Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  Christ has revealed to me that the third snare that destroys my happiness is the ‘taking of an oath.’ I believe this, and I dare not take any oath. Nor dare I allege, for my justification, that my doing so cannot harm anyone, that all do so, that the State requires it of me, and that my refusing to do so will do no good either to others or myself. I know that this is an evil for all men and me, and I cannot do it. I know, besides, wherein the temptation lay, which enticed me into this evil, and I dare not yield to it any more. I know that the snare lies in our sanctioning deception. Men swear to submit to the commands of other men, whereas man must submit to God alone. The most awful evils in the world, by the consequences they entail, such as war, imprisonment, executions, and torture, only exist through this snare, by which all responsibility is taken off those who do evil. I now understand the meaning of the words, ‘All that is more than a simple affirmation or negation, yes or no, is evil.’ Every promise is evil. Having understood this, I now see that the taking of an oath is against my own good, as well as the good of others; and the knowledge that it is so has altered my estimate of what is good and noble or bad and base. All that had seemed most good and noble to me before – obligatory allegiance to the government, the extortion of oaths from men, all the deeds conscience condemns that are mostly the result of a man’s having taken an oath – seem bad and base to me now. Therefore, I can no longer set aside the commandment of Christ, which says, ‘Swear not at all.’ I cannot now swear an oath, nor can I insist upon others dong so, nor can I encourage men to consider taking an oath as necessary or even harmless. Christ has revealed to me that the fourth snare is ‘resisting evil by violence.’ I know that my doing so leads others and me into evil, and cannot therefore justify myself by saying that it is necessary for the protection of others, of my property, or of myself. No sooner do I remember this than I cannot help abstaining from violence of every kind. And I know, likewise, what the snare is. It is the erroneous idea that my welfare can be secured by defending my property and myself against others. I now know that the greater part of the evil men suffer from arises from this. Instead of working for others, each tries to work as little as possible, and forcibly makes others work for him. And on recalling to mind all the evil done by others and myself, I see that it proceeded, for the most part, from our considering it possible to secure and better our conditions by violence.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  Most of our Plains Indians in the period of the horse-riding Indians had originally been of the Mississippifan culture. They lived along the Mississippi in settled dwelling towns and agriculturally based villages. And then they receive the horse from the Spaniards, which makes it possible to venture out into the plains and handle the great hunt of the buffalo herds. At this time, the mythology transforms from a vegetation mythology to a buffalo mythology. You can see the structure of the earlier vegetation mythologies underlying the mythologies of the Dakota Indians and the Pawnee Indians and the Kiowa, and so forth. MOYERS: You’re saying that the environment shapes the story? CAMPBELL: The people respond to the environment, you see. But now we have a tradition that doesn’t respond to the environment—it comes from somewhere else, from the first millennium B.C . It has not assimilated the qualities of our modern culture and the new things that are possible and the new vision of the universe. Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world. MOYERS: You mean artists are the mythmakers of our day? CAMPBELL: The mythmakers of earlier days were the counterparts of our artists. MOYERS: They do the paintings on the walls, they perform the rituals. CAMPBELL: Yes. There’s an old romantic idea in German, das Volk dichtet , which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below. MOYERS: In these early elementary cultures, as you call them, who would have been the equivalent of the poets today? CAMPBELL: The shamans. The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego. MOYERS: And ecstasy is a part of it. CAMPBELL: It i S . MOYERS: The trance dance, for example, in the Bushman society. CAMPBELL: Now, there’s a fantastic example of something. The Bushmen live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, a life of great, great tension. The male and female sexes are, in a disciplined way, separate. Only in the dance do the two come together.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  MOYERS: And the other cultures? CAMPBELL: They don’t stress the beauty of youth to that extent. MOYERS: You say that the image of death is the beginning of mythology. What do you mean? CAMPBELL: The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves. MOYERS: And they suggest that men and women saw life, and then they didn’t see it, so they wondered about it? CAMPBELL: It must have been something like that. You only have to imagine what your own experience would be. The grave burials with their weapons and sacrifices to ensure a continued life—these certainly suggest that there was a person who was alive and warm before you who is now lying there, cold, and beginning to rot. Something was there that isn’t there. Where is it now? MOYERS: When do you think humans first discovered death? CAMPBELL: They first discovered death when they were first humans, because they died. Now, animals have the experience of watching their companions dying. But, as far as we know, they have no further thoughts about it. And there is no evidence that humans thought about death in a significant way until the Neanderthal period, when weapons and animal sacrifices occur with burials. MOYERS: What did these sacrifices represent? CAMPBELL: That I wouldn’t know. MOYERS: Only a guess. CAMPBELL: I try not to guess. You know, we have a tremendous amount of information about this subject, but there is a place where the information stops. And until you have writing, you don’t know what people were thinking. All you have are significant remains of one kind or another. You can extrapolate backward, but that is dangerous. However, we do know that burials always involve the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a plane of being that is behind the visible plane, and that is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one. MOYERS: What we don’t know supports what we do know. CAMPBELL: Yes. And this idea of invisible support is connected with one’s society, too. Society was there before you, it is there after you are gone, and you are a member of it. The myths that link you to your social group, the tribal myths, affirm that you are an organ of the larger organism. Society itself is an organ of a larger organism, which is the landscape, the world in which the tribe moves. The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body. Man lives by killing, and there is a sense of guilt connected with that. Burials suggest that my friend has died, and he survives. The animals that I have killed must also survive.

