THE GOO D sim ple to speak of a tension. We are in conflict, even confusion, about wha t it means to affirm ordinary life. What for some is the highest affirmation is for others blanket denial.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Socrates replied that in fact all the terrible things we feared lay in the future, and were, therefore, unknown to us; it was impossible to separate the knowledge of future good or evil from our experience of good and evil in the present and the past. We say that courage was only one of the virtues, but anyone who was truly valiant must also have acquired the qualities of temperance, justice, wisdom, and goodness that were essential to valor. If you wanted to cultivate one virtue, you also needed to master the others. So at base, a single virtue, such as courage, must be identical with all the rest. By the end of the conversation, the three hoplites had to admit that, even though they had all endured the trauma of the battlefield and should be experts on the subject, they were quite unable to define courage. They had not discovered what it was, could not decide what distinguished it from the other virtues, and felt deeply perplexed. They were ignorant and, like children, needed to go back to school. 37 Socrates had invented dialectic, a rigorous dialogue designed to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. By asking questions and analyzing the implications of the answers, Socrates and his colleagues discovered the inherent flaws and inconsistencies of every single point of view. One definition after another would be rejected, and often the dialogue ended with the participants feeling as dizzy and stunned as Laches and Niceas. Socrates’ aim was not to come up with a clever or intellectually satisfying solution. The struggle usually led to the admission that there was no answer, and the discovery of this confusion was far more important than a neat conclusion, because once you had realized that you knew nothing, your philosophical quest could begin. Socrates’ dialectic was a Greek, rational version of the Indian brahmodya, the competition that attempted to formulate absolute truth but always ended in silence. For the Indian sages, the moment of insight came when they realized the inadequacy of their words, and thus intuited the ineffable. In that final moment of silence, they had sensed the brahman, even though they could not define it coherently. Socrates was also trying to elicit a moment of truth, when his interlocutors appreciated the creative profundity of human ignorance. The knowledge thus acquired was inseparable from virtue. Unlike the Sophists, Socrates did not believe that courage, justice, piety, and friendship were empty fictions, even though he could not define them. He was convinced that they pointed to something genuine and real that lay mysteriously just out of reach. As his dialogues demonstrated, you could never pin the truth down, but if you worked hard enough, you could make it a reality in your life.

