From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Demisexuality is a sexual orientation in which an individual does not experience sexual attraction with another person until they have developed emotional connections.^[2][3] It is generally categorized on the asexuality spectrum.^[2][3] Demisexuals note a distinction between primary sexual attraction, or attraction based on immediately visible characteristics, and secondary sexual attraction, or attraction that develops over time based on an emotional relationship.^[4][5] The strength of emotional attraction that a demisexual individual needs to feel with another person before developing sexual attraction varies from person to person.^[6]

History

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The term was coined on the AVEN Forums in February 2006. Based on the theory that allosexuals experience both primary and secondary sexual attraction and asexuals do not experience either, the term demisexuals was proposed for people who experience one without the other.^[7]

Definition

A common general definition of demisexuality states that “demisexuality is a sexual orientation in which a person feels sexually attracted to someone only after they’ve developed a close/strong emotional bond with them”.^[8] This definition of demisexuality has been criticized as demisexuals are capable of developing sexual attraction towards people they do not have a close bond with and even towards people they do not personally know.^{[citation needed]}

This means sexual attraction for demisexuals can be one-sided and not necessarily forming from a bond they share with another person.

How much demisexuals need to know about a person before they feel sexually attracted to them varies from person to person. There is no specific timeline on how long it takes either. There is also no way to determine what qualifies as a close or strong bond, which causes confusion.^[9]

Demisexuals can enjoy a person’s presence or be attracted to some of their qualities without having an interest in dating them or building a romantic relationship with them.^[10]

Primary vs. secondary sexual attraction model

• Primary sexual attraction: a sexual attraction to people based on instantly available information (such as their appearance or smell). Primary sexual attraction is characterized by being experienced at first sight.
• Secondary sexual attraction: a sexual attraction to people based on information that is not instantly available (such as personality, life experiences, talents, etc.); how much a person needs to know about the other and for how long they need to know them before secondary sexual attraction develops, varies from person to person.^[11][12]

After secondary sexual attraction is developed, demisexuals are not only aroused by personality traits. They also may or may not experience arousal or desire based on the physical traits of the persons they already experience secondary sexual attraction towards.^[13][14]

Common misconceptions and sexual activities

A common misconception is that demisexual individuals cannot engage in casual sex.^{[citation needed]} It is important to note that being demisexual refers to how an individual experiences sexual attraction, it is not stating a choice or an action, but is describing a feeling.^[9][15] While it is common for demisexuals not to desire sex without feeling sexually attracted to the other person, it is not a rule individuals have to fall into to be considered demisexual. Demisexuals can choose if they want to engage in casual sex even without experiencing sexual attraction towards said person.^[16]

Another common misconception is that demisexuals disregard people’s physical appearance.^{[citation needed]} This confusion stems from the fact that demisexuals do not experience primary sexual attraction based on instantly available information, such as appearance. However, demisexuals do experience aesthetic attraction and can have an aesthetic preference.^[17] An aesthetic attraction is an attraction to another person’s appearance that is not connected to any sexual or romantic desire;^[18] it is so called because of similarity to other aesthetic desires.^[19]

While it is common for demisexuals not to give much importance to appearances when choosing a partner, it is not a rule individuals have to fall into to be considered demisexual.

It is also a myth that demisexuality is a sign of low sex drive. Once demisexual people are in a sexual relationship, they have varying levels of sex drive. Demisexuality only refers to the type of attraction that person feels, not how often they have sex.^[20]

Demisexuals can be attracted to fictional characters; it is common for demisexuals to be attracted to a character played by an actor but to experience no attraction to the actor themselves when out of character.^[21]

Attitudes towards sex

Demisexuals, gray-asexual and asexual individuals (commonly referred to as aces) often use the terms favorable, neutral or indifferent, averse, or repulsed to describe how they feel about sex. Nonetheless, these terms can be used by anyone, regardless if they are asexual or not.^[22]

• Sex-repulsed: feeling repulsed, uninterested or uncomfortable by the thought of engaging in sex.^[23]
• Sex-indifferent: no particular feelings toward sex. Sex-indifferent individuals might partake in sex or avoid it. They may also have no positive or negative feelings toward it.
• Sex-favorable: sex-favorable individuals enjoy sex and may seek it out.^[24]
• Sex-ambivalent: experiencing mixed or complicated feelings regarding the act or concept of sexual interaction, usually fluctuating between sex-neutral, sex-favorable or sex-positive and sex-repulsed, sex-negative or sex-averse.^[25]