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

  No sooner do I feel that I am giving way to my passions than I know myself to be in an unhealthy, unnatural state of mind, and try by all possible means to escape this evil. And, knowing the sin, I know, too, the snares that led me into it, and I can no longer yield to it. I know now that the chief cause of temptation lies in the separation of men and women from those to whom they were once united. I know now that the forsaking of those to whom men and women have been once united is the ‘divorce’ that Christ forbids, for it brings depravity into the world. On recalling my past life, I see clearly that it was not only the unnatural education I had received that had led me into lasciviousness, by both physically and morally exciting my passions and justifying them by all the refinements of wit, but likewise my having forsaken the woman with whom I had first been united. I understood the full meaning of Christ’s words, and saw that God had created man and woman in order that they might live in couples, and that what God had joined together should never be put asunder. I now see clearly that monogamy is the natural law of mankind and must never be broken. I understand the words that ‘he who divorces his wife,’ that is, the woman to whom he was first united, ‘forces her to commit adultery,’ and brings new evil into the world. My belief in this has changed my former estimate of what is good and noble or bad and base in life. The things that I had formerly prized – a refined, elegant life and the passionate and poetic love extolled by all poets and artists – has become wicked and hideous in my eyes. A hard working, poor, simple life, which masters human passions, alone seems desirable. It is not our human institution of marriage that makes really lawful the union of man and woman. I consider as sacred and obligatory that union alone which, once and forever, binds a man to the first woman he loves. I can no longer give way to idleness and an easy life, which always tends to excite inordinate desires, nor can I find pleasure in novel reading, poetry, music, or balls, which I had hitherto regarded, not only as innocent, but even as refined occupations. I cannot forsake my wife, for I now know that my doing so is a snare for others, for her, and for myself; neither can I cooperate in the separation of any husband and wife, whether their union has been associated with church rites or not. Every union between a man and woman I consider to be sacred and binding to the end of their days.

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

  If I know that my anger is unnatural and wicked, I likewise know the snare that led me into it. The snare was my standing aloof from others, acknowledging only a few as my equals, and all the rest of the world as insignificant (racas) or foolish and ignorant (you fool!). I see now that these habits of holding myself aloof from others and considering them as fools (racas) were the chief causes of my enmity toward men. On recalling my past life to mind, I now see that I never once harbored a feeling of enmity toward those whom I considered my superiors[20], and that I never intentionally wounded their feelings; that, on the contrary, the most trifling circumstances sufficed to excite my anger against a man whom I considered my inferior, and the more I considered myself above him the easier I found it to outrage him. But I know now that he who humbles himself before others and who works for others is the only one who stands above the rest. I understand now that what is highly esteemed by men is abomination in the sight of God, why woe is foretold to the rich and famous, and why beggars and those who are humble are the blessed. My understanding of this has changed my view of all that is good and noble or bad and base in life. All that had formerly seemed good and noble in my eyes – such things as honor, glory, education, riches, all the refinements of life, elegant furniture, good food, fine clothes, etc. – have grown worthless to me. All that had seemed bad and base – such things as obscurity, poverty, uncouth manners, simplicity of furniture, of food, of clothes, etc. – have grown good and noble in my eyes. If, therefore, I now inadvertently give myself up to anger and wound another’s feelings, I dare not, after a moment’s serious reflection, yield to the temptation that deprives me of true happiness, union, and love, any more than a man can set a snare for himself in which he was once caught. I can no longer try to rise above other men and to separate myself from them, nor can I allow either rank or title for others or myself, except the title of ‘man’. I can no longer seek fame or glory, nor can I help trying to get rid of my riches, which separate me from my fellow-creatures. I cannot help seeking in my way of life, in its surroundings, in my food, my clothes, and my manners to draw nearer to the majority of men, and to avoid all that separates me from them. Christ has shown me that the second snare that destroys my happiness is ‘lasciviousness,’ ‘sensuality.’ Knowing this, I can no longer acknowledge such passions to be natural, and I cannot justify them to myself.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  OF COURSE I considered quitting graduate school. I paid my ticket, I rode the ride. Right? Half the people I started with quit. I did not have to continue toward scholar. But something wouldn’t let me. Some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter. Some woman in me I’d never met. You know who she was? My intellect. When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. Watch out, woman. To which she replied, I’m Lidia. I have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind. And I’m here to write a dissertation. Yeah. Right. Whatever. And anyway, where did you even come from? Oh, I think you know. I’m from your father. Now open the goddamned door. My father. Whose mind curled around art and architecture and classical music and film. Whose intellect I carried in my blood rivers. That’s when my two mes had it out. The me I’d forged to leave a family and body batter my way into the world, and the me I’d never met, or even knew existed, except perhaps hidden in my hands, hiding like the crouch of dreams in my fingers. My father’s daughter. “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.” The night after I jumped from the train of things, at the computer my heart raced. My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt - bruised and cut from falling from a train - or a marriage - or a self in the night - I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book. Until my very skin made screamsong. Short Story SO MY FIRST BOOK OF STORIES BEAT MY DISSERTATION to print. I got published by an independent press. One that did not care about how far I’d paddled outside the mainstream. I called the book Her Other Mouths. In every story, intense things happen to a body. Because, well, they do. Did. And I knew how to tell it. Words the body of me.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  When Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl in 2021, it was another reminder not just of his excellence but also of the astonishing length of his career. In fact, scanning a list of the advertisers from Brady’s first Super Bowl back in 2002, nineteen years earlier, you can see that Brady also outlasted many once successful and very prominent companies. The list is now a virtual corporate graveyard: AOL, Blockbuster, Circuit City, CompUSA, Gateway, RadioShack, and Sears. In case you are wondering why it’s so important to be good at quitting to adeptly navigate a changing world, all you have to do is look at that list. If you could afford $2 million for thirty seconds of airtime in 2002 (it is over $5 million now), along with the production and agency costs of making an ad you think will stand out, you were a big, successful company. And presumably, you were working hard at trying to stay a big company, and hopefully get even bigger. All those companies were smart enough to build something very successful. They had the money and the resources to survey the landscape really well. Yet in each case, the world changed on them, and they failed to quit on time, persisting into oblivion. Take the example of Blockbuster. New competitors, including Netflix, sprung up. New and disruptive technology (streaming) was developed. Blockbuster, when presented with the opportunity to acquire Netflix, refused. Then, it persisted in its business of renting physical copies of entertainment content to people coming in person to their store locations. We all know what happened to Blockbuster, and what happened to Netflix. Looking at Blockbuster and the rest of that list, you realize that the scale must be gaffed against quitting not just for individuals but for businesses as well. This should not be surprising because businesses are a collection of individuals. The road to sustained profitability for a business is not only about sticking to a strategy or business model (even one that has been profitable in the past). It is also about surveying and reacting to the changing landscape. Similarly, for each of us on an individual level, the road to happiness is not in sticking blindly to the thing that we’re doing, as so many aphorisms cajole us to do. We need to see what’s going on around us so we can do whatever will maximize our happiness and our time and our well-being. And that usually means doing more quitting. “Know When to Hold ’Em, Know When to Fold ’Em”: But Mostly, Fold ’EmAs Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler , “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Notice that three of those four things are about quitting. When it comes to the importance of cutting your losses at poker, Kenny Rogers got it.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  A poker table, it turns out, is a very good place to learn about the upside of quitting. Optimal quitting might be the most important skill separating great players from amateurs. In fact, without the option to abandon a hand, poker would be much more like baccarat, a game of no skill because there are no new decisions you get to make once the cards are dealt. Top poker players are better at quitting than amateurs in a variety of ways. The most obvious is that they know when to fold ’em. Deciding which hands are worth playing and which hands are not is the first and most consequential choice a player makes. And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold’em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time. In the battle of whether to hold ’em or fold ’em, amateurs usually hold ’em. Professionals usually fold ’em. This may be, in part, because in the choice between holding ’em and folding ’em, only holding ’em lets you know for sure that you never miss out on raking in a pot that you might have won if you had just stayed in the hand till the last card. There’s an old saying in poker that goes “Any two cards can win,” meaning that if you stick with your hand, there is always some possibility, no matter how slim, that even a terrible hand can triumph. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go on to say, “. . . but not enough of the time for it to be profitable.” I remember many, many nights at a poker table when a player sitting next to me would nudge me after a hand to let me know that the cards they folded would have won the pot. It would occasionally get ridiculous, like when they had folded a seven-deuce at the beginning of the hand (the mathematically worst two-card starting combination you can be dealt, so it’s a no-brainer to fold) and the five community cards would end up including seven-deuce-deuce. They would invariably lean over and groan, “I folded seven-deuce. I would have made a full house!” I’d tell them, “There’s a way to avoid that.” “How?” “Just play every hand all the way to the last card.” That advice might have been absurd, but I was making the point that a necessary part of succeeding in poker is to fold some hands that might have won. To be good at the game you just have to learn to live with that. Playing every hand you are dealt is an easy and fast way to go broke since you would be playing too many hands that aren’t profitable in the long run. That would also make poker more like baccarat, taking out a key element of skill, the option to fold.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Isabella kept Sargent’s late-life tribute where it had been painted—in the Macknight Room. She placed it on top of a large bookcase, so that it faces and is reflected in an enormous eighteenth-century Venetian mirror on the opposite wall. Paul Manship’s Diana stands on a table under the mirror, with its waterlike surface. It is as if Isabella always wanted to be looking into the past—the Venetian past as well as her own. When standing in front of the mirror, visitors see their own reflection and also Isabella’s, discernible in the background like a ghostly presence. Thirty-ThreeSpring1923–24A little-seen documentary from the 1970s about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, includes interviews with a few of her relatives, some of them quite elderly. The film documents a moving story from the last years of Isabella’s life, which took place on a spring morning in 1923. Isabella, increasingly frail, insisted on taking a taxi to see the newest member of the Gardner family, a baby boy who had been born just hours before, at 2 A.M. on April 14, which happened to be Isabella’s eighty-third birthday. George Peabody Gardner Jr., her great-nephew, and his wife, Rose, had previously stated that if the child was a boy, they would name him John Lowell Gardner. This, of course, was the name of Isabella’s father-in-law; of Jack, her husband of thirty-eight years; and of little Jackie. Rose Gardner recalled that Great-Aunt Isabella had not favored the idea; she “looked rather unhappy about it and didn’t say much.” But now the little boy had been born on her birthday, and she was determined to see him. When she arrived at Green Hill, she requested that the baby be brought down to the car. The nurse placed the newborn in her arms, and she cradled him for a long while. It must have seemed like a visitation from long ago. Something shifted, as if a circle had been closed, for after this moment she was “simply delighted” with his name. Rose Gardner remembered this scene through tears. *** NOT LONG AFTER, ISABELLA SENT WORD TO HER FRIENDS AT SOCIETY OF Saint John the Evangelist that she was failing and wanted communion immediately. The record does not mention who came, only that she was conscious but weak. Her niece Olga Monks rushed to her side. Then, miraculously it seemed, Isabella revived and regained her strength. Mary Berenson wrote from Athens in May to express great relief upon hearing that she was better, and by July, Isabella returned to what she loved to do in warm weather—travel by motorcar, to be out in the world. She did not mind the wind in her face.

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  Heraclitus said that for God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not. When you are a man, you are in the field of time and decisions. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization of both terms, to say, “I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal aberrations and that, in God’s view, there is no difference.” MOYERS: That is the idea in the Upanishads: “Not female, nor yet male is it, neither is it neuter. Whatever body it assumes, through that body it is served.” CAMPBELL: That is right. So Jesus says, “Judge not that you may not be judged.” That is to say, put yourself back in the position of Paradise before you thought in terms of good and evil. You don’t hear this much from the pulpits. But one of the great challenges of life is to say “yea” to that person or that act or that condition which in your mind is most abominable. MOYERS: Most abominable? CAMPBELL: There are two aspects to a thing of this kind. One is your judgment in the field of action, and the other is your judgment as a metaphysical observer. You can’t say there shouldn’t be poisonous serpents—that’s the way life is. But in the field of action, if you see a poisonous serpent about to bite somebody, you kill it. That’s not saying no to the serpent, that’s saying no to that situation. There’s a wonderful verse in the Rig Veda that says, “On the tree”—that’s the tree of life, the tree of your own life—“there are two birds, fast friends. One eats the fruit of the tree, and the other, not eating, watches.” Now, the one eating the fruit of the tree is killing the fruit. Life lives on life, that’s what it’s all about. A little myth from India tells the story of the great god Shiva, the lord whose dance is the universe. He had as his consort the goddess Parvathi, daughter of the mountain king. A monster came to him and said, “I want your wife as my mistress.” Shiva was indignant, so he simply opened his third eye, and lightning bolts struck the earth, there was smoke and fire, and when the smoke cleared, there was another monster, lean, with hair like the hair of a lion flying to the four directions. The first monster saw that the lean monster was about to eat him up. Now, what do you do when you’re in a situation like that? Traditional advice says to throw yourself on the mercy of the deity. So the monster said, “Shiva, I throw myself on your mercy.” Now, there are rules for this god game. When someone throws himself on your mercy, then you yield mercy. So Shiva said, “I yield my mercy. Lean monster, don’t eat him.” “Well,” said the lean monster, “what do I do?

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  In order to reconcile Jesus’ harsh judgment with our capitalist social location, we must spiritualize the parable, interpreting it so that the sin is not hoarding resources that could be shared with those who had none but rather is relying on the individual to succeed instead of God. This metaphoric reading reinterprets the action of hoarding as the core of the sin and reduces it to the individual motivation of the person. But those who read the Bible literally, those who live on the margins of society, instead agree with Jesus’ pronouncement that this rich person is a fool. There exists the realization that those who hoard their profits usually believe that they have earned their wealth and thus are entitled to their riches and beholden to no one. This is what makes them fools. Missing from this analysis, however, is how societal privilege opens doors to one ethnic group at the expense of other groups. I recall a student who insisted that his father's economic success, his rags-to-riches testimony, was due solely to his entrepreneurial skills. I simply asked one question: If his father were a black Latino, would he have been able to achieve the same level of success? Would he have had access to adequate public education, normally available in white suburban neighborhoods? Would he have been hired by his company for a managerial position? If hired, how many people on the margins would end up working in top administrative posts in the company, or would his color or ethnicity prevent him from passing the glass ceiling? Would he have gotten the necessary funding from the local bank to set out on his own? The student was forced to recognize that whiteness provided a privilege that contributed directly or indirectly to his father's success. If his father stores his profit believing that he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps, like the fool in Jesus’ parable, the day will come when he will have to give an account for himself. He will have to reckon with his complicity with societal structures designed to privilege him at the expense of others whose skin pigmentation or ethnic background deprive them of the opportunities taken for granted by the dominant culture. A HISPANIC CHRIST José was a simple man who worked with his hands. He built things. He tried to make a living as a carpenter, but times were hard and taxes were high. Regardless of the foreign military occupation of his homeland, there simply was no time for him to become involved with any of those revolutionary groups doing maneuvers and hiding in the wilderness. He just worked hard, barely keeping food on the table for his rapidly growing family.

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

  For which of these good works do you wish to stone me? They said: Not for your good works do We wish to stone you, but because you, a man, make yourself God. And Jesus replied to them: The same is written in your scriptures where it is said that God Himself said to the wicked rulers: 'Ye are Gods.' If He called even wicked men Gods, why do you consider it blasphemous to call what God in his love has sent into the world, 'the son of God"' Every man in the spirit is a son of', God. If I do not live in God's way, then do not believe that I am a son of God. But if I live after God's way then believe by my life that I am with the Father, and understand that the Father is in me and I in Him. And the Jews began to dispute. Some said that he was possessed and others said: A man who is possessed cannot enlighten men. And they did not know what to do with him and could not condemn him. And he again went beyond the Jordan and stayed there. And many believed in his teaching and said that it was true as the teaching of John was. Therefore many believed in it. And Jesus once asked his pupils: Tell me, how do people understand my teaching about the son of God and the son of man? They said: Some understand it like the teaching of John: others like the prophecies of Isaiah: others again say it is like the teaching of Jeremiah. They understand that you are a prophet. And he asked them: But how do you understand my teaching? And Simon Peter said to him: I think your teaching is that you are the chosen son of the God of life. You teach that God is the life within man. And Jesus said to him: Happy are you, Simon, that you have understood this. No man could disclose it to you: you have understood it because the divine spirit in you has disclosed it to you. Not human understanding and not I by my words have disclosed it to you, but God, my Father, has disclosed it to you directly. And on this is founded the society of men for whom there is no death. Life is not TemporalTable of ContentsTherefore true life must be lived in the present. EACH DAYJESUS said: He who is not prepared to suffer all bodily sufferings and deprivations has not understood me. He who obtains all that is best for his bodily life destroys the true life. But he who sacrifices his bodily life in fulfilling my teaching will receive the true life. And at those words, Peter said to him: See, we have obeyed you, have thrown off all ties and property, and have followed you. What reward shall we receive for this?

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

  And they began to dispute, and asked of the man who had been enlightened: What do you think of Jesus? He said: I think he is a prophet. But the Jews did not believe that he had been ignorant and was now enlightened, so they called his parents and asked them: Is this your son, who has been ignorant since his birth? How is it he has now become enlightened? His parents said: We know that he is our son and that he was ignorant from his birth, but how he has become enlightened we do not know. He is of age, you should ask him. The Orthodox called the man a second time, and said: Pray to our God, the real God. The man who enlightened you is a layman, and is not sent by God. We are sure of that. And the man who had been enlightened said: Whether he is from God or not I do not know. But I know that I used not to see the light and that I see it now. The Orthodox again asked: What did he do to you when he enlightened you? He replied: I have told you already, but you do not believe. If you wish to be his pupils I will tell you again. They began to revile him and said: You are his pupil, but we are the pupils of Moses. God Himself spoke to Moses, but we do not even know whence this man is. And the man answered: It is strange that he has enlightened me and yet you do not know whence he is. God does not hear sinners but hears those who honour Him and do His will. It can never be that one who is not from God could enlighten an ignorant man. If he were not from God he could do nothing. The Orthodox were angry at this, and said: You are altogether sunk in delusions and yet you want to teach us. And they drove him away. And Jesus said: My teaching is an awakening to life. He who believes in my teaching, though he die in the flesh, remains living, and everyone who lives and believes in me will not die. And yet a third time Jesus taught the people. He said: Men accept my teaching not because I myself prove it. It is impossible to prove the truth. The truth itself proves all else. But men accept my teaching because there is no other that is native to them and promises life. My teaching is to men like the familiar voice of the shepherd to the sheep, when he comes to them through the door and gathers them to lead them to pasture. No one believes your teaching, for it is foreign to them, and they see your own lusts in it.

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

  They said: Why, this is Jesus the son of Joseph: we know his father and mother. How is it that he says his teaching has come down from heaven? And Jesus said: Do not discuss who I am and where I came from. My teaching is true, not because, like Moses, I declare that God spoke to me on Sinai, but because it exists in you too. Everyone who believes my commandments does so not because it is I who speak, but because our common Father draws him to Himself; and my teaching will give him life at the last day. It is written in the prophets that all men shall be taught of God. Everyone who understands the Father, and learns to know His will, yields himself to my teaching. No one has ever seen the Father, but he that is of God has seen and sees Him. He who believes in me (in my teaching) has everlasting life. My teaching is the food of life. Your fathers ate manna, food sent from heaven, and yet died. But the true food of life which descends from heaven is such that he who feeds on it will not die. And my teaching is this food of life that has descended from heaven. He who feeds on it lives forever. And this food which I teach is my body which I give for the life of mankind. The Jews did not at all understand what he said, and began to dispute as to how it was possible to give one's body for the life of men, and why. And Jesus said to them: If you do not give your body for the life of the spirit there will be no life in you. He who does not give his body for the life of the spirit has no real life. Only that in me which gives up the body for the spirit has real life. And therefore our bodies are truly food for the real life. Only that in me which consumes my body, that which gives up the bodily life for the true life-is really I-it is in me, and I am in it. And as I live in the body by the will of the Father, so that which lives in me lives by my will. And some of his pupils when they heard this, said: These are hard words, and it is difficult to understand them. And Jesus said to them: Your minds are so confused, that my saying about what man was, is, and always will be, seems to you difficult. Man is a spirit in the flesh, and the spirit alone gives life-the flesh does not give life. In the words that seem to you so difficult I said no more than that the spirit is life. Afterwards Jesus chose seventy men from among those near him, and sent them to places he himself wished to go to.

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

  And so I repeat to you: he who comprehends my teaching and performs it shall not see death. And the Jews said: Now, were we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a devil? You convict yourself! The prophets died, so did Abraham, yet you say that he who fulfills your teaching shall not see death. Abraham died, and will you not die? Or are you greater than Abraham? The Jews discussed what he-Jesus of Galilee-was, whether he was an important or an unimportant prophet, and forgot that he had told them that he said nothing of himself as a man but spoke of the spirit that was within him. And Jesus said: I do not make myself out to be anything. If I spoke of myself, of what I imagine, then all I might say would be of no importance. But there is that source of all things which you call God. It is of that I speak. You have not known, and do not know, the true God. But I know Him and if I said I do not know Him I should be a liar like you. I know Him and know and fulfill His will. Your father Abraham saw and rejoiced at what I understand. The Jews said: You are not yet thirty: how could you be alive in Abraham's day? He replied: Before Abraham existed there was the understanding of good that I tell you of. Then the Jews picked up stones to throw at him, but he escaped. And on the road, Jesus saw a man who had no understanding from the time of his birth. And his pupils asked him: Who is at fault that this man is without understanding since his birth? He, or his parents for not having taught him? And Jesus replied: Neither his parents nor lie are at fault. It is God's doing, that there may be light where there was darkness. If I have a teaching, it is the light of the world. And Jesus explained to the ignorant man that he was a son of God in the spirit, and on receiving this teaching the ignorant man was conscious of light. Those who had known him previously did not recognize him. Though resembling what he had been, he had now become another man. But he said: I am he, and Jesus has shown me that I am a son of God, and the light has reached me, so that now I see what I used not to see. This man was taken to the Orthodox teachers; and it was on a Saturday. The Orthodox asked him how he had come to understand what he had not seen before. He said: I do not know how; I only know that now I understand everything. They said: You do not understand in a godly way, for Jesus did this on a Saturday, and besides, a layman cannot enlighten people.

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

  For a man who invents from himself follows his own imagination, but he who seeks to know the mind of Him that sent him is true and there is no falsehood in him. Your law of Moses is not the Father's law, and so those who follow it do not fulfill the Father's law, but do evil and tell falsehoods. I teach you the fulfillment of the will of the Father alone. In my teaching there can be no contradictions, but your written Mosaic law is full of contradictions. Do not judge by externals, but by the spirit. And some said: They said he was a false prophet, but he condemns the law and no one says anything to him. Perhaps he is really a true prophet and even the rulers have recognized him. But there is one reason for not believing him: it is written that when God's messenger shall come no one will know whence he came, but we know where this man was born and we know his whole family. The people still did not understand his teaching, and still sought proofs. Then Jesus said to them: You know me, and where I came from in the body, but you do not know where I come from in the spirit. You do not know Him from whom I come in spirit, and that is the one thing it is necessary to know. If I had said: 'I am the Christ', you would have believed me, the man, but you would not have believed the Father who is in me and in you. You should believe in the Father only. For the short space of my life I point out to you the path to that source of life from which I have come. But you ask of me proofs, and wish to condemn me. If you do not know that path, then when I am no longer here you will not be able to find it. You should not judge me but should follow me. He who does what I say will know whether what I say is true. He for whom the life of the flesh has not become merely food for the spirit, he who does not seek truth as a thirsty man seeks for water, cannot understand me. He who thirsts for truth, let him come to me and drink. And he who believes my teaching will obtain true life. He will receive the life of the spirit. And many believed his teaching and said: What he says is true, and is of God. Others did not understand him, and were always seeking in the prophecies for proofs that he was sent from God. And many disputed with him but no one was able to controvert him. The Orthodox teachers of the law sent their assistants to contend with him, but these assistants returned to them and said: We can do nothing with him.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  understand more clearly why . And because this is going to be such a big deal from here on out, let me repeat: The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition. And again, the same could be said of people of faith today. We don’t see this type of diversity over time in Proverbs. Yes, Proverbs says different things about wealth, as we’ve seen, but those sayings aren’t different because they were written at different points on Israel’s historical timeline. Some sayings might have had earlier oral precursors, but given their general nature, there is no way to date these sayings; they could just as easily all have been written by one sage on one day. The Law, however, is tied to a storyline, and so, as we’ve seen, laws in Deuteronomy and Exodus differ, because they are separated on Israel’s timeline by wandering and soul-searching in the desert for forty years (at least as the story is told—hold that thought). Deuteronomy adapted and adjusted earlier laws for later times and circumstances, like amendments to the Constitution or a Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment allows the banning assault rifles, because the world has changed since the eighteenth century. What is true of the Law is also true of the Bible generally. The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) exhibits this same characteristic of the sacred past being changed, adapted, rethought, and rewritten by people of faith , not because they disrespected the past, but because they respected it so much they had to tie it to their present. I’ll go even farther. Without such changes over time, Christianity wouldn’t exist. The Christian tradition depends on these changes over time—and some rather big ones at that. But we’ll leave that for later. For now it’s enough to say, The Bible isn’t a book that reflects one point of view. It is a collection of books that records a conversation—even a debate—over time. When I began to see that for myself, a lot of things fell into place about the Bible’s purpose and what it means to read it with the eyes of faith. When we accept the Bible as the moving, changing, adaptive organism it is, we will more readily accept our own sacred responsibility to engage the ancient biblical story with wisdom, to converse with the past rather than mimic it—which is to follow the very pattern laid out in the Bible itself. A rulebook view of the Bible misses that dynamic process entirely; indeed, it seems determined to obscure it. The Most Important Part of the Book Thus Far

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

  The bar had two levels. When their eyes had caught at a distance—Jill standing upstairs and Calla below—Jill’s had refused to let go. “Ballsy,” Calla remembered, and recalled other impressions: Jill’s sharp features, her combination of dark blond ringlets and green irises, the spareness of her athletic body, and the way that, when Calla had wandered off from their first conversation to flirt with someone else, Jill reappeared and announced, with whimsical flair, that she intended to compete. Calla took her home. For most of the year leading up to their meeting, Calla, who was in her early forties, had kept herself celibate in an effort to purge all the forces that had led to her last relationship, her last quick, eager pledge of fidelity, her last attempt at living together, her last disappointment, her last flight, her last repetition of this process, and that night with Jill, short, sinewy, brazen Jill, the sex went on ceaselessly, as though somehow a year might be pressed into hours. For Calla, there had been a moment. One afternoon back in high school, in PE class, on a volleyball court two courts away from her own, with blue and white balls and black and white nets and cut-offs and gym shorts between them, she had noticed a classmate, a girl she’d seen and briefly spoken to before. But she’d never noticed her in this way, never had this reaction, this sense of invading chaos. Filled with dread, within days she gave herself a test. “I proceeded to go through in my mind the act of going down on her,” she said. “And when I was done, I thought, No, I don’t want to do that.” To her great relief, this meant that she wasn’t a lesbian. Soon she was writing the girl poetry. Soon they were applying each other’s makeup, telling each other how pretty they looked. She spent nearly all her nights at the girl’s house, in her bed, the two of them in their underwear, tickling or running fingers along lengths of limbs. Things went no further. It wasn’t until her freshman year in college that Calla stole away from a party, went to a dance at the university’s LGBT center, wound up thoroughly immersed in a woman’s body for the first time, and, in the wake of that night in that graduate student’s bed, “realized how crazy girls made me.”

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

  When all this shall become completely clear to all, it will be natural for men to ask themselves, "But why should we feed and maintain all these kings, emperors, presidents, and members of all kinds of Chambers and ministries, if nothing results from all their meetings and discussions? Would it not be better, as some jester said, to make a queen out of rubber?" "And what good to us are the armies, with their generals, and music, and cavalry, and drums? What good are they when there is no war and no one wants to conquer any one, and when, even if there is a war, the other nations do not let us profit from it, and the troops refuse to shoot at their own people?" "And what good are judges and prosecutors who in civil cases do not decide according to justice and in criminal cases know themselves that all punishments are useless?" "And of what use are collectors of taxes who unwillingly collect the taxes, while what is needed is collected without them?" "And of what use is the clergy, which has long ago ceased to believe in what it preaches?" "And of what use is capital in private hands, when it can be of use only by becoming the common possession?" And having once asked themselves this, people cannot help but come to the conclusion that they ought not to support all these useless institutions. But not only will the men who support these institutions arrive at the necessity of abolishing them,—the men themselves who occupy these positions will simultaneously or even earlier be brought to the necessity of giving up their positions. Public opinion more and more condemns violence, and so men, more and more submitting to public opinion, are less and less desirous of holding their positions, which are maintained by violence, and those who hold these positions are less and less able to make use of violence. But by not using violence, and yet remaining in positions which are conditioned by violence, the men who occupy these positions become more and more useless. And this uselessness, which is more and more felt by those who maintain these positions and by those who hold them, will finally be such that there will be found no men to maintain them and none who would be willing to hold them. Once I was present in Moscow at some discussions about faith, which, as usual, took place during Quasimodo week near a church in Hunter's Row. About twenty men were gathered on the sidewalk, and a serious discussion on religion was going on. At the same time there was some kind of a concert in the adjoining building of the Assembly of Noblemen, and an officer of police, noticing a crowd of people gathered near the church, sent a mounted gendarme to order them to disperse. The officer had personally no desire that they should disperse.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  My first two attempts to find objective fingerprints of emotion—in the face and body—had led me smack into a closed door. But as they say, when a door closes, sometimes a window opens. My window was the unexpected realization that an emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremendous variety. Anger, for example, varies far more than the classical view of emotion predicts or can explain. When you’re angry at someone, do you shout and swear or do you seethe quietly? Do you tease back in reproach? How about widening your eyes and raising your eyebrows? During these times, your blood pressure might go up or down or stay the same. You might feel your heart beating in your chest, or not. Your hands might become clammy, or they might remain dry . . . whatever best prepares your body for action in that situation. How does your brain create and keep track of all these diverse angers? How does it know which one fits the situation best? If I asked how you felt in each of these situations, would you give a detailed answer like “aggravated,” “irritated,” “outraged,” or “vengeful” automatically with little effort? Or would you answer “angry” in each case, or simply, “I feel bad”? How do you even know the answer? These are mysteries that the classical view of emotion doesn’t acknowledge. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I considered emotion categories in all their diversity, I was unwittingly applying a standard way of thinking in biology called population thinking, which was proposed by Darwin. A category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms. Just as no American family consists of 3.13 people, no instance of anger must include an average anger pattern (should we be able to identify one). Nor will any instance necessarily resemble the elusive fingerprint of anger. What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype.29 Once I adopted a mindset of population thinking, my whole landscape shifted, scientifically speaking. I began to see variation not as error but as normal and even desirable. I continued my quest for an objective way to distinguish one emotion from another, but it wasn’t quite the same quest anymore. With growing skepticism, I had only one place left to look for fingerprints. It was time to turn to the brain.*