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

  He told me he had met with Halligan and Shah when they first put the company together and were trying to raise money. “I went back and told my partners, ‘I wouldn’t put a penny into that place. They’re selling snake oil.’ Since then I’ve had to eat my words, because they’ve done pretty well.” Gordon had an engineering background. Before he became a venture capitalist he had built and sold a tech company. He asked me if I believed that HubSpot’s software did what the company claimed. “Do you really think some small-business owner, like a plumber, is going to come home at the end of the day and then write a blog? Do you think that happens?” “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Even if people use the software, do you think it actually works?” I had wondered the same thing. One of the consultants told me it was a mixed bag. Some customers buy the software but don’t use it, because they’re too busy to write a blog. They’re like people who sign up for a gym membership then never go to the gym. Among those who do use the software, results vary. There are some places where the stuff just doesn’t work very well, the consultant told me. “And then there are about 10 percent of customers where it’s absolutely magic,” he said. “It’s like you’ve given them a dowsing rod, they’ve found a well, the town is saved. It’s magic.” Gordon says Halligan and Shah are good at telling stories and generating hype, but he doesn’t think much of HubSpot’s engineering team, and he is particularly dismissive of Shah. “He’s not really an engineer anymore,” Gordon says. “He’s a blogger. He writes a blog. He makes PowerPoint decks.” Gordon was equally contemptuous of Cranium: “Everyone tells me he’s some kind of marketing genius, but I don’t see it. I’ve asked him several times to explain the product to me. He couldn’t do it. I still don’t understand what the product does. I’ve met a bunch of people at HubSpot and nobody there impresses me. None of them seems that smart.” After breakfast, we stood outside. It was a chilly Cambridge morning, with a cold wind blowing off the Charles River. Gordon told me I should stick around through the IPO, then find something better to do. “The place is a house of cards,” he told me. “I’m just hoping they can get to an IPO so the guys who invested can cash out before the whole thing collapses.” Those were pretty strong words, especially to use around a former business journalist. I don’t think Gordon meant that HubSpot was a flimflam operation. Obviously HubSpot had a real business, and was selling a real product, to real customers, and generating real revenue. I think what Gordon meant was that he didn’t think the business was sustainable, that sooner or later a strong wind would come along and blow the place down.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  28 It represented all the myriad patterns, forms, and potential that made nature the way it was. 29 The Way mysteriously ordered the shifting transformations of the qi, but it existed at a point where all the distinctions that characterize our normal modes of thought cease. Any attempt to pontificate about these ineffable matters simply led to unseemly, egotistic squabbling. We had to realize that we knew nothing. If we selected one theory and rejected another, we were distorting reality, trying to force the creative flow of life into a channel of our own making. The only valid assertion was a question that plunged us into doubt and a luminous sense of unknowing. We should not be dismayed to find that there was no such thing as certainty, because this confusion could lead us to the Way. Egotism was the greatest obstacle to enlightenment. It was an inflated sense of self that made us identify with one opinion rather than another; ego made us quarrelsome and officious, because we wanted to change other people to suit ourselves. Zhuangzi often mischievously used the figure of Confucius to express some of his own ideas. One day, he said, Yan Hui told Confucius that he was off to reform the king of Wei, a violent, reckless, and irresponsible young man. Marvelous, Confucius remarked wryly, but Yan Hui did not fully understand himself. How could he possibly change anybody else? All he could do was lay down the law and explain a few Confucian principles. How would these external directives affect the obscure subconscious impulses that were the source of the king’s cruelty? There was only one thing that Yan Hui could do. He must empty his mind, get rid of all this bustling self-importance, and find his inner core. “Centre your attention,” Confucius began. “Stop listening with your ears and listen with your mind. Then stop listening with your mind and listen with your primal spirit [qi]. Hearing is limited to the ear. Mind is limited to tallying things up. But the primal spirit’s empty: it’s simply that which awaits things. Tao is emptiness merged and emptiness is the mind’s fast.” 30 Instead of using every opportunity to feed the ego, we had to starve it. Even our best intentions could be grist to the mill of our selfishness. But qi had no agenda; it simply allowed itself to be shaped and transformed by the Way, and so everything turned out well. If Yan Hui stopped blocking the qi, deflecting it from its natural course, the Way could act through him. Only then could he become a force for good in the world. By the end of the conversation, however, Yan Hui seemed to have lost all interest in the project.

