Relief

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

  Bedouin allies did not have to convert to Islam but swore merely to fight the ummah’s enemies: Muhammad must be one of the few leaders in history to build an empire largely by negotiation. 19 In March 628, during the month of the hajj, Muhammad announced, to everybody’s astonishment, that he intended to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which, since pilgrims were forbidden to carry weapons, meant riding unarmed into enemy territory. 20 About a thousand Muslims volunteered to accompany him. The Quraysh dispatched their cavalry to attack the pilgrims, but their Bedouin allies guided them by a back route into the sanctuary of Mecca, where all violence was forbidden. Muhammad then ordered the pilgrims to sit beside the Well of Hudaybiyyah and wait for the Quraysh to negotiate. He knew that he had put them in an extremely difficult position: if the guardians of the Kabah killed pilgrims on sacred ground, they would lose all credibility in the region. Yet when the Qurayshi envoy arrived, Muhammad agreed to conditions that seemed to throw away every advantage the ummah had gained during the war. His fellow pilgrims were so horrified that they almost mutinied, yet the Quran would praise the truce of Hudaybiyyah as a “manifest victory.” While the Meccans had behaved with typical jahili belligerence when they tried to slaughter the unarmed pilgrims, God had sent down the “spirit of peace” ( sakina ) upon the Muslims. 21 Muhammad’s first biographer declared that this nonviolent victory was the turning point for the young movement: during the next two years “double or more than double as many entered Islam as ever before,” 22 and in 630 Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army. Our main source for Muhammad’s life is the Quran, the collection of revelations that came to the Prophet during the twenty-three years of his mission. The official text was standardized under Uthman, the third caliph, some twenty years after Muhammad’s death. But it had originally been transmitted orally, recited aloud, and learned by heart; as a result, during and after the Prophet’s life, the text remained fluid, and people would have remembered and dwelled on different parts they had heard. The Quran is not a coherent revelation: it came to Muhammad piecemeal in response to particular events, so as in any scripture, there were inconsistencies—not least about warfare. Jihad (“struggle”) is not one of the Quran’s main themes: in fact, the word and its derivatives occur only forty-one times, and only ten of these refer unambiguously to warfare. The “surrender” of islam requires a constant jihad against our inherent selfishness; this sometimes involves fighting ( qital ), but bearing trials courageously and giving to the poor in times of personal hardship was also described as jihad.

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

  An impulse which discharges itself immediately is generally quite neutral as regards pleasure or pain —the breathing impulse, for example. If such an impulse is arrested, however, by an extrinsic force, a great feeling of uneasiness is produced —for instance, the dyspnœa of asthma. And in proportion as the arresting force is then overcome, relief acrues —as when we draw breath again after the asthma subsides. The relief is a pleasure and the uneasiness a pain; and thus it happens that round all our impulses, merely as such, there twine, as it were, secondary possibilities of pleasant and painful feeling, involved in the manner in which the act is allowed to occur. These pleasures and pains of achievement, discharge, or fruition exist, no matter what the original spring of action be. We are glad when we have successfully got ourselves out of a danger, though the thought of the gladness was surely not what suggested to us to escape. To have compassed the steps towards a proposed sensual indulgence also makes us glad, and this gladness is a pleasure additional to the pleasure originally proposed. On the other hand, we are chagrined and displeased when any activity, however investigated, is hindered whilst in process of actual discharge. We are 'uneasy' till the discharge starts up again. And this is just as true when the action is neutral, or has nothing but pain in view as its result, as when it was undertaken for pleasure's express sake. The moth is probably as annoyed if hindered from getting into the lamp-flame as the roué is if interrupted in his debauch; and we are chagrined if prevented from doing some quite unimportant act which would have given us no noticeable pleasure if done, merely because the prevention itself is disagreeable.

