Joy

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 Between Us

  Happiness is not an end in the Daoist tradition. If there were an end, it would be to be flexible enough to adjust to any turn of events. Life is constantly changing, and happy events may turn out to have a dark side or miserable consequences. As one traditional Chinese text reads: “For misery, happiness is leaning against it; for happiness, misery is hiding in it.” The views of our foreparents in the United States may have been closer to the Daoist perspective than to ours. The 1850 Webster’s Dictionary reads that “perfect happiness, or pleasure unalloyed with pain, is not attainable in this life.” The same dictionary recognizes that happiness occurs against the background of unhappiness: “Happiness is comparative. To the person distressed with pain, relief from that pain affords happiness.” A century later (in 1961), the definition of “happiness” has changed to include: “a state of wellbeing characterized by relative permanence . . . and by a natural desire for its continuation.” An undilutedly positive state became defining of happiness. In many cultures, though, the model is closer to Wang’s and the Daoist definition: happiness and unhappiness are intimately connected. My friend, the psychologist Mayumi Karasawa, told me that, growing up, her parents and teachers warned her against showing happiness about a good grade, because it would have disrupted her relationships with her classmates. Happiness, especially the proud and excited happiness that is so common among white Americans, does not serve the Japanese goal of maintaining good relationships, and is considered harmful. In the study described before, Japanese psychologists Yukiko Uchida and Shinobu Kitayama compared U.S. with Japanese conceptions of happiness and found that, in contrast to U.S. students, who saw their happiness as exclusively positive, Japanese college students routinely listed negative features of happiness: Happiness is “elusive,” because it never lasts, it is hard to put your finger on, and it is deceptive (distracting from reality). Happiness is “socially disruptive,” because it makes people inattentive to their environment and their obligations, and because it risks eliciting the envy or jealousy of others.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  FLUKES AND PREFERENCESBy rating the importance of each type of feeling in a variety of your peak turn-ons you will be able to determine whether certain emotions intensify your arousal consistently, only occasionally, or not at all. If your emotional ratings differ for each turn-on, this is an indication that your feelings were situational—simply the result of a unique set of circumstances. Remember Ron, who had a passionate and superanxious encounter in the basement of a London pub with his boss’s wife? In this unique situation, anxiety whipped up his excitation to a fever pitch, whereas in other far less risky situations he felt too nervous to maintain an erection. Sometimes it’s merely a fluke that a particular emotion makes a surprising appearance in an erotic scenario. If many of your peak turn-ons have a high rating for one or more emotion, you can assume that you have a preference for that set of feelings; you consistently rely on them to help arouse you. Keep in mind that an emotion need not be felt strongly for it to be important to you erotically. For example, you might prefer to feel just a touch of guilt. Maybe if you’re not feeling slightly naughty you become bored sexually. At the other extreme, if you are often flooded with intense guilt during or after sex, you are unlikely to experience it as an aphrodisiac. If you’re like most members of The Group, the unexpected aphrodisiacs—anxiety, guilt, and anger—are most likely to enhance arousal in low to moderate doses. Many members of The Group say that these “negative” aphrodisiacs appear in their peak turn-ons as often as the loving, celebrative, “positive” ones—but more in the background. The closeness emotions are different and special. A sense of connection appears to be a predictable result of a high proportion of memorable turn-ons—even those that involve anxious or angry feelings. How can such negative emotions lead to such positive results? To understand this apparent contradiction, we must turn our attention to an extremely important characteristic of emotions—their changeability. EMOTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONSWhen you recognize and accept what you feel, without judging your emotions by logical standards, you will notice that the natural life of most feelings is remarkably short and fluid. If you are able to feel anger when you are threatened or when someone treats you unjustly, and if circumstances allow you to express yourself assertively, your anger will yield to a calm self-assurance. Likewise, if you’re not ashamed to feel anxious when you perceive danger, chances are that you will take whatever steps are necessary to protect yourself, thereby demonstrating just how courageous you can be. Feelings that are attended to and honored move along, sometimes veering off in unexpected directions. It’s the feelings that fester and won’t let go that cause us distress. People who ignore or resist their feelings often end up obsessed with them.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Third, once mind had begun but before it could become the cultural mind we can recognize today, it was necessary to enrich it by adding impressive new features. Among them were a powerful, image-based memory function capable of learning, recalling, and interrelating unique facts and events; an expansion of the imagination, reasoning, and symbolic thought capabilities such that nonverbal narratives could be generated; and the ability to translate nonverbal images and symbols into coded languages. The latter opened the way for a decisive tool in the construction of cultures: a parallel line of verbal narratives. Alphabets and grammars were the “genetic” tools of this latter and enabling development. The eventual invention of writing was the crowning entry into the toolbox of creative intelligence, an intelligence capable of being moved by feeling to respond to homeostatic challenges and possibilities. Fourth, a critical instrument of the cultural mind resides with a largely unsung function: play, the desire to engage in seemingly useless operations that includes the moving about of actual pieces of the world, real or in toy form; the moving of our own bodies in that world, as in dancing or playing an instrument; the moving of images in the mind, real or invented. Imagination is a close partner of this endeavor, of course, but imagination does not fully capture the spontaneity, the range and reach of PLAY, to use the capitalized form that Jaak Panksepp prefers when he talks about this function. Think of play when you think about what can be done with the infinity of sounds, colors, shapes, or with pieces in Erector or Legos sets or computer games; think of play when you think of the infinitely possible combinations of word meanings and sounds; think of play as you plan an experiment or ponder different designs for whatever it is that you are planning to do. Fifth, the ability, especially developed in humans, to work cooperatively with others to achieve a discernible, shared goal. Cooperativity relies on another well-developed human ability: joint attention, a phenomenon to which Michael Tomasello has devoted pioneering studies.18 Play and cooperation are, in and of themselves, independently of the results of the respective activities, homeostatically favorable activities. They reward the “players/cooperators” with a slew of pleasurable feelings. Sixth, cultural responses begin in mental representations but come into being by the grace of movement. Movement is deeply embedded in the cultural process. It is from emotion-related movements happening in the interior of our organisms that we construct the feelings that motivate cultural interventions. Cultural interventions often arise from emotion-related movements—of the hands, quite prominently, of the vocal apparatus, of the facial musculature (a critical enabler of communication), or of the whole body. Last, the march from life’s beginnings to the doors of human cultural development and cultural transmission was only possible due to another homeostasis-driven development: the genetic machinery that standardized the regulation of life inside cells and permitted the transmission of life to new generations. —