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

  This brought him, on the one hand, the peculiar favor of the emperor Constantine, but, on the other, from the leaders of the Nicene orthodoxy, the suspicion of a secret leaning to the Arian heresy.1898 It is certain that, before the council of Nicaea, he sympathized with Arius; that in the council he proposed an orthodox but indefinite compromise-creed; that after the council he was not friendly with Athanasius and other defenders of orthodoxy; and that, in the synod of Tyre, which deposed Athanasius in 335, he took a leading part, and, according to Epiphanius, presided. In keeping with these facts is his silence respecting the Arian controversy (which broke out in 318) in an Ecclesiastical History which comes down to 324, and was probably not completed till 326, when the council of Nicaea would have formed its most fitting close. He would rather close his history with the victory of Constantine over Licinius than with the Creed over which theological parties contended, and with which he himself was implicated. But, on the other hand, it is also a fact that he subscribed the Nicene Creed, though reluctantly, and reserving his own interpretation of the homoousion; that he publicly recommended it to the people of his diocese; and that he never formally rejected it. The only satisfactory solution of this apparent inconsistency is to be found in his own indecision and leaning to a doctrinal latitudinarianism, not unfrequent in historians who become familiar with a vast variety of opinions in different ages and countries. On the important point of the homoousion he never came to a firm and final conviction. He wavered between the older Origenistic subordinationism and the Nicene orthodoxy. He asserted clearly and strongly with Origen the eternity of the Son, and so far was decidedly opposed to Arianism, which made Christ a creature in time; but he recoiled from the homoousion, because it seemed to him to go beyond the Scriptures, and hence he made no use of the term, either in his book against Marcellus, or in his discourses against Sabellius. Religious sentiment compelled him to acknowledge the full deity of Christ; fear of Sabellianism restrained him. He avoided the strictly orthodox formulas, and moved rather in the less definite terms of former times. Theological acumen he constitutionally lacked. He was, in fact, not a man of controversy, but of moderation and peace. He stood upon the border between the ante-Nicene theology and the Nicene. His doctrine shows the color of each by turns, and reflects the unsettled problem of the church in the first stage of the Arian controversy.1899 With his theological indecision is connected his weakness of character. He was an amiable and pliant court-theologian, and suffered himself to be blinded and carried away by the splendor of the first Christian emperor, his patron and friend.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Parmenides had claimed that despite the evidence of our senses, everything was immobile. Zeno illustrated this by stating that an arrow in flight was actually motionless. At each second it occupied a space that was exactly equal to itself and was therefore always at rest, wherever it was. “What is moving is moving neither in the place in which it is, nor in the place in which it is not.” 12 Again Zeno argued that it was impossible for Achilles, who ran faster than anyone else, even to begin the race of the Panathenaea: before he could complete the course, he had to travel halfway; before he reached that point, he had to get a quarter of the way there. But this line of reasoning could continue ad infinitum: before Achilles covered any distance he had to cover half of it. 13 It was, therefore, impossible to talk sensibly about motion, so it was better, as Parmenides advised, to say nothing about it at all. Zeno wanted to demonstrate the logical absurdity of common sense and had discovered that motion was really a succession of immobilities in a way that would fascinate later philosophers. Chinese logicians, as we shall see, would evolve similar conundrums. But many of Zeno’s contemporaries felt that reason was undermining itself. If it was impossible to formulate any truth, what was the point of these discussions? The Sicilian philosopher Empedocles (495–435) tried to reinstate the normal world, while holding on to some of Parmenides’ insights. He argued that the four elements were indeed unchanging, but that they moved about and combined to form the phenomena we see. Anaxagoras of Smyrna (508–428) believed that every substance contained parts of every other substance, even though their presence could not be discerned by the naked eye. It followed that because it contained the seeds of all that exists, anything could develop into absolutely anything else. Like the Milesians, he tried to find the source from which everything developed. He called it nous (“mind”). This cosmic intelligence was divine, but not supernatural; it was merely another form of matter. Once nous had set everything in motion, there was nothing more it could do. Impersonal, natural forces took over, and the process continued without guidance. Democritus (466–370) imagined innumerable tiny particles careering around in empty space. He called them “atoms,” the word deriving from atomos (“uncuttable”). The atoms were solid, indivisible, and indestructible, but when they collided with one another, they stuck together, and created the familiar objects that we see around us. When the atoms dispersed, things fell apart and apparently died, but the atoms went on to create new forms of being. 14 These philosophers were not lonely thinkers, shut away from the world in ivory towers. They were celebrities. Empedocles, for example, claimed that he was divine, wore a purple robe, a golden girdle, and bronze shoes. Crowds flocked to hear him speak. With hindsight, we can see that some of the intuitions of these philosophers were remarkable.