Realization

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 Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Among the Greeks and the Romans, the practice of life guidance included a fairly wide range of different procedures. One finds it in the form of discontinuous and circumstantial relations: Antiphon the Sophist maintained a consulting office where he would sell advice to those facing difficult situations,2 and the physicians would respond to requests concerning not only physical ailments but also moral illnesses: just as much as preventive methods or guidelines for health, the regimens they prescribed were rules for living, for controlling the passions, gaining self-control, managing the economy of pleasures, and ensuring fairness in relations with others.3 But the consultations could also be acts of friendship and kindness, without remuneration: conversations, exchanges of correspondence, drafting of a little treatise addressed to a friend in distress. In general, these episodic forms of direction responded to a specific situation: a stroke of bad luck, exile, a spell of mourning could trigger them, but also a crisis, a period of difficulty, a moment of uncertainty. This was the case with Serenus when he explained his condition to Seneca, requesting the aid of his diagnosis and his counsel.4 He felt he was no longer progressing on the path of Stoic wisdom: opposite impulses were agitating his soul, not to the point of provoking a “storm,” but with enough force to give him “something like seasickness.”5 But there also existed much more continuous and much more institutionalized forms of direction. They functioned in the schools of philosophy in particular. There the discipline of collective life that was imposed on everyone was completed by much more individualized relations. The teacher was a constant guide for the disciple: he taught him the truth little by little, helped him progress on the path of virtue, self-control, and tranquility of the soul, tested his progress, and, day by day, gave him advice on living. Thus, among the Epicureans, individual interviews were set up, a rule of frankness was imposed on members of the school, encouraging everyone to reveal their soul and not to hide anything, so that they might be guided effectively; only the wisest teachers could take charge of this individual direction of students, while the others had the collective responsibility for a group.6

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN COMING ASHORE I n 1964, three years into my career at Stanford, I decided to attend an eight-day National Training Laboratory Institute at Lake Arrowhead in Southern California. The weeklong institute program offered many social psychological activities, but the heart of it, and my reason for going, was the daily three-hour small-group meeting. I arrived a few minutes early the morning of the first meeting, took one of the thirteen chairs placed in a circle, and glanced about at the leader and the other early arrivals. Though I had much experience leading therapy groups, and was heavily involved in group therapy research and teaching, I had never been a member of a group. It was time to remedy that. No one spoke as the others filed in and took seats. At 8:30, the leader, Dorothy Garwood, a therapist in private practice with two PhDs (biochemistry and psychology), stood up and introduced herself: “Welcome to the 1964 Lake Arrowhead NTL Institute,” she said. “This group will be meeting every morning at this time for three hours for the next eight days, and I’d like us to keep everything we say, all of our comments, in the here-and-now.” A long silence followed. I thought, “That’s all?” and looked around to see eleven faces radiating perplexity and eleven heads shaking in bewilderment. After a minute, members responded: “That’s a pretty skimpy orientation.” “Is this some kind of joke?” “We don’t even know anyone’s name.” No response from the leader. Gradually, the collective uncertainty began to generate its own energy: “This is pathetic. Is this the kind of leadership we’re getting?” “That’s rude. She’s doing her job. Don’t you get that this is a process group? We have to examine our own process.” “Right, I have a hunch, more than a hunch, she knows exactly what she’s doing.” “That is blind faith: I’ve never liked blind faith. The truth is we’re floundering, and where is she? Sure as hell not helping us.” There were a few pauses between comments as members waited for the leader to respond. But she smiled and remained silent. Other members pitched in. “And, anyway, how are we supposed to stay in the here-and-now when we have no history together? We’ve just met today for the first time.” “I’m always uncomfortable with this kind of silence.” “Yeah, me too. We’re paying a good bit of money and we’re sitting here doing nothing and wasting time.” “Personally, I like the silence. Sitting here quietly with all of you mellows me out.” “Me, too. I just slip into meditation. I feel focused, ready for anything.” A s I engaged in this interchange and reflected upon it, I had an epiphany—I learned something that I later incorporated into the very core of my approach to group therapy.

• From Another Country (1962)

  But that is not so important—anyway, no matter how happy I may become, and I am sure that I shall have great moments yet, this house will always stay with me. I found out something here.” “And what was that?” Yves turned his head and looked up at Eric. “I was afraid that I would just remain a street boy forever, that I was no better than my mother.” He turned away, toward the window again. “But, somehow, down here in this house with you, I finally realized that that is not so. I have not to be a whore just because I come from whores. I am better than that.” He stopped. “I learned that from you. That is really strange, for, you know? in the beginning I thought you thought of me like that. I thought that you were just another sordid American, looking for a pretty, degenerate boy.” “But you are not pretty,” Eric said, and sipped his whiskey. “Au fait, tu es plutôt moche.” “Oh. Ça va .” “Your nose turns up.” He stroked the tip of Yves’ nose. “And your mouth’s too big”—Yves laughed—“and your forehead’s too high and soon you won’t have any hair.” He stroked Yves’ forehead, stroked his hair. “And those ears, baby! you look like an elephant or a flying machine.” “You are the first person who ever say that I am ugly. Perhaps that is why I am intrigued.” He laughed. “Well. Your eyes are not too bad.” “Tu parle. J’ai du chien, moi.” “Well, yes, baby, now that you mention it, I’m afraid you’ve got a point.” They were silent for a moment. “I have been with so many horrible people,” Yves said, gravely, “so soon, and for so long. Really, it is a wonder that I am not completely sauvage .” He sipped his whiskey. Eric could not see his face, but he could imagine the expression it held: hard and baffled and terribly young, with the cruelty that comes from pain and fear. “First, my mother and all those soldiers, ils étaient mes oncles, tous ,” and he laughed, “and then all those awful, slimy men, I no longer know how many.” He was silent again. “I lay in the bed, sometimes we never got to bed, and let them grunt and slobber. Some of them were really fantastic, no whore has ever told the truth about who comes to her, I am sure of that, they would chop off her head before they would dare to hear it. But it is happening, it is happening all the time.” He leaned up, hugging his knees, staring at the sea. “Then I would take their money; if they made difficulties I could scare them because I was mineur . Anyway, it was very easy to scare them.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Bandler, an eminent analyst, concurred that my presentation spoke for itself and they had no additional comments. One by one each faculty member around the table made similar comments. I left the meeting stunned: all I had done was to tell a story that seemed so natural and easy for me. Throughout my college and medical education I had always felt invisible, but at that moment everything changed. I walked out thinking I might have something special to offer the field. M arried life was both wonderful and stressful during my last two years of medical school. Money was tight and, for the most part, my parents supported us. Marilyn earned some money by working part-time in a dentist’s office while studying for a master of arts in teaching degree at Harvard, while I continued to earn money by selling blood to the hospital. I had applied to be a sperm donor, but the urologist told me that my sperm count was too low and advised me not to delay any attempt to have children. How wrong he was! Marilyn conceived instantaneously on our honeymoon. Our daughter Eve’s middle name is “Frances” to indicate “made in France,” and a year and a half later, during my fourth year of medical school, Marilyn became pregnant again. My clinical clerkships in my last two years of med school demanded long hours, but somehow my anxiety had calmed, replaced perhaps by honest exhaustion and the gratification of feeling that I was being helpful to my patients. I grew more committed to psychiatry and began reading extensively in the field. Certain horrific scenes from my psychiatry clerkships stay in my mind: a room of human statues at the Boston State Hospital—an entire ward of catatonic patients spending their lives in absolute stillness. The patients were mute and spent hours standing in one position, some by their beds, some by a window, some sitting, sometimes muttering but usually silent. All the staff could do was to feed them, keep them alive, and speak to them kindly. Such scenes were to be found in every large hospital in the mid-1950s before the advent of the first tranquilizer, Thorazine, and, soon thereafter, Stelazine, followed by a continuous stream of new, more effective major tranquilizers. Another scene at the Boston State Hospital stays with me: At some point in my clerkship I was able to observe Dr. Max Day, a Harvard psychiatrist, leading a group of about twelve psychiatric residents who had been asked to study their own group process. As a medical student I was permitted to attend a single meeting but not to participate, not one word. Although more than half a century has passed, I can still see that room in my mind’s eye. The residents and Dr. Day sat in a circle in the center of a large room.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Gardner Lindzey brings up another reason that beauty was shunned by social scientists—the “spectacular failure” of previous attempts to link physical attributes to behavior (phrenology, physiognomy, and so on). In the next chapter we will review these studies and see that they yielded very little in the way of scientific fact and spread many fictions. It is no wonder that many scientists were eager to dissociate themselves from this work. Charles Darwin was one of many of its near victims. The captain of the Beagle, like many people of his time, had been influenced by the physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, written in 1772, which suggested that certain facial features predict character. As Darwin wrote in his biography, the captain “was an ardent disciple of Lavater … and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.” As psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has said, “The theory of evolution was almost lost for want of a proper nose.” Social scientists shunned beauty as trivial, undemocratic, and all in all not a proper subject for science. But by the late 1960s, Lindzey was chiding his colleagues for their “neglect of morphology [outward appearance]” and suggesting, “Perhaps now is the time to restore beauty and other morphological variables to the study of social phenomena.” Within the next three decades an explosion of research was to provide compelling evidence for a new view of human beauty. It suggested that the assumption that beauty is an arbitrary cultural convention may simply not be true. The research comes at a time when scientists have begun to question anew many other assumptions about the relationship between human behavior and culture. As Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jerome Barkow point out: “Culture is not causeless and disembodied. It is generated in rich and intricate ways by information-processing mechanisms situated in human minds. These mechanisms are in turn the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary process.” Clearly, culture cannot just spring forth from nowhere; it must be shaped by, and be responsive to, basic human instincts and innate preferences. Until the 1960s it was believed that languages could vary arbitrarily and without limit, but now there is a consensus among linguists that there is a universal grammar underlying this diversity. Similarly, it was thought that facial expressions of emotion could arbitrarily vary across cultures until the psychologist Paul Ekman showed that many emotions are expressed by the same facial movements across cultures. Ekman made the important distinction between the facial expression of emotion (smiles, frowns, scowls, and so on), which are universal, and the rules for when to display those emotions, which show cultural variation. Similarly, aspects of judgments of human beauty may be influenced by culture and individual history, but the general geometric features of a face that give rise to perception of beauty may be universal.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Mothers can recognize their babies by smell alone within six hours after birth, and within days babies can recognize their mothers’ distinct smells. As adults, we can recognize our own smells well enough to reliably fish out our T-shirts from a pile of others. Wedekind’s research suggests that we become attracted to the people who smell the least like our family members. When we tamper with our reproductive capability, as when we use birth control pills, we also derail this mechanism. Wedekind concludes that “no one smells good to everybody, it depends on who is sniffing whom.” People sometimes wonder why some beauties leave them sexually unaroused: perhaps they are sniffing something too close to home. Not Waiting for Beauty Visual beauty does not reign supreme in our sensual world—we are lured by beautiful voices, gestures of invitation, and sexy smells. We are even drawn to people by secretions from their hormones and immune systems that we cannot consciously detect. Looks are not everything, even in the superficial world of attraction and glances. But we are still left with the question of how to think about beauty, or why we should be thinking about it. After all, beauty is howlingly unfair. It is a genetic given. And physical appearance tells us little about a person’s intelligence, kindness, pluck, sense of humor, or steadfastness, although we think it does. As Tom Wolfe has written, “At the very core of fashionable society exists a monstrous vulgarity: The habit of judging human beings by standards having no necessary relation to their character. To be found dwelling upon this vulgarity, absorbed in it, is like being found watching a suck ’n fuck movie.” The grubbiness spreads contagiously and no one wants to touch the topic. But our squeamishness is no reason to stay away. Knowledge is power: the more we know about human nature, the better hope we have of addressing inequalities and of changing ourselves. Scientific inquiry is different from the assignment of value, and the fact that a tendency or preference is innate does not mean that culture, nurture, and circumstance cannot radically alter its expression. Our impulses are not necessarily good, but they are resistible. The politics of beauty needs a fresh forum, free from the attacks of the beauty bashers, as well as the unthinking reverence of beauty worshipers. As Lester Bangs wrote in 1979 about another fact of life (rock music), since it is “bound to stay in your life you would hope to see it reach some point where it might not add to the cruelty and exploitation already in the world.” Beauty is not going anywhere. The idea that beauty is unimportant or a cultural construct is the real beauty myth. We have to understand beauty, or we will always be enslaved by it.

• From Another Country (1962)

  That day. That day. Had he known where that day would lead him would he have writhed as he did, in such an anguished joy, beneath the great weight of his first lover? But if he had known, or been capable of caring, where such a day might lead him, it could never have been his necessity to bring about such a day. He was frightened and in pain and the boy who held him so relentlessly was suddenly a stranger; and yet this stranger worked in Eric an eternal, a healing transformation. Many years were to pass before he could begin to accept what he, that day, in those arms, with the stream whispering in his ear, discovered; and yet that day was the beginning of his life as a man. What had always been hidden was to him, that day, revealed and it did not matter that, fifteen years later, he sat in an armchair, overlooking a foreign sea, still struggling to find the grace which would allow him to bear that revelation. For the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne. But how to bear it? He rose from his seat and paced restlessly into the garden. The kitten lay curled on the stone doorstep, in the last of the sun, asleep. Then he heard Yves’ bicycle bell and, shortly, Yves’ head appeared above the low stone wall. He passed, looking straight ahead, and then Eric heard him in the kitchen, bumping into things and opening and closing the icebox door. Then Yves stood beside him. “Madame Belet will be here in a few moments. She is cooking for us a chicken. And I have bought some whiskey and some cigarettes.” Then he looked at Eric and frowned. “You are mad to be standing here in your bathrobe. The sun is down and it is getting cold. Come in and get dressed, I will make us both a drink.” “What would I do without you?” “I wonder.” Eric followed him into the house. “I also bought some champagne,” Yves said, suddenly, and he turned to face Eric with a small, shy smile, “to celebrate our last night here.” Then he walked into the kitchen. “Get dressed,” he called, “Madame Belet will be here soon.” Eric stepped into the bedroom and began putting on his clothes. “Are we going out after dinner?” “Perhaps. That depends. If we are not too drunk on champagne.” “I’d just as soon stay in, I think.” “Oh, perhaps we must have just one last look at our little seaside town.” “We have to get packed, you know, and clean up this house a little, and try to get some sleep.” “Madame Belet will clean it for us. Anyway, we would never be able to get it done. We can sleep on the train. And we do not have so very much to pack.”

• From Little Women (1868)

  In a minute a hand came down over the page, so that she could not draw, and Laurie's voice said, with a droll imitation of a penitent child, "I will be good, oh, I will be good!" But Amy did not laugh, for she was in earnest, and tapping on the outspread hand with her pencil, said soberly, "Aren't you ashamed of a hand like that? It's as soft and white as a woman's, and looks as if it never did anything but wear Jouvin's best gloves and pick flowers for ladies. You are not a dandy, thank Heaven, so I'm glad to see there are no diamonds or big seal rings on it, only the little old one Jo gave you so long ago. Dear soul, I wish she was here to help me!" "So do I!" The hand vanished as suddenly as it came, and there was energy enough in the echo of her wish to suit even Amy. She glanced down at him with a new thought in her mind, but he was lying with his hat half over his face, as if for shade, and his mustache hid his mouth. She only saw his chest rise and fall, with a long breath that might have been a sigh, and the hand that wore the ring nestled down into the grass, as if to hide something too precious or too tender to be spoken of. All in a minute various hints and trifles assumed shape and significance in Amy's mind, and told her what her sister never had confided to her. She remembered that Laurie never spoke voluntarily of Jo, she recalled the shadow on his face just now, the change in his character, and the wearing of the little old ring which was no ornament to a handsome hand. Girls are quick to read such signs and feel their eloquence. Amy had fancied that perhaps a love trouble was at the bottom of the alteration, and now she was sure of it. Her keen eyes filled, and when she spoke again, it was in a voice that could be beautifully soft and kind when she chose to make it so. "I know I have no right to talk so to you, Laurie, and if you weren't the sweetest-tempered fellow in the world, you'd be very angry with me. But we are all so fond and proud of you, I couldn't bear to think they should be disappointed in you at home as I have been, though, perhaps they would understand the change better than I do." "I think they would," came from under the hat, in a grim tone, quite as touching as a broken one. "They ought to have told me, and not let me go blundering and scolding, when I should have been more kind and patient than ever. I never did like that Miss Randal and now I hate her!" said artful Amy, wishing to be sure of her facts this time.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  To call a sexual behavior “abnormal” means to ignore the fact that to its practitioner the act feels utterly, ineluctably normal—normative. Not only does it feel right for a gay man to kiss another man, it feels wrong for him to kiss a woman in the same way. “Normality is, of course, a very difficult concept to define, being usually considered the equivalent of statistically common and accepted acts in the society doing the defining,” wrote Gershon Legman in his peculiar treatise on oral sex, Oragenitalism. “So understood, obviously neurotic and mentally diseased actions are regularly applauded as normal in cultures that are themselves abnormal or insane.” And acts that might somewhere else seem ordinary are condemned as mentally diseased. The first time I thought about sex in terms of perversities was when I read Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown’s lesbian-coming-of-age novel. Brown’s heroine, Molly Bolt, is in the big city at last and completely broke when she’s offered $100 to throw grapefruits at a man who can’t have orgasms any other way. “I picked up another one and carefully took aim. Squish! I got him square in the middle. He squealed with delight and got a hard-on. This isn’t so bad. I like throwing things. By now I was into hitting Ronnie. I aimed for cock. Bull’s-eye. He loved it.” I was seventeen when I read Rubyfruit Jungle, and still bless Rita Mae Brown for that scene, which I’ve remembered many times over the years. I remember wondering at length about all its permutations. Why grapefruit, and not oranges, for instance? I took it to heart—Ronnie’s happy squeals, most of all—and my ideas about sex and what it could be grew a hundred-fold that day. Perversity is not only relative to the culture, but, like obscenity, a condition in constant flux. Religiously and criminally persecuted perversions have at one time or another included all forms of homosexuality, incest, prostitution, adultery, fornication, oral sex, anal sex, and exhibitionism. A 1942 marriage manual lists as part of “the perverse component of the normal libido” voyeurism, cunnilingus, kleptomania, pyromania, and the use of fantasy. “Fortunately, in normal persons,” the book informs us, “these perverse elements are so thoroughly repressed that they give no trouble.”

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  This is the esoteric meaning of Polyhistor’s statement that Abraham came from Uria, light, and created astronomy. As the Creative Principle he created astronomy by creating an aster—star, collectively, the cosmos. Yes, “God geometrizes.” And now, perhaps, we can see what lies behind Josephus’s naive statement that these ancients lived to great age because of their useful work in astronomy and geography. Again India furnished the idea, a myth about the first astronomer, namely, Asuramaya, “as great a magician as he was an astronomer.” He is said to have lived one hundred thousand years ago, which, like the Bible’s one thousand, signifies an indefinite period. The letters ur , light, appear in his name because Surya was the Sun God; and maya means illusion, matter. The Asuryas were many and they fought the Devas, devils, who created this maya-matter. And later we will find Abram fighting the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, which means the same thing. Abram knew not whither he went, but the law did; it knew his destiny was Egypt, which throughout the Bible also means, matter, earth. This fact is clearly proved by Revelation 11:8, which speaks of “the great city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt where also our Lord was crucified.” Now, “our Lord” was not crucified in Egypt unless Egypt is one with the earth. So whether he knew it or not Abram was on his way to Egypt, or matter. This is part of the creative plan and the meaning of Abram’s recourse to Hagar, the Egyptian, the Hebrew equivalent of Fetahil’s recourse to lalda-baoth, also matter. This is identical with “the sons of God” consorting with “the daughters of men,” and the result is also identical, namely Ishmael, another Cain. 12. And he will be a wild man; his hand (like Cain’s) will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him . . . (Gen. Chap. 16). And now again the mythologist, this time the Elohist, covers up the inference as with Seth, by making the line of descent from Isaac, not Ishmael. That it’s all myth and allegory is affirmed by Paul in Galatians 4:22-24. “For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid (Hagar), the other by a free woman (Sarah). But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the free woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory . . .” And so is Abraham, and so is the entire Bible. Therefore to understand this strange book we must know its nature and construction. It is not history or even a sequential allegory, but a mixture of many allegories. Collectively, these constitute the sum of Hebrew legend and tradition. Somewhere around 400 B.C. an Editor selected excerpts from them and inserted them as he saw fit, sometimes a whole chapter, sometimes but a single verse. The key to the system is the little sign ¶.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He stared into the streets and thought—bitterly, but also with a chilling, stunned sobriety—that, though he had been seeing them so long, perhaps he had never known them at all. The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him. Now the girl who lived across the street, whose name, he knew, was Nancy, but who reminded him of Jane—which was certainly why he never spoke to her—came in from her round of the bars and the coffee houses with yet another boneless young man. They were everywhere, which explained how she met them, but why she brought them home with her was a somewhat more sinister question. Those who wore their hair long wore beards; those who wore theirs short felt free to dispense with this useful but somewhat uneasy emphasis. They read poetry or they wrote it, furiously, as though to prove that they had been cut out for more masculine pursuits. This morning’s specimen wore white trousers and a yachting cap, and a paranoiac little beard jutted out from the bottom half of his face. This beard was his most aggressive feature, his only suggestion of hardness or tension. The girl, on the other hand, was all angles, bone, muscle, jaw; even her breasts seemed stony. They walked down the street, hand in hand, but not together. They paused before her stoop and the girl staggered. She leaned against him in an agony of loathing, belching alcohol; his rigidity suggested that her weight was onerous; and they climbed the short steps to the door. Here she paused and smiled at him, coquettishly raising those stony breasts as she pulled back her hair with her hands. The boy seemed to find this delay intolerable. He muttered something about the cold, pushing the girl in before him. Well, now, they would make it—make what? not love, certainly—and should he be standing at this window twenty-four hours hence, he would see the same scene repeated with another boy.

• From Little Women (1868)

  busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said soberly to himself... "She is right! Talent isn't genius, and you can't make it so. That music has taken the vanity out of me as Rome took it out of her, and I won't be a humbug any longer. Now what shall I do?" That seemed a hard question to answer, and Laurie began to wish he had to work for his daily bread. Now if ever, occurred an eligible opportunity for 'going to the devil', as he once forcibly expressed it, for he had plenty of money and nothing to do, and Satan is proverbially fond of providing employment for full and idle hands. The poor fellow had temptations enough from without and from within, but he withstood them pretty well, for much as he valued liberty, he valued good faith and confidence more, so his promise to his grandfather, and his desire to be able to look honestly into the eyes of the women who loved him, and say "All's well," kept him safe and steady. Very likely some Mrs. Grundy will observe, "I don't believe it, boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles." I dare say you don't, Mrs. Grundy, but it's true nevertheless. Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood by refusing to echo such sayings. Let the boys be boys, the longer the better, and let the young men sow their wild oats if they must. But mothers, sisters, and friends may help to make the crop a small one, and keep many tares from spoiling the harvest, by believing, and showing that they believe, in the possibility of loyalty to the virtues which make men manliest in good women's eyes. If it is a feminine delusion, leave us to enjoy it while we may, for without it half the beauty and the romance of life is lost, and sorrowful forebodings would embitter all our hopes of the brave, tenderhearted little lads, who still love their mothers better than themselves and are not ashamed to own it. Laurie thought that the task of forgetting his love for Jo would absorb all his powers for years, but to his great surprise he discovered it grew easier every day. He refused to believe it at first, got angry with himself, and couldn't understand it, but these hearts of ours are curious and contrary things, and time and nature work their will in spite of us. Laurie's heart wouldn't ache. The wound persisted in healing with a rapidity that astonished him, and instead of trying to forget, he

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  I could see that it filled him up to be near Limori, and that he experienced a high just by being able to talk to her in person for a few hours. But I was not comfortable at all with the person he turned into in her presence. This was not the man I loved and admired. The following day, Michael and I went for a long walk on the beach and discussed what had transpired the day before. For the first (and last) time I questioned Limori’s methods directly to Michael’s face. I expressed what had bothered me for years: that Limori talked about love but her methodology didn’t seem loving. And I was crushed that Limori had said Mildred’s energy was bad. I was deeply fond of Mildred and couldn’t bear the thought that she, like all the rest of us, was now a screw-up in God’s eyes. I had gotten used to the fact that Limori/God thought that the rest of us were all screw-ups, but Mildred had always been exempt from that. She had never been tarred with the same brush that Limori used on the rest of us and thus had always given me hope that it was possible to stay in God’s good graces. “But if it’s The Truth,” Michael said, “then it’s The Truth. Limori was not attacking Mildred; she was simply telling us what she saw. And love does not always have to look soft and mushy. Sometimes tough love is the only thing that will get through to a person. [“Tough love” had lately become a part of our loaded language. Essentially it meant that Limori could treat anyone as badly as she wanted to and was justified by calling it tough love.] The key question is why does it bother you that Limori speaks The Truth, about Mildred or anyone else?” His tone was defensive about the fact that I was questioning Limori, and I noticed that and thought about it for a second. Then something radical happened, something that had never happened before and was, I believe, a small, tentative step toward the end of my time in the cult: I actually spoke up about what I really felt. I voiced my actual opinion without couching it in group rhetoric and addressed his defensive tone. “Why is it not OK to ask questions about Limori and her methods? Why do you get defensive any time I do that? She has always invited us to question her, yet when we do we get chastised for it.” I turned my head toward him as we walked and vividly remember the look of controlled confusion on Michael’s face. I could practically see the circuits frying in his head. I had addressed, out loud, one of the primary hypocrisies in Limori’s teaching and it didn’t sit well with either of us. He didn’t have an answer for me so we continued our walk in sullen silence.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  How can that be, when Limori, whom I trust, told me that the consequence of thoughts like that would be deadly?” Over time, as I acquired more and more references to instances in which I was able to feel my feelings and think my thoughts and there were no biblical repercussions (no plagues descended, no earthquakes swallowed the city whole, I didn’t feel in the grip of a devilish possession), my curiosity naturally grew. Mary’s kind and gentle questions only reinforced this growing sense of safety in my own thoughts and feelings. “How does that feel to you?” she would ask, or, “What do you think is true?” For the first few months I would answer her with group rhetoric but then gradually I began to see her point, and I would travel inside, briefly and tentatively at first, and check with myself: “How do I feel?” Initially I had not the first clue about how I felt about anything, but with practice my confidence in naming my feelings began to grow. The only time we ever strayed close to using the word cult was many months into my work with her, when she loaned me a copy of a book called The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power . I was more than slightly confused about why she was loaning me this particular book, but I trusted her and took it home with me that night and began to read it. I was absolutely staggered by the time I got to the end of the first chapter; it was as though the authors of this book had been flies on the wall at all of Limori’s workshops and all of our Wednesday and Thursday night meditation circles. Some of the phrases that the authors used, as examples of ones that manipulative, coercive gurus use, were almost, word for word, things that Limori would say to us. I would be reading the book on my couch and have to put it down in my lap, simply to marvel at the information I was absorbing; it was all hitting so close to home. I returned the book to Mary at our next appointment, sharing with her how much I related to the material, and very soon went out and bought my own copy. Then I read it through again, this time using a pink highlighter to mark everything that rang true for me. After that I sat at my computer and typed up a document of everything I’d highlighted so that I could take it in to Mary and show her all the parallels between the what the authors were saying and what I’d experienced.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Phil (love him or hate him, he uses great imagery to get his points across) talks about unhealed wounds being like a beach ball that you are desperately trying to keep under water. As you sit on that beach ball in the ocean of your life, keeping it pushed down below the surface takes tremendous energy. And if you tip even slightly off balance that ball will bob to the surface with no effort on its part at all. If you were in a cult, don’t waste another ounce of energy trying to keep that beach ball submerged. By getting professional help with your wounds, you will be taking back your life from the guru who stole it. By not getting help, you are simply gifting your abuser with even more months and years of your precious life. Your abuser does not deserve such a precious gift. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I didn’t begin to use the word cult in reference to Limori’s group until several years of my recovery had gone by. In late 2003, I felt psychologically strong enough for the first time to consider that the group wasn’t simply dysfunctional but fell into the category of coercive mind control. I pulled my copy of The Guru Papers off my bookshelf and read it for the third time. During this reading the pieces began to fall into place for me, and I began to be able to apply words like cult and thought reform to my situation. Until then it had been unimaginable and far too painful to consider that this was the truth. I then began what I would later recognize as part of my personal method of healing: gathering information about how cults work and why I had been vulnerable to one. Finding understanding was one of the primary ways I found solace and healing. I began reading as many books about the phenomenon as I could get my hands on and, more often than not, when I found a particularly informative book I would read it two or three times while my brain slowly wrapped itself around what I was learning. It was more than a little unsettling to recognize myself and my experience in the pages of books written about cults, and I found that my ability to process what I was learning would come in waves. For a few weeks or a couple of months, I’d be gripped with curiosity and read books borrowed from the library or bought locally and surf the internet for additional information and articles. Then I would need a break and stop reading for months at a time, allowing what I’d learned to integrate, until I felt curiosity and the need for greater understanding overtake me again. With each new wave of exploratory energy, I found that my understanding deepened and my comfort about addressing what had happened to me increased.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Besides turning me into a solitary, these attacks of fear dealt yet another blow to my already wavering faith. No, I did not imagine that I had seen Satan during these visitations and knew very well that the evil I sensed had no metaphysical existence but was simply the product of my own mind. But these visions got me thinking. In an age that was less scientific than our own, it would surely have been natural to conclude that the ghostly, senile presence that I sensed with hallucinatory intensity was a real, diabolic personality. Poets and mystics had often spoken of the foul stench of hell. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be a disease, the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. If there were no God, then much of my life had been nonsense, and I should, surely, have felt more upset. But then, God had never been a real presence to me. He had been so consistently absent that he might just as well not exist. Perhaps I should just leave the church and have done with it. Father Geoffrey Preston, a benign Dominican at Blackfriars in St. Giles, urged me not to make too hasty a decision. I had started to attend Mass at Blackfriars on the recommendation of one of my tutors, who was also recovering from an unhappy Catholic past and sometimes looked as though she had barely survived the struggle. She had recommended the family Mass at Blackfriars on Sunday morning, and I found that it was indeed a cheerful, imaginative liturgy, geared to the needs of children, who could crawl or run around the church freely and, within reason, make as much noise as they liked. My tutor also advised me to talk to Geoffrey. He was clearly a kind man, but seemed faintly ill at ease, and I suspected that, like many priests, he had ambivalent feelings about nuns. “I hope you’re not feeling guilty about all this.” He shifted his massive girth uncomfortably around on the formal parlor chair. “I know nuns tend to trade on guilt. I expect you had to count up your faults on a special string of beads and write them down in a little book.” He chuckled, inviting me to share what he clearly assumed was a joke.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “What have you been brooding about, Cass? I thought you and Richard had it made.” These words sounded, in his own ears, stiff and uncaring. But he had known Cass and Richard too long and been too young when he met them; he had never really thought of Cass and Richard as lovers. Sometimes, of course, he had watched Cass move, realizing that, small as she was, she was all woman and all there, had good legs and nice breasts and knew how to twist her small behind; and, sometimes, watching Richard’s great paw on her wrist, wondered how she bore his weight. But he had the tendency of all wildly disorganized people to suppose that the lives of others were tamer and less sensual and more cerebral than his own. And for the very first time he had the sense of Cass as a passionate woman who had merely been carrying on a legal love affair; who writhed as beautifully and shamelessly in Richard’s arms as the women Vivaldo had dreamed about for all these years. “I guess,” he added, “I must sound pretty dumb. Forgive me.” She smiled—smiled as though she had read his thoughts. “No, you don’t. Perhaps I also thought we had it made. But nobody ever has it made.” She lit another cigarette, straightening her shoulders, slowly circling, as she had for many weeks now, around some awful decision. “I keep telling myself it’s because of the way our lives have changed, now that Richard’s becoming so well known. But it isn’t that. It’s something that’s been there all along.” Now she was very grave and dry. She looked at Vivaldo through the smoke of her cigarette, narrowing her eyes. “You know, I used to look at you and all your horrible adventures and compare you to Richard and me and think how lucky we were. He was the first”—she faltered and looked down—“the very first man I ever had, and I was the first for him, too—really the first, the first girl, anyway, he ever loved.” And she looked down again, as though the burden of confession were too great. Yet they were united in the knowledge that what she had begun she must now finish. “And you think he doesn’t love you any more?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It was Fred Burnham, the director of Trinity Institute, Wall Street, who made me rethink this. We had both spent a week at Chautauqua, that quintessentially American utopia in New York State, in the summer of 2001, just two months before the catastrophe of September 11, in which Fred was nearly killed. Each afternoon I had lectured on the theme of “The Human Person” in the Hall of Philosophy, and Fred had come from Trinity to introduce me and to moderate the sessions. On our last evening, sitting on the porch of the Hall of Missions, Fred with a vodka on the rocks and I with a glass of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, Fred had said: “You always claim that you have never had a religious experience. But I disagree. I think you are constantly living in the dimension of the sacred. You are absorbed in holiness all the time!” I waved this aside, thinking that Fred was telling me that I was a holy person. But Fred is not given to such exuberant or inaccurate remarks, and that was not what he meant. His words stayed with me, and now I see what he was getting at. Insofar as I spend my life immersed in sacred writings, living with some of the best and wisest insights that human beings have achieved, constantly moved and stirred by them, I am indeed in constant contact with holiness. The fact that my “prayer” seems directed toward no person, no end, is something that many of the theologians I have studied had experienced. This, after all, was what I had been writing and talking about for the past seven years. I had constantly explained that the greatest spiritual masters insisted that God was not another being, and that there was Nothing out there. Yet for all this, at some level I had not relinquished the old ideas. I was still seduced by the realistic supernatural theism that I thought I had left behind, still childishly waiting for that clap of thunder, that streak of lightning, and the still, small voice of calm whispering in my ear. I thought that I had renounced “the blessèd face” but I was still hankering to drink “where trees flower, and springs flow.” I had not truly accepted the hard, irreducible fact that “there is nothing again.” The Greek Fathers of the church had loved the image of Moses going up the mountain and on the summit being wrapped in an impenetrable cloud. He could not see anything, but he was in the place where God was. This cloud of unknowing was precisely that. It offered no knowledge: “I know I shall not know,” as Eliot had put it. I had been expecting the thick mist to part, just a little, and had not really known, with every fiber of my being, that I would never know, would never see clearly. I was still hankering for the “one veritable transitory power.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Hyam Maccoby had given me a clue when we sat together, six years earlier, eating egg-and-tomato sandwiches in the little café near Finchley Central tube station. He had told me that in most traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. The myths of the hero, for example, are not meant to give us historical information about Prometheus or Achilles— or for that matter, about Jesus or the Buddha. Their purpose is to compel us to act in such a way that we bring out our own heroic potential. In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering “the truth” or “the meaning of life” but about living as intensely as possible here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to “get to heaven” but to discover how to be fully human—hence the images of the perfect or enlightened man, or the deified human being. Archetypal figures such as Muhammad, the Buddha, and Jesus become icons of fulfilled humanity. God or Nirvana is not an optional extra, tacked on to our human nature. Men and women have a potential for the divine, and are not complete unless they realize it within themselves. A passing Brahmin priest once asked the Buddha whether he was a god, a spirit, or an angel. None of these, the Buddha replied; “I am awake!” By activating a capacity that lay dormant in undeveloped men and women, he seemed to belong to a new species. In the past, my own practice of religion had diminished me, whereas true faith, I now believe, should make you more human than before.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  The journal Nature, where Conard published his findings in May 2009, described the tiny statue as a “prehistoric pin-up.” The New York Times quoted one scholar saying it “could be seen as bordering on the pornographic.” (Dale Guthrie got a laugh from this, as the quotation came from one of the researchers who had remained silent about The Nature of Paleolithic Art. “I guess he’s coming around!” he said.) But, the Times went on to say, “Scholars speculate that these Venus Figurines, as they are known, were associated with fertility beliefs or shamanistic rituals.” Pornographic or shamanistic? Here was the same debate that had divided Guthrie from so many others in the academic world. There is something striking about the issue, though. Why does it matter so much whether prehistoric representations of the human sex organs had sexual or religious purposes? Why does this particular aspect of archaeology spark such intense debate? And why is this particular sculpture the one that made headlines in The New York Times? Whatever purpose the Venus of Hohle Fels served, it is now one more example of how overtly sexual subject matter has been part of representational art since the beginning. It also exemplifies how sexual representation, no matter how one interprets it, has the power to get people talking, writing, reading and debating. A thirty-five-thousand-year-old sculpture of a naked woman can still drive people to step up their communication today. Whether Guthrie is right or not about what those ancient drawings and sculptures were for, his theory about a universal human behaviour stands the test. [image file=image_rsrc1FT.jpg] TWO [image file=image_rsrc1FU.jpg] The “Hottentot Venus” and the History of CivilizationJill Cook flinched when I mentioned the Venus of Hohle Fels. I had sought out Dr. Cook, a curator at the British Museum in London, for her expertise in prehistoric art, as well as for her particular interest in representations of men, women and couples. I met her in her office, which sits at the end of a small maze of corridors and stairways that are normally off limits to museum visitors. I wanted to talk with her about the role of sexuality in those first sculptures and artworks. In particular, I wanted to speak to her about a number of ancient sculptures of nude women known as Venuses, and which include the 2008 discovery in Hohle Fels. I did not know that my education would begin with a lesson on the far from benign nature of this nomenclature. “This term”—Venus—“is a piece of the history of sex if you like, which it is high time we dropped,” she said. “The term was not applied to these female figures because people were thinking of the classical Venus figures. It was applied because the heavy breasts and buttocks of these figurines reminded anthropologists of the day about what we now recognize as the terrible story of Saartjie Baartman.”