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

  Another time, in a sauna, it was the friendliness of a little masseuse which brought about this duality. The tiers of slatted wooden benches had forced me to keep turning round. I had alternately bent and reached up to take all the eager pricks in my mouth. I don’t sweat much. So I stayed dry long enough for each of them to grab hold of me while I myself had to make great efforts to hold onto and direct pieces of flesh which had become viscous and slippery. All the way to the showers, my clitoris had been aggressed and my nipples pinched. Eventually I lay down aching on the massage table. The girl spoke softly, leaving a pause between her sentences in the same way that she stopped to put talc on her hands between each series of movements. She was sympathising with my fatigue. When you feel like that, there’s nothing quite like a steam bath followed by a good massage, is there! She feigned ignorance of exactly what sort of ordeals I had just subjected my body to, and she spoke to me as a beautician would, offering professional but also maternal ministrations to a modern active woman who without reserve puts herself into her hands. I have always liked slipping into a role, especially in this sort of situation, and I replied to her questions, relaxing more by this conformism than by the action of her fingers. It amused me to feel her kneading muscles which a few moments earlier had been subjected to more carnal pressures. She also seemed distant. I was separated from her by a succession of transformations. She took on a disguise constructed by the course of our conversation, but beneath this disguise was my skin, which she touched so gently, overlaying the other caresses that had gone before, and I abandoned this skin to her just as willingly, like a cast-off. After all, I was no more the debauched little bourgeoise she must have taken me for than the steadfast one we were inventing. As far as I know we were the only two women in the establishment that evening, but I thought of myself as being in the active realm of the men – and, in a way, they were still standing round me – whereas I saw her in a passive feminine realm, a place she occupied as an observer, and the two were incontrovertibly separate.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  could draw, I’d like to have sketched her as she was then. She struck me as so comical, that silly little scatterbrain! I’ve learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character! Yours, Anne TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1942 Dearest Kitty, The strangest things happen to you when you’re in hiding! Try to picture this. Because we don’t have a bathtub, we wash ourselves in a washtub, and because there’s only hot water in the office (by which I mean the entire lower floor), the seven of us take turns making the most of this great opportunity. But since none of us are alike and are all plagued by varying degrees of modesty, each member of the family has selected a different place to wash. Peter takes a bath in the office kitchen, even though it has a glass door. When it’s time for his bath, he goes around to each of us in turn and announces that we shouldn’t walk past the kitchen for the next half hour. He considers this measure to be sufficient. Mr. van D. takes his bath upstairs, figuring that the safety of his own room outweighs the difficulty of having to carry the hot water up all see which is the best place. Father bathes in the private office and Mother in the kitchen behind a fire screen, while Margot and I have declared the front office to be our bathing grounds. Since the curtains are drawn on Saturday afternoon, we scrub ourselves in the dark, while the one who isn’t in the bath looks out the window through a chink in the curtains and gazes in wonder at the endlessly amusing people. A week ago I decided I didn’t like this spot and have been on the lookout for more comfortable bathing quarters. It was Peter who gave me the idea of setting my washtub in the spacious office bathroom. I can sit down, turn on the light, lock the door, pour out the water without anyone’s help, and all without the fear of being seen. I used my lovely bathroom for the first time on Sunday and, strange as it may seem, I like it better than any other place. The plumber was at work downstairs on Wednesday, moving the water pipes and drains from the office bathroom to the hallway so the pipes won’t freeze during a cold winter. The plumber’s visit was far from pleasant. Not only were we not allowed to run

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The first chapter of Genesis, which described how Israel’s God had created heaven and earth in six days, is probably P’s most famous work, and it is a good place to start. When his first audience listened to a creation story, they expected to hear tales of violent struggle. The exiles were living in Babylon, where Marduk’s victory over Tiamat, the primal sea, was reenacted in a spectacular ritual at the new year, and there were many stories about Yahweh slaying a sea dragon when he created the world. So the audience would not have been surprised to hear the sea mentioned in P’s opening words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was wild and waste, there was darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters.” But then P surprised them. There was no fighting or killing. God simply spoke a word of command: “Let there be light!” And—without any struggle at all—the light shone forth. God ordered the world by issuing a further series of edicts: “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered in one place!” “Let the earth sprout forth with sprouting growth!” “Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night!” And finally: “Let us make humankind [adam] in our image!” And each time, without a single battle, “it was so.”37 In the same way as the Indian ritualists had systematically taken the violence out of the traditional ritual, P methodically extracted aggression from the traditional cosmogony. This was a remarkable spiritual achievement. The deportees had been the victims of a horrifying assault. The Babylonians had devastated their homeland, reduced their city to rubble, razed their temple to the ground, and forcibly driven them into exile. We know that some of them wanted to pay back the Babylonians in kind: Destructive Daughter of Babel, A blessing on the man who treats you As you have treated us, A blessing on him who takes and dashes Your babies against the rock!38 But this, P seemed to tell them, was not the way to go. His creation story can be seen as a polemic against the religion of their Babylonian conquerors. Yahweh was far more powerful than Marduk. He did not have to fight a battle against his fellow gods when he ordered the cosmos; the sea was not a terrifying goddess, but simply the raw material of the universe; and the sun, moon, and stars were mere creatures and functionaries. Marduk’s creation had to be renewed annually, but Yahweh finished his work in a mere six days and was able to rest on the seventh. He had no divine competition but was incomparable, the only power in the universe and beyond opposition.39