Generally, these terms are used to refer to someone’s opinion about engaging in activities themselves. However, they might also be used to describe how they feel reading, watching, hearing about, or imagining these activities. The term -repulsed in particular is often used to refer to one’s feelings about engaging in activities or being around those activities. One’s feelings can vary depending on the situation or other factors such as identity, societal context, common social understanding or intent of actions, or comfort level with another individual. For example, someone who is aegosexual may enjoy thinking about sexual activities involving others, but if they imagined being personally involved in those activities, they may feel sex-repulsed.^[26][27][28]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demisexuality

“We know that all things work together for good…”

Romans 8:28, New Revised Standard Version Revised Edition

Karl Constantine FOLKES 1935 (Portland)

Tanka

The Divine at work
As ‘Collective Unconscious’
Source of all knowledge
Pondered by philosophers
Goldmine of psychiatry.

Poets have probed it
Like Keats, Shelley and others
All remain puzzled
Even as I am today
The Mystery of All Mysteries.

Mightier than all
Kings bow down before this force
All on bended knees
Whereby nations rise and fall
To power without ending.

Mystery of Mysteries
Hidden, yet to be revealed
The One in the All
Requires our discernment
Of The Divine Light in All.

About this poem

What motivates my poetry? What motivates all of life? What is ‘The Source’ some call The Holy Grail? What is the divine spark of creativity? That is the great mystery. That is the mystery of all mysteries to which we are all subjected and to which we are all its objects. When one knows and actively consults that which is woven inwardly, and when one acts outwardly in concert with its divine intentions, when one embraces fully that which is teleologically his royal treasure, his divine heritage buried deep within, he becomes as one with his intended individuated Self.  more »

Written on August 25, 2022

Submitted by karlcfolkes on August 26, 2022

Modified by karlcfolkes 27 sec read  98 Views

Karl Constantine FOLKES

Retired educator of Jamaican ancestry with a lifelong interest in composing poetry dealing particularly with the metaphysics of self-reflection; completed a dissertation in Children’s Literature in 1995 at New York University entitled: An Analysis of Wilhelm Grimm’s “Dear Mili” Employing Von Franzian Methodological Processes. The subject of the dissertation concerned the process of Individuation. more…

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb meditation on the life of the mind, would mean to “lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

But our questions, besides having the power to civilize us, also have the power — perhaps even more needed today — to rewild us.

Often, our deepest questions are our simplest ones, and our wildest questions — the most maddeningly unanswerable ones — are our most resaning, most redolent with meaning. This is why children’s questions are so often portals to the profoundest answers.

Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) channeled 320 such questions — questions earthly and cosmic about art and life, dreams and death, nature and human nature; magical-realist questions that could have been asked by a child or a sage — into his final work of poetry, originally published months before his sudden death.

His Book of Questions (public library) now comes alive in a stunning bilingual picture-book, illustrated by Chilean artist Paloma Valdivia, whose father grew up in the same coastal region that shaped Neruda’s boyhood and whose grandmother was friends with Neruda’s sister.

Of Neruda’s original questions — each of them unanswerable, all of them worth asking, crackling with some vital spark of playfulness or poignancy — seventy come ablaze amid the vibrant illustrations and fold-out delights, radiant with the colors and textures of Latin American tapestry.

Out of the totality arises a larger sense of reckoning — a person of uncommon soulfulness and sensitivity to the subterranean strata of life, approaching the end of his days with a cascade of curiosity, singing the ultimate question: What is all this?

What emerges is the abstract, lyrical counterpart to the questions of meaning Tolstoy faced at the end of his own days.

Why do trees hide
the splendor of their roots?

Given Valdivia’s roots and her personal resonance with Neruda, many of the illustrated questions are chosen for and filtered through the lens of landscape and its ecosystems.

Some are laced with the abstract wonderment of astronomy.

Many are aimed at bodies of water, evocative of poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan’s sublime meditation on the sea and the soul.

Why do the waves ask me
the same questions I ask them?

Some both sting and salve with their almost unbearable soulfulness:

Do unshed tears
wait in little lakes?

Some break us free from the solitary confinement of our own consciousness:

Is 4, 4 for everyone?
Are all sevens the same?