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  If we selected one theory and rejected another, we were distorting reality, trying to force the creative flow of life into a channel of our own making. The only valid assertion was a question that plunged us into doubt and a luminous sense of unknowing. We should not be dismayed to find that there was no such thing as certainty, because this confusion could lead us to the Way. Egotism was the greatest obstacle to enlightenment. It was an inflated sense of self that made us identify with one opinion rather than another; ego made us quarrelsome and officious, because we wanted to change other people to suit ourselves. Zhuangzi often mischievously used the figure of Confucius to express some of his own ideas. One day, he said, Yan Hui told Confucius that he was off to reform the king of Wei, a violent, reckless, and irresponsible young man. Marvelous, Confucius remarked wryly, but Yan Hui did not fully understand himself. How could he possibly change anybody else? All he could do was lay down the law and explain a few Confucian principles. How would these external directives affect the obscure subconscious impulses that were the source of the king’s cruelty? There was only one thing that Yan Hui could do. He must empty his mind, get rid of all this bustling self-importance, and find his inner core. “Centre your attention,” Confucius began. “Stop listening with your ears and listen with your mind. Then stop listening with your mind and listen with your primal spirit [ qi ]. Hearing is limited to the ear. Mind is limited to tallying things up. But the primal spirit’s empty: it’s simply that which awaits things. Tao is emptiness merged and emptiness is the mind’s fast.” 30 Instead of using every opportunity to feed the ego, we had to starve it. Even our best intentions could be grist to the mill of our selfishness. But qi had no agenda; it simply allowed itself to be shaped and transformed by the Way, and so everything turned out well. If Yan Hui stopped blocking the qi, deflecting it from its natural course, the Way could act through him. Only then could he become a force for good in the world. By the end of the conversation, however, Yan Hui seemed to have lost all interest in the project.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Like the salt, the brahman could not be seen, but it could be experienced. It was manifest in every single living thing. It was the subtle essence in the banyan seed, from which a great tree grows, yet when Shvetaketu dissected the seed, he could not see anything. The brahman, Uddalaka explained, was the sap that was in every part of the tree and gave it life.27 It was, therefore, the atman of the tree, as it was the atman of every single human being; all things shared the same essence. But most people did not understand this. They imagined that they were special and unique, different from every other being on the face of the earth. Instead of appreciating the deepest truth about themselves, they clung to those particularities that, they thought, made them so precious and interesting. But in reality, these distinguishing characteristics were no more durable or significant than rivers that flowed into the same sea. Once they had merged, they became “just the ocean” and did not stridently assert their individuality, crying, “I am that river,” “I am this river.” “In exactly the same way, son,” Uddalaka persisted, “when all these creatures reach the existent, they are not aware that ‘we are reaching the existent.’ ” They no longer cling to their individuality. Whether they were tigers, wolves, lions, or gnats, “they all merge into that,” because that is what they have always been, and they can only ever be that. To cling to the mundane self was, therefore, a delusion that would lead inescapably to pain and confusion. People could escape this only by acquiring the deep, liberating knowledge that the brahman was their atman, the truest thing about them.28 But this knowledge was not easy to acquire. How could you find the unknowable atman? The atman was not what Western people call the “soul” or the psyche.29 The Upanishads did not separate body from spirit, but saw human beings as a composite whole. Uddalaka made his son fast for fifteen days, allowing him to drink as much water as he liked. At the end of this, Shvetaketu was so weak and malnourished that he could no longer recite the Vedic texts that he had mastered so competently with his guru. He had learned that the mind was not pure intellect but was also “made up of food, of breath, of water, and speech, and heat.”30 The atman was physical and spiritual; it was immanent in the heart and in the body, the ultimate, immutable, inner core of all things, material and ephemeral. It could not be identified with or compared to any single phenomenon. It was “no thing,” and yet it was the deepest truth of everything.31 It could be discovered only within the human being, after a long, disciplined effort.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Socrates had attempted to discover the true nature of goodness, but he does not seem to have formulated this in a way that satisfied anybody—perhaps not even himself. In the early dialogues, Plato probably stuck closely to his master’s procedures. As we have seen, he made Socrates ask his interlocutors to consider different instances of a virtue such as courage, in the hope of finding a common denominator. If this type of behavior was brave and that was not, what did this tell us about the nature of courage per se? How could you behave virtuously if you did not know what virtue was? In the political turbulence of his time, in which the supporters of the competing polities—democracy, oligarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, monarchy—stridently argued their case, Plato believed that the only hope of achieving a solution was to find the underlying principles of good government. Like Socrates, Plato was disturbed by the relativism of the Sophists. He wanted to find a dimension of reality that was constant and unchanging but that could be grasped by a sustained effort of rational thought. Yet Plato departed from Socrates by putting forward an extraordinary suggestion. Virtue, he argued, was not a concept that could be constructed by accumulating examples of behavior in daily life. It was an independent entity, an objective reality that existed on a higher plane than the material world. The ideas of goodness, justice, or beauty could not be experienced by the senses; we could not see, hear, or touch them, but they could be comprehended by the power of reasoning that resided in the soul (psyche) of each human being. Everything in our material world had an eternal, unchanging form: courage, justice, largeness—even a table. If we stood on a riverbank, we recognized that the body of water in front of us was a river rather than a pond or an ocean because we had the form of a river in our minds. But this universal concept was not something that we had created for our own convenience. It existed in its own right. In this world, for example, no two things were truly equal, yet we had an idea of absolute equality, even though we had no experience of it in our everyday lives. “Things have some fixed being or essence of their own,” Plato made Socrates say. “They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature.”78