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Certain body sites—for instance, the endocrine glands—are brought into play and produce molecules capable of changing body functions on their own. The upshot of all this bustle is a collection of changes in the geometries of viscera—the caliber of blood vessels and tubular organs, for example, the distension of muscles, the change of respiratory and cardiac rhythms. As a result, in the case of delight, visceral operations are harmonized, by which I mean that the viscera act with no impediment or difficulty and the harmonized state of the body proper is duly signaled to the parts of the nervous system charged with making images of the old interior; metabolism is changed so that the ratio between energy demand and production is reconciled; the operation of the nervous system itself is modified so that our image production is made easier and abundant and our imagination becomes more fluid; positive images are favored over negative ones; one’s mental guard is lowered even as, interestingly, our immune responses are possibly made stronger. It is the ensemble of these actions, as it becomes represented in the mind, that makes way for the pleasant feeling state that one describes as delight and encompasses a minimal amount of stress and considerable relaxation. 6 Negative emotions are associated with distinct physiological states, all of them problematic from the perspective of health and future well-being. 7 The feelings newly provoked by emotive responses literally ride, physiologically speaking, on top of the wave of spontaneous, homeostatic responses, already traveling along in their natural flow. The process behind emotive responses is a far cry from the relative immediacy and transparency of the process behind spontaneous feelings. Feelings may be more or less prominent in our minds. Minds engaged in a variety of analyses, imaginings, narratives, and decisions pay more or less attention to a particular object, depending on how relevant it may be at the moment. Not every item merits attention, and this is true of feelings as well. Where Do Emotive Responses Come From? The answer to this question is clear. Emotive responses originate in specific brain systems—sometimes in a specific region—responsible for commanding the varied components of the response: the chemical molecules that must be secreted, the visceral changes that must be accomplished, the movements of face, limbs, or whole body that are part of a particular emotion, be it fear, anger, or joy. We know where the critical brain regions are located. Mostly they consist of groups of neurons (nuclei) in the hypothalamus, in the brain stem (where a region known as the periaqueductal gray is especially prominent), and in the basal forebrain (where the amygdala nuclei and the region of the nucleus accumbens are the lead structures). All of these regions can be activated by the processing of specific mental contents.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  4EMOTIONAL APHRODISIACSFeelings are potent sexual intensifiers—but not always the ones you expect. In a far corner of the globe, hidden from view, is a magical substance capable of evoking sexual desire in anyone lucky enough to find it—or so holds one of the oldest and most persistent of all myths. The perennial search for a “true” aphrodisiac has motivated people to sample everything from barks and roots of trees, leaves and flowers of exotic plants, innumerable animal extracts and body parts, to a host of concocted potions. More recently scientists have taken an interest in the biochemistry of attraction and arousal. But despite our best efforts, a reliable sex-enhancing substance remains little more than a dream. Aphrodisiac quests have lured seekers for centuries. But few have given much attention to the readily available and remarkably potent aphrodisiacs much closer to home—our emotions. Perhaps emotions are so much a part of everyday life that we take them for granted, erroneously believing that anything as ordinary as a feeling couldn’t possibly make the difference between ho-hum sex and sex that moves and satisfies us profoundly. Yet emotion plays an enormously important role in sexual desire, arousal, and fulfillment. Whereas the four cornerstones we explored in the last chapter are the building blocks of eroticism, emotions are the energizers. Feelings make sex matter. True, some purely lusty encounters and fantasies, appear to be practically emotionless.1 Although sex with minimal emotion can offer a pleasurable distraction and a welcome release of tension—while keeping the participants shielded from vulnerabilities—such experiences are limited in the amount of satisfaction they can bring. Among The Group’s peak turn-ons, not one single encounter or fantasy—not even anonymous ones with strangers—is free of emotion. Without emotion, we simply cannot have a peak. Emotion has always been a focus of modern psychology. Yet no matter how much feelings are analyzed, there is very little consensus about what they actually are, where they come from, how they work, or what they mean. No one can even agree on how many different emotions we’re capable of having. William James, the great psychologist, speculated that “there is no limit to the number of possible emotions which may exist.”2 Disagreements aside, just about everyone recognizes the crucial role of emotions. German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann was unequivocal: “emotions are the stuff of life’s inner content and the basis of its richness.”3 Reaching a similar conclusion after an exhaustive study of emotion in psychology, James Hillman proclaimed that “emotion is the essence of life.”4 Whenever The Group describes peak encounters or favorite fantasies, their stories are animated by a wide range of emotions. Feelings associated with peak eroticism tend to be of six distinct types, listed here starting with the ones mentioned most frequently: Exuberance, including joy, celebration, surprise, freedom, euphoria, and pride. Satisfaction, including contentment, happiness, relaxation, and security. Closeness, including love, tenderness, affection, connection, unity (oneness), and appreciation. Anxiety, including fear, vulnerability, weakness, worry, and nervousness. Guilt, including remorse, naughtiness, dirtiness, and shame.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision — a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult? The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need — the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel. As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.