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In 628 CE he announced that he wanted to make the hajj pilgrimage and invited the Muslim volunteers to accompany him. This was extremely dangerous. During the hajj, Arab pilgrims could not carry arms; all violence was forbidden in the Meccan sanctuary. It was even forbidden to speak a cross word or kill an insect. In going unarmed into Mecca, Muhammad was, therefore, walking into the lion’s den. Nevertheless, a thousand Muslims chose to accompany him. The Meccans sent their cavalry to kill the pilgrims, but local Bedouins guided them into the sanctuary by another route. Once they had entered the sacred territory, Muhammad made the Muslims sit down in a peaceful demonstration, knowing that he was putting the Meccans in a difficult position. If they harmed pilgrims in the holiest place of Arabia, blasphemously violating the sanctity of the Kabah, their cause would be irreparably damaged. Eventually, the Meccans sent an envoy to negotiate, and to the horror of the Muslims present, Muhammad obeyed the directives of the Qur’an and accepted conditions that seemed not only to be dishonorable but also to throw away all the advantages that the Muslims had fought and died for. Nevertheless, Muhammad signed the treaty. The Muslim pilgrims were furious, and even though mutiny was narrowly averted, they started the ride home in sullen silence. But during the homeward journey, Muhammad received a revelation from God, who called this apparent defeat a “manifest victory.”74 While the Meccans, inspired by the violence of the old religion, had “harboured a stubborn disdain in their hearts,” God had sent down the “gift of inner peace [sakinah]” upon the Muslims, so that they had been able to respond to their enemies with calm serenity.75 They were distinguished by total surrender to God, and this separated them from the pagan Meccans and linked them with what we would call the religions of the Axial Age. The spirit of peace, said the Qur’an, was their link with the Torah and the gospel: “They are like a seed that brings forth its shoot, and then he strengthens it so that it grows stout, and in the end stands firm upon its stem, delighting the sowers.”76 The treaty that had seemed so unpromising led to a final peace. Two years later the Meccans voluntarily opened their gates to Muhammad, who took the city without bloodshed.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Eventually, the Meccans sent an envoy to negotiate, and to the horror of the Muslims present, Muhammad obeyed the directives of the Qur’an and accepted conditions that seemed not only to be dishonorable but also to throw away all the advantages that the Muslims had fought and died for. Nevertheless, Muhammad signed the treaty. The Muslim pilgrims were furious, and even though mutiny was narrowly averted, they started the ride home in sullen silence. But during the homeward journey, Muhammad received a revelation from God, who called this apparent defeat a “manifest victory.” 74 While the Meccans, inspired by the violence of the old religion, had “harboured a stubborn disdain in their hearts,” God had sent down the “gift of inner peace [ sakinah ]” upon the Muslims, so that they had been able to respond to their enemies with calm serenity. 75 They were distinguished by total surrender to God, and this separated them from the pagan Meccans and linked them with what we would call the religions of the Axial Age. The spirit of peace, said the Qur’an, was their link with the Torah and the gospel: “They are like a seed that brings forth its shoot, and then he strengthens it so that it grows stout, and in the end stands firm upon its stem, delighting the sowers.” 76 The treaty that had seemed so unpromising led to a final peace. Two years later the Meccans voluntarily opened their gates to Muhammad, who took the city without bloodshed. I n every single one of the religions of the Axial Age, individuals have failed to measure up to their high ideals. In all these faiths, people have fallen prey to exclusivity, cruelty, superstition, and even atrocity. But at their core, the Axial faiths share an ideal of sympathy, respect, and universal concern. The sages were all living in violent societies like our own. What they created was a spiritual technology that utilized natural human energies to counter this aggression. The most gifted of them realized that if you wanted to outlaw brutal, tyrannical behavior, it was no good simply issuing external directives. As Zhuangzi pointed out, it was useless for Yan Hui even to attempt to reform the prince of Wei by preaching the noble principles of Confucianism, because this would not touch the subconscious bias in the ruler’s heart that led to his atrocious behavior.