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

  With the feelings of accommodation it is very much the same. Donders has shown[234] that the apparent magnifying power of spectacles of moderate convexity hardly depends at all upon their enlargement of the retinal image, but rather on the relaxation they permit of the muscle of accommodation. This suggests an object farther off, and consequently a much larger one, since its retinal size rather increases than diminishes. But in this case the same vacillation of judgment as in the previously mentioned case of convergence takes place. The recession made the object seem larger, but the apparent growth in size of the object now makes it look as if it came nearer instead of receding. The effect thus contradicts its own cause. Everyone is conscious, on first putting on a pair of spectacles, of a doubt whether the field of view draws near or retreats.[235] There is still another deception, occurring in persons who have had one eye-muscle suddenly paralyzed has led Wundt to affirm that the eyeball-feeling proper, the incoming sensation of effected rotation, tells us only of the direction of our eye-movements, but not of their whole extent.[236] For this reason, and because not only Wundt, but many other authors, think the phenomena in these partial paralyses demonstrate the existence of a feeling of innervation, a feeling of the outgoing nervous current, opposed to every different sensation whatever, it seems proper to note the facts with a certain degree of detail.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  It is difficult to know exactly what Socrates said or thought, because he wrote nothing down. Indeed, he disapproved of writing, which, he thought, encouraged a slick, notional conception of truth. Our main sources are the dialogues written by his pupil Plato years after Socrates’ death. Plato attributed many of his own insights and attitudes to Socrates, especially in the middle and later works, but the early dialogues, such as Laches: On Courage, probably give us an accurate idea of the way Socrates operated. We see that his main preoccupation was goodness, which he believed to be indivisible. Socrates’ conception of the Good was, therefore, not unlike Confucius’s ren; he seemed to have been reaching toward a transcendent notion of absolute virtue that could never be adequately conceived or expressed. As we shall see in the next chapter, Plato would make the Good the supreme, ineffable ideal. Socrates may have hoped to advance further than the perplexity and confusion that marked the end of each of his recorded discussions, but this seemed to be as far as he got. By rigorous use of logos, he had discovered a transcendence that he deemed essential to human life. However closely he and his companions reasoned, something always eluded them. Socrates took pride in the ignorance that he had discovered at the heart of each firmly held opinion, no matter how dogmatically maintained. He understood just how little he knew, and was not ashamed to encounter the limitations of his thought again and again. If he did feel that he had an edge over others, it was only because he realized that he would never find answers to the questions he raised. Where the Sophists had taken refuge from this ignorance in practical action, Socrates experienced it as an ekstasis that revealed the deep mystery of life. People must interrogate their most fundamental assumptions. Only thus could they think and act correctly, see things as they truly were, get beyond false opinion, and arrive at intimations of that perfect intuition that would make them behave well at all times. Those who did not do this could only live expediently and superficially. As he explained in one of the most memorable utterances attributed to him: “The life that is unexamined is not worth living.”38

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

  The moment the signal occurs, or the time is run out, the subject, who until then seems in a perfectly normal waking condition, will experience the suggested effect. In many instances, whilst thus obedient to the suggestion, he seems to fall into the hypnotic condition again. This is proved by the fact that the moment the hallucination or suggested performance is over he forgets it, denies all knowledge of it, and so forth; and by the further fact that he is 'suggestable' during its performance, that is, will receive new hallucinations, etc., at command. A moment later and this suggestibility has disappeared. It cannot be said, how-ever, that relapse into the trance is an absolutely necessary condition for the post-hypnotic carrying out of commands, for the subject may be neither suggestible nor amnesic, and may struggle with all the strength of his will against the absurdity of this impulse which he feels rising in him, he knows not why. In these cases, as in most cases, he forgets the circumstance of the impulse having been suggested to him in a previous trance; regards it as arising within him-self; and often improvises, as he yields to it, some more or less plausible or ingenious motive by which to justify it to the lookers-on. He acts, in short, with his usual sense of personal spontaneity and freedom; and the disbelievers in the freedom of the will have naturally made much of these cases in their attempts to show it be an illusion. The only really mysterious feature of these deferred suggestions is the patient's absolute ignorance during the interval preceding their execution that they have been deposited in his mind. They will often surge up at the preappointed time, even though you have vainly tried a while before to make him recall the circumstances of their production. The most important class of post-hypnotic suggestions are, of course, those relative to the patient's health—bowels, sleep, and other bodily functions. Among the most interesting (apart from the hallucinations) are those relative to future trances. One can determine the hour and minute, or the signal, at which the patient will of his own accord lapse into trace again.