• From Between Us

  Tsai’s team also found that Korean students who played a computer game with an avatar (supposedly representing a real-life playmate), trusted an avatar with a calm smile more and gave them more money than an avatar with an excited smile; for white American students, it was the reverse. Interestingly, the intensity of their smiles, but not the gender or ethnicity of the avatars, determined how trustworthy the students felt them to be. These experiments made use of avatars generated by a computer. They are not exactly modeling natural interactions, and yet, it is because of their artificiality that we can conclude that the subtle facial cues from which we infer emotions play an important role in whose faces we find trustworthy, and to whom we give money. Korean students preferred the calm faces. Other Ways of Feeling Good: Connected Emotion research was saturated with East Asia–North American comparisons when I started studying emotions in Latinx in the United States and Mexicans in Mexico. If I thought that all collectivist cultures were alike—less happy than white Americans—I was in for a big surprise. Judging by survey research, the happiest people in my studies were the Latinx in the U.S. and the Mexicans in Mexico; they reported more happiness even than white American samples. Together with several gifted master’s students at Wake Forest University, and my colleague Hilda Fernandez de Ortega, now at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla in Mexico, I collected data on happiness in the early 2000s. We ended up not publishing them, in part because we found it hard at the time to make sense of them. What did it mean that the first-generation Mexican community samples in North Carolina and the Mexican students in Mexico were so happy? Did they put less emphasis on connectedness than the Japanese? That seemed unlikely. I would now say that happiness figures prominently in achieving the connectedness and familísmo that is so central in Latin culture. Happiness is part of a strong sense of attachment, loyalty, reciprocity, and solidarity among members of the nuclear and extended family, and it plays an important role in the pleasant relationships, or simpatía, that governs Latinx and Mexican social life more broadly. Simpatía means to be happy and positive in positive situations, and to de-emphasize negative feelings and behaviors in negative situations. A simpático/simpática person is happy, polite, and agreeable, and avoids being stressed or losing their temper. Therefore, where happiness in some East Asian contexts can be a threat to connectedness, connectedness in Latin contexts—within the family and outside—is the whole reason for happiness.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Once in bed we kissed good night and a warm feel flowed through me like heated olive oil. I felt a new level of respect, appreciation, and being cared for. He immediately sensed my openness and his sensitivity turned me on all the more. We caressed each other slow and easy. Of course, I ended up taking him inside me and having a furious orgasm. He was also very moved by the experience. Lying there quietly with him in the wet heat afterward was sweet, so sweet. Just as we might expect, Connie’s sense of being accepted and affirmed by Mary is connected to the developing intimacy between them. However, analysis of The Group’s peak turn-ons reveals that even casual encounters or fantasies can be profoundly validating. Raoul, an interior designer in his early thirties, describes the affirmative impact of a one-time encounter: Some of my friends tease me because I don’t like one-night stands—in fact, I hate them! Maybe that’s one reason why I have trouble meeting women (besides the fact that I’m not really over my last relationship). One evening after working late on a project that wasn’t going well, I went out for a drink. I was in one of those moods when I question my abilities and generally rip myself apart. I finished a drink and was about to leave when the bartender brought me another, pointing out an attractive woman across the bar who had bought it for me. I went over to talk with her even though I was eager to get home. Not only was she beautiful with a radiant smile, she was also smart and funny—and married. She was in town for a conference and this was her last night. We really hit it off so she invited me to her hotel. I was naive enough to think we would just continue talking. She made me feel so good about myself, telling me I was handsome and that I must be a great designer because I dress with such style. In a way these sounded like empty lines, but she seemed sincere and I needed to hear it. I spent the night with her and have never felt so good about casual sex. Even though we hardly knew each other it was very intimate. I can’t remember ever being a better lover. In the morning when I took her to the airport she softly said, “I’ll always remember you, my darling,” with such finality and love that I cried on the way to my office. It wasn’t so much that I wouldn’t see her again but that she somehow made me feel worth something. By midafternoon I had worked out my problem at work. Maybe this was pure coincidence but I don’t think so.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Some proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill. These proclaim Christ out of love, knowing that I have been put here for the defense of the gospel; the others proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but intending to increase my suffering in my imprisonment. What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice. (1:15–18) Some Christians may have resisted anything liable to draw Roman attention or opposition to their community and argued that Paul’s imprisonment vindicated their position. It is striking that, although he mentions community persecution at Philippi, he says nothing about any such general reprisals at Ephesus. Many there may not have agreed with whatever Paul did to result in his arrest. Epaphras and Epaphroditus In his letter to Philemon, Paul mentions a person named Epaphras whom he describes as “my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus” (1:23). In the other letter from that same Ephesian imprisonment, Paul mentions an Epaphroditus sent to him with assistance by the Philippians. But Epaphras and Epaphroditus are simply the shorter and longer forms of the same name. So, for example, Luke uses the shorter form Silas repeatedly in Acts 15–18, but Paul uses the longer Silvanus in 1 Thessalonians 1:1 and 2 Corinthians 1:19. Conversely, Luke uses the longer form Priscilla in Acts 18:2, 18, 26, but Paul uses the shorter Prisca in 1 Corinthians 16:19 and Romans 16:3. In those instances we are dealing with shorter and longer forms of the same name for the same person. Here, then, is the question. Granted that Epaphras and Epaphroditus are the same name, are Epaphras of the Philemon letter and Epaphroditus of the Philippians letter the same person? On the one hand, as we see below, Paul’s Epaphroditus is obviously from Philippi, but in the pseudo-Pauline letter to the Colossians, an Epaphras is called “one of you” that is, he is from Colossae (1:7; 4:12). On the other, it is surely too coincidental to have two persons with the same name playing significant roles in Paul’s Ephesian imprisonment. It might even be too coincidental to have two different persons with the same name playing significant roles in two different Pauline imprisonments. Tentatively, then, and despite Colossians, we take Epaphroditus and Epaphras as the same name for the same person during Paul’s Ephesian imprisonment. What do we know about this Epaphras/Epaphroditus from Paul’s two prison letters that mention his name? In his letter to the Philippians Paul thanks them for their consistent assistance to him from the very beginning of their relationship. In this context he mentions the financial aid they just sent to him with Epaphroditus:

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  If all else fails at least we can spend some time going down memory lane together. When I pull up to his house half an hour later, I feel like I’ve just entered Dr. Dolittle’s yard. Ducks are waddling down the driveway, cats are purring on the back porch and the chocolate Lab is barking from inside the door. Now that I can fully see the house in daylight, its many charms are fully exposed, and what’s more charming about an old farmhouse than a little decay? Paint is peeling, weeds are flourishing, creaky uneven wooden floorboards lead to the back door and I am thoroughly captivated by every detail. I shout hello and he yells for me to come in, the rickety screen door banging shut behind me. I find him busily puttering around his rustic kitchen, surrounded by piles of greens and fruit, bread and olives, a tall vase of wildflowers holding command at the center. The kitchen has a fresh, yeasty smell and I notice a bread machine on the floor, an appliance I haven’t seen in at least 25 years since the one my mother bought me when I was newly married and my entire kitchen was the size of the bread machine. I’m enchanted. If there is an antidote to the ferocity of my emotions of late, I’m certain it may well be found right here in this kitchen with its freshly baked bread and just-picked flowers. I am not sure how to greet him. We are too new for perfunctory kisses hello, but it seems cold and slightly absurd at this point to keep my physical distance. I approach him and he bends down to give me a quick kiss on the lips. It gives me a stabbing pang of sadness, this kiss – the informality and ease of it a reminder of my marriage that I hadn’t realized I missed. The acknowledgement of familiarity embedded in this greeting jars me from my revelry: do I even want this level of ease with a man? It feels too much like it should be happening with Michael instead. My recent forays have been all about sex, but this one is embarking on new territory: intimacy. To mask my confused feelings, I pull out my treasure trove of yearbooks and fan them out for him to see. His face lights up and he grins, pulling me into the living room where we sit on the loveseat and start with the first yearbook, when I was in second grade and he was in fifth. We find my photo first, pint-sized and smiling broadly with a mouth of crooked teeth and a head of unruly curly hair; then we find him, tall, grinning mischievously. We are delighted to find ourselves in the same yearbook from 1979, 39 years earlier. What are the odds?

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  My legs bounce all the way back. Flashes, doors, questions hurled up my driveway. Once again, I have him pull into the garage. He helps me this time, stacking everything just inside the door that leads into the foyer. I hand him the rest of the wad from my cookie tin. “For one day,” I say. His eyes bulge. He thinks I’m crazy, but hey, I’m handing him lots of money. He leaves before I can change my mind. I watch him pull out and quickly close the garage door. I grab an armload of my purchases and nudge the stereo with my toe as I walk past it. The first song Isaac ever gave me kicks on. It’s loud. I make it louder until it’s pounding through the house. I’m sure they can hear it outside: a one-man party. I carry everything to the white room and pry off the lids of the cans with a butter knife: crimson, yellow, cobalt, bubblegum pink, deep purple—like a bruise—and three different greens to match the summer leaves. I stick my hand in the red paint first, and rub my fingertips together. It falls heavy, spilling on my clothes and the floor where I am kneeling. I scoop up more, ‘til my hands are brimming. Then I throw it—a handful of red paint at my white, white wall. Color explodes. It spreads. It runs. I take more—I take all of the colors—and I stain my white room. I stain it with all the colors of Isaac, as Florence Welch sings me her song. It’s then that my phone rings. I don’t pick it up, but when I listen to the message later that night, Detective soft s Garrison informs me that Saphira is dead. Dead by her own hand. Good, I think at first, but then my chest aches. He doesn’t tell me how she did it but something tells me she opened her own veins. Bled out. She liked her patients to bleed out their thoughts and feelings; she would have chosen to go that way. Saphira and her god-complex would never have tolerated being tried in a court of law. She thought people were stupid. It would have been beneath her to be judged. I call him the next morning. There would be no trial. He sounds disappointed when he tells me, but I feel relieved. It’s an end to the nightmare. I couldn’t have handled months and months of a trial. Wasting my last days seeking human justice. I think I forgive her for believing she was God, I’m not sure God will. Garrison informs me that there is an ongoing investigation into Saphira’s accomplices. “Everyone we have questioned is shocked. She was well respected in the mental health community. No family in the country. No friends. She seems to have just snapped, lost touch with reality.” Who has time for friends when you’re performing human experiments? I think.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The yogin must not kill or injure other creatures; he could not even swat a mosquito or speak unkindly to others. Second, he was forbidden to steal, which also meant that he could not grab whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it; he must simply accept the food and clothing that he was given without demur, cultivating an indifference to material possessions. Third, he must not lie, but must speak the truth at all times, not distorting it by making an incident more entertaining or more flattering to himself, for example. Finally, he must abstain from sex and from intoxicating substances, which could cloud his mind and enervate the mental and physical energies that he would need in this spiritual expedition. The preparatory program also demanded the mastery of certain bodily and psychic disciplines (niyama). The aspirant must keep himself scrupulously clean; he must study the teaching (dharma) of his guru; and he must cultivate a habitual serenity, behaving kindly and courteously to everybody, no matter how he was feeling inside. This preparatory program showed the spiritual ambition of the yogins. They were not interested in simply having a transient, inspiring experience. Yoga was an initiation into a different way of being human, and that meant a radically moral transformation. The prohibitions and disciplines were a new, Axial Age version of the traditional imitation of the archetypal model. Yogins had to leave their unenlightened selves behind, abandon the ego principle, and behave as though the purusha had already been liberated. When people in the past had ritually imitated a god, they had experienced a “stepping out” of their normal lives and an enhancement of being. The same was true of the yama and niyama. By dint of practice, these ethical disciplines would become second nature, and when this happened, Patanjali explained, the aspirant would experience “indescribable joy.” 87 As he left the “ego principle” behind, he had intimations of the final liberation. Once his teacher was satisfied that the aspirant had mastered the yama and niyama, he was ready to learn the first properly yogic discipline: asana, “sitting.” He had to sit with crossed legs, straight back, and in a completely motionless position for hours at a time. This was uncomfortable at first, and sometimes unbearably painful. Motion is what characterizes living creatures. Everything that moves is alive. Even when we imagine that we are sitting still, we are in constant motion: we blink, scratch, shift from one buttock to another, and turn our heads in response to stimulus. Even in sleep, we toss and turn. But in asana, the yogin was learning to sever the link between his mind and his senses. He was so still that he seemed more like a statue or a plant than a human being.

• From Between Us

  It is possible that the emotion profiles differed because immigrants encountered different types of interpersonal situations in public spaces versus at home. If they were more happy in public spaces, perhaps the reason was they encountered more (or fewer) situations that elicited happiness. For example, I might have been more “happy” after I immigrated to the U.S., because people in the U.S. create so many opportunities for happiness by celebrating you and giving you compliments. Alternatively, if the kinds of situations were no different, immigrants might have switched to a different frame of doing emotions (much like I started to do less “opinionated indignation” in North Carolina, just because the relational goals there were different than they had been in my native Holland). Both explanations may hold, but my colleague Jozefien De Leersnyder and I wanted to see if we could detect frame-switching in emotions, even if biculturals encountered the same kinds of interpersonal situations. So we designed a study to test this. We asked bicultural Turkish Belgians to collaborate with a “neighbor” on designing their ideal neighborhood. Their task was to jointly come up with a plan, helped by a map of the neighborhood, pictures of such things that they might want to have in their neighborhood (such as playgrounds and trees), pens, glue, etc. We created two cultural contexts. Half of the biculturals were invited to the social room of the Turkish neighborhood mosque, where they interacted with a Turkish “neighbor” and a Turkish experimenter, and spoke Turkish throughout the interaction. The other half of the biculturals were invited to the community center in the neighborhood that was funded by the local (Belgian) government, they interacted with a Belgian majority neighbor and a Belgian experimenter, and they spoke Dutch (the language spoken in this part of Belgium) throughout the experiment. Our main question was whether the emotional responses of the Turkish Belgian biculturals in the Turkish condition would be more “Turkish,” and in the majority Belgian condition more “Belgian”? Would the dance be different, depending on dance partners and music playing in the background?

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  She was surprised when I asked if she could remember any especially fulfilling sexual encounters with Ted. Even though she couldn’t see how my question was relevant to her depression, she halfheartedly agreed to consider it during the week. At the beginning of our next session she pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her purse. After an awkward silence, followed by a deep sigh and then a slight smile (the first I had seen), she read a story complete with spontaneous commentary: Like most people who have been married nineteen years, Ted and I have a lot of routines, including making love on Saturday mornings before starting our chores. This tends to be rather mechanical and obligatory. One Saturday—I think it was about three or four years ago—I woke up late and Ted was already out in the garden. I opened the drapes to a glorious morning. There was Ted in his overalls, digging in the dirt, whistling. Instead of feeling hurt that he was ignoring me, I thought how cute he looked and how happy I felt. Even then that was pretty rare because I was often pissed off with Ted for not showing me enough affection. It’s so silly what happened over the next several hours. [She made me promise not to laugh.] We were both so different. I joined him in the yard and we instantly began flirting. He made sexy comments under his breath. I remember one: “I’d like to rub my face in that bush over there,” motioning toward me. I tried a few innuendoes myself, nutty stuff like, “Is that a trowel in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” He made me feel so free and sexy that I unbuttoned my shirt. When he saw my breasts he instantly dropped what he was doing and began licking my nipples and smearing dirt all over me. I can’t explain why this didn’t bother me because I’m such a cleanliness fanatic. Before long we were both stark naked, fighting over who would pull each weed, sometimes rolling on top of each other, laughing our heads off, and being totally outrageous. The sun was hot so I grabbed the hose and sprayed him down. Soon we were both drenched and making love on the lawn. The most exciting part was when Ted gazed into my eyes and said with so much feeling I was absolutely overwhelmed, “I love you more than anyone in the whole world.” “I have no idea what got into him,” Sabrina added, “but I sure wish Ted would be like that more often!” “And what about you?” I asked. “What if you were like that more often?” Sabrina didn’t care for that question one bit, which she demonstrated by wiping the radiant smile off her face and stuffing her joyous tale back into her purse. She remained mostly silent for the rest of the session.

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

  69 This is purely an external deterrent, so to speak, and has nothing t o do with what I am calling moral sources. But Hutcheson also holds that n o t believing in our own moral inclinations dampens th e m, and recognizing th e m gives them strength. In acknowledging the mainsprings of go o d in us, w e rej oice in them, and this joy makes them flow the stronger. This is why it i s crucial to establish his doctrine of the moral sense, and this is w hy t h e misanthropic extrinsic theory has to be combated. In the Preface to his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions a nd Affections, Hutches o n justifies inquiring into the passions, which some mi g h t think as "too subtile for common Appr ehensi on , and cons e q ue ntly n o t Mor al Sentiments • 2 6 J n ecessary for the Instruction of Men in Morals, which are the common business of Mankind". But in fact certain notions are already current a bout the passions (the extrinsic theory), "to the great Detriment of many a Natural T emper; since many have been discouraged from all Attempts of cultivating ki nd generous Affections in themselves, by a p revious Notion that ther e are no such Affections in Nature, and that all Pret e n ce to them was only Diss imulation, Affectation, or at best some unnatural Enthu siasm , , . 70 To be good, it is importan t to identify our own sources o f goodness. And n ot only in ourselves but in our fellow humans and, of course, in the God who designed all this. We have to believe in the goodness of human na ture. Or else, when upon any small Injury's, or sudden Resentment, or any weak superstitious Suggestions, our Benevolence is so faint, as to let us run into a ny odious Conceptions of Mankind ... as if they were wholly Evil, or Malicious, or as if the y were a worse Sort of Beings than they really are; these Conceptions must lead us into malevolent A f fections, or at least weaken our good ones , and make us really Vitio us. 7 1 Seeing the goodness of human beings makes us better. And that is why it is important to grasp that "Every Passion or Affection in its moderate Degree is innocent, many are directly amiable, and morally goo d: we have Senses and Affections leading us to publick Good, as well as to private; to Virtue, as well a s to other sorts of Pleasure".

• From Between Us

  119 ​did not reduce stress in Asian American individuals: Stress was measured both as self-reported and in terms of cortisol levels; Shelley E Taylor et al., “Cultural Differences in the Impact of Social Support on Psychological and Biological Stress Responses,” Psychological Science 18, no. 9 (2007): 831–37. Conclusions about reduced stress levels are based on the comparison with a control condition in which participants wrote on an the irrelevant topic. 120 ​“right” emotion in the relationship between parents and children: E.g., Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style. 120 ​“I love you” is a fairly modern invention: By some historical estimates, “romantic love” as a feeling was only starting to be recognized by the upper-class English in the late eighteenth century (Gillis, “From Ritual to Romance,” 103). Only in the late Victorian era did love become an important goal for couples (Stearns, American Cool). Similarly, sexual desire, while it always has existed, did not become central in the relationship between spouses until the early twentieth century, when the individual rewards of sexual satisfaction became highlighted (Stearns, 173). 120 ​you probably value happiness: For an excellent discussion of American happiness as a virtue—or vice, as it may be—see Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (London: Picador, 2009). 121 ​“. . . perceived as friendly and cheerful”: Anna Wierzbicka, “Emotion, Language, and Cultural Scripts,” in Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence, ed. Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel R. Markus (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994), 182. (Italics are mine.) 121 ​list “features” of happiness: Uchida and Kitayama, “Happiness and Unhappiness in East and West: Themes and Variations,” Study 1. 121 ​“proud,” . . . “on top of the world,” . . . “superior,” . . . “self-esteem”: Kitayama, Mesquita, and Karasawa, “Cultural Affordances and Emotional Experience: Socially Engaging and Disengaging Emotions in Japan and the United States.” 121 ​both good and successful: Phillip R. Shaver et al., “Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52, no. 6 (1987): 1078. 121 ​your own achievements: Other research confirms the high value placed on achievement in the U.S. (S. H. Schwartz, “Cultural Value Orientations: Nature and Implications of National Differences” [Moscow State University—Higher School of Economics Press, 2008]; S. H. Schwartz and A. Bardi, “Value Hierarchies across Cultures: Taking a Similarities Perspective,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32, no. 3 [May 1, 2001]: 268–90; Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995]). 121 ​outgoing, energetic, and approach-oriented: Descriptions in this paragraph rendered by Shaver et al., “Emotion Knowledge: Further Exploration of a Prototype Approach,” 1078.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  The relatively few instances in which drugs play a central role in a peak turn-on invariably involve one of the hallucinogenic substances such as LSD (“acid”), psychoactive mushrooms, MDMA (“ecstasy”), or hashish (a highly concentrated form of marijuana). These powerful drugs so radically alter the perceptions and emotions of whoever is under their influence, they’re often seen as coparticipants in the experience. Note how the drug ecstasy is pivotal in Jennifer’s story of love, sensuality, and obliterated inhibitions: My lover and I were vacationing on a beach in Mexico. I wanted him to be in love with me as I was with him, but he was holding back. One afternoon we took ecstasy together. The drug had an almost magical effect, helping us to open our hearts and express feelings that were locked inside. It was overwhelming to learn that he was madly in love with me but also terribly afraid of being hurt again (his ex-wife had dumped him for a younger man). Every touch was a revelation, as if we were discovering each other for the first time. Our senses were drinking in the wind, the sand between our toes, the rhythm of the surf and the penetrating warmth of the sun. We were even more overcome by emotions as we kissed and talked for hours. Back at the hotel my excitement continued to be mostly emotional. He let himself become vulnerable to me. I never realized this man felt so much inside. His openness was a gift that made me want to make love to him without reservation. It was beyond comprehension. I was amazed by how we were both freed of all inhibitions. Verbally and physically he expressed adoration of my body and soul. He took me strongly in a virile, manly way and I also ravaged him. We naturally enjoyed acts we would have avoided before. We knew we could be nasty and still be loved. I knew he cherished me as much as I did him. More than once I cried at the beauty of the moment—the curve of his earlobe, the softness of my skin against his lips. We were all heart, all soul, and all body. Clearly the drug was a catalyst for a remarkable degree of sensual and emotional freedom and intimacy. Naturally, you might wonder if all this ecstatic love was merely chemically induced. Jennifer had a similar concern: When I awoke the next morning I immediately wondered if Eric would be cautious again. Did he mean what he said on ecstasy? Even though we were completely down from the drug, Eric kissed me, held me, and softly told me how much he loved me (he hardly ever said these things before). We live together now and have discussed this experience often. We both agree that the drug removed our inhibitions so we could be completely truthful. The intensity was much greater than normal but the feelings were real—because we still feel them.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  When Dr. Maslow wrote about peak experiences he naturally emphasized the highly personal experiences of his subjects rather than the specific details of what took place. He knew that a vast array of events and situations can be catalysts for peak experiences. He also realized that it’s not the events themselves but the individual’s inner responses that produce the joy of a peak moment. Maslow’s insight turns out to apply equally to peak eroticism. Unless we have a profoundly personal response, even the sexiest partner or situation will ultimately he little more than interesting—and probably not very memorable. Once I realized that The Group’s stories were valuable sources of information about fulfillment as well as excitation, I noted what respondents said about the subjective experience of peak turn-on. In addition to all the juicy details, The Group spontaneously mentions these personal responses far more frequently than any others: Sensual and orgasmic intensity Reduced inhibitions Validation given and received Mutuality and resonance Transcendence of personal boundaries Taken together, I believe these responses are the essence of peak eroticism. They represent the hopes and needs we bring to an erotic adventure and, just as surely, the keys to our fulfillment. As I describe each of them, notice which ones are familiar to you. SENSUAL AND ORGASMIC INTENSITYThe sexual experience is, at the most fundamental level, an expression of your physical self. Without your inborn capacities to receive and process sensual stimulation, to build up muscle tension as you become aroused and to release it through orgasm, eroticism as you know it could not exist. During peak sex your body and all its senses spring to life. Your response to touch is particularly likely to become more acute. If someone were to observe the stimulation you receive during peak sex they probably wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary—a stroke here, a lick there. But from a purely subjective point of view, your receptivity goes into hyperdrive, bringing a richness to stimuli that under more normal circumstances might seem mundane. Ironically, the flood of tactile sensations you experience during peak sex is not primarily the result of heightened physical sensitivity. Researchers who measure the physiology of arousal note that our skin sensitivity actually drops as excitement escalates. You feel so much more because you become totally absorbed in whatever is turning you on while screening out all extraneous stimuli. Although sexologists still have a lot to learn about it, this narrowing of focus is an altered state of consciousness quite similar to hypnosis. You might think of it as a “sexual trance.”1 Forty-six percent of The Group’s peak encounters and 39 percent of their favorite fantasies contain spontaneous references to the intensity of their sensations or their orgasms or both. And they don’t just say, “That felt good.” They rave about their sensations, making comments such as: “My body came alive.” “Every touch made me tingle.” “I became lost in the texture of her skin.”

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

  This membership is acknowleged in the recognition, th e gratitude of future generations towards the lonely fighters of today. And so correlative to the sense of obligation to work for this fulfilled humanity (so hard to understand purely on grounds of the harmony of interests) is an expectation of fame and gratitude from our posterity. The community of interest which is not there on the level of concrete human fulfilments, between me and the happy future communit y for which I sacrifice my present well-being, is restored on the level of the meaning of our lives, by their recognition of my signal contribution to what they have all come to define as what makes human life significant. And so it is not surprising that posterity is repeatedl y evoked by the Aufklarer. Its recognition is their great consolation. Their posthumous fame w as their immortality. 5 7 Diderot invoked i t constantly. In his later years, he wrote his most penetrating works entirely for readers of the future, and didn,t even try to publish them in his lifetime. In his Refutation of Helvetius, de /'Homme, just after the passage I quoted above, in which he shows how absurd it is to explain the heroism of contemporary philosophes in terms of physical pleasure, Diderot formulates what he thinks their real motivation is: Ils se flattent qu'un jour on les nommera , et que leur memoire ser a eternellement honoree parmi les hommes ... Ils jouissent d'avance de l a douce melodie de ce concert lointain de voix a venir et occupees a les celebrer, et leur coeur en tresaille de joie. They flatter themselves that one day we will acclaim them, and that th eir memory will be forever honoured among men ... They rejoice in advance in the sweet melody of the distant concert of voices, which will come to celebrate them, and their heart quivers with joy.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  He swims over to my rock and climbs up. Slowly, passionately, he kisses me and then licks every part of my body, one by one. I can barely stand it when his tongue wiggles its way up my thighs to my vagina where he meticulously traces the shape of each lip, circling the opening and then kissing my clit until I’m writhing in ecstasy. He lies down beside me and soon we make joyous love. First he is on top of me, then I’m on top of him. We are free, incredibly sensuous and tender. Afterward I quietly swim off as he sleeps. I glance back for one last look at his moist body glistening in the sun. Arlene’s fantasy is quintessential “high romance,” far more common among women than men. I’ve often noticed that women frequently make a point of sketching out dreamy settings, sometimes concentrating their attention on the environment as much as or more than on sexual specifics. When a man describes idyllic fantasies, with rare exceptions he emphasizes the perfection of his partner’s body, usually with little or no interest in the environment, except as a setup for great sex. Like Arlene, Luke enthusiastically dwells on the exquisite beauty of his ideal fantasy lover. The ambiance, though, is notably different: I’m at home in my apartment watching TV in my gym shorts when the doorbell rings. I can’t believe my eyes when a gorgeous fox is standing there. She’s my new neighbor and just stopped by to say hello. I eagerly invite her in. She’s drop-dead gorgeous in a silky nightgown that reveals every curve. Her waist is narrow, her hips wide and shapely. I watch her ass sway as she walks to my sofa. Long, auburn hair swoops down, partially covering the milky skin of her cleavage. I can’t help staring at nipples which show clearly through her gown. I’m fumbling for words when she slides closer to me and plays with my chest and stomach with her long fingernails. I pull her closer still as she grabs my dick. I feel a shiver go through her body. I invite her to the bedroom and lift the gown over her head, revealing an even more incredible body than I expected. She rips off my shorts and we fall into bed, fucking with uncontrollable abandon. She loves it when I plunge into her juicy pussy. Before I know it she’s coming wildly, screaming. Her reaction turns me on so much that I thrust faster and faster, coming, coming until I collapse on top of her, spent. After I calm down, I watch her slip into her gown, shake out her hair, and walk toward the door. “See ya later, neighbor,” she whispers as the door closes behind her.