Three and a half centuries after Kepler composed his Harmony of the World, envisioning the Earth as an ensouled body that breathes and sounds — a vision that landed his mother in a witchcraft trial — and a century after Ernst Haeckel birthed the notion of ecology, Neruda asks:

Does the earth chirp like a cricket
in the symphony of the skies?

Valdivia reflects in her artist’s afterword:

Illustrating these poems was like deciphering a map of the poet, exploring the territories of his words, looking for meanings in his houses and among his collections, tracing symbolic pathways — only to arrive at understanding, after five years of creative labor, that there are no answers, only more questions arising from Neruda’s questions.

Complement the paper-cast enchantment that is this Book of Questions with Neruda’s love letter to the forest, his ode to silence, his stirring Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and a lovely picture-book about his life, then revisit artist Margaret C. Cook’s stunning century-old illustrations for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote in his superb investigation of what he termed “the genes of the soul,” “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” A century before him, Whitman bellowed his hymnal affirmation of this living pattern: “There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal,” he wrote. “This is the thought of identity.”

And yet this is precisely what makes identity not eternal but transient: It is a thought. Existential ephemera. We are hardly even identical to ourselves, moment to moment, season of being to season of being. For this reason, I find identity to be the least interesting aspect of personality and the least imaginative byproduct of consciousness. At the same time, its interaction of the realities within and the realities without — that exoskeleton of the self we call culture — is one of the most interesting aspects of being human, and one of the most challenging. What we make of that challenge — whether we turn its inherent frictions into a creative force or into kindling for arson — is the making of our character and the making of our world.

One of Salvador Dalí’s rare 1969 illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.

That is what Kwame Anthony Appiah explores in The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (public library) — an uncommonly perceptive and sensitive book about the nested nature of belonging, punctuated by poetry, with the appropriately nested sub-subtitle “Creed, Country, Colour, Class, Culture.”

Our cultural inheritances, Appiah observes again and again from these five angles, are constantly being interpreted and reinterpreted, nowhere more clearly than in religion:

Our ancestors are powerful, though not in the ways the fundamentalists imagine. For none of us creates the world we inhabit from scratch; none of us crafts our values and commitments save in dialogue with the past. Dialogue is not determinism, however. Once you think of creedal identities in terms of mutable practices and communities rather than sets of immutable beliefs, religion becomes more verb than noun: the identity is revealed as an activity, not a thing. And it’s the nature of activities to bring change.

[…]

In the ethical realm — whether civic or religious — we have to recognize that one day we, too, shall be ancestors. We do not merely follow traditions; we create them.

One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne

He offers a thought experiment to illustrate that “interpretation itself is a practice”:

Imagine that we sent the Torah and the Talmud to some utterly remote Amazonian tribe and persuaded its members to create a religion based upon its commandments. Would it look like rabbinic Judaism? That seems unlikely. What if they took to heart the parts about genocidal slaughter and passed over the parts about charity? Or simply read everything in wildly unfamiliar ways? We shouldn’t be surprised whatever the outcome. It would be like sending aliens a violin and learning that they used it as a percussion instrument, or a measuring device, or a surface on which to carve love poems.

This interpretive quality of scripture is something it shares with evolution — only by reading the demands of the environment did nature continually rewrite the genetic code of the organism to better adapt it for life. Appiah shines a sidewise gleam on this parallel in his interpretation of interpretation:

If interpretation is a practice, we should bear in mind that practice changes over time, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly; and that changed practice can lead to changed belief. Scriptural passages can get new readings. If they can’t adapt, they’re often abandoned… If scriptures were not subject to interpretation — and thus to reinterpretation — they wouldn’t continue to guide people over long centuries. When it comes to their survival, their openness is not a bug but a feature.

[…]

Identity survives through change — indeed… it survives only through change.

A similar mutability scores the history of race. With an eye to the troubled cultural heritage of trying to enlist science in reckoning with social realities — which invariably bleeds into pseudoscience — he writes:

One illustrious discipline after another was recruited to give content to color… What the new understanding of genetics has made clear is that the old picture of race conflated questions of biology and questions of culture. It wanted to explain every difference between groups in terms of an underlying racial essence, inherited by each generation from the one before. Nowadays, it is clear that one of the most distinctive marks of our species is that our inheritance is both biological and cultural. Each generation of human beings in a particular society can build on what was learned by the ones before; by contrast, among our great ape cousins, there is little cultural inheritance, and in most other organisms there is almost none. What makes us the wise species — sapiens, remember, is the Latin for “wise” — is that our genes make brains that allow us to pick up things from one another that are not in our genes.

