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 The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  It was possible for a man, who regarded the heaven as a finite, firm vault, to believe, or not, that God created the heaven, that heaven was opened, that Christ flew to heaven; but for us these words have no meaning whatsoever. Men of our time can only believe that they must believe so; but they cannot believe in what has no meaning for them. But if all these expressions are to have a figurative meaning and are emblems, we know that, in the first place, not all churchmen agree in this, but that, on the contrary, the majority insist on understanding Holy Scripture in a direct sense, and, secondly, that these interpretations are varied and not confirmed by anything. But even if a man wishes to make himself believe in the doctrine of the churches, as it is imparted,—the general diffusion of knowledge and of the Gospels, and the intercourse of men of various denominations among themselves, form for this another, even more insuperable obstacle. A man of our time need but buy himself a Gospel for three kopeks and read Christ's clear words to the woman of Samaria, which are not subject to any other interpretation, about the Father needing no worshippers in Jerusalem, neither in this mountain, nor in that, worshippers in spirit and in truth, or the words about a Christian's being obliged to pray, not in temples, as the pagans do, and in the sight of all, but in secret, that is, in his closet, or that a disciple of Christ must not call any one father or teacher,—a man needs but read these words, to become convinced that no ecclesiastic pastors, who call themselves teachers in opposition to Christ's teaching, and who quarrel among themselves, form an authority, and that that which the churchmen teach us is not Christianity. But more than that: if a man of our time continues to believe in miracles and does not read the Gospel, his mere intercourse with men of other denominations and faiths, which has become so easy in our time, will make him doubt in the authenticity of his faith. It was all very well for a man who never saw any men of another faith than his own to believe that his own faith was the correct one; but a thinking man need only come in contact, as he now does all the time, with equally good and equally bad men of various denominations, which condemn the doctrines of one another, in order to lose faith in the truth of the religion which he professes. In our time only a very ignorant man or one who is quite indifferent to the questions of life, which are sanctified by religion, can stay in the church faith.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Wallen’s realization, in the seventies, that rhesus females are the aggressors in sex had begun with a pattern he noticed in graduate school. At his university, pairs of adult monkeys—one female, one male—were observed in ten-by-eight-foot cages. At a lab in Britain whose work he read about, the cages were markedly smaller. On both sides of the ocean, the females had their ovaries removed; the scientists were tallying the copulations of the rhesus in the absence of ovarian hormones. And Wallen, who found himself contemplating the two sets of results against each other, was captivated by the fact that the couples in the tighter cages had a lot more sex. “So I pulled the literature on a range of similar tests that were done in different-sized cages, and the relationship was quite clear. In the smallest cages there was the most sex, in the largest ones there was the least, and the in-between ones had an in-between amount.” Soon Wallen arrived at Yerkes, and, watching the rhesus in the center’s broad compounds—habitats whose size came closer to natural conditions—he developed his thinking about the way the tight confines in many experiments had helped to mold the accepted vision of monkey sexuality: lessening the female role and distorting the truth. Put a male and female in a small cage, and no matter what the female’s hormonal state—no matter whether she had ovaries at all—the pair would have plenty of sex, in part, Wallen came to understand, because their proximity to each other mirrored the kind of stalking Deidrah was doing now. This sexual signaling, created by the cramped dimensions, stirred the males to mount. The males appeared to be the initiators of the species. But put rhesus in a less artificial situation, and sex depended almost completely on the female’s tracking, her ceaseless approaching, her lipping and stroking and belly-kissing and tap-tapping, her craving. Without her flood of ovulatory hormones, without the priming of her brain, copulation wasn’t going to occur. Are females the main sex-hunters in most other monkey species? The answer isn’t yet known, Wallen said; not enough meticulous science has been done. Capuchins, tonkeans, pigtails—he named three types whose females are the stalkers. With their sweeping tails and ebony faces, female langurs initiate fervently. And among the massive orangutans, scenes like this were documented, for the first time, in the late eighties: males lying on their backs, showing off their erections to females, and waiting passively; and females closing in, mounting, pumping. As for bonobos, with their strangely parted hair and reputation for abandon, females avidly get sex going with males and with each other.

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

  A personal experience of my own seems strongly to corroborate this view. For years I have been familiar, during the act of gaping, with a large, round, smooth sensation in tile region of the throat, a sensation characteristic of gaping and nothing else, but which, although I had often wondered about it, never suggested to my mind the motion of anything. The reader probably knows from his own experience exactly what feeling I mean. It was not till one of my students told me, that I learned its objective cause. If we look into the mirror while gaping, we see that at the moment we have this feeling the hanging palate rises by the contraction of its intrinsic muscles. The contraction of these muscles and the compression of the palatine mucous membrane are what occasion the feeling; and I was at first astonished that, coming from so small an organ, it could appear so voluminous. Now the curious point is this—that no sooner had I learned by the eye its objective space-significance, than I found myself enabled mentally to feel it as a movement upwards of a body in the situation of the uvula. When I now have it, my fancy injects it, so to speak, with the image of the rising uvula; and it absorbs the image easily and naturally. In a word, a, muscular contraction gave me a sensation whereof I was unable during forty years to interpret a motor meaning, of which two glances of the eye made me permanently the master. To my mind no further proof is needed of the fact that muscular contraction, merely as such, need not be perceived directly as so much motion through space.

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

  When by simply flexing my right forefinger on its metacarpal joint, I trace with its tip an inch on the palm of my left hand, is my feeling of the size of the inch purely and simply a feeling in the skin of the palm, or have the muscular contractions of the right hand and forearm anything to do with it? In the preceding pages I have constantly assumed spatial sensibility to be an affair of surfaces. At first starting, the consideration of the 'muscular sense' as a space-measurer was postponed to a later stage. Many writers, of whom the foremost was Thomas Brown, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, and of whom the latest is no less a Psychologist than Prof. Delbœuf,[194] hold that the consciousness of active muscular motion, aware of its own amount, is the fons et origo of all spatial measurement. It would seem to follow, if this theory were true, that two skin-feelings, one of a large patch, one of small one, possess their difference of spatiality, not as an immediate element, but solely by virtue of the fact that the large, to get its points successively excited, demands more muscular contraction than the small one does. Fixed associations with the several amounts of muscular contractions required in this particular experience would thus explain the apparent sizes of the skin-patches, which sizes would consequently not be primitive data but derivative results. It seems to me that no evidence of the muscular measurements in question exists; but that all the facts may be explained by surface-sensibility, provided we take that of the joint-surfaces also into account. The most striking argument, and the most obvious one, which an upholder of the muscular theory is likely to produce is undoubtedly this fact: if, with closed eyes, we trace figures in the air with the extended forefinger (the motions may occur from the metacarpal-, the wrist-, the elbow-, or the shoulder-joint indifferently), what we are conscious of in each case, and indeed most acutely conscious of, is the geometric path described by the finger-tip. Its angles, its subdivisions, are all as distinctly felt as if seen by the eye; and yet the surface of the finger-tip receives no impression at all.[195] But with each variation of the figure, the muscular contractions vary, and so do the feelings which these yield. Are not these latter the sensible data that make us aware of the lengths and directions we discern in the traced line?

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  And—I may be all off the beam now, but it seems to me that, that is somehow tied up in the—this feeling that I—I have now, into how the therapeutic value can carry through. Now, I couldn’t tie it up, I couldn’t tie it in, but it’s as close as I can come to explaining to myself, my—well, shall I say the learning process, the follow through on my realization that—yes, you do care in a given situation. It’s just that simple. And I hadn’t been aware of it before. I might have closed this door and walked out, and in discussing therapy, said, yes, the counselor must feel thus and so, but, I mean, I hadn’t had the dynamic experience. In this portion, though she is struggling to describe her own feeling, it would seem that what she is saying would be characteristic of the therapist’s attitude toward the client as well. His attitude, at its best, is devoid of the quid pro quo aspect of most of the experiences we call love. It is the simple outgoing human feeling of one individual for another, a feeling, it seems to me which is even more basic than sexual or parental feeling. It is a caring enough about the person that you do not wish to interfere with his development, nor to use him for any self-aggrandizing goals of your own. Your satisfaction comes in having set him free to grow in his own fashion. Our client goes on to discuss how hard it has been for her in the past to accept any help or positive feeling from others, and how this attitude is changing. C: I have a feeling . . . that you have to do it pretty much yourself, but that somehow you ought to be able to do that with other people. (She mentions that there have been “countless ” times when she might have accepted personal warmth and kindliness from others.) I get the feeling that I just was afraid I would be devastated. (She returns to talking about the counseling itself and her feeling toward it.) I mean there’s been this tearing through the thing myself. Almost to—I mean, I felt it—I mean I tried to verbalize it on occasion—a kind of—at times almost not wanting you to restate, not wanting you to reflect, the thing is mine. Course all right, I can say it’s resistance. But that doesn’t mean a damn thing to me now. . . . The—I think in—in relationship to this particular thing, I mean, the—probably at times, the strongest feeling was, it’s mine, it’s mine. I’ve got to cut it down myself. See?

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  Oak, “I have thought that in some deep way I was bad, that the most basic elements in me must be dire and awful. I don’t experience that badness, but rather a positive desire to live and let live. Perhaps I can be that person who is, at heart, positive.” What is it that makes possible anything but the first sentence of each of these formulations? It is the addition of awareness. In therapy the person adds to ordinary experience the full and undistorted awareness of his experiencing—of his sensory and visceral reactions. He ceases, or at least decreases, the distortions of experience in awareness. He can be aware of what he is actually experiencing, not simply what he can permit himself to experience after a thorough screening through a conceptual filter. In this sense the person becomes for the first time the full potential of the human organism, with the enriching element of awareness freely added to the basic aspect of sensory and visceral reaction. The person comes to be what he is, as clients so frequently say in therapy. What this seems to mean is that the individual comes to be —in awareness—what he is —in experience. He is, in other words, a complete and fully functioning human organism. Already I can sense the reactions of some of my readers. “Do you mean that as a result of therapy, man becomes nothing but a human organism, a human animal? Who will control him? Who will socialize him? Will he then throw over all inhibitions? Have you merely released the beast, the id, in man?” To which the most adequate reply seems to be, “In therapy the individual has actually become a human organism, with all the richness which that implies. He is realistically able to control himself, and he is incorrigibly socialized in his desires. There is no beast in man. There is only man in man, and this we have been able to release.” So the basic discovery of psychotherapy seems to me, if our observations have any validity, that we do not need to be afraid of being “merely” homo sapiens. It is the discovery that if we can add to the sensory and visceral experiencing which is characteristic of the whole animal kingdom, the gift of a free and undistorted awareness of which only the human animal seems fully capable, we have an organism which is beautifully and constructively realistic. We have then an organism which is as aware of the demands of the culture as it is of its own physiological demands for food or sex—which is just as aware of its desire for friendly relationships as it is of its desire to aggrandize itself—which is just as aware of its delicate and sensitive tenderness toward others, as it is of its hostilities toward others.

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  Many of these prove to be in extreme contradiction to the concept of self, and could not ordinarily be experienced in their fullness, but in this safe relationship they can be permitted to seep through into awareness without distortion. Thus they often follow the schematic pattern, “I am thus and so, but I experience this feeling which is very inconsistent with what I am”; “I love my parents, but I experience some surprising bitterness toward them at times”; “I am really no good, but sometimes I seem to feel that I’m better than everyone else.” Thus at first the expression is that “I am a self which is different from a part of my experience.” Later this changes to the tentative pattern, “Perhaps I am several quite different selves, or perhaps my self contains more contradictions than I had dreamed.” Still later the pattern changes to some such pattern as this: “I was sure that I could not be my experience—it was too contradictory—but now I am beginning to believe that I can be all of my experience.” Perhaps something of the nature of this aspect of therapy may be conveyed from two excerpts from the case of Mrs. Oak. Mrs. Oak was a housewife in her late thirties, who was having difficulties in marital and family relationships when she came in for therapy. Unlike many clients, she had a keen and spontaneous interest in the processes which she felt going on within herself, and her recorded interviews contain much material, from her own frame of reference, as to her perception of what is occurring. She thus tends to put into words what seems to be implicit, but unverbalized, in many clients. For this reason, most of the excerpts in this chapter will be taken from this one case. From an early portion of the fifth interview comes material which describes the awareness of experience which we have been discussing. Client: It all comes pretty vague. But you know I keep, keep having the thought occur to me that this whole process for me is kind of like examining pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. It seems to me I, I’m in the process now of examining the individual pieces which really don’t have too much meaning. Probably handling them, not even beginning to think of a pattern. That keeps coming to me. And it’s interesting to me because I, I really don’t like jig-saw puzzles. They’ve always irritated me.

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

  But is this my last word? By no means. Many readers have certainly been saying to themselves for the last few pages: "Why on earth doesn't the poor man say the Soul and have done with it?" Other readers, of anti-spiritualistic training and prepossessions, advanced thinkers, or popular evolutionists, will perhaps be a little surprised to find this much-despised word now sprung upon them at the end of so physiological a train of thought. But the plain fact is that all the arguments for a 'pontifical cell' or an 'arch-monad' are also arguments for that well-known spiritual agent in which scholastic psychology and common-sense have always believed. And my only reason for beating the bushes so, and not bringing it in earlier as a possible solution of our difficulties, has been that by this procedure I might perhaps force some of these materialistic minds to feel the more strongly the logical respectability of the spiritualistic position. The fact is that one cannot afford to despise any of these great traditional objects of belief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great drift of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in their direction. If there be such entities as Souls in the universe, they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences that go on in the nervous centres. To the state of the entire brain at a given moment they may respond by inward modifications of their own. These changes of state may be pulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few or many, simple or complex. The soul would be thus a medium upon which (to use our earlier phraseology) the manifold brain-processes combine their effects. Not needing to consider it as the 'inner aspect' of any arch-molecule or brain-cell, we escape that physiological improbability; and as its pulses of consciousness are unitary and integral affairs from the outset, we escape the absurdity of supposing feelings which exist separately and then 'fuse together' by themselves. The separateness is in the brain-world, on this theory, and the unity in the soul-world; and the only trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one of understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can affect or influence another at all. This trouble, however, since it also exists inside of both worlds, and involves neither physical improbability nor logical contradiction, is relatively small. I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  THE CONDITIONS FOR INTELLECTUAL, AFFECTIVE, GUT-LEVEL LEARNING There are a few experiences in my professional life that I remember vividly. One is the beautiful, air-conditioned, plush-seated auditorium at the University of Michigan in 1956. Those elements only surprised me—they are not the reason I remember the occasion. I was talking to a highly sophisticated professional audience, and I was advancing a theoretical view—very new, very tentative—as to what conditions were necessary and sufficient to produce change in individuals in one-to-one psychotherapy. I was dimly aware—fortunately, only dimly—that I was challenging almost all of the “sacred cows” in the therapeutic world. I was saying in effect, although not very openly, that it wasn’t a question of whether the therapist had been psychoanalyzed, or had a knowledge of personality theory, or possessed expertise in diagnosis, or had a thorough acquaintance with therapeutic techniques. Rather, I was saying that the therapist’s effectiveness in therapy depended on his or her attitudes. I even had the nerve to define what I thought those attitudes were (Rogers, 1957). It wasn’t a very popular talk. Perhaps because I was frightened of the possible reaction, it was one of the most closely reasoned, carefully stated talks I have ever given. I am still proud of it. And, though not very popular, it has sparked more research than any other talk I’ve ever given. First, a number of studies showed that when these conditions existed in psychotherapy, the self-learning that occurred did promote change. Then I became bolder and postulated that these same attitudinal conditions would promote any whole-person learning—that they would hold for the classroom as well as the therapist’s office. This hypothesis has also sparked research. Before I comment briefly on some of these studies, let me describe these attitudinal conditions as they relate to education, and as I have come to see them over the years. They are attitudes that, in my judgment, characterize a facilitator of learning. I have described them before (see Chapter 6), but I wish to repeat them here, since they relate to learning. Realness in the Facilitator of Learning * Perhaps the most basic of these essential attitudes is realness, or genuineness. When the facilitator is a real person, being what he or she is, entering into relationships with the learners without presenting a front or a façade, the facilitator is much more likely to be effective. This means that the feelings that the facilitator is experiencing are available to his or her awareness, that he or she is able to live these feelings, to be them, and able to communicate them if appropriate. It means that the facilitator comes into a direct, personal encounter with the learners, meeting each of them on a person-to-person basis. It means that the facilitator is being, not denying himself or herself. The facilitator is present to the students. Prizing, Acceptance, Trust

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

  Reformation was in the air. The educated classes could not escape its influence. The seed sown by Lefèvre had sprung up in France. The influence from Germany and Switzerland made itself felt more and more. The clergy opposed the new opinions, the men of letters favored them. Even the court was divided: King Francis I. persecuted the Protestants; his sister, Marguerite d’Angoulème, queen of Navarre, protected them. How could a young scholar of such precocious mind and intense studiousness as Calvin be indifferent to the religious question which agitated the universities of Orleans, Bourges, and Paris? He must have searched the Scriptures long and carefully before he could acquire such familiarity as he shows already in his first theological writings. He speaks of his conversion as a sudden one (subita conversio), but this does not exclude previous preparation any more than in the case of Paul.412 A city may be taken by a single assault, yet after a long siege. Calvin was not an unbeliever, nor an immoral youth; on the contrary, he was a devout Catholic of unblemished character. His conversion, therefore, was a change from Romanism to Protestantism, from papal superstition to evangelical faith, from scholastic traditionalism to biblical simplicity. He mentions no human agency, not even Volmar or Olivetan or Lefèvre. "God himself," he says, "produced the change. He instantly subdued my heart to obedience." Absolute obedience of his intellect to the word of God, and obedience of his will to the will of God: this was the soul of his religion. He strove in vain to attain peace of conscience by the mechanical methods of Romanism, and was driven to a deeper sense of sin and guilt. "Only one haven of salvation," he says, "is left open for our souls, and that is the mercy of God in Christ. We are saved by grace—not by our merits, not by our works." Reverence for the Church kept him back for some time till he learned to distinguish the true, invisible, divine essence of the Church from its outward, human form and organization. Then the knowledge of the truth, like a bright light from heaven, burst upon his mind with such force, that there was nothing left for him but to obey the voice from heaven. He consulted not with flesh and blood, and burned the bridge behind him.

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  T: Your feeling at the present time is that you have been very much aware of all the cultural pressures—not always very much aware, but “there have been so many of those in my life—and now I’m going down more deeply into myself to find out what I really feel” and it seems very much at the present time as though that somehow separates you a long ways from your culture, and that’s a little frightening, but feels basically good. Is that— C: Yeah. Well, I have the feeling now that it’s okay, really. . . . Then there’s something else—a feeling that’s starting to grow; well, to be almost formed, as I say. This kind of conclusion, that I’m going to stop looking for something terribly wrong. Now I don’t know why. But I mean, just—it’s this kind of thing. I’m sort of saying to myself now, well, in view of what I know, what I’ve found—I’m pretty sure I’ve ruled out fear, and I’m positive I’m not afraid of shock—I mean, I sort of would have welcomed it. But—in view of the places I’ve been, what I learned there, then also kind of, well, taking into consideration what I don’t know, sort of, maybe this is one of the things that I’ll have to date, and say, well, now, I’ve just—I just can’t find it. See? And now without any—without, I should say, any sense of apology or covering up, just sort of simple statement that I can’t find what at this time, appears to be bad. T: Does this catch it? That as you’ve gone more and more deeply into yourself, and as you think about the kind of things that you’ve discovered and learned and so on, the conviction grows very, very strong that no matter how far you go, the things that you’re going to find are not dire and awful. They have a very different character. C: Yes, something like that. Here, even as she recognizes that her feeling goes against the grain of her culture, she feels bound to say that the core of herself is not bad, nor terribly wrong, but something positive. Underneath the layer of controlled surface behavior, underneath the bitterness, underneath the hurt, is a self that is positive, and that is without hate. This I believe is the lesson which our clients have been facing us with for a long time, and which we have been slow to learn. If hatelessness seems like a rather neutral or negative concept, perhaps we should let Mrs. Oak explain its meaning.

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  But the fact that at heart man is irrational, unsocialized, destructive of others and self—this is a concept accepted almost without question. To be sure there are occasional voices of protest. Maslow (1) puts up a vigorous case for man’s animal nature, pointing out that the anti-social emotions—hostility, jealousy, etc.—result from frustration of more basic impulses for love and security and belonging, which are in themselves desirable. And Montagu (2) likewise develops the thesis that cooperation, rather than struggle, is the basic law of human life. But these solitary voices are little heard. On the whole the viewpoint of the professional worker as well as the layman is that man as he is, in his basic nature, had best be kept under control or under cover or both. As I look back over my years of clinical experience and research, it seems to me that I have been very slow to recognize the falseness of this popular and professional concept. The reason, I believe, lies in the fact that in therapy there are continually being uncovered hostile and anti-social feelings, so that it is easy to assume that this indicates the deeper and therefore the basic nature of man. Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feelings are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of man’s personality is the organism itself, which is essentially both self-preserving and social. To give more specific meaning to this argument, let me turn again to the case of Mrs. Oak. Since the point is an important one, I shall quote at some length from the recorded case to illustrate the type of experience on which I have based the foregoing statements. Perhaps the excerpts can illustrate the opening up of layer after layer of personality until we come to the deepest elements. It is in the eighth interview that Mrs. Oak rolls back the first layer of defense, and discovers a bitterness and desire for revenge underneath. C: You know over in this area of, of sexual disturbance, I have a feeling that I’m beginning to discover that it’s pretty bad, pretty bad. I’m finding out that, that I’m bitter, really. Damn bitter. I—and I’m not turning it back in, into myself . . . I think what I probably feel is a certain element of “I’ve been cheated.”

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

  1. This recentering of baptism around death, or at least the death-resurrection association, has three consequences concerning the notion of metanoia as indispensable to baptism. The first is that this conversion of the soul, this disengagement by which one renounces the world of sin and turns away from the path of death, increasingly takes the form of an exercise of oneself upon oneself, consisting of a mortification—of a deliberate, diligent, and continuous elimination of everything in the body or soul that might be attached to sin. The second is that this mortification must not be localized in the moment of baptism alone, but demands a long and slow preparation. It must not come to an end with the redemptive immersion, but must be pursued in a life of mortification that will end only in death itself. Baptism, conceptualized as a death and a resurrection, no longer simply marks one’s entry into Christian life; it is a permanent matrix for this life. Finally, another consequence—the requirement of a probatio, which had to verify both the desire and the ability of the candidate to reach the truth—will tend, while keeping that function, to give more and more prominence to a set of “tests” that are at once exercises of mortification and confirmation of this death to sin—of this death “to the death of sin.” The relation of self to self, understood as a labor of oneself upon oneself and as a coming to awareness of oneself by oneself, thus assumes a more and more distinct and salient role in the overall process of conversion-penance designated by the word metanoia. —

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  MOYERS: Is this true for everyone? CAMPBELL: It is true for everyone who has reached in his life the level of the heart. MOYERS: You really believe there is a geography of the psyche? CAMPBELL: This is metaphorical language, but you can say that some people are living on the level of the sex organs, and that’s all they’re living for. That’s the meaning of life. This is Freud’s philosophy, is it not? Then you come to the Adlerian philosophy of the will to power, that all of life is centered on obstructions and overcoming the obstructions. Well, sure, that’s a perfectly good life, and those are forms of divinity also. But they are on the animal level. Then there comes another kind of life, which involves giving oneself to others one way or another. This is the one that’s symbolized in the opening of the heart. MOYERS: What is the source of that life? CAMPBELL: It must be a recognition of your life in the other, of the one life in the two of us. God is an image for that one life. We ask ourselves where this one life comes from, and people who think everything has to have been made by somebody will think, “Well, God made it.” So God’s the source of all this. MOYERS: Well then, what is religion? CAMPBELL: The word “religion” means religio, linking back. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back. This has become symbolized in the images of religion, which represent that connecting link. MOYERS: Jung, the famous psychologist, says that one of the most powerful religious symbols is the circle. He says that the circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind and that, in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self. What do you make of that? CAMPBELL: The whole world is a circle. All of these circular images reflect the psyche, so there may be some relationship between these architectural designs and the actual structuring of our spiritual functions. When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-off area, that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle. MOYERS: I remember reading about an Indian chief who said, “When we pitch camp, we pitch a camp in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in a circle. When we look at the horizon, the horizon is in a circle.” Circles were very important to some Indians, weren’t they? CAMPBELL: Yes. But they’re also in much that we’ve inherited from Sumerian mythology. We’ve inherited the circle with the four cardinal points and three hundred and sixty degrees.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  MOYERS: Does it come out of the fear of hell and the desirable alternative? CAMPBELL: That’s good standard Christian doctrine—that at the end of the world there will be a general judgment and those who have acted virtuously will be sent to heaven, and those who have acted in an evil way, to hell. This is a theme that goes back to Egypt. Osiris is the god who died and was resurrected and in his eternal aspect will sit as judge of the dead. Mummification was to prepare the person to face the god. But an interesting thing in Egypt is that the person going to the god is to recognize his identity with the god. In the Christian tradition, that’s not allowed. So if you’re saying that the alternative is hell or heaven, well, give me heaven forever. But when you realize that heaven is a beholding of the beatific image of God—that would be a timeless moment. Time explodes, so again eternity is not something everlasting. You can have it right here, now, in your experience of your earthly relationships. I’ve lost a lot of friends, as well as my parents. A realization has come to me very, very keenly, however, that I haven’t lost them. That moment when I was with them has an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What it gave me then is still with me, and there’s a kind of intimation of immortality in that. There is a story of the Buddha, who encountered a woman who had just lost her son, and she was in great grief. The Buddha said, “I suggest that you just ask around to meet somebody who has not lost a treasured child or husband or relative or friend.” Understanding the relationship of mortality to something in you that is transcendent of mortality is a difficult task. MOYERS: Myths are full of the desire for immortality, are they not? CAMPBELL: Yes. But when immortality is misunderstood as being an everlasting body, it turns into a clown act, really. On the other hand, when immortality is understood to be identification with that which is of eternity in your own life now, it’s something else again. MOYERS: You’ve said that the whole question of life revolves around being versus becoming. CAMPBELL: Yes. Becoming is always fractional. And being is total. MOYERS: What do you mean? CAMPBELL: Well, let’s say you are going to become fully human. In the first few years you are a child, and that is only a fraction of the human being. In a few more years you are in adolescence, and that is certainly a fraction of the human being. In maturity you are still fractional—you are not a child, but you are not old yet. There is an image in the Upanishads of the original, concentrated energy which was the big bang of creation that set forth the world, consigning all things to the fragmentation of time.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  It wasn’t even the words, really; the very tone of the father’s voice had immediately changed the frigid timbre in the room. A fire had been lit. The daughter’s anger melted. She let herself into his arms. The father and daughter embraced each other and cried, the sobs muffled by each other’s clothing. Even though so few words had actually been said, something healing had just occurred. “That was the right answer,” Dr. Ham said proudly. — I sat back and closed the video. The image that occurred to me was of Anne Sullivan forcing Helen Keller’s hand under the pump and spelling out the letters W-A-T-E-R on her palm. This video had similarly baptized me, awoken me to a shocking truth: Punishment doesn’t work. I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain. Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more. The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter. Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community. When I was a little girl, my mother used to ask me all the time, “Who do you love more? Mommy or Daddy?” I knew from a very young age to be diplomatic, to say, “I love both of you equally,” even though this always seemed like a disappointment to both of them rather than a reassurance. The question would come up during fun times—mornings when we all snuggled in my parents’ bed—and tense fights, when they dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night to arrange some premature custody agreement. Finally, one day I was fed up, or maybe I was just tired. So when my mother asked, “Who do you love more?” I answered, “I guess Mommy. Because she punishes me more. So she must love me more.” I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  Because interpellation talks about only one aspect of the meaning of “making”/“producing”/“creating”/“sedimenting,” it does not tell the whole story. It is simply one of the more important things that happen to subjects at the level of discourse. And, in general, discourse constitutes and is constituted by what Walter Pater called, in the conclusion to The Renaissance, “a roughness of the eye.” Thus, without a great deal more elaboration, the notion of interpellation is as reductive as any other theoretical move. But it locates a powerful and pivotal point in the process. And it makes it clear that the process is, as are all the creative powers of discourse, irrevocably anchored within the social, rather than somehow involved with some fancied breaking out of the social into an uncharted and unmapped beyond, that only awaits the release of police surveillance to erupt into that red Eden of total unconstraint. Here is what the priority of the social says about those times in war where that vision of hell was first encountered by people like my uncle, possibly among our own soldiers: Look, if you spend six months socializing young men to “kill, kill, kill,” it’s naive to be surprised when some of them, in the course of their pursuit of pleasure, do. It is not because some essentialist factor in “perversion” or “prostitution” (or sexuality in general) always struggles to break loose. It is language (and/as social habit) that cuts the world up into the elements, objects, and categories we so glibly call reality—a reality that includes the varieties of desire; a reality where what is real is what must be dealt with, which is one with the political: the world is what it is cut up into—all else is metaphysics. That is all that is meant by that troubling poststructuralist assertion that the world is constituted of and by language and nothing more that we have any direct access to.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  That’s the meaning of the image of the Grail, of the inexhaustible fountain, of the source. The source doesn’t care what happens once it gives into being. It’s the giving and coming into being that counts, and that’s the becoming life point in you. That’s what all these myths are concerned to tell you. In the study of comparative mythology, we compare the images in one system with the images in another, and both become illuminated because one will accent and give clear expression to one aspect of the meaning, and another to another. They clarify each other. When I started teaching comparative mythology, I was afraid I might destroy my students’ religious beliefs, but what I found was just the opposite. Religious traditions, which didn’t mean very much to them, but which were the ones their parents had given them, suddenly became illuminated in a new way when we compared them with other traditions, where similar images had been given a more inward or spiritual interpretation. I had Christian students, Jewish students, Buddhist students, a couple of Zoroastrian students—they all had this experience. There’s no danger in

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  So when the hands came, we offered our cheeks. We offered ourselves as conduits for their anguish because they had suffered so we wouldn’t, so we could watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat sugary cereal and go to college and trust the government and never go hungry. We excused all of it, absorbed the slaps and the burns and the canings and converted them into perfect report cards to wipe away our parents’ brutal pasts. We did the work, as they like to say now. We got into good colleges, got internships and postdocs, and eventually moved on to successful, rewarding careers in big cities that paid us enough money to buy high-end audio gear for our modernist apartments. We achieved the American Dream because we had no other choice. — For a long time, this was the story I remembered about my childhood. I told myself it was not worth dwelling on. It was what it was. It was the price you paid for growing up in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. My story was the same as everyone else’s story. But now, I wasn’t so sure. CHAPTER 24 [image file=image_rsrc3E3.jpg] I’m blasting “Work” by Jimmy Eat World on the 280 from SFO to San Jose—a tribute to the last version of myself to embark on this drive. I listened to this song every day on my way to high school—an anticipatory anthem to escape. Can we take a ride? Get out of this place while we still have time? I allow myself a moment to feel pride for that teenage self, the way she harvested that emo-pop angst into a rocket that blasted her out of this goddamn town. Then I shiver a bit, wondering what she would think of me now, driving back of my own volition, still sporting blue hair and combat boots fifteen years later. — I’ve come back to San Jose to fact-check my abuse. I’ve come back because ever since my diagnosis, I’ve been questioning the reliability of memory. The veil of my dissociation, I know now, has done some damage to my memories of this place. Some of my recent research has stoked my skepticism. In some studies, scientists implanted false memories in their subjects: They made people believe they’d gotten lost in the mall when they were children,[1] or that there was footage of the crash of United 93 on September 11, though no such footage exists.[2] Our memories are fallible, scientists say, and there is evidence that our brains are constantly rewriting them; in fact, the very act of conjuring or relaying a memory can change it in our brains.[3] In the years since I’d left San Jose, I’d frequently brought up violent memories of myself and the children in this community being abused. How much of that was truth—and how much of it had been the equivalent of running a picture through a copier too many times, degrading my memories until they became a grainy blur?

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I don’t remember exactly how my parents got me back, but it was not without drama and not for long. A few weeks later there was the episode in the garden near Lyon that I have described at the beginning of this book. A few weeks after that I went to live with Claude. The flight to Dieppe had allowed me to ‘become a woman’, and I had established the right to come and go as I pleased. All the same, looking back on it, our frolicking in the tent seemed like kids’ games. They remind me of the way I used to hide from adults by pulling my sheet up over my head, creating the confined but vital space of a little house of my own. Succumbing to a forbidden activity in a place regulated by communal laws, poorly protected by a thin or flawed screen, by a bit of foliage, even by a wall of human accomplices, derives – at least in part – from the same playful spirit. It represents an elementary mechanism of transgression which, paradoxically, belongs less to extroversion than to introversion; you don’t make an exhibition of yourself, you turn in on your intimate pleasure, pretending to ignore the fact that it might accidentally erupt in front of spectators who are not prepared for it and might even stop it.