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  In early January he emails me again, saying, “You’ve unfollowed me on Twitter, blocked me on Facebook, and haven’t replied to email. I get that things weren’t great after you returned from LA, but I would like to talk.” He says we can bury the hatchet, or if I just need to vent, he’ll sit and listen. If I don’t want to talk to him at all, “that’d be a shame, but I’ll respect it. I always liked you, considered you a friend. It’d be unfortunate if… if… if poof, that’s all over because we didn’t find a professional groove after your return.” This time I write back: “Hey! Great to hear from you. I’ve been crazy busy. Hope you had great holidays and will enjoy 2015!” A few weeks later, I publish a blog post announcing that I’m writing a book about my time at HubSpot. I never hear from Trotsky again. Epilogue(Revised September 2016)A few weeks after I delivered a first draft of this book manuscript to my publisher, things took a weird, dark turn. On July 29, 2015, late in the afternoon, HubSpot issued a press release announcing that Wingman had been promoted to chief marketing officer. Buried in the second paragraph was a bombshell: Wingman had been promoted because HubSpot had fired its longtime CMO, Mike Volpe, the guy called Cranium in this book. Volpe was terminated for cause because he had “violated the Company’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics” in his “attempts to procure” a manuscript of a book involving HubSpot, the release said. Furthermore, Joe Chernov (Trotsky) had resigned from HubSpot “before the company could determine whether to terminate him for similar violations.” Brian Halligan, the CEO, had been “appropriately sanctioned” but would not be fired. Given the very public manner in which Volpe was fired and Chernov left the company, I decided to name them here. I left their nicknames intact in the main text of the book because, frankly, the fake names are a lot more memorable. The press release did not say what Volpe and Chernov had done. It said only that HubSpot had hired an outside law firm, Goodwin Procter, to conduct an investigation, and that after reviewing the law firm’s report, the board had voted to fire Volpe. Also, the board had “notified the appropriate legal authorities about these matters.” The press release did not specify that the book in question was my book. It just referred to “a book involving the Company.” I figured it was my book, but I couldn’t be sure. This kicked off a speculative whirlwind in Boston. What was the book? What did it say? What had Volpe and Chernov done? Why were legal authorities involved? Soon after the release was issued, a reporter from the Boston Globe , Curt Woodward, started calling HubSpot PR people trying to get an interview with Halligan or Shah. Later in the evening Woodward actually showed up at HubSpot headquarters and was let into the lobby.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  For the rest, everything went according to plan. Mr. Kleiman was phoned, the poles were removed from the doors, the typewriter was put back in the chest. Then we all sat around the table again and waited for either jan or the police. Peter had dropped off to sleep and Mr. van Daan ANNE FRANK and I were lying on the floor when we heard loud footsteps below. I got up quietly. “It’s Jan!” “No, no, it’s the police!” they all said. There was a knocking at our bookcase. Miep whistled. This was too much for Mrs. van Daan, who sank limply in her chair, white as a sheet. If the tension had lasted another minute, she would have fainted. Jan and Miep came in and were met with a delightful scene. The table alone would have been worth a photograph: a copy of Cinema &.. Theater, opened to a page of dancing girls and smeared with jam and pectin, which we’d been taking to combat the diarrhea, two jam jars, half a bread roll, a quarter of a bread roll, pectin, a mirror, a comb, matches, ashes, cigarettes, tobacco, an ashtray, books, a pair of underpants, a flashlight, Mrs. van Daan’s comb, toilet paper, etc. Jan and Miep were of course greeted with shouts and tears. Jan nailed a pinewood board over the gap in the door and went off again with Miep to inform the police of the break-in. Miep had also found a note under the ware- house door from Sleegers, the night watchman, who had noticed the hole and alerted the police. Jan was also planning to see Sleegers. So we had half an hour in which to put the house and ourselves to rights. I’ve never seen such a transformation as in those thirty minutes. Margot and I got the beds ready downstairs, went to the bathroom, brushed our teeth, washed our hands and combed our hair. Then I straightened up the room a bit and went back upstairs. The table had already been cleared, so we got some water, made coffee and tea, boiled the milk and set the table. Father and Peter emptied our improvised potties and rinsed them with warm water and powdered bleach. The largest one was filled to the brim and was so heavy they had a hard time lifting it. To make things worse, it was leaking, so they had to put it in a bucket.

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

  For all his talk of kenosis, Athanasius never lost his pointy elbows or his theological certainty, which was inspired in no small part by the new monastic movement that had emerged in the deserts around Alexandria. In 270, the year of Constantine’s birth, a young Egyptian peasant had walked to church lost in thought. Antony had just inherited a sizable piece of land from his parents but found this good fortune an intolerable burden. He was only eighteen years old, yet now he had to provide for his sister, take a wife, have children, and toil on the farm for the rest of his life to support them all. In Egypt, where famine loomed whenever the Nile failed to flood, starvation was always a real threat, and most people accepted this relentless struggle as inevitable. 29 But Jesus had said: “I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat and about your body and how to clothe it.” 30 Antony also remembered that the first Christians had sold all their possessions and given the proceeds to the poor. 31 Still musing on these texts, he entered the church only to hear the priest reading Jesus’s words to a rich young man: “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” 32 Immediately Antony sold his property and embarked on a quest for freedom and holiness that would become a countercultural challenge to both the Christianized Roman state and the new worldly, imperial Christianity. Like other monastic communities we have considered, Antony’s followers would try to model a more egalitarian and compassionate way for people to live together. For the first fifteen years, like other “renouncers” (apotaktikoi), Antony lived at the very edge of his village; then he moved to the tombs on the periphery of the desert and finally ventured farther into the wilderness than any other monk, living for years in an abandoned fortress beside the Red Sea until, in 301 he began to attract disciples. 33 In the immensity of the desert, Antony discovered a tranquillity (hesychia) that put worldly care into perspective. 34 Saint Paul had insisted that Christians must support themselves, 35 so Egyptian monks either worked as day laborers or sold their produce in the market. Antony grew vegetables so that he could offer hospitality to passing travelers, because learning to live kindly with others and sharing your wealth was essential to his monastic program. 36 For some time, Egyptian peasants had engaged in this type of disengagement (anchoresis) to escape economic or social tension. During the third century, there had been a crisis of human relations in the villages.

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

  The negotiations resulted in the Peace of Venice, which was embodied in twenty-eight articles.139 Alexander was acknowledged as legitimate pope. Calixtus, the anti-pope, was remanded to an abbey, while his cardinals were reduced to the positions they had occupied before their appointment to the curia. Beatrice was acknowledged as Frederick’s legal wife, and his son Henry as king of the Romans. Rome and the patrimonium were restored to the pope, and Spoleto, the Romagna, and Ancona were recognized as a part of the empire. The peace was ratified by one of the most solemn congresses of the Middle Ages. Absolved from the ban, and after eighteen years of conflict, the emperor met the pope in front of St. Mark’s, July 24, 1177. A vast multitude filled the public square. The pope in his pontifical dress sitting upon a throne in front of the portal of the cathedral must have had mingled with his feelings of satisfaction reminiscences of his painful fortunes since the time he was elected to the tiara. Cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and other dignitaries occupied lower seats according to their rank. The emperor, on arriving in the magnificent gondola of the doge, with a train of prelates and nobles, was received by a procession of priests with banners and crosses, and the shouts of the people. He slowly proceeded to the cathedral. Overcome with feelings of reverence for the venerable pope, he cast off his mantle, bowed, and fell at his feet.140 Alexander, in tears, raised him up,141 and gave him the kiss of peace and his benediction. Thousands of voices responded by singing the Te Deum.142 Then the emperor, taking the hand of the pope, walked with him and the doge into the church, made rich offerings at the altar, bent his knees, and received again the apostolic benediction. On the next day (the 25th), being the feast of St. James, the pope, at the emperor’s request, celebrated high mass, and preached a sermon which he ordered the patriarch of Aquileia to translate at once into German. The emperor accompanied him from the altar to the door, and paid him the customary homage of holding the stirrup.143 He offered to conduct his palfrey by the bridle across the piazza to the bark; but the pope dispensed with this menial service of a groom, taking the will for the deed, and gave him again his benediction. This is the authentic account of contemporary writers and eye-witnesses. They make no mention of the story that the emperor said to the pope, "I do this homage to Peter, not to thee," and that the pope quickly replied, "To Peter and to me." The hierarchical imagination has represented this interview as a second Canossa. In Venetian pictures the pope is seen seated on a throne, and planting his foot on the neck of the prostrate emperor, with the words of Ps. 91:13: — "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder:

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

  The Pleasure of TellingI have never tried to hide the extent or the eclectic variety of my sexual contacts, other than from my parents. (As a child when a ‘wedding night’ was just a vague formula, even imagining that my mother would be able to picture me when that first night happened to me was truly a source of torment.) I have gradually and obscurely come to understand what this lifestyle had to offer me: the illusion of opening myself to innumerable possibilities. Given that, in other ways, I obviously had to comply with all sorts of constraints (a very demanding and stressful job, a destiny determined by poverty and, the worst shackle of all, the baggage of family conflicts and rows in relationships), the certainty that I could have sexual relations in any situation with any willing party (as a matter of principle, the illusion only held on condition that anyone unwilling was excluded from the horizon), was the lungfuls of fresh air you inhale as you walk to the end of a narrow pier. And, as reality did still impose limits on this freedom (I couldn’t do just that, and even if I could, my thighs would have formed a link around only a tiny part of the human chain), this meant that the spoken word, the briefest evocation of episodes in my sexual life, should always conjure up the panorama of possibilities in all their fullness. ‘I am here, with you, but if I talk about it, I pull aside the sheet, I open up a breach in the wall, and I let in the entire army of lovers which surrounds us.’ Usually, after about the third or fourth date, I would drop in a few men’s names, connecting them with day to day activities which were, nonetheless, open to ambiguous interpretation, and – if I was feeling more confident – I would refer to a few picturesque situations in which I had made love in the past. I would evaluate the reaction. I have said that I did not go in for preaching, and even less for provocation, except as part of a well-meaning and harmless perversion, addressed only to people who had already been identified as kindred spirits. I was careful to be sincere, adhering to a dialectic with three terms: to some extent I protected myself from new relationships by branching out only if there was a connection with my community of swingers; that way I could identify whether or not the newcomer belonged to this community; finally, whatever his reaction, while still careful to protect myself, I would appeal to his curiosity.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Irrationally, we tend to stay in negative situations, from crappy relationships to lousy investments to cults, telling ourselves that a win is just around the corner, so we don’t have to admit to ourselves that things just didn’t work out and we should cut our losses. It’s an emotional example of the sunk cost fallacy, or people’s tendency to think that resources already spent justify spending even more. We’ve been in it this long, we might as well keep going. As with confirmation bias, not even the smartest, most judicious people are immune to loss aversion. It’s deeply embedded. I’ve been in my fair share of toxic one-on-one relationships, and noticing the similarities between abusive partners and cultish leaders has been, to say the least, humbling. So while power abuse can look like poisoned punch and purple shrouds, the linchpin is what it sounds like. If a form of language cues you to have an instant emotional response while also halting you from asking further questions, or makes you feel “chosen” just for showing up, or allows you to morally divorce yourself from some one-dimensionally inferior other, it’s language worth challenging. The labels and euphemisms probably won’t kill you, but if you’re after more than just basic survival, surely the most fulfilling life is the one you narrate yourself. “Our inner guidance is the best possible navigation any of us has,” Frank Lyford told me. This doesn’t mean we can’t look outward (or upward) for help through the chaos. “But to me,” he continued, “a good coach is one who does not guide, but shines light on a person’s deepest desires and blocks.” Not a guide, not a prophet, not a guru telling you just what to say. But a candle in the dimly lit library of existence. The only dictionary you need is already open. Part 3Even YOU Can Learn to Speak in Tongues i.My favorite story to tell is the one about how I got kidnapped by the Scientologists. I was nineteen years old, spending a lonely summer in Los Angeles with a crappy part-time job, a mild depression, and not much I could bring myself to do except pal around with the one person I knew in town: an aspiring young actress named Mani. We’d met freshman year at NYU. Mani was living in the Valley while on break from school, sharing an apartment with her mom and kid sister, auditioning for commercials and starring in USC student films. Mani was spellbinding: She had long blond hair and catlike Ukrainian features, wore baggy T-shirts with fishnets, and owned a pet snake. Her full name was Amanda, like mine, but free-spirited and untamable as she was, she went by the more exotic-sounding nickname: Mah-nee . We’d carry out our days doing whatever she wanted.

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

  An impulse which discharges itself immediately is generally quite neutral as regards pleasure or pain —the breathing impulse, for example. If such an impulse is arrested, however, by an extrinsic force, a great feeling of uneasiness is produced —for instance, the dyspnœa of asthma. And in proportion as the arresting force is then overcome, relief acrues —as when we draw breath again after the asthma subsides. The relief is a pleasure and the uneasiness a pain; and thus it happens that round all our impulses, merely as such, there twine, as it were, secondary possibilities of pleasant and painful feeling, involved in the manner in which the act is allowed to occur. These pleasures and pains of achievement, discharge, or fruition exist, no matter what the original spring of action be. We are glad when we have successfully got ourselves out of a danger, though the thought of the gladness was surely not what suggested to us to escape. To have compassed the steps towards a proposed sensual indulgence also makes us glad, and this gladness is a pleasure additional to the pleasure originally proposed. On the other hand, we are chagrined and displeased when any activity, however investigated, is hindered whilst in process of actual discharge. We are 'uneasy' till the discharge starts up again. And this is just as true when the action is neutral, or has nothing but pain in view as its result, as when it was undertaken for pleasure's express sake. The moth is probably as annoyed if hindered from getting into the lamp- flame as the roué is if interrupted in his debauch; and we are chagrined if prevented from doing some quite unimportant act which would have given us no noticeable pleasure if done, merely because the prevention itself is disagreeable. Let us now call the pleasure for the sake of which the act may be done the pursued pleasure. If follows that, even when no pleasure is pursued by an act, the act itself may be the pleasantest line of conduct when once the impulse has begun, on account of the incidental pleasure which then attends its successful achievement and the pain which would come of interruption. A pleasant act and an act pursuing a pleasure are in themselves, however, two perfectly distinct conceptions, though they coalesce in one concrete phenomenon whenever a pleasure is deliberately pursued. I cannot help thinking that it is the confusion of pursued pleasure with mere pleasure of achievement which makes the pleasure-theory of action so plausible to the ordinary mind. We feel an impulse, no matter whence derived; we proceed to act; if hindered, we feel displeasure; and if successful, relief.

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

  ‘Like a nut in its shell’In the biggest orgies in which I participated, from that time on, there could be up to about 150 people (they did not all fuck, some had come to watch), and I would deal with the sex machines of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: in my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my arse. Sometimes I would exchanges kisses and caresses with women, but that was always less important. In the clubs, the proportion was far more variable depending, obviously, on the clientele but also on the customs of each place – I will come back to that. It would be much more difficult to make an estimate of the evenings spent in the Bois de Boulogne: should I count only the men that I sucked off with my head squashed next to their steering wheels, or those with whom I took the time to get undressed in the cabins of their trucks, and ignore the relay of faceless bodies behind the car doors, one hand manically rubbing up and down their cocks in diverse stages of erection, while the other hand dived into the open car window to energetically knead my breasts? Today, I can account for forty-nine men whose sexual organs have penetrated mine and to whom I can attribute a name or, at least, in a few cases, an identity. But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity. In the situations I am describing here, and even if there were people I knew or recognised at an orgy, the confused succession of embraces and couplings was such that if I could distinguish individual bodies, or at least their attributes, I could not always distinguish the people themselves. And even when I refer to the attributes, I have to admit that I did not always have access to all of them; some exchanges are very ephemeral and, if I recognised a woman by the softness of her lips, I would not necessarily recognise her touch which could be fiercely energetic. Sometimes, I would only realise after the fact that I had been fondling a transvestite. I was abandoned to a hydra. Until, that is, Éric broke away from the group to prize me out of it, in his own words, ‘like a nut from its shell’.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’ Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I’d had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep; and after ten days of low-hung grey skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier. Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’ [image file=image_rsrcBN.jpg] Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? ‘Them as asks’ (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’) don’t get. Perhaps can’t. And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  WHY EDUCATORS SHIFT THEIR POLITICS What is it that causes educators to move in the direction of becoming facilitative, to move away from conventional education and toward a person-centered type of learning? I would like, first, to cite my own experience. In doing individual counseling and psychotherapy, I found it more and more rewarding to trust the client’s capacity for moving toward self-understanding, for taking constructive steps to resolve his or her problems. These things happened if I could create a facilitative climate in which I was empathic, caring, and real. If clients were trustworthy, why couldn’t I create this same kind of climate with students and foster a self-guided process of learning? This question nagged at me more and more. So, at the University of Chicago I decided to try. I ran into a great deal of resistance and hostility in students, more than I had found in clients. Typical comments were, “I paid good money for this course and I want you to teach me,” or “I don’t know what to learn—you’re the expert.” Part of this resistance grew out of the fact that for years, these students had been dependent. Part of it, I think, was due to the fact that I probably put all responsibility on the class, instead of on all of us together. I certainly made many mistakes. Sometimes I doubted the wisdom of what I was attempting to do, but in spite of my clumsiness, the results were astonishing. Students worked harder, read more deeply, expressed themselves more responsibly, learned more, did more creative thinking than in any previous classes. So I persevered, and gradually I improved as a facilitator of learning. I found I couldn’t go back. In this new approach, I was much encouraged by the experience of others. More and more teachers wrote me that they were taking the plunge of changing their approach, of moving along the continuum in a person-centered direction. The experience was very threatening to those teachers who had taught in a conventional way or were working under a restrictive school administration. Yet, they were finding it so rewarding when they trusted students that the satisfactions more than balanced the frightening relinquishment of status and control. As I, and an increasing number of others, have come to experience the satisfactions of a person-centered education, this small trickle of pioneering educators has grown into a highly significant trend in present-day learning enterprises. I would like to mention some of my personal learnings regarding this kind of development.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, ‘You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.’ Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I’d had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep; and after ten days of low-hung grey skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier. Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’ [image file=image_rsrcBN.jpg] Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? ‘Them as asks’ (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’) don’t get. Perhaps can’t. And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Letting people tell us only what we want to hear is something we all do. It’s classic confirmation bia s: an ingrained human reasoning flaw defined by the propensity to look for, interpret, accept, and remember information in a way that validates (and strengthens) our existing beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing anything that controverts them. Experts agree that not even the most logical minds—not even scientists—can escape confirmation bias completely. Common human irrationalities like hypochondria, prejudice, and paranoi a are all forms of confirmation bias, where every little thing that happens can be interpreted as an illness, a reason to deride a whole demographic of people, or proof that something is out to get you. This phenomenon also explains why, to a willing listener, even the vaguest astrological horoscopes, psychic readings, and indistinctly “relatable” social media posts seem to resonate uniquely. Cultish leaders all rely on the power of confirmation bias by presenting a one-sided version of information that supports their ideology and that their followers actively want to hear; after that, confirmation bias does the work for them. Enhanced by peer pressure, it becomes all the harder to resist. Confirmation bias also explains why cultish leaders’ rhetoric is so vague—the loaded language and euphemisms are made purposefully amorphous to mask off-putting specifics about their ideology (and to leave space for that ideology to change). Meanwhile, followers project whatever they want onto the language. (For instance, whenever Jones used the phrase “White Night,” followers like Laura interpreted it how they wished, neglecting the possibility of more violent implications.) For most people, the fallout of confirmation bias isn’t Jonestown-level urgent, but it’s not the woefully naive or desperate among us who get that far. In many cases, it’s the extraordinarily idealistic. In her post-commune years, Laura became a public school teacher, a Quaker, an atheist, and an immigrant rights activist. “I have not become less political, but I have become less mesmerized by [the] words somebody says,” she told a reporter in 2017. Still, Laura never stopped searching for a way to achieve what the Peoples Temple originally promised. Even after all the violence, hope remained. “If there were any way for me to live in a community today, I would do it in a hot second,” she told me. “It just has to be leaderless, and it has to be diverse.” Easier imagined than found; Laura let loose a wistful sigh. “I just haven’t found a safe community that has the things I want. But I am a communalist, always have been. I’ve had a wild life, but I don’t want to sit with people who have had my same kind of wildness. So I did really love living in Peoples Temple. Jonestown was the highlight of my life.” Frank Lyford, who lost his entire early adulthood and beloved partner to Marshall Applewhite, doesn’t stew in regret, either. “My view of my experience is, I incarnated with the goal of going through Heaven’s Gate.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Looking back, she’s disturbed by how long her trust was drawn out: “It was never supposed to be two years of my life,” she confessed. Sticking with the kink metaphor, there’s only one way to have a constructive, nontraumatizing experience using whips and bondage, and it’s by having a key component down pat: consent. You have to have a safe word so that your partner knows exactly when you want out. Kink fundamentally doesn’t work without this. Metaphorically, you need a safe word with religion, too. When you’re experimenting with faith and belief, there has to be room to ask questions, express your misgivings, and seek outside information, both early on and deep into your membership. “The most important thing to remember is that if something is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny,” Steven Hassan told me. In 2018, Abbie had already decided to leave Shambhala when a bombshell news story surfaced. That summer, the New York Times published a series of grievous reports accusing the Sakyong of sexual assault. A group of ex- Shambhala women united to bring forward their testimonies about not just the Sakyong, but also some high-ranking teachers. Abbie released a pensive exhale: “It was surreal to watch this whole community crumble.” Soon after the controversy, Abbie quietly slipped out of Vermont. Not quite at the Scientology point along the influence continuum, Shambala’s exit costs didn’t threaten her physical safety or all-out decimate her life; in a way, her departure felt anticlimactic, like a balloon idly trickling to the floor. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue a master’s in social work, and now she practices a less hierarchical form of Buddhism. Abbie attends a variety of meditation groups and then goes home to her own apartment, which she shares with three roommates (“so I still get the communal aspect,” she laughs). She has a mini altar in her room, and sometimes privately draws on teachings she learned in Vermont. “I try to take what I liked and leave the rest,” she said. “I’m still figuring out what to make of everything that happened.” Cathy Schenkelberg, too, dabbles in alternative spirituality, keeping a healthy distance from Scientology and all her old relationships from that time. After leaving the organization, she had to replace everyone in her life—her friends, her agent, her manager, her accountant, her dentist, her chiropractor— because they were all in the church. But sometimes, when she least expects it, Cathy will overhear a Scientology term out in the world, and those pangs of paranoia she felt for so many years suddenly crackle through her nervous system. “I have a visceral reaction when fellow ex-Scientologists use the terminology. It’s PTSD to me,” Cathy confessed. “I say, ‘Out of respect, could you please not use Scientology language? It upsets me.’