What lovely affirmation of Maalouf’s generation-old notion of identity as “the genes of the soul.”

Art by Ping Zhu from The Snail with the Right Heart — a story about genetics

To me, the most heartening portion of Appiah’s book is the systematic elegance of reason with which he demonstrates how the real assault on culture is not the practice of cultural appropriation but the notion of cultural appropriation — a blamethirsty notion I find to be a particularly malignant metastasis of American propertarianism. He writes:

All cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixture.

[…]

The real problem isn’t that it’s difficult to decide who owns culture; it’s that the very idea of ownership is the wrong model. The Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution supplies a plausible reason for creating ownership of words and ideas: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” But the arts progressed perfectly well in the world’s traditional cultures without these protections; and the traditional products and practices of a group — its songs and stories, even its secrets — are not best understood as its property, or made more useful by being tethered to their putative origins.

Art by Ryōji Arai from Almost Nothing, yet Everything by Hiroshi Osada

He offers an illustrative example of how policing the remixing of culture kills the very soul of creativity and keeps capitalist power structures in place:

For centuries, the people on the Venetian island of Murano made a living because glassmakers there perfected their useful art. Their beads, with multicolored filaments, some made of gold, were among the artistic wonders of the world. To keep their commercial advantage, the Venetian state forbade glassmakers from leaving with their secrets; the penalty for revealing them to outsiders was death. Good for Murano and its profits: bad for everyone else. (As it happens, lots of the skilled artisans escaped anyway and brought their knowledge to a wider European world.) Venetian beads were already being imported into the Gold Coast by the turn of the seventeenth century, arriving across the Sahara, where they had been an important part of the trade on which the empire of Mali had risen to commercial success centuries earlier. Crushed and sintered to make new beads, they developed into the distinctive bodom you still see today in Ghana, beads my mother and my stepgrandmother collected and made into bracelets and necklaces. What sorts of progress would have been advanced by insisting that the Venetians owned the idea of glass beads, and policing their claim? Unfortunately, the vigorous lobbying of huge corporations has made the idea of intellectual property go imperial; it seems to have conquered the world. To accept the notion of cultural appropriation is to buy into the regime they favor, where corporate entities acting as cultural guardians “own” a treasury of IP, extracting a toll when they allow others to make use of it.

[…]

Those who parse these transgressions in terms of ownership have accepted a commercial system that’s alien to the traditions they aim to protect. They have allowed one modern regime of property to appropriate them.

Art by Nahid Kazemi from Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon by JonArno Lawson

Larger than identity, larger than commerce, is the atmosphere we breathe in: culture, which Appiah devotedly illuminates as our ground for connection rather than division. Nearly a century after the visionary Ruth Benedict wrested the term culture from the technical terminology of plant cultivation and chemistry to give it its modern meaning and observed in her epoch-making book Patters of Culture that “the life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community,” Appiah writes:

Culture isn’t a box to be checked on the questionnaire of humanity; it’s a process you join, in living a life with others.

Art by Nahid Kazemi from Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon by JonArno Lawson

Where this leaves us is a place of both greater freedom and greater responsibility — to ourselves and to each other, evocative of Simone Weil’s nuanced reflection on the relationship between our rights and our responsibilities. Appiah writes:

There is a liberal fantasy in which identities are merely chosen, so we are all free to be what we choose to be. But identities without demands would be useless to us. Identities work only because, once they get their grip on us, they command us, speaking to us as an inner voice; and because others, seeing who they think we are, call on us, too. If you do not care for the shapes your identities have taken, you cannot simply refuse them; they are not yours alone. You have to work with others inside and outside the labeled group in order to reframe them so they fit you better; and you can do that collective work only if you recognize that the results must serve others as well.

[…]

Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. And our lives must make sense at the largest of all scales as well. We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.

For a very different lens on the many paradoxes of identity, complement The Lies that Bind with quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on the atom and the doctrine of identity, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, Hermann Melville on the mystery of what makes us ourselves, and this lyrical illustrated meditation on otherness and belonging.

William James

From a lecture delivered at Stanford University during James’ year (1906) as a visiting scholar on leave from Harvard. The brother of the novelist Henry James, William was among the most eminent of America’s late nineteenth-century philosophers.

William James considers substitutes for martial experience.

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man’s relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, only when an enemy’s injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now thought permissible.

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer War, both governments began with bluff but couldn’t stay there—the military tension was too much for them. In 1898, our people had read the word “war” in letters three inches high for three months in every newspaper. The pliant politician McKinley was swept away by their eagerness, and our squalid war with Spain became a necessity.

“Peace” in military mouths today is a synonym for “war expected.” The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that “peace” and “war” mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the “peace” interval.

Navigators Using an Astrolabe in the Indian Ocean, miniature from the Book of Wonders and Other Travel Books and Texts About the Orient, by the Boucicaut Master, c. 1410. National Library of France, Manuscripts Department, Paris. 

So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy-minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which everyone feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind of keeping military characters in stock—of keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection—so that Roosevelt’s weaklings and mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the face of nature.

Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any controversy, then move the point, and your opponent will follow. So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And, as a rule, they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded. Tolstoy’s pacifism is the only exception to this rule, for it is profoundly pessimistic as regards all this world’s values, and makes the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe absolutely in this world’s values; and instead of the fear of the Lord and the fear of the enemy, the only fear they reckon with is the fear of poverty if one be lazy. This weakness pervades all the socialistic literature with which I am acquainted. Meanwhile, men at large still live as they always have lived, under a pain-and-fear economy—for those of us who live in an ease-economy are but an island in the stormy ocean—and the whole atmosphere of present-day utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life’s more bitter flavors. It suggests, in truth, ubiquitous inferiority.

Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper. “Dogs, would you live forever?” shouted Frederick the Great. “Yes,” say our utopians, “let us live forever, and raise our level gradually.” The best thing about our “inferiors” today is that they are as tough as nails, and physically and morally almost as insensitive. Utopianism would see them soft and squeamish, while militarism would keep their callousness, but transfigure it into a meritorious characteristic needed by “the service” and redeemed by that from the suspicion of inferiority. All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride; but it has to be confessed that the only sentiment which the image of pacific cosmopolitan industrialism is capable of arousing in countless worthy breasts is shame at the idea of belonging to such a collectivity. Where is the savage “yes” and “no,” the unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the blood tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?

I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. 

All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the antimilitarist party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be, or will be, permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army discipline. A permanently successful peace economy cannot be a simple pleasure economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting, we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built.

Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all—this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population, to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people; no one would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

The fear of war is worse than war itself.—Seneca, 50

Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life. I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.

The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree of its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. 

It would be simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed is fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley’s party on the Congo with their cannibal war cry of “Meat! Meat!” and that of the “general staff” of any civilized nation. History has seen the latter interval bridged over: The former one can be bridged over much more easily.

By George Cappannelli

We are currently facing the most existential threat to democracy in the United States and to our way of life in our nation’s 246-year history. And of particular consequence, We the People would be wise to remember that Democracy is not a spectator sport and start exercising our rights and privileges in a timely and effective way, and especially before the midterms in November or we will not only put our Democracy be at risk, but humanity, all of the other species and our precious habitat itself.

As part of my effort to contribute to saving Democracy, I have been producing and hosting The Democracy Dialogues, a multiple week series on Humanity Rising, the innovative live stream program that airs daily from 8:00 AM PT to 9:30 AM PT to more than 130 countries.  This series is presented in collaboration with John Steiner and Margo King and in association with Jim Garrison of Ubiquity University. It features truth telling authors, experts, activists, leaders and candidates committed to bringing sanity back to our times.

You can watch any or all of the first three weeks of the series in replay at:
https://othernetworks.org/George_Cappannelli_Participation_on_Humanity_Rising
15 programs listed, click on each for a full description, guest bios and more.

To watch the final week of the series live – October10-14 – go to https://humanityrising.solutions/

To receive your free copy of my new guide – In Extremis, A Guide to The Power of One…Democracy’s Best and Perhaps Last Hope.  Email George@agenation.com – Put -In Extremis- in the subject line.  And please remember….

“We are born to be the architects of the future, not its victim.
–  Buckminster Fuller

Deepak Chopra

Aug 15, 2022 (deepakchopra.medium.com)

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The time has come to have brave new ideas about time itself. If you want to make a breