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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends. And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured—disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui —in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  distinct American breed. “We see with other eyes,” he wrote, “we hear with other ears, and think with other thoughts than those formerly used.” 52 To his credit, Paine held nothing back in poking holes in the dogma of hereditary monarchy. But with his broad swipes at royalty, he obscured other forms of injustice. He too loosely clothed the language of class in the garb of continental races and commercial impulses. Indians and slaves are marginalized in his grand vision of a new world order. Neither did he allow the ignoble waste people to make any appearance in Common Sense; the vast numbers of convict laborers, servants, apprentices, working poor, and families living in miserable wilderness cabins are all absent from his prose. For Paine, the crucial issue for Americans in 1776 was not whether but how soon a new and independent regime would advance toward its destiny as first among nations. He assumed that the mighty forces of commerce and continental expansion would eliminate idleness and correct imbalances. There was nothing wrong with cultivating Anglo-American commercial instincts and sustaining peaceful transnational trade alliances with Great Britain. But in other areas, Paine hoped that the British way of seeing and hearing would disappear from America. He presumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that class would take care of itself. CHAPTER FOUR Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  13 gain wisdom. Homer and the Bible agree that fear of god is the beginning of wisdom. The omens of the gods should be taken seriously, because they are the means by which the gods make their will known. The Iliad is ultimately a book about the meaning of life and how to lead that life. It is a story of the education of Achilles. The mother of Achilles, who was divine, had given him a choice: He could either live a long life or live a life of glory and die young. He elected a life of glory and honor, which gave meaning to his life. He had a reputation for telling the truth, keeping his word, seeking vengeance for those who wronged him, and defending himself and the weak. The importance of moderation in pursuing one’s values is an important lesson. Achilles attained wisdom when Priam came to claim his son; Achilles realized that the concept of honor could be pushed too far. Each person has an ideal that he or she prizes and will do anything to hold onto that concept. We increase our wisdom only by suffering. Achilles learned by suffering, that is, by the loss of what was dearest to him. Zeus willed that we learn and gain wisdom only through suffering. All generations must read the same books, repeat the same errors, and fi ght the same wars. True wisdom knows when to push a thing so far that other ordinary mortals will think it excessive. A truly wise person also must know how far is too far. Achilles gives us this lesson: All mortals must die, but how people live their lives is what matters. ■ Homer, Iliad. Rose, Greek and Roman Religion. Willcock, Companion to the Iliad. Essential Reading Supplementary Reading 14 Lecture 2: Homer, Iliad 1. What view of Zeus do you fi nd in the Iliad? Do you see the beginning of the idea of monotheism? 2. How can the Iliad be said to be a tale of moral growth and redemption, even for the gods? Questions to Consider

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Makes me wish I had a daughter,” Frekki told her. “About the resemblance, I mean.” “I don’t see any resemblance.” “Really? I’ve always thought your brother had the most unusual eyes, almond-shaped and hazel. And so does she. Of course I haven’t seen Mike in ages, not since he left town in a hurry.” “He didn’t leave in a hurry. He enlisted.” “Either way. We went to all the same parties that spring. He and Rusty Ammerman were crazy for each other. She was in my class at Battin.” “I don’t remember that name.” The redhead. She hoped her face wasn’t giving anything away. Mike had brought her to the house in Weequahic a couple of times. And Frekki had been to the Ammermans’ house, too. Had enjoyed Mrs. Ammerman’s delicious chocolate cake. “She’s still around,” Sherry said. “And this is her daughter, Miri.” “What are you getting at?” “Do I have to spell it out?” “What you’re suggesting isn’t possible.” “Are you sure? There was a story going around back then that Rusty had run off and married a boy that summer, a boy who was going overseas.” “She didn’t marry my brother.” “Well, she’s never married anyone else that I know of.” “I think you should forget about this, Sherry. There’s no truth to it and all you can do is make trouble for both families.” Frekki glanced at the photo again. “She looks like a nice girl.” “She is. The Osners love her like a daughter.” Frekki dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, applied fresh lipstick and pushed back her chair. “I have to get back to the boys. Thanks for the lunch. Next time it’s on me.” Before she put on her jacket she said, “Oh, do you mind if I keep the picture?” “Of course,” Sherry said. Was that a smirk on her face? Frekki called her brother that night, made sure he could talk privately, then told him the story. “I just want to know one thing. Is it possible, yes or no?” “No,” her brother said, convincingly. She probably would have let it go if it hadn’t been for the plane crash. She didn’t need any more tsoris in her life. But by then she knew where Rusty lived, and how close the plane had come to her house and that beautiful young girl with Mike’s eyes, that girl who very likely was her niece. She couldn’t sleep that night thinking about it, or the night after that. Which is how she came to ring Rusty’s doorbell on Sunday morning. MiriRusty and Irene were masters of cleaning up, putting everything away, keeping things in order—things they didn’t want to think about, as if they had a box in the closet and they could open it, shove in Frekki and her yellow Cadillac, close the lid, lock the box, put it back on the top shelf and be done with it.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Those who claim this just means men are more likely to be repressing some universal human bisexuality will have to consider sexologist Michael Bailey’s fMRI scans of gay and straight men’s brains while they viewed pornographic photos. They reacted as men tend to do: simply and directly. The gay guys liked the photos showing men with men, while the straight guys were into the photos featuring women. Bailey was looking for activation of the brain regions associated with inhibition, to see whether his subjects were denying a bisexual tendency. No dice. Neither gay nor straight men showed unusual activation of these regions while viewing the photos. Other experiments using subliminal images have generated similar results: gay men, straight men, and lesbians all responded as predicted by their stated sexual orientation, while nominally straight women (“I contain multitudes”) responded to just about everything. This is just how we’re wired, not the result of repression or denial.14 Of course, signs of repression aren’t hard to find in sex research. There’s plenty. For example, one of the long-standing mysteries of human sexuality has been that heterosexual men tend to report having more sexual encounters and partners than heterosexual women do—a mathematical impossibility. Psychologists Terry Fisher and Michele Alexander decided to take a closer look at people’s claims regarding age of first sexual experience, number of partners, and frequency of sexual encounters.15 Fisher and Alexander set up three different testing conditions: The subjects were led to believe their answers might be seen by the researchers waiting just outside the room.The subjects could answer the questions privately and anonymously.The subjects had electrodes placed on their hand, arm, and neck—believing themselves (falsely) to be hooked up to a lie detector.Women who thought their answers might be seen reported an average of 2.6 sexual partners (all the subjects were college students younger than twenty-five). Those who thought their answers were anonymous reported 3.4 partners, while those who thought their lies would be detected reported an average of 4.4 partners. So, while women admitted to 70 percent more sexual partners when they thought they couldn’t fib, the men’s answers showed almost no variation. Sex researchers, physicians, and psychologists (and parents) need to remember that women’s answers to such questions may depend on when, where, and how the question is asked, as well as who’s asking. If it’s true that women’s sexuality is much more contextual than most men’s, we might need to reconsider a lot of what we think we know about female sexuality. In addition to the distortions created by the age bias we discussed earlier (are twenty-year-olds representative?), how useful are the responses of women answering questions in a cold classroom or laboratory setting? How would our understanding of female sexuality be different if George Clooney distributed the questionnaires by candlelight and collected them after a glass of wine in the Jacuzzi?

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  In Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece 100 Blow Jobs, Sprinkle—who worked for many years as a prostitute—kneels down on the ground and gives head to several dildos nailed to a board in front of her, while recorded male voices yell degrading things like “Suck it, bitch.” (Sprinkle has said that out of the approximately 3,500 customers she had as a sex worker, there were about 100 bad ones; the sound track to 100 Blow Jobs derives from the bad ones.) She sucks and sucks, she chokes and gags. But just when someone might be thinking, This is exactly what I imagined sex work to be like—haunting, woman-hating, traumatizing—Sprinkle gets up, pulls herself together, gives herself an Aphrodite Award for sexual service to the community, and performs a cleansing masturbatory ritual. Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies does not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy. The realization that I could incorporate the stalker into my talk about Sedgwick eventually became an incitement for me to get back to work. Yes, get back to work. It even became a source of comfort, as if bringing such an episode into the orbit of Eve would neutralize its negative force. Not everyone believes in the magical powers of such an approach. When I told my mother that I was thinking of including the stalker in a public talk, for example, she said, “Oh honey, are you sure that’s a good idea?”—meaning that she didn’t think it was a good idea at all. Who could blame her? She’s spent over forty years warding off the specter of wingnuts with attaché cases who tell women they deserve their violent deaths before they occasion them. Why give them any more attention than they deserve? Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don’t. Often I watch myself gravitating toward the bad idea, as if the final girl in a horror movie, albeit one sitting in a Tuff Shed at a desk sticky with milk. But somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  COPING WITH TROUBLESOME TURN-ONSEach individual’s CET evolves in response to the challenges and conflicts of early life. The erotic mind attempts to gain mastery over these problems by using the obstacles they present to stimulate desire and arousal. You can see how everyone in this chapter except Janet had learned to use long-standing conflicts quite successfully as turn-ons. But while most found plenty of excitation, they also discovered that their erotic scripts ultimately perpetuated the very problems they were trying to resolve. If you identify with any of the troublesome turn-ons described in this chapter, the best thing you can do is to use the understanding you have gained thus far to help you recognize how your patterns of arousal are working against you. Without this awareness you must blindly follow the established path wherever it leads you. Now is a good time to conduct a simple reassessment of your eroticism to see if you might be affected by any of the three types of erotic problems we’ve explored in this chapter: Feeling side effects Troublesome attractions Love-lust conflicts First, reconsider the emotions most prominent in your CET. You already realize that the full range of human emotions can energize your turn-ons and that some feelings—especially anxiety and guilt—can disrupt your body’s ability to function sexually. Consequently, if you’re grappling with a sexual dysfunction, pay careful attention to the emotional aspects of your CET. Keep in mind that, like Nancy and Burt, you may not easily recognize how guilty you actually feel, especially if you regularly rely on alcohol or other drugs to calm your inhibitions. Or, like Brian, you may have become so accustomed to anxiety in your sex life that you hardly even notice it. If you’ve been unlucky in a string of relationships, could it be that you are reenacting frustrating or painful relationships from the past? Make a list of each of the people to whom you’ve been most strongly attracted in your life. What characteristics do they have in common? Can you identify difficulties from your early life that you’re still trying to fix or otherwise play out through your current relationships? Unresolved feelings from historically significant relationships, particularly those within the family, are natural aspects of attraction, so there’s no need to feel ashamed if you recognize them within yourself. The important thing is to notice if you keep trying to reverse a painful relationship from the past by unwittingly selecting partners with whom you are doomed to repeat it. This dilemma can only be resolved when you are willing to bring your motivations into consciousness.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Finally, consider the degree of connection between love and lust in your eroticism. It helps to sketch out your personal zone of love-lust interaction. As I demonstrated earlier in this section, draw or visualize two circles, one representing lust and the other representing love. Position the circles to show how much they’ve overlapped in your past as well as in the present. Like many people, you may have developed two parallel systems of attraction, one focusing on qualities you associate with sexual magnetism and the other emphasizing features compatible with intimacy and affection. Unless these sets of attractions allow for at least some degree of overlap, you’ll probably have trouble maintaining a long-term sexual relationship. On the other hand, if you find it difficult to distinguish between love and lust, you’re especially vulnerable to unworkable involvements. By recognizing where you stand, you can identify potential problems and prepare for constructive solutions. Once you’ve acknowledged a troublesome turn-on, what should you do about it? In many instances confronting your predicament creates conditions ripe for growth. Luckily, the erotic mind is quite capable of making positive adjustments based on lessons learned from experience. In Chapter 8, “Winds of Change,” we’ll focus on how to nurture the creative, adaptable characteristics of your eroticism. In the meantime, nonjudgmental self-observation will help you reclaim the ability to choose. 7SEX AND SELF-HATEWhen low self-esteem fuses with high arousal, the results are the most destructive of all turn-ons. The infinitely variable scripts that shape and energize erotic life share a common goal: to affirm the value and desirability of the story’s star. But what if your eroticism began evolving at a time in your life when persistent feelings of inferiority were dictating your self-image? What if profoundly negative beliefs about yourself had become so thoroughly woven into your turn-ons that they simultaneously excited you immensely and made you feel worthless? To complicate matters still further, what if you were only vaguely aware that all this had ever happened? Chances are that you or someone you care about is struggling with this most perplexing and troublesome of all turn-ons: the fusion of sexual excitation with self-hate. Although hardly anyone discusses them openly, erotic problems linked to low self-esteem are distressingly widespread and are the focus of this chapter. You might assume that such profound conflicts would be easy to spot, but frequently they go unrecognized. For one thing, the symptoms of eroticized self-hate are amazingly variable. They can include chronic mood disturbances, difficulties becoming aroused or having orgasms, an absence of sexual desire, or an overwhelming uptightness or aversion toward sex. Some sufferers derive unmatched intensity from compulsively reenacting their grueling inner struggle in nonstop sexual repetitions that generate enormous heat, but little satisfaction.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. Or they then spake of Him in lowly words, as only a great and wonderful man, but as yet proclaimed Him not as the Christ. Yet if any will have it that He was even at the first proclaimed to be Christ, he may say that now He chose that first short announcement of His name to be left in silence and not repeated, that that little which they had heard concerning Christ might be digested into their minds. Or the difficulty may be solved thus: that the former relation concerning their preaching Christ does not belong to the time before His Resurrection, but to the time that should be after the Resurrection; and that the command now given is meant for the time present; for it were of no use to preach Him, and to be silent concerning His cross. Moreover, He commanded them that they should tell no man that He was the Christ, and prepared them that they should afterwards say that He was Christ who was crucified, and who rose again from the dead. JEROME. But that none should suppose that this is only my explanation, and not an evangelic interpretation, what follows explains the reasons of His forbidding them to preach Him at that time; Then began Jesus to shew unto his disciples that he must needs go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and Scribes, and Chief Priests, and be put to death, and rise again the third day. The meaning is; Then preach Me when I shall have suffered these things, for it will be of no avail that Christ be preached publicly, and His Majesty spread abroad among the people, when after a little time they shall see Him scourged and crucified. CHRYSOSTOM. For what having once had root has afterwards been torn up, if it is again planted, is with difficulty retained among the multitude; but what having been once rooted has continued ever after unmoved, is easily brought on to a further growth. He therefore dwells on these sorrowful things, and repeats His discourse upon them, that He may open the minds of His disciples.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  For Paul, the fact that Christ had died on the cross demonstrated that this new mechanism of being “in Christ” was necessary for humanity’s salvation. If such salvation had been available before, Christ’s death would have been in vain (Gal 2:21). Thus, Paul concluded, tra- ditional Jewish theology, practices, and understandings of covenant and Torah must have been inadequate to produce justification or righteous standing before God. Paul’s thought had not developed from any long-held worry that Judaism was a broken system in need of a new solution. Instead, his new realization that God had pro- vided a solution in Christ necessitated the diagnosis that the previous system was flawed. As Sanders put it, Paul’s thought process proceeded not from plight to solution but from solution to plight. Far from having struggled with the difficulty of living by Torah, Paul had previously considered himself 5. Sanders, PPJPPJ, 422. 6. Sanders, PPJPPJ, 543. 7. Sanders, PPJPPJ, 463–72. xiii PAUL AND PALESTINIAN JUDAISM “blameless under the law” (Phil 3:6). But although justification, Paul Judaism might enable a form of right form of instructed the Philippians, it was not the right justification, which was attainable only through Christ (Phil 3:4–11). This realization explained the ad hoc and inconsistent nature of Paul’s arguments about the law. He reacted furiously to other missionaries’ teachings that gentiles must adopt Torah observance for eschatological salvation, yet he himself freely drew from the Torah when the issue at hand was not salvation but ethics. Sanders made clear that scholars who had taken their cues for understanding early Judaism primarily from Paul rather than from other Jewish sources had not rec- ognized how fundamentally his views differed from those held by his Jewish contemporaries. Likewise, those who had uncritically repeated assertions in earlier bib- lical scholarship that Judaism was dry and obsessively legalistic stood guilty of maligning a religion and people both ancient and living. Readers of Sanders’s careful, his- torical work who were conscious of the looming shadow of Auschwitz immediately realized the book’s implica- tions. A new period of trying to understand the relation- ship between early Judaism and early Christianity had begun. Forty years later (an appropriately biblical time frame), that period continues. Palestinian Judaism In retrospect, the extent to which scholars immedi- ately recognized the paradigm-shifting significance of Judaism is remarkable. To be sure, they PaulPaul andand Palestinian differed in the degree to which they accepted Sanders’s individual arguments, but many regarded their cumula- tive impact as undeniable. The book was quickly hailed as a stunning masterpiece. Praising its “vigorous, cogent, well-documented argument,” Nils A. Dahl declared it a “milestone in the history of Pauline scholarship” that deserved a place alongside the classics of earlier genera- xiv FOREWORD

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

  And the old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another, became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had been made so plausible. In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God—given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to their moral sense. And so one might suppose that having lost confidence in any religious authority for a belief in the divinity of potentates of various kinds, people would try to free themselves from subjection to it. But unfortunately not only were the rulers, who were considered supernatural beings, benefited by having the peoples in subjection, but as a result of the belief in, and during the rule of, these pseudodivine beings, ever larger and larger circles of people grouped and established themselves around them, and under an appearance of governing took advantage of the people. And when the old deception of a supernatural and God-appointed authority had dwindled away these men were only concerned to devise a new one which like its predecessor should make it possible to hold the people in bondage to a limited number of rulers. IVTable of ContentsChildren, do you want to know by what your hearts should be guided? Throw aside your longings and strivings after that which is null and void; get rid of your erroneous thoughts about happiness and wisdom, and your empty and insincere desires. Dispense with these and you will know Love. KRISHNA. Be not the destroyers of yourselves. Arise to your true Being, and then you will have nothing to fear. KRISHNA. New justifications have now appeared in place of the antiquated, obsolete, religious ones. These new justifications are just as inadequate as the old ones, but as they are new their futility cannot immediately be recognized by the majority of men. Besides this, those who enjoy power propagate these new sophistries and support them so skilfully that they seem irrefutable even to many of those who suffer from the oppression these theories seek to justify. These new justifications are termed 'scientific'.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  Fortunately, once we become aware of the psychological causes of a recurring health problem such as headaches, back pain, or asthma, the problems often subside to some degree. There are several reasons for this. Once we see the psychological basis for a particular health problem, we can use the health problem as a signal of distress. By focusing our energy on reducing the cause of the distress, we more quickly resolve the underlying psychological issues that we may not have known were issues in the first place. Another reason that seeing the cause–effect relationship is beneficial is that it makes the health problems more predictable and, hence, controllable. Perceptions of control and predictability over our worlds are essential to good psychological health. A recurring debate among researchers interested in psychosomatics and emotion concerns whether specific emotions or situations can bring about specific biological changes. Our bias is that many emotions do, in fact, have necessary and potentially unique biological substrates. However, particularly powerful situations can “fool” people into thinking that they are feeling an emotion that is not biologically present. A good example of this often invisible link between a psychological event and biological activity occurred with Warren, an extremely bright student who had been the valedictorian of his high school class. After performing quite well his first year and a half of college, he suddenly developed test anxiety. Midway through his second year of college, he began to fail every test he took. He was soon placed on academic probation and later forced to withdraw from school. Over the next year, Warren saw a therapist who specialized in behavioral treatments. Several weeks of relaxation training and behavior modification failed to produce significant improvements. Two years after his problems started, Warren explained his predicament. He agreed to be interviewed about his life while his heart rate was continuously measured. During the first hour-long interview, it became clear that Warren’s body was telling a different story than Warren’s words. TopicHeart rateWarren’s commentsGirl friend77Fairly new relationship. Some conflict about sex, but we’re close.College courses71Most have been interesting . . . tests have been another matter.Failing exams76It’s been hard on my ego. I can’t explain it.Parents84We were a close family until the divorce.Parents’ divorce103It was no big deal, really. They are a lot happier now.The future79

• From Between Us

  During my thirty years as an emotion researcher, and through my encounters with different cultures, I have come to realize that many of the answers about emotions are not to be found in our insides, but importantly, in our social contexts. I started my studies at the University of Amsterdam with Professor Nico H. Frijda, who, right around the time we met, was finishing his book The Emotions, for which he became world-renowned. The book was a milestone in the psychology of emotions, and covered everything from neuroscience to philosophy. However, it did not cover culture very well. My graduate work under his supervision, which started in 1987, was meant to fill this gap. I surveyed the psychological, anthropological, sociological, and philosophical research on culture and emotions, and in 1992 published a synthesis (coauthored with Nico Frijda) that was one of the turning points for the study of culture and emotion in psychology. It helped to shift psychological research from an almost exclusive focus on universality to one also including cultural differences. It launched me as a cultural psychologist of emotions: I became interested in how culture and emotion “make each other up.” My research turned my focus outward, but so did my personal experience as a sojourner and an immigrant. In the early ’90s, I left my comfort zone, and started living and working outside of the Netherlands. I lived in Italy for two years, worked as a psychological consultant for UNICEF in war-struck Bosnia for six months altogether, and ultimately moved to the United States. As a postdoctoral researcher, I joined the Culture and Cognition Program, a hub of the emerging interdisciplinary field of cultural psychology at the University of Michigan, and later I became an assistant professor at Wake Forest University, in North Carolina. Roughly twenty years later, in 2007, I returned to Belgium, which from across the Atlantic may seem close to the Netherlands, but is culturally different enough. Exchanging my familiar Amsterdam for other places brought home in a more personal way that emotions are tied to culture. Being out of sync with my environment made apparent, time and again, that my emotions were not the universal default, as I had (implicitly) assumed until then. My emotions were created by my culture. They were good currency for interactions in my native context, they were beneficial to the kinds of relationships valued there, and they positioned me well in my Dutch culture, but they weren’t as useful in these other environments. These experiences, too, turned my focus inside out: they led me to follow the trail from my emotions outward, to the values, goals, and practices of my social and cultural environment.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  When Worlds Collide: Believing and ViolenceGrowing up in Belfast during the late 1960s, I was surrounded by sectarian tensions arising from Ireland’s complex and troubled political history, which often involved religion. It was not difficult for me to frame these persuasively within my early atheist worldview: if there was no religion, there would be no religious violence. I never gave much thought to the consequences of my emerging teenage belief that religion was evil, and thus ought to be eliminated or excluded from society. The idea that this might violate human rights never entered my head, partly because I was inclined to think that a religion-free world was itself a basic human right. Where some argued for freedom of religion, it seemed obvious to me that an ideal world involved freedom from religion. I would have been shocked to read of what I now know happened in the Soviet Union during the 1920s as a state-sponsored programme of the suppression of religion took place, using execution squads, prison camps and protracted social violence to create a religion-free world. Because religion was evil, its elimination justified any means that this required. At Oxford, I discovered Isaiah Berlin and the intensely serious tradition of reflection on diversity and its implications that his writings stimulated. For Berlin, individuals, communities and nations have divergent visions of what is good and right. Back in the 1960s, some visionaries dreamed of diverse communities of individuals who each pursued their own goals and visions of personal fulfilment independently and harmlessly. Today, we are perhaps more realistic, recognising that one community’s exercise of freedom may impact on another’s identity, wellbeing or freedom – and thus lead to conflict and the possibility of violence. In this section, we shall consider the ways in which the human propensity for belief can create tensions and violence, and reflect on its implications for our understanding of the place of belief in life. I have no doubt that religion can generate tensions and violence. But it’s not alone in this. As writers as diverse as Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau make clear, viable accounts of the origins of division and conflict can be offered that neither require nor exclude a significant religious element.31 Racial and political ideologies are human belief systems with a particular propensity for violence and extermination. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have ‘disappeared’ in ruthless campaigns of violence by right-wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated millions in his relentless pursuit of an elusive communist paradise.

• From The Varieties of Religious Experience

  Al‐Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in the eleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem church, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of Christian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere—the absence of strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness of religions other than the Christian. M. Schmölders has translated a part of Al‐Ghazzali’s autobiography into French:(246)— “The Science of the Sufis,” says the Moslem author, “aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me than practice, I read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul. How great, for example, is the difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists,—as being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach,—and _being_ drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence, and _being_ abstinent or having one’s soul detached from the world.—Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the ears, but solely by giving one’s self up to ecstasy and leading a pious life.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  For the fourth-century theologian Augustine, who was to become the greatest teacher of the future Christian church, the climax of his conversion was his decision, inspired by the story of Anthony, to give up a Christian marriage that would have ensured him wealth and social status, along with a brilliantly promising career, to embrace the ascetic life. Augustine would eventually transform traditional Christian teaching on freedom, on sexuality, and on sin and redemption for all future generations of Christians. Where earlier generations of Jews and Christians had once found in Genesis 1–3 the affirmation of human freedom to choose good or evil, Augustine, living after the age of Constantine, found in the same text a story of human bondage. Yet as Augustine grew older, he argued that even the most saintly ascetic was not, in himself, capable of self-mastery; that all humankind was fallen; and that the human will was incorrigibly corrupt. This cataclysmic transformation in Christian thought from an ideology of moral freedom to one of universal corruption coincided, as we shall presently see, with the evolution of the Christian movement from a persecuted sect to the religion of the emperor himself. VTHE POLITICS OF PARADISEARE HUMAN BEINGS CAPABLE OF governing themselves? Defiant Christians hounded as criminals by the Roman government emphatically answered yes. But in the fourth and fifth centuries, after the emperors themselves became patrons of Christianity, the majority of Christians gradually came to say no. Early Christian spokesmen, like Jews before them and the American colonists long after, had claimed to find in the biblical creation account divine sanction for declaring their independence from governments they considered corrupt and arbitrary. The Hebrew creation account of Genesis 1, unlike its Babylonian counterpart, claims that God gave the power of earthly rule to adam—not to the king or emperor but simply to “mankind” (and some even thought this might include women).1 Most Christian apologists in the first three centuries would have agreed with Gregory of Nyssa, who followed rabbinic tradition by explaining that after God created the world “as a royal dwelling place for the future king,”2 he made humanity “as a being fit to exercise royal rule” by creating it “the living image of the universal King.”3 Consequently, Gregory concludes, “the soul immediately shows its royal and exalted character, far removed as it is from the lowliness of private station, in that it owns no master, and is self-governed, ruled autocratically by its own will.”4 Besides dominion over the earth and animals, this gift of sovereignty conveys the quality of moral freedom: Preeminent among all is the fact that we are free from any necessity, and not in bondage to any power, but have decision in our own power as we please; for virtue is a voluntary thing, subject to no dominion. Whatever is the result of compulsion and force cannot be virtue.5

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

  As I worked on the scripts, I was entering more and more deeply into a Jewish perspective. I was now engrossed in the books that Hyam Maccoby had recommended, trying to imagine the religious ambience which Paul and Jesus had imbibed. There were elements that were both familiar and, at the same time, revealingly different. Hyam had been right, of course. This truly was a religion of doing rather than believing, and the discipline of living according to the Law was, I could see, very similar to our observance of the rule in the convent. Or rather, in both cases, the ideal was the same. The 613 commandments of the Law brought God into the minutiae of daily life, whether one was eating, drinking, cooking, working, or making love. No activity, no matter how mundane, was without religious potential. Each was what Christians called a sacrament: it was an opportunity to encounter the divine, moment by moment. Every time a Jew observed one of the commandments (mitzvoth ), he or she was turning toward God, giving daily life a sacred orientation. Certainly, the Law could seem oppressive. Paul seemed to have found it so; it had ceased to project him into the divine presence, just as my convent rule had seemed stifling to me after a time. But the Law could also bring joy. This was clear in the psalms that described the Law as luminous and liberating. I was beginning to understand why Jesus’ first disciples had been so angry when Paul, the brilliant newcomer, told them that God had now abrogated the Law and that Jesus had become God’s primary revelation of himself to the world. They did not feel that Jesus had set them free from the Torah, but had experienced Paul’s vision as a potential deprivation. They were fighting for something very precious that gave meaning and value to their lives.

• From The Varieties of Religious Experience

  This is my conclusion so far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves a feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to such a subject, and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I made at the beginning of Lecture XIII.(223) How, you say, can religion, which believes in two worlds and an invisible order, be estimated by the adaptation of its fruits to this world’s order alone? It is its _truth_, not its utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend. If religion is true, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world they should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. It goes back, then, after all, to the question of the truth of theology. The plot inevitably thickens upon us; we cannot escape theoretical considerations. I propose, then, that to some degree we face the responsibility. Religious persons have often, though not uniformly, professed to see truth in a special manner. That manner is known as mysticism. I will consequently now proceed to treat at some length of mystical phenomena, and after that, though more briefly, I will consider religious philosophy. LECTURES XVI AND XVII. MYSTICISM. Over and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them open and unfinished until we should have come to the subject of Mysticism. Some of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated postponements. But now the hour has come when mysticism must be faced in good earnest, and those broken threads wound up together. One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand. But though forced to look upon the subject so externally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can; and I think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in question, and of the paramount importance of their function. First of all, then, I ask, What does the expression “mystical states of consciousness” mean? How do we part off mystical states from other states?

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

  I now understand the meaning of the words, ‘man is born, not to be ministered to, but to minister to others.’ I now understand the saying, ‘the laborer is worthy of his hire.’ I now believe that my happiness, and that of all men, will only be attained when each labors for others and not for himself, when none refuses to labor for him who is in need of help. My belief in this has altered my estimate of good and evil. All that I had formerly prized – such things as riches, property, honor, and self-dignity – have grown worthless in my eyes; and all I had formerly despised – such things as hard work, poverty, humility, the renunciation of property, and the renunciation of one’s rights – have grown good and noble in my eyes. If I now feel tempted to defend others or myself, the property of others or my own, by violence, I can no longer give way to temptation. I dare not amass riches for myself. I dare not use violence of any kind against my fellow-creatures, except, perhaps, against a child in order to save it from present harm; nor can I now take part in any act of authority, the purpose of which is to protect men’s property by violence. I can neither be a judge, nor take part in judging and condemning. Christ has revealed to me that the fifth snare is ‘the distinction we make between our own and foreign nations.’ If, therefore, a feeling of enmity arises in my heart against a foreigner, I cannot help acknowledging, after a few moments’ serious reflection, that the feeling is a wicked one; I can no longer justify this feeling to myself by acknowledging the superiority of my own nation over others, or by the cruelty or barbarity of any other nation. I cannot help trying to be kinder and more friendly toward a foreigner than toward my own countrymen, rather than otherwise. And knowing that the distinction I formerly made between my own and other nations is evil, I see the snare that led me into this evil, and can no longer consciously let myself be drawn into it. It is the erroneous idea that my welfare is linked only with that of my native land, and not with that of all mankind. But I now know that my unity with other men cannot be destroyed by frontiers, barriers, the disposal of kingdoms, or by my belonging to some particular nation. I now know that men are equal everywhere – that all are ‘brethren.’ On recalling to mind all the evil that I did myself and that I suffered from others in consequence of the enmity that so often exists between different nations, it is clear to me that the cause was the gross imposition called ‘patriotism’.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  AfterwordWe have seen that, like the weather, religion “does lots of different things.” To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action. In the Hebrew Bible, the Deuteronomists and the Priestly authors all meditated on the same stories, but the Deuteronomists turned virulently against foreign peoples, while the Priestly authors sought reconciliation. Chinese Daoists, Legalists, and military strategists shared the same set of ideas and meditative disciplines but put them to entirely different uses. Saint Luke and the Johannine authors all reflected on Jesus’s message of love, but Luke reached out to marginalized members of society, while the Johannines confined their love to their own group. Antony and the Syrian boskoi both set out to practice “freedom from care,” but Antony spent his life trying to empty his mind of anger and hatred, while the Syrian monks surrendered to the aggressive drives of the reptilian brain. Ibn Taymiyyah and Rumi were both victims of the Mongol invasions, but they used the teachings of Islam to come to entirely different conclusions. For centuries the story of Imam Husain’s tragic death inspired Shiis to withdraw from political life in principled protest against systemic injustice; more recently it has inspired them to take political action and say no to tyranny. Until the modern period, religion permeated all aspects of life, including politics and warfare, not because ambitious churchmen had “mixed up” two essentially distinct activities but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance. Every state ideology was religious. The kings of Europe who struggled to liberate themselves from papal control were not “secularists” but were revered as semidivine. Every successful empire has claimed that it had a divine mission; that its enemies were evil, misguided, or tyrannical; and that it would benefit humanity. And because these states and empires were all created and maintained by force, religion has been implicated in their violence. It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that religion was ejected from political life in the West. When, therefore, people claim that religion has been responsible for more war, oppression, and suffering than any other human institution, one has to ask, “More than what?” Until the American and French Revolutions, there were no “secular” societies. So ingrained is our impulse to “sanctify” our political activities that no sooner had the French revolutionaries successfully marginalized the Catholic Church than they created a new national religion. In the United States, the first secular republic, the state has always had a religious aura, a manifest destiny, and a divinely sanctioned mission.