• From Between Us

  The future is yours, and I hope this book can help, if even just a little, to help build a better future—one that accommodates diversity. This is a work of nonfiction. However, some potentially identifying characteristics and most of the names of participants in studies with which I was involved have been changed. Also, to make them come to life for the reader, I have given invented names to participants in other studies who were not named in the published research. Copyright © 2022 by Batja Mesquita All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Jacket design: Jared Oriel Jacket art: The Laundry Room / Stocksy United Ltd Book design by Lovedog Studio Production manager: Devon Zahn Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 978-1-324-00244-4 ISBN 978-1-324-00247-5 (ebk.) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . Lost in Translation Do all human beings have emotions, just like we all have noses or hands? Our noses have different shapes and sizes but when all is said and done they help us breathe, and let us sniff and smell the world around us. Our hands can be big or small, strong or weak, but regardless they help us touch, grasp, hold, and carry. Does the same hold for emotions? Is it true that emotions can look different but, in the end, we all have the same emotions—that deep inside, everybody is like yourself? It would mean that once you take the time to get to know somebody, you will recognize and comprehend the feelings of people who have different backgrounds, speak different languages, come from other communities or cultures. But are other people angry, happy, and scared, just like you ? And are your feelings just like theirs? I do not think so. The first time I became aware that my emotions were not like those of people from another culture was when I moved to the United States. I was raised in the Netherlands, and, save some short ventures to other European countries, that was where I had lived until I was about thirty years old. In many ways, my transition was easy. My English was conversational when I first came to the States, because I had used it professionally. My American colleagues at the University of Michigan could not have been nicer. The day I arrived, they welcomed me with a faculty dinner. One of them invited me to their Christmas family dinner; others gave me small end-of-the year presents. Yet, I remember my first year in the United States as rocky. I often felt a little off.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  But ‘this’ is not now imaginable. In that respect H. and all the dead are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him. In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love—its eyes cannot here be used—to the reality, through—across—all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings. I mustn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her. Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life—that’s one way it differs from novels—his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about. My reason for assuming that I do this to other people is the fact that so often I find them obviously doing it to me. We all think we’ve got one another taped. And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as often as proves necessary. Unless I have to be finally given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever; ‘free among the dead.’ Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to H., it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all. That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End. Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, ‘No toffee now. But when you’ve grown up and don’t really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose’?

• From Cultish (2021)

  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. I’ve found that “cult” has become one of those terms that can mean something totally different depending on the context of the conversation and the attitudes of the speaker. It can be invoked as a damning accusation implying death and destruction, a cheeky metaphor suggesting not much more than some matching outfits and enthusiasm, and pretty much everything in between. In modern discourse, someone could apply the word “cult” to a new religion, a group of online radicals, a start-up, and a makeup brand all in the same breath. While working at a beauty magazine a few years ago, I promptly noticed how commonplace it was for cosmetics brands to invoke “cult” as a marketing term to generate buzz for new product launches. A cursory search for the word in my old work inbox yielded thousands of results. “Take a sneak peek at the next cult phenomenon,” reads a press release from a trendy makeup line, swearing that the new face powder from their so-called Cult Lab will “send beauty junkies and makeup fanatics into a frenzy.” Another pitch from a skincare company vows that their $150 “Cult Favorites Set” of CBD-infused elixirs “is more than skincare, it’s the priceless gift of an opportunity to decompress and love oneself in order to handle whatever life throws at them.” A priceless opportunity?

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

  “Pick your flop,” he said and gestured toward the beds. “I'll take a . that is, if you do get dressed shower while you get dressed for bed . . for bed.” She smirked and grabbed her bag, plopping down on the bed closest to the door. Later, he stepped out of the shower and wrapped a large towel around his waist. Its mate was big enough to mostly cover the girl, but not him. He turned the light off before he emerged and made his way to the far bed. She hadn’t drawn the curtains and moonlight filled the room, so he could see her form under the bedclothes. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep. But he sensed her eyes on him as he tossed away the towel and then slid naked beneath the sheets. He curled up with his back toward her. “Iocan?” “Hmm? I thought you were asleep.” “Can't... too much going on in my head.” “Betteritry% “Do you believe in God?” “Oh, brother.” “Oh, humor me a little, will you?” “Do you?” She was silent for a long time, then, “I used to. Then I didn’t; now I’m not so sure. The things I’ve seen since .. .” “Since being drafted into the Palatinae? You couldn’t have seen that much yet.” “The cane devil. Jesus! How about that?” “Supernatural creature? Is that how you figure it?” “Well, yeah.” samtaaing 221 “So, you figure if there are evil, supernatural monsters in the world, they must have a counterpart — God and his angels and whatever, right? Well, the cane devil is probably a perfectly natural species. It scares the hell out of us because of the legends that have grown up around it. It’s likely been around as long as we have ... mankind that is. Everything we call supernatural is probably just something natural that science hasn’t figured out yet.” “Then what about vampires?” “What about them?” “How do you explain them?” “Diseased. They have some malady that makes them crave blood. Just like a diabetic can’t make his own insulin, he has to get it by other means. They’re pretty pathetic, really, worse than junkies.” “So, there are no true vampires?” “T didn’t say that.” S bw a “Some, the decent sorts, just want to live quiet lives and be left alone. They find ways to keep a low profile.” “Decent sorts?” ae they can’t help being what they are, no more than we can .

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now? Indeed it’s likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards. And I shan’t know whether it is or not until the next blow comes—when, say, fatal disease is diagnosed in my body too, or war breaks out, or I have ruined myself by some ghastly mistake in my work. But there are two questions here. In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, or because I only dream that I believe them? As for the things themselves, why should the thoughts I had a week ago be any more trustworthy than the better thoughts I have now? I am surely, in general, a saner man than I was then. Why should the desperate imaginings of a man dazed—I said it was like being concussed—be especially reliable? Because there was no wishful thinking in them? Because, being so horrible, they were therefore all the more likely to be true? But there are fear- fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment dreams. And were they wholly distasteful? No. In a way I liked them. I am even aware of a slight reluctance to accept the opposite thoughts. All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just Billingsgate—mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment. But the mood is no evidence. Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector. Her bad language throws no light on it one way or the other. And I can believe He is a vet when I think of my own suffering. It is harder when I think of hers. What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Maybe it feels odd and peer pressure–y at first, but they didn’t ask you to fork over your life savings or kill anyone. How much damage can it do? Cultish language works so efficiently (and invisibly) to mold our worldview in the shape of the guru’s that once it’s embedded, it sticks. After you grow your hair out, move back home, delete the app, whatever it is, the special vocabulary is still there. In part 2 of this book, we’ll meet a man named Frank Lyford, a survivor of the 1990s “suicide cult” Heaven’s Gate, who, twenty-five years after defecting and disowning its belief system, still calls his two former leaders by their monastic names, Ti and Do; refers to the group as “the classroom”; and describes its members’ haunting fate with the euphemism “leaving Earth,” just as he was taught to do over two decades ago. The idea to write this book occurred to me after my best friend from college decided to quit drinking and go to Alcoholics Anonymous. She lived three thousand miles away from me at the time, so I only saw her a few times a year, and from afar, I couldn’t tell how committed she was to this no-drinking thing, or really what to make of it. That is, until the first time I went to visit her after she got sober. That night, we were having trouble figuring out dinner plans, when the following sentence exited her mouth: “I’ve been HALTing all day, I caught a resentment at work, but trying not to future-trip . Ugh, let’s just focus on dinner: First things first , as they say!” I must have looked at her as if she had three heads. “HALT”? “Future-trip”? “Caught a resentment”? What on earth was she saying?* Three months in AA, and this person who was so close to me I could’ve accurately distinguished the meanings of her different exhalations was suddenly speaking a foreign language. Instantly, I had a heuristic reaction—it was the same instinct I felt looking at those old photos of Tasha Samar in the desert; the same response my dad had the day he first stepped onto Synanon’s grounds. A Jonestown survivor once told me, “They say that a cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.” Or, if you’re like me, you know it when you hear it. The exclusive language was the biggest clue. AA wasn’t Synanon, of course; it was changing my friend’s life for the better. But its conquest of her vocabulary was impossible to unhear. Instincts aren’t social science, though—and in truth, I didn’t actually “know” AA was a “cult.” But I had a strong inkling that there was something mighty and mysterious going on there. I had to look deeper. I had to understand: How did the group’s language take such rapid hold of my friend?

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  But ‘this’ is not now imaginable. In that respect H. and all the dead are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him. In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love—its eyes cannot here be used—to the reality, through—across—all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings. I mustn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her. Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life—that’s one way it differs from novels—his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about. My reason for assuming that I do this to other people is the fact that so often I find them obviously doing it to me. We all think we’ve got one another taped. And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as often as proves necessary. Unless I have to be finally given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever; ‘free among the dead.’ Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to H., it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all. That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End. Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, ‘No toffee now. But when you’ve grown up and don’t really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose’?