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 New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  This conversion occurred through a direct act of God, who "was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles" (1:15). Thus, the revelation of who Jesus really was, as opposed to who Paul had earlier thought he was, came directly from God and for a clear purpose: so Paul could take the message to the Gentiles, that is, to non-Jews like the Galatians. This message was not given by the Jerusalem apostles or by anyone else: "I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me" (1:16-17; contrast Acts 9:19-30). Why is Paul so emphatic on this point? It may be that he suspects that his Galatian opponents have claimed that he modified the gospel that he originally learned from Jesus' earliest followers, the Jerusalem apostles. If so, then his autobiographical sketch shows that the claim is simply not true ("before God, I do not lie!" 1:20). On the other hand, he may know that his opponents have claimed superior authorization for themselves, by pointing to the Jerusalem apostles as the source of their own message. If so, then his sketch shows that whatever the source of his oppo- nents' message, his own came straight from God. To be sure, Paul does not deny that he has had some contact with the Jerusalem apostles. He admits that three years after his conversion (i.e., long after his views were set) he went to visit Cephas for fifteen days. He does not, however, indicate precisely why he went. Indeed, the term that he uses, which is sometimes simply translated as "to visit" (Gal 1:18), can mean either that he went "to learn something" or "to convey some information." It may be that he went to keep Cephas, the chief apostle in Jerusalem at the time, apprised of his actions (see box 19.5). 2,88 THE NEW TEST,'VlENT: A HSTOC,'L INTRODUCTION SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT Box 19.5 Cephas and Peter Most people naturally assume that when Paul says that he went to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, he is referring to Peter, jesus' closest disciple. This isbecause neither "Peter" nor "Cephas" was a proper name in the Greco-Roman world, but both are translations of the word Urock" ("Peter" is Greek and "Cephas" is Aramaic). Moreover, according to the Fourth Gospel, this word was the nickname (something like our modem name "Rocky") that Jesus bestowed upon his disciple Simon 0ohn 1:41). A number of Christian authors fro m the second to the eighth centUries, hob, ever, believed that there were two different persons, one named Peter and the other Cephas, that is, two important followers of Jesus who shared the same unusual nickname. If this ancient tradition is right, then Peter would have been Jesus' original disciple and Cephas would have been the leader of the church in Jerusalem some years later. Could this tradition be historically accurate?

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  The account is multiply attested (Mark 11 and John 2) and it is consistent with the predictions scattered throughout the tradition about the com- ing destruction of the Temple. Therefore, it is unlikely that Christians invented the story, in order to show their own opposition to the Temple, as some scholars have claimed. It is possible, how- ever, that Christians modified the tradition in some ways, as they modified most of the stories CHAPTER 1.5 JEsus, THE APOCALYPTIC DROPHET 221 that they retold over the years. In the earliest sur- viving account, Jesus displays a superhuman show of strength, shutting down the entire Temple cult by an act of his will (Mark 11:16). The Temple complex was immense, and there would have been armed guards present to prevent any major distur- bances. Mark's account, then, may represent an exaggeration of the effect of Jesus' actions. It is hard to know whether Jesus' words during this episode should be accepted as authentic. He quotes the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah to indi- cate that the Temple cult has become corrupt, calling it "a den of thieves." Indeed, it is possible that Jesus, like the Essenes, believed that the wor- ship of God in the Temple had gotten out of hand and that the Sadducees in control had abused their power and privileges to their own end. But it is also possible that Jesus' actions are to be taken as a kind of enacted parable, comparable to the symbolic actions performed by a number of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures (see box 15.3). By overturning the tables and causing a distur- SOMETHING TO THINIK ABOUT Box 15.3 The Temple Incident as an Enacted Parable Parables are simple stories that are invested with deeper spiritual meaning. An enacted parable is a simple action that carries a symbolic, spiritual significance. In the Hebrew Bible, prophets were sometimes told by God to perform a symbolic action to accompany their mes- sage. For some interesting examples, read Jeremiah 13:1-14; 19:1-15; and 32:1-44, and Ezekiel 4:1-17. One of the most dramatic occurs in Isaiah 20:1-6. Is it possible that Jesus' actions in the Temple were enacted parables meant to symbolize something far greater than themselves? It is indeed possible that by overturning the tables and disrupting asmall part of the Temple operation, Jesus was making a symbolic gesture to indi- cate what was to happen in the coming destruction. Such an action would fit well with the ' predictio of the Temple's destruction by Jesus throughout the early (and late) traditions. Jesus as by no means the first Jewish prophet to attack the Temple. Some 600 years ear- lier the prophet Jeremiah pronounced a judgment that was quite similar (Jet 7:1-15; 26:1-15) and received a comparable response from the leaders in charge of the place (see Jet 26:8, 11 ).

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

  The forward movement of humanity takes place, not in this way, that the best elements of society, seizing the power and using violence against those men who are in their power, make them better, as the conservatives and revolutionists think, but, in the first and chief place, in that all men in general unswervingly and without cessation more and more consciously acquire the Christian life-conception, and in the second place, in that, even independently of the conscious spiritual activity of men, men unconsciously, in consequence of the very process of seizure of power by one set of men and transference to another set, and involuntarily are brought to a more Christian relation to life. This process takes place in the following manner: the worst elements of society, having seized the power and being in possession of it, under the influence of the sobering quality which always accompanies it, become less and less cruel and less able to make use of the cruel forms of violence, and, in consequence of this, give place to others, in whom again goes on the process of softening and, so to speak, unconscious Christianization. What takes place in men is something like the process of boiling. All the men of the majority of the non-Christian life-conception strive after power and struggle to obtain it. In this struggle the most cruel and coarse, and the least Christian elements of society, by doing violence to the meeker, more Christian people, who are more sensible to the good, rise to the higher strata of society. And here with the men in this condition there takes place what Christ predicted, saying: "Woe unto you that are rich, that are full now, and when all are glorified." What happens is that men in power, who are in possession of the consequences of power,—of glory and wealth,—having reached certain different aims, which they have set to themselves in their desires, recognize their vanity and return to the position which they left. Charles V., John IV., Alexander I., having recognized all the vanity and evil of power, renounced it, because they saw all its evil and were no longer able calmly to make use of violence as of a good deed, as they had done before. But it is not only a Charles and an Alexander who travel on this road and recognize the vanity and evil of power: through this unconscious process of softening of manners passes every man who has acquired the power toward which he has been striving, not only every minister, general, millionaire, merchant, but also every head of an office, who has obtained the place he has been ten years waiting for, every well-to-do peasant, who has laid by a hundred or two hundred roubles. Through this process pass not only separate individuals, but also aggregates of men, whole nations.

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

  PatientFor much of my life I fucked naively. What I mean by that was that sleeping with men was a natural activity which didn’t unduly bother me. Obviously, from time to time I would come across some of the attendant psychological problems (lies, wounded pride, jealousy), but they could be written off on the profit and loss account. I wasn’t very sentimental. I needed affection, and I found it, but without feeling any need to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships. When I did fall for someone, I think I was still conscious of succumbing to some charm, a physical seduction, even to the geometry of relations (for example, simultaneously having affairs with a much older man and a younger man, and having fun shifting from playing the role of a little girl to that of a protector) without ever being fully engaged. When I complained how difficult it was managing four or five sustained relationships at once, I had a good friend who would tell me that it wasn’t the number of men that was difficult but finding a balance between them, and he would recommend that I took a sixth. So I just left everything up to chance. I paid no more attention to the quality of sexual relationships. In cases where they didn’t give me much pleasure, or they even bothered me in some way, or when the man made me do things which weren’t really to my liking, that wasn’t reason enough to call them into question. In most cases, it was the friendship in the relationship that was most important. It could obviously lead to a sexual relationship, and I even found that reassuring; I needed to sense that all of me was appreciated. Whether or not I found immediate sensory satisfaction was less important. That too was written off on the balance sheet. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that, until I was about 35, I had not imagined that my own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter. That I hadn’t understood. My hardly romantic attitude never stopped me from handing out ‘I love you’s to my heart’s content, only at the precise moment when the little motor situated in my partner’s groin revved up. Or I would keep saying his name out loud. I don’t know what made me think that that would encourage him to pursue and achieve his pleasure. I was all the more prodigal with these purely opportune declarations of love because they remained on the surface, uttered neither under the effects of any emotion, nor because I was carried away in my ecstasy. I clear-headedly applied what I believed to be a technical device. As time goes by, we do away with this sort of artifice.

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

  If the violated are worse than those who exercise violence, they attack them and try to overthrow them, and, under favourable conditions, do overthrow them, or, what is most usual, enter the ranks of the violators and take part in their acts of violence. Thus the very thing with which the defenders of the state frighten men, that, if there did not exist a violating power, the bad would be ruling over the good, is what without cessation has been accomplished in the life of humanity, and so the abolition of political violence can in no case be the cause of the increase of the violence of the bad over the good. When the violence of the government is destroyed, acts of violence will, probably, be committed by other men than before; but the sum of the violence will in no case be increased, simply because the power will pass from the hands of one set of men into those of another. "The violence of state will be stopped only when the bad men in society shall be destroyed," say the defenders of the existing order, meaning by this that, since there will always be bad men, violence will never come to a stop. That would be true only if what they assume actually existed, namely, that the violators are better, and that the only means for the emancipation of men from evil is violence. In that case violence could, indeed, never be stopped. But as this is not the case, and the very opposite is true, namely, that it is not the better men who exercise violence against the bad, but the bad who do violence to the good, and that outside of violence, which never puts a stop to evil, there is another means for the abolition of violence, the assertion that violence will never stop is not correct. Violence grows less and less, and must evidently stop, but not, as the defenders of the existing order imagine, because men who are subject to violence will in consequence of the influence exerted upon them by the governments become better and better (in consequence of this they will, on the contrary, always become worse), but because, since all men are constantly growing better and better, even the worst men in power, growing less and less evil, will become sufficiently good to be incapable of exercising violence.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  This too may contain some ele- ment of truth, but it also is somewhat problematic. If Jesus had died and no one had come to believe that he had been raised from the dead, then his death would perhaps have been seen as yet another tragic incident in a long history of tragedies experi- enced by the Jewish people, as the death of yet another prophet of God, another holy man dedicat- ed to proclaiming God's will to his people. But it would not have been recognized as an act of God for the salvation of the world, and a new religion would probably not have emerged as a result. Did Christianity begin with Jesus' resurrection? Historians would have difficulty making this judg- ment, since it would require them to subscribe to 7,34 THE NEW TESTAMENT: HSTOC,'L INTRODUCTION faith in the miraculous working of God. Yet even if historians were able to speak of the resurrection as a historically probable event, it could not, in and of itself, be considered the beginning of Christianity, for Christianity is not the resurrec- tion of Jesus but the belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Historians, of course, have no difficulty speaking about the belief in Jesus' resurrection, since this is a matter of public record. It is a his- torical fact that some of Jesus' followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution. We know some of these believ- ers by name; one of them, the apostle Paul, claims quite plainly to have seen Jesus alive after his death. Thus, for the historian, Christianity begins after the death of Jesus, not with the resurrection itself, but with the belief in the resurrection. JESUS' RESURRECTION FROM AN APOCALYPTIC PERSPECTIVE How did belief in Jesus' resurrection eventually lead to the Gospels we have studied ? Or to put the question somewhat differently, how does one understand the movement from Jesus, the Jewish prophet who proclaimed the imminent judgment of the world through the coming Son of Man, to the Christians who believed in him, who main- tained that Jesus himself was the divine man whose death and resurrection represented God's ultimate act of salvation? To answer this question, we must look at who the first believers in Jesus' resurrection actually were. The Gospels provide somewhat different accounts about who discovered Jesus' empty tomb and about whom they encountered, what they learned, and how they reacted. But all four canon- ical Gospels and the Gospel of Peter agree that the empty tomb was discovered by a woman or a group of women, who were the first of Jesus' followers to realize that he had been raised. Interestingly, the earliest author to discuss Jesus' resurrection, the apostle Paul, does not mention the circumstance that Jesus' tomb was empty, nor does he name any women among those who first believed in Jesus' resurrection (1 Cor 15:3-8).

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

  And, no matter what arguments may be adduced to a man who has outgrown the political form, about its indispensableness, he cannot return to it, cannot take part in the affairs which are denied by his consciousness, just as the full-grown chicks can no longer return into the shell which they have outgrown. "But even if this is so," say the defenders of the existing order, "the abolition of the violence of state would be possible and desirable only if all men became Christians. So long as this is not the case, so long as among men who only call themselves Christians there are men who are no Christians, evil men, who for the sake of their personal lust are prepared to do harm to others, the abolition of the power of state would not only fail to be a good for all the rest, but would even increase their wretchedness. The abolition of the political form of life is undesirable, not only when there is a small proportion of true Christians, but even when all shall be Christians, while in their midst or all about them, among other nations, there shall remain non-Christians, because the non-Christians will with impunity rob, violate, kill the Christians and make their life miserable. What will happen will be that the evil men will with impunity rule the good and do violence to them. And so the power of state must not be abolished until all the bad, rapacious men in the world are destroyed. And as this will not happen for a long time to come, if at all, this power, in spite of the attempts of individual Christians at emancipating themselves from the power of state, must be maintained for the sake of the majority of men." Thus speak the defenders of the state. "Without the state the evil men do violence to the good and rule over them, but the power of state makes it possible for the good to keep the evil in check," they say. But, in asserting this, the defenders of the existing order of things decide in advance the justice of the position which it is for them to prove. In saying that without the power of state the evil men would rule over the good, they take it for granted that the good are precisely those who at the present time have power, and the bad the same who are now subjugated. But it is precisely this that has to be proved. This would be true only if in our world took place what really does not take place, but is supposed to take place, in China, namely, that the good are always in power, and that, as soon as at the helm of the government stand men who are not better than those over whom they rule, the citizens are obliged to depose them.

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

  If a man, in consequence of the higher consciousness matured in him, is no longer able to comply with the demands of the state, no longer finds room in it, and at the same time no longer is in need of the preservation of the political form, the question as to whether men have matured for the change of the political form, or not, is decided from an entirely different side, and just as incontestably as for the chick that has picked its shell, into which no power in the world can again return it, by the men themselves who have outgrown the state and who cannot be returned to it by any power in the world. "It is very likely that the state was necessary and even now is necessary for all those purposes which you ascribe to it," says the man who has made the Christian life-conception his own, "but all I know is that, on the one hand, I no longer need the state, and, on the other, I can no longer perform those acts which are necessary for the existence of the state. Arrange for yourselves what you need for your lives: I cannot prove either the common necessity, or the common harm of the state; all I know is what I need and what not, what I may do and what not. I know for myself that I do not need any separation from the other nations, and so I cannot recognize my exclusive belonging to some one nation or state, and my subjection to any government; I know in my own case that I do not need all those government offices and courts, which are the product of violence, and so I cannot take part in any of them; I know in my own case that I do not need to attack other nations and kill them, nor defend myself by taking up arms, and so I cannot take part in wars and in preparations for them. It is very likely that there are some people who cannot regard all that as necessary and indispensable. I cannot dispute with them,—all I know concerning myself, but that I know incontestably, is that I do not need it all and am not able to do it. I do not need it, and I cannot do it, not because I, my personality, do not want it, but because He who has sent me into life, and has given me the incontestable law for guidance in my life, does not want it." No matter what arguments men may adduce in proof of the danger of abolishing the power of the state and that this abolition may beget calamities, the men who have outgrown the political form can no longer find their place in it.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  With that visit to Sinai as a cautionary overture, I turn back once more to Matthew’s version of the Abba Prayer of Jesus. We saw its overall structure at the end of the last chapter, recognized its two parallel parts, and noticed how the first part was emphasized as a unit by that triple “your” for God and those framing mentions of “in heaven” (literally, “in the heavens” and “in heaven”). That very deliberate unity is further underlined—in Greek—by having exactly the same format for the three segments: Be hallowed the name of you Be come the kingdom of you Be done the will of you In the Greek of all our versions, the verb in each line comes first and ends with -th [image "image" file=Image00051.jpg] t [image "image" file=Image00053.jpg] in rhyming format. That makes the triad sound like a deliberate chant. Next, those three verbs are all in the Greek imperative mood, used for orders and commands, rather than in its optative mood, used for wishes and requests. Furthermore, “hallowed” and “done,” in the passive voice, frame the active “come,” but the emphasis in all three cases is on God’s action. That is surely extraordinary. And the imperative mood continues throughout the second half of the prayer. Imperatives appear again in “give us,” “forgive us,” and “deliver us.” Should we not have polite requests with “may it be” or at least persistent prayers with “let it happen”? But “be hallowed” and “be come” and “be done” are commands. So who is commanding whom here? Are we ordering God the Father/Householder or is God the Father/Householder ordering us? Or are we, as it were, ordering one another—collaboratively? I ask one final question on that triple command before concentrating in this chapter on the first one, “hallowed be your name.” If all three commands are in such similar format, do they all have exactly the same content? Or is there some deliberate progression from first to second to third challenge? The verb “to hallow” is released from its rather archaic past at least once a year. It is hidden in our trick-or-treat, goblins-and-ghosts festival on October 31 called Halloween. That is short for Hallows’ Even or All Hallows’ Eve. In the Christian calendar that is the evening before All Saints’ Day on November 1. In other words, “hallows” means “saints,” and “to hallow” means “to make holy” or “to sanctify.” But here is the question. Persons, places, and things—for example, saints, temples, and scriptures—are called holy because of their relationship with God. How, then, could God ever be other than holy? Is not the name as identity or name as reputation of God always holy? (Is not the Pope always Roman Catholic?) When God’s name is hallowed, what exactly is the content of that divine holiness? The Psalms speak repeatedly of God’s “holy name,” but as we read through the following examples, is the exact meaning of that holiness evident to us?

• From The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2007)

  Jesus cannot be understood fully unless he is understood through first-century Jewish eyes and heard through first-century Jewish ears. The parables are products of first-century Jewish culture, not ours; the healings were assessed according to that worldview, not ours; the debates over how to follow Torah took place within that set of legal parameters and forms of discourse, not ours. To understand Jesus’s impact in his own setting—why some chose to follow him, others to dismiss him, and still others to seek his death—requires an understanding of that setting. If we today have difficulty fathoming how our grandparents could function without the Internet and cell phones, let alone without television, how can we possibly presume to understand the worldview of Jesus and his contemporaries without asking a few historical questions? When Jesus is located within the world of Judaism, the ethical implications of his teachings take on renewed and heightened meaning; their power is restored and their challenge sharpened. Jews as well as Christians should be able to agree on a number of these teachings today, just as in the first century Jesus’s followers and even those Jews who chose not to follow him would have agreed with such basic assertions as that God is our father, that his name should be hallowed, and that the divine kingdom is something ardently to be desired. Conversely, the failure to understand the Jewish Jesus within his Jewish context has resulted in the creation and perpetuation of millennia of distrust, and worse, between church and synagogue. Understanding Torah Jesus’s connections to the basic Jewish teachings were right on target. Mark 12:28–34 recounts that a scribe (a Jewish expert in the interpretation of Torah) heard Jesus teaching and, finding his answers solid, asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus responded, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” The scribe affirms Jesus’s response: “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one and besides him there is no other’ and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” The same story, with different details, appears in Matthew 22:34–40 and Luke 10:25–28. This “Great Commandment,” as Matthew terms it, is a combination of Deuteronomy 6:4–5 and Leviticus 19:18. The first reading, called the Shema (from its first word, “Hear!” or, better, “Listen!”), is a major part of the synagogue liturgy. The next verses in Deuteronomy enjoin the people: “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

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

  If a subjective eye were on a journey, what a world of contrasts it would see! Like a mountain road interrupted by tunnels, you pass abruptly from darkness into light, and from the light into darkness. Here I am trying to explain that I prefer to keep covered something which it is perfectly acceptable to reveal, when within these same pages I have displayed an intimacy that most people keep secret. It is obvious that, in the same way that psychoanalysis helps you to shed unwanted parts of yourself, when you write a book in the first person the latter becomes the third person. The more I describe my body and my actions, the more I leave myself behind. Who recognises themselves in those magnifying mirrors which show cheeks and noses as vast fissured landscapes? Because, sexual pleasure brings you outside your own limits, it can impose the same sort of distance. Perhaps there is even a structural relationship, and the distance governs the pleasure as much as it is governed by it, at least for the category of creature to which I belong. Because, and this is the point I wanted to make, the same woman whom I described as uncomfortable under someone’s insistent gaze, and who hesitated to wear suggestive clothes, the same woman in fact who partook blind in sexual adventures with faceless partners, this same woman, then, takes indisputable pleasure in exposing herself on condition that the exposure is distanced at once, by a narrative.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  The challenge called for a response, but a lesson in the algebra of prediction would not be enthusiastically received. Instead, I used chalk to mark a target on the floor. I asked every officer in the room to turn his back to the target and throw two coins at it in immediate succession, without looking. We measured the distances from the target and wrote the two results of each contestant on the blackboard. Then we rewrote the results in order, from the best to the worst performance on the first try. It was apparent that most (but not all) of those who had done best the first time deteriorated on their second try, and those who had done poorly on the first attempt generally improved. I pointed out to the instructors that what they saw on the board coincided with what we had heard about the performance of aerobatic maneuvers on successive attempts: poor performance was typically followed by improvement and good performance by deterioration, without any help from either praise or punishment. The discovery I made on that day was that the flight instructors were trapped in an unfortunate contingency: because they punished cadets when performance was poor, they were mostly rewarded by a subsequent improvement, even if punishment was actually ineffective. Furthermore, the instructors were not alone in that predicament. I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty. Talent and Luck A few years ago, John Brockman, who edits the online magazine Edge , asked a number of scientists to report their “favorite equation.” These were my offerings: success = talent + luck great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck The unsurprising idea that luck often contributes to success has surprising consequences when we apply it to the first two days of a high-level golf tournament. To keep things simple, assume that on both days the average score of the competitors was at par 72. We focus on a player who did very well on the first day, closing with a score of 66. What can we learn from that excellent score? An immediate inference is that the golfer is more talented than the average participant in the tournament. The formula for success suggests that another inference is equally justified: the golfer who did so well on day 1

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

  What does this mean? We are talking here about something at an experiential level—a phenomenon which is not easily put into words, and which, if apprehended only at the verbal level, is by that very fact, already distorted. Perhaps if we use several sorts of descriptive formulation, it may ring some bell, however faint, in the reader’s experience, and cause him to feel “Oh, now I know, from my own experience, something of what you are talking about.” Therapy seems to mean a getting back to basic sensory and visceral experience. Prior to therapy the person is prone to ask himself, often unwittingly, “What do others think I should do in this situation?” “What would my parents or my culture want me to do?” “What do I think ought to be done?” He is thus continually acting in terms of the form which should be imposed upon his behavior. This does not necessarily mean that he always acts in accord with the opinions of others. He may indeed endeavor to act so as to contradict the expectations of others. He is nevertheless acting in terms of the expectations (often introjected expectations) of others. During the process of therapy the individual comes to ask himself, in regard to ever-widening areas of his life-space, “How do I experience this?” “What does it mean to me? ” “If I behave in a certain way how do I symbolize the meaning which it will have for me?” He comes to act on a basis of what may be termed realism—a realistic balancing of the satisfactions and dissatisfactions which any action will bring to himself. Perhaps it will assist those who, like myself, tend to think in concrete and clinical terms, if I put some of these ideas into schematized formulations of the process through which various clients go. For one client this may mean: “I have thought I must feel only love for my parents, but I find that I experience both love and bitter resentment. Perhaps I can be that person who freely experiences both love and resentment.” For another client the learning may be: “I have thought I was only bad and worthless. Now I experience myself at times as one of much worth; at other times as one of little worth or usefulness. Perhaps I can be a person who experiences varying degrees of worth.” For another: “I have held the conception that no one could really love me for myself. Now I experience the affectional warmth of another for me. Perhaps I can be a person who is lovable by others—perhaps I am such a person.” For still another: “I have been brought up to feel that I must not appreciate myself—but I do. I can cry for myself, but I can enjoy myself, too. Perhaps I am a richly varied person whom I can enjoy and for whom I can feel sorry.” Or, to take the last example from Mrs.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In the final pages of Delancey, I wrote, “I see now that Delancey was the beginning of a process that will continue to shape, stretch, and reshape us. I don’t know what we would be without it, that process, that constant growing, but it doesn’t mean that I crave it the way Brandon does, or that I always like it. But I’ve learned now that we can withstand it, and that I can withstand it. I consider it a great personal victory that I could be eight months pregnant, helping to pick out crown molding for a bar that, for all I knew, could open on the same day that I went into labor, and not have to breathe into a paper bag.” I would not revise this assessment. But I would add something now: that one cannot live at one’s limits for long. One cannot stay there indefinitely, not even for love. [image file=image_rsrc2FN.jpg] 8On Fresh Air, I listened to Terry Gross interview therapist Esther Perel.17 Gross: So you say sometimes when we seek the gaze of another it isn’t our partner we’re turning away from, but the person we’ve become. We’re looking for another version of ourselves. Can you expand on that for us? Perel: When you pick a partner, you pick a story. And that story becomes the life you live and the parts of you that become expressed. And sometimes you realize after years of living those parts of you that there are other parts of you that have virtually disappeared. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The summer of jury duty, I felt close to Brandon. When I told him about Nora, I’d made us both afraid, but we were afraid together. We talked about it, unpacked it, worked at it. We had sex more often than we had in years. We carried the fear between us like an open secret. That fall, 2015, June turned three. We were managing, like parents of young children do. We had about a dozen hours of paid childcare a week, a regular schedule we’d worked out with a young dancer who bussed tables at Delancey and babysat on the side. I didn’t have enough work to justify spending more on childcare. I was once again between writing projects, between ideas. Meanwhile Brandon got a new opportunity: a third restaurant on a busy corner, a lucrative idea he wanted to call Dino’s. I got angry. He knew I didn’t want another business, but he tried to convince me anyway. I let him convince me. I didn’t stop him. The location was too good to pass up, he said. And in some ways, Dino’s would make Delancey and Essex easier to run, because economies of scale! This was all good reasoning. But another restaurant was also another siphon on our hours, days, months, attention. I didn’t want it. I wished we weren’t having the conversation. I wished what we had was enough.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I got an email from the writer acquaintance whose class I’d spoken to that spring, the day I had the panic attack. She knew nothing about the intervening months. We went out for coffee to catch up. When I finished talking, she said: I don’t know if this is anything, but I noticed the wording you used to describe watching the lawyer in the courtroom. You said, “I wanted to know what it was like to live in her world.” Yeah, I said, that sounds right. I’d heard myself say it before, when I told people about jury duty. I think it’s interesting, my friend said, that you put it that way. I remember when you wrote about opening Delancey, you said that you had never imagined being a part of “the restaurant world.” That Brandon had chosen to enter into that world, but it wasn’t really yours. I remember that, I said. I always thought about it that way: not just as Delancey, as his restaurant or our restaurant, but as this whole world that we went into, like a separate universe with its own people and its own calendar and its own climate. And it was never really yours, said my friend. I did come to like it, and to be glad for it, but no. Maybe who you are, each of you, was sort of clarified by Delancey, she said. It’s like the restaurant revealed you. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon moved out in the first days of August. He’d found an apartment across town, near Dino’s, a large one-bedroom with a spacious walk-in closet that could be June’s room. He took me to see it after he’d signed the lease. It was in a handsome brick building, with a wide spiral staircase from the lobby to the landing on the second floor, his floor. I was happy for him that he’d found a nice place. I was happy for June. Our friends wanted to know: What had we told her? We told June that our family would now have two houses. We’d have a “Delancey house,” where I lived, not far from Delancey, and a “Dino’s house,” Brandon’s apartment. We presented this as a normal thing, a thing some families do. We said it wasn’t a good thing or a bad thing, though it might be hard sometimes. I ordered a stack of books online about separation and divorce, some for parents and some for children. The first one that came was about a family of dinosaurs who get divorced. On page five there was a drawing of a dinosaur in a pink dress and pearls, standing beside a vial of pills and tossing back a martini in one toothy gulp. The caption read, “Sometimes parents who are upset with each other behave in ways that hurt themselves and the rest of the family.” I shoved the book in a bag of recycling.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  The impressions produced in us by the physical world can, by definition, contain nothing that surpasses this world. Out of the visible, only the visible can be made; out of that which is heard, we cannot make something not heard. Then to explain how the idea of sacredness has been able to take form under these conditions, the majority of the theorists have been obliged to admit that men have superimposed upon reality, such as it is given by observation, an unreal world, constructed entirely out of the fantastic images which agitate his mind during a dream, or else out of the frequently monstrous aberrations produced by the mythological imagination under the bewitching but deceiving influence of language. But it remained incomprehensible that humanity should have remained obstinate in these errors through the ages, for experience should have very quickly proven them false. But from our point of view, these difficulties disappear. Religion ceases to be an inexplicable hallucination and takes a foothold in reality. In fact, we can say that the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: this power exists, it is society. When the Australian is carried outside himself and feels a new life flowing within him whose intensity surprises him, he is not the dupe of an illusion; this exaltation is real and is really the effect of forces outside of and superior to the individual. It is true that he is wrong in thinking that this increase of vitality is the work of a power in the form of some animal or plant. But this error is merely in regard to the letter of the symbol by which this being is represented to the mind and the external appearance which the imagination has given it, and not in regard to the fact of its existence. Behind these figures and metaphors, be they gross or refined, there is a concrete and living reality. Thus religion acquires a meaning and a reasonableness that the most intransigent rationalist cannot misunderstand. Its primary object is not to give men a representation of the physical world; for if that were its essential task, we could not understand how it has been able to survive, for, on this side, it is scarcely more than a fabric of errors. Before all, it is a system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it. This is its primary function; and though metaphorical and symbolic, this representation is not unfaithful. Quite on the contrary, it translates everything essential in the relations which are to be explained: for it is an eternal truth that outside of us there exists something greater than us, with which we enter into communion.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  They imagine that the profane person, who was the young man up till then, has died, that he has been killed and carried away by the god of the initiation, Bunjil, Baiame or Daramulun, and that quite another individual has taken the place of the one that no longer is. [1065] So here we find the very heart of the positive effects of which negative rites are capable. Of course we do not mean to say that these latter produced this great transformation all by themselves; but they certainly contributed to it, and largely. In the light of these facts, we are able to understand what asceticism is, what place it occupies in the religious life and whence come the virtues which have generally been attributed to it. In fact, there is no interdict, the observance of which does not have an ascetic character to a certain degree. Abstaining from something which may be useful or from a form of activity which, since it is usual, should answer to some human need, is, of necessity, imposing constraints and renunciations. So in order to have real asceticism, it is sufficient for these practices to develop in such a way as to become the basis of a veritable scheme of life. Normally, the negative cult serves only as an introduction and preparation for the positive cult. But it sometimes happens that it frees itself from this subordination and passes to the first place, and that the system of interdicts swells and exaggerates itself to the point of usurping the entire existence. Thus a systematic asceticism is born which is consequently nothing more than a hypertrophy of the negative cult. The special virtues which it is believed to confer are only an amplified form of those conferred, to a lesser degree, by the practice of any interdiction. They have the same origin; for they both rest on the principle that a man sanctifies himself only by efforts made to separate himself from the profane. The pure ascetic is a man who raises himself above men and acquires a special sanctity by fasts and vigils, by retreat and silence, or in a word, by privations, rather than by acts of positive piety (offerings, sacrifices, prayers, etc.). History shows to what a high religious prestige one may attain by this method: the Buddhist saint is essentially an ascetic, and he is equal or superior to the gods. It follows that asceticism is not a rare, exceptional and nearly abnormal fruit of the religious life, as some have supposed it to be; on the contrary, it is one of its essential elements. Every religion contains it, at least in germ, for there are none in which a system of interdicts is not found. Their only difference in this regard which there may be between cults is that this germ is more or less developed in different ones.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  These changes, which occurred despite the fact that I was dressing the same and had not consciously altered my behavior, took me by surprise. I eventually realized that over those many years of crossdressing I must have unlearned many of the rote masculine mannerisms that I’d acquired during my adolescence and early adulthood—behaviors that had served as a selfdefense mechanism that allowed me to escape effemimanic derision. In other words, during the years that I crossdressed, it wasn’t so much that I learned how to be female (as I was no longer employing any of the contrived and stereotyped feminine mannerisms I practiced back when I was crossdressing), but that I had in effect unlearned maleness. If it were not for my years as a crossdresser, I doubt that I would have been able to demystify femaleness and unlearn maleness to the point that I could live for several years as a feminine bigendered boy—an identity that preceded my decision to transition. While I certainly do not believe that crossdressing is merely a phase that eventually leads to becoming a transsexual woman, I do believe that many crossdressers experience similar phases of demystifying femaleness/femininity and unlearning maleness/masculinity over the course of their lives. While crossdressing may seem highly contrived to many outsiders, from an MTF perspective, it is an invaluable way to reconcile our female/feminine inclinations with our male/masculine bodies and socialization. It provides a way to allow parts of ourselves that we have been made to feel shame about, that we have learned to hide or repress, to show through and become integrated with the rest of our personalities. Rethinking “Male Privilege” I think it’s appropriate to end this chapter with a discussion of “male privilege” with respect to MTF spectrum folks. I have decided to frame “male privilege” in quotation marks here not to suggest that it doesn’t exist or to claim that MTF spectrum folks don’t experience it to some extent, but to challenge the way in which it is often put forward in dialogues and debates—as though it were the “one and only” gender privilege. 8 The concept of “male privilege” emerged out of the incorrect assumption that sexism functions as a unilateral form of oppression. According to this model, men unilaterally oppress women, and thus they reap all of the benefits, while women bear all of the hardships. This, however, is a gross oversimplification of sexism for numerous reasons. First, the concept of unilateral sexism denies other important factors, such as racism, classism, ableism, etc., that contribute to discrimination. After all, it’s difficult to make the case that a rich white woman is more oppressed than a poor black man in our culture. Second, it ignores oppositional sexism, which favors those with typical gender inclinations over those with exceptional ones, regardless of sex. For example, if you happen to be attracted to men, then your life will certainly be easier in many respects if you happen to be female rather than male.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  But when I eventually did transition, I chose not to put on a performance—I simply acted, dressed, and spoke the way I always had, the way that felt most comfortable to me. After being on female hormones for a few months, I found that people began to consistently gender me as female despite the fact that I was “doing” my gender the same way I always had. What I found most striking was how other people interpreted my same actions and mannerisms differently based on whether they perceived me to be female or male. For example, when ordering drinks at bars, I found that if I looked around the room while waiting for my drink (as I always unconsciously had prior to transitioning), men started hitting on me because they assumed I was signaling my availability (when I was perceived as male, the same action was likely to be interpreted simply as me scoping out the room). And in supermarket checkout lines, when the child in the cart ahead of me started smiling and talking to me, I found that I could interact with them without their mother becoming suspicious or fearful (which is what often happened in similar situations when I was perceived as male). During the first year of my transition, I experienced hundreds of little moments like that, where other people interpreted my words and actions differently based solely on the change in my perceived sex. And it was not merely my behaviors that were interpreted differently, it was my body as well: the way people approached me, spoke to me, the assumptions they made about me, the lack of deference and respect I often received, the way others often sexualized my body. All of these changes occurred without my having to say or do a thing. I would argue that social gender is not produced and propagated because of the way we as individuals “perform” or “do” our genders; it lies in the perceptions and interpretations of others. I can modify my own gender all I want, but it won’t change the fact that other people will continue to compulsively assign a gender to me and to view me through the distorted lenses of cissexual and heterosexual assumption. While no gendered expression can subvert the gender system as we know it, we are nevertheless still capable of instituting change in that system. However, such change will not come by managing the way we “do” our own gender, but by dismantling our own gender entitlement.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I found myself inexplicably compelled to remove a set of white, lacy curtains from the window and wrap them around my body like a dress. I walked toward the mirror. Since I was a prepubescent boy with one of those longish boy haircuts that were popular in the late ’70s, the curtains alone were sufficient to complete my transformation: I looked like a girl. I stared at my reflection for over an hour, stunned. It felt like an epiphany because, for some unexplainable reason, seeing myself as a girl made absolutely perfect sense to me. The second discovery happened shortly thereafter. Every day after school, I used to play by myself in my bedroom, making up little adventure stories that I would act out. For a while (most likely inspired by my mirror epiphany), the adventures I created had a plot twist where my imaginary nemesis would turn me into a girl and I would spend the rest of the story trying to find him so that he could turn me back into a boy. After a while, I got bored with that last part of the story, so I would simply continue throughout the rest of the adventure as a girl. I did this for a couple weeks before I realized that the “being a girl” part of the story was much more than just play. It became obvious to me that I actually wanted to be a girl and that, on some level, it felt right. Trying to translate these subconscious experiences into conscious thought is a messy business. All of the words available in the English language completely fail to accurately capture or convey my personal understanding of these events. For example, if I were to say that I “saw” myself as female, or “knew” myself to be a girl, I would be denying the fact that I was consciously aware of my physical maleness at all times. And saying that I “wished” or “wanted” to be a girl erases how much being female made sense to me, how it felt right on the deepest, most profound level of my being. I could say that I “felt” like a girl, but that would give the false impression that I knew how other girls (and other boys) felt.