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

  “I’m sorry, madam,” the waiter said, “we don’t serve the Reuben any longer.” “Well,” Limori said, her tone and body language conveying the message Don’t you know who I am? , “that’s what I want for lunch. Ask the chef and I’m sure he’ll make the sandwich for me.” The rest of us at the table sat quietly, well used to this sort of performance. The waiter left our table to go into the kitchen to talk to the chef and was back in a few seconds. “I’m very sorry, madam, we’re just not set up to serve the Reuben since it’s been taken off the menu. May I offer you the club sandwich?” Limori thought about this for a second or two, her hands clasped over her vast midsection, rings sparkling in the light. Then she set her gaze so directly at the waiter that I was surprised she didn’t burn holes through to the back of his skull. “I want a Reuben sandwich,” she said. “I’ve been coming to this hotel for years and I always have a Reuben sandwich when I’m here. You tell the chef that I am the customer, and a regular customer at that, and that I know it’s possible for him to make me a Reuben sandwich and that’s what I want.” She held the waiter’s gaze when she’d finished and after a second or two he moved away toward the kitchen again. Limori got her Reuben sandwich. Are you surprised? I wasn’t, but what did surprise me was that when the waiter asked the rest of the table what we wanted for lunch, Michael looked at Limori, and then at the waiter and said, “I’ll have the Reuben sandwich as well.” This choice was mildly surprising to me because Michael was a health nut and was always fastidious about what he put in his mouth, and a sandwich laden with processed meat would not normally be a choice that he’d make. But more than that, it was the split-second attitude that came across when he placed his order that struck me. He was sucking up. He was sucking up to Limori in a way that, if I had witnessed it before, I had been too preoccupied or blind to notice. He wanted her to be pleased with him, I realized, and he wanted to be in with the in crowd. (Alice, Susan and Rosemarie seemed to follow Michael’s lead and also ordered the Rueben. I alone had something other than that for lunch.) Michael had always been a lion to me. He was the one person in our group who stood up to Limori. He’d had many an argument with her, both ones I’d witnessed and ones he’d described after they’d happened. Unlike me, he had never seemed afraid of her. I had always been able to see that he respected her, but this was the first moment I noticed that he wanted her approval, just as I did.

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

  My parents named me Lynda Alexandra when I was born, but at 19 I decided I liked Alexandra better and began using it. (I’m astonished that he remembered that; the name change happened a few years before I met him.) What I can’t figure out is why he changed my name and no one else’s. Is it because he doesn’t want to drive traffic to this book? That’s my best guess. I’m not sure he’s read this book, but he does mention it (not by name) and says that in his opinion I wrote it in order to destroy Limori and Wolf’s Den. This is categorically untrue, and one of the reasons I changed everyone’s name was specifically to protect the privacy of those I discuss, including his and Limori’s. I’ve been asked at author readings and other events to give Limori’s real name and have always refused. We all have blind spotsReading Michael’s book helped me to see that I was entirely blind to how devoted he was to Limori and to the fact that his spiritual journey was the primary focus of his life. In his book, he mentions that he had an insightful, spiritual, world-dissolving moment of blinding light before he met Limori, which he describes in part by saying “…the world was going to change in huge and dramatic ways, and … I had a part to play in it.” He had shared this story with me a number of times when we were friends, and I heard him but clearly didn’t really understand how that experience informed his character and defined him, in a deep and lasting way. He was and is still willing to do anything to fulfill the promise of that experience. In hindsight, I was also utterly blind to how much that pivotal spiritual experience mattered to him and how deeply he felt the drive to fulfill the destiny that he felt was calling him. Even when I wrote this book, I hadn’t connected those dots. It is only now, in 2019, having read his story from his point of view, that I finally get it. He describes in his book how, after that moment of blinding light, he searched for years for a teacher before finding Limori. I do remember him telling me that he searched for so long that he thought he’d missed the thing he was supposed to find. I remember him saying that when he found Limori, he was hugely relieved. He decided that she was The One. Why now?When I tell people that Michael has written his book, often the first question out of their mouths is “Why?” Of course, I can’t know for sure, but here are my thoughts on that. Limori died in January 2013, as I detailed in a previous update. As of this writing, six years have passed since her death.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  For a couple of months, Devon turned that idea over in his mind, recognizing and resisting it, knowing it was true but not wanting it to be so. He worried about telling his parents. He worried about swimming. He worried about what he called “losing lesbians” (when some members of a lesbian empowerment board posted that trans men were tools of the patriarchy, “that fucked me up for a couple of weeks,” Devon recalled). Finally, he enrolled in a workshop on gender where he could meet some trans people, “and this kid walks in,” Devon said, “about thirteen years old, and I’m double-taking because I can see myself in him. The way he walks that’s a little more feminine than you’d expect. His chest was bound, which I used to do. He wore cargo pants, just like I would. But he had facial hair and this low voice. And when he started talking about being a trans person, I started bawling and I couldn’t stop. Every other line felt like, ‘This is me! This is me!’ It tore my world apart. And it gave me the spark to start a new one.” In the fall, Devon began hormone therapy. He wanted to have top surgery immediately, but his parents, who he said have supported him fully, were nonetheless reluctant for him to rush into having his breasts removed (most transgender people, whether male or female, do not transition surgically, either out of choice or due to lack of funds and discrimination by health insurers). Devon’s father accompanied him to a facility in Florida that specialized in female-to-male transition—the staff told them it was the first time that a patient came with a male rather than a female parent. Devon wept with relief when he woke from the surgery. “It was a huge weight off my chest—ha ha,” he quipped. “I was passing before, but now I pass all the time.” His only real concern was swimming—according to NCAA rules, the hormones made him ineligible to swim as a woman. It took some negotiation and advocacy by his parents, but by the time he started school the following fall, he’d been accepted on the men’s team.

• 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.”

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

  The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else’s, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life. Thus transfigured, he (or she) can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind. But if the knight finds himself riding along an already established track, he is simply following in somebody else’s footsteps and will not have an adventure. In the words of the Old French text of The Quest of the Holy Grail, if he wants to succeed, he must enter the forest “at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.” The wasteland in the Grail legend is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society and doing only what other people expect. The myth of the Holy Grail was a watershed in the spiritual development of the West. It turned the crusading ethos on its head. Instead of marching to their adventure in the huge, massed armies of the Crusades, the Grail knights embarked on a solitary quest, riding into the forest alone. The destination of the Grail knights is not the earthly city of Jerusalem but the heavenly city of Saras, which has no place in this world. The forest represents the interior realm of the psyche, and the Grail itself becomes a symbol of a mystical encounter with God. By the thirteenth century, when the Grail legend began to take root in Europe, the people of the West were finally ready to develop a more spiritualized form of Christianity. And when I started to work on A History of God, I too began to focus on my inner life. This was not initially a conscious choice, but whether I liked it or not, I was now much more alone than before. Henceforth I would often be very busy indeed—researching, writing, lecturing, traveling, having fun, seeing friends—but increasingly that was no longer where the action was. There were plenty of events in my external life, but I cannot— at least at present—find a narrative there. The real story was unfolding, at first imperceptibly and by slow degrees, within myself.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  When you were born, you were Wendy Malone. Perhaps you were Wendy Malone for but minutes, or hours. We don’t know. Your adoption had been arranged prior to your birth, and at three weeks old, you were delivered to your parents, whereupon you became Rebecca Priscilla Bard. Which is who you were for the next twenty-odd years. Becky. In college, you made a loose stab at renaming yourself Butch, though, hilariously, you didn’t really know what it meant. It had just been a nickname for you, used by your father. After you knew, you could tell who was gay by introducing yourself. “I’m Butch,” you’d say, swinging your long blond hair. “No you’re not,” those in the know would chuckle. Then, after dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco, in a Judy Chicago—style rebirth, you renamed yourself Harriet Dodge. After you had a child, you inched toward the state and made the change official: you placed an ad in the paper, filed the paperwork at the courthouse. (Until then, you’d kept your distance from “affairs of the state”: no one had your correct Social Security number until you were thirty-six; you’d never had a bank account.) Over time you became Harriet “Harry” Dodge: an attempt to conjure the feeling of and, or but. Now you are simply Harry, the Harriet a distasteful but sometimes indicative appendage.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  So there is, without a doubt, a strong chronanistic element to my doing of tapes. It may even be that if I hadn’t spent so large a portion of the last ten years of my life transcribing words, starting and stopping so many thousands and thousands of modest human sentences-in-progress with my foot-pedal, I would have long ago lost the ability to drop into the Fold altogether. The daily regimen of microcassettes has kept me unusually sensitive, perhaps, to the editability of the temporal continuum—to the fact that an apparently seamless vocalization may actually elide, glide over, hide whole self-contained vugs of hidden activity or distraction—sneezes, expletives, spilled coffee, sexual adventures—within. “The mind is a lyric cry in the midst of business,” says George Santayana, whose autobiography (volume one) I got out of the Boston Public Library yesterday; and it occurs to me that this aphorism illuminates the peculiar suggestiveness of the microcassette, and of all audiocassettes, in fact: these stocky, solid, paragraph-shaped material objects, held together with minuscule Phillips-head screws at each corner (the screws are smaller, incidentally, than the screws in the hinges of my glasses, so small that only SCARA robots could have twirled them in place in such quantity), with their pair of unfixed center sprockets left deliberately loose so that they can comply with slight variations in the spindle distances of different brands of machine—these chunky pieces of geometrical business within which, nonetheless, an elfin wisp of Mylar frisks around any tiny struts or blocks of felt placed in its path, minnowing the ferromagnetic after-sparkle of a voiced personality through whatever Baroque diagonals and Bezier curves it can contort from the givens of its prison. This said, the surprising thing really is how little luck I have had using the foot-pedal of my tape-transcription machine to trigger a true Drop. I have thus far been unable to stop the universe using it, or using the remote-control PAUSE buttons of VCRs or CD players, which would seem obvious actuators. I had, as I mentioned, only a brief success in college with a garage-door opener. It may be that to engage time effectively and stop it cold, a mechanism has to have some quality that links it uniquely with me, with my own emotional life, which is why, for example, the toggle-switch transformer for my race-track only worked as a chronoclutch after my fallen hand brushed against it, discovering its warmth, in the middle of the night. This could also explain why the general trend in my Fold-actuators, with a few important exceptions, has been away from hardware and toward simpler, purely bodily spurs like a finger-snap or the pushing up of my glasses on my nose.

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

  This was startling information, but once I had been introduced to these ideas, I read the gospels and epistles with new eyes. All kinds of anomalies and contradictions in the text, which were easily overlooked when you read it piecemeal or heard it recited in a liturgical setting, now made sense. I could see why this had not been included in my diploma course, however. This was dynamite. It gravely undermined many of the theological assumptions of my Catholic years. I had realized that much Christian theology was man-made, but I had not appreciated how shaky were its very foundations. All my original ideas for the television series had to be revised. It was Saint Paul, not Jesus, who was the founder of Christianity, and even he would have been dismayed by some of the theological conclusions that were later drawn from his letters. I now discovered that Paul’s epistles are the earliest extant Christian documents and that the gospels, all written years after Paul’s own death, were penned by men who had adopted Paul’s version of Christianity. Far from Paul perverting the gospels, the gospels, it seemed, owed their vision to Paul. The only Jesus we knew was the Jesus bequeathed to us by Paul. Further, it appeared that not all the epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament were actually written by him. And this radically altered my view of Paul himself. Some of the most misogynist passages, for example, were almost certainly written by Christians some sixty years after Paul’s death. Perhaps he wasn’t the monster I had imagined.

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

  So that evening, when at 7:20 p.m. I heard the college bell summoning the students to dinner, I did not lay down my pen, close my books neatly, and walk obediently to the dining hall. My essay had to be finished in time for my tutorial the following morning, and I was working on a crucial paragraph. There seemed no point in breaking my train of thought. This bell was not the voice of God, but simply a convenience. It was not inviting me to a meeting with God. Indeed, God was no longer calling me to anything at all—if he ever had. This time last year, even the smallest, most mundane job had had sacred significance. Now all that was over. Instead of each duty being a momentous occasion, nothing seemed to matter very much at all. As I hurried across the college garden to the dining hall, I realized with a certain wry amusement that my little gesture of defiance had occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. That morning, the nuns had knelt at the altar rail to receive their smudge of ash, as the priest muttered: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” This memento mori began a period of religious observance that was even more intense than usual. Right now, in the convent refectory, the nuns would be lining up to perform special public penances in reparation for their faults. The sense of effort and determination to achieve a greater level of perfection than ever before would be almost tangible, and this was the day on which I had deliberately opted to be late for dinner! As I pushed back the heavy glass door, I was confronted with a very different scene from the one I had just been imagining. The noise alone was an assault, as the unrestrained, babbling roar of four hundred students slapped me in the face. To encourage constant prayer and recollection, our rule had stipulated that we refrain from speech all day; talking was permitted only for an hour after lunch and after dinner, when the community gathered for sewing and general recreation. We were trained to walk quietly, to open and close doors as silently as possible, to laugh in a restrained trill, and if speech was unavoidable in the course of our duties, to speak only “a few words in a low voice.” Lent was an especially silent time. But there was no Lenten atmosphere in college tonight. Students hailed one another noisily across the room, yelled greetings to friends, and argued vigorously, with wild, exaggerated gestures. Instead of the monochrome convent scene— black-and-white habits, muffled, apologetic clinking of cutlery, and the calm, expressionless voice of the reader—there was a riot of color, bursts of exuberant laughter, and shouts of protest. But whether I liked it or not, this was my world now.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Towards the end of this final three-week retreat, as I recreated for the record my magnetic-resonance scan with Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, I was visited by a little realization of my own. It will seem ludicrously obvious to the reader, but to me it felt like real progress. My realization was that I would have to tell Joyce about the Fold right at the outset, before I tried to fuck her even once. There could be no more secrets: if I was going to shock Joyce with my chronanism, I had to shock her from the start, and if I was going to seduce her with the Fold’s help, she would, unlike Rhody, have to be a knowing party to the seduction. That decided, I discovered I liked the idea of finally telling someone. It might make me, “just a temp,” a little more glamorous in her eyes. The night before I was to see Joyce again, I couldn’t sleep for about two hours early in the morning. I Dropped during most of my insomnia, because I didn’t want to waste the night in sleeplessness. I wanted to be fresh for her. I lay in bed in a paused universe with my hand cupped over my troika; every time I thought of telling her that I had tied her knit dress around her waist in the middle of the afternoon and touched her hips and felt her sparkling vafro, I could feel my malefactor come alive. I wanted to tell her the shocking thing that I had done. I wanted her to forgive me and love me for it. Here is how I asked her out the next day. Around eleven-thirty, she came by to drop off a tape and waved. I whipped off my phones. “How were things here last week?” I asked. Joyce was wearing a green dress I’d never seen before; her black hair was loosely tied in back with the Cyrillic scarf. I took this as a good omen. “I’m swamped with various disasters,” she said. “We missed you. The person they sent to fill in for you was none too speedy.” “I’m sorry to hear that.” I held out my hand and Joyce gave me the microcassette. “I’ll have this done in no time,” I said. “I’ve missed these tapes, you know. I like being in the middle of typing something you’ve just said into my ear and looking up and seeing you walk across the floor.” This took Joyce a tiny bit by surprise. “How was your vacation?” “It was good, quite good. Long, though.” “What have you been up to?” “I’ve been—this sounds insane—but I’ve been writing my autobiography,” I said. “Have you led an interesting life?” Joyce asked. I leaned forward. “Well, you know—I have! I have. What about you?” “No.” “That’s unfortunate,” I said. “What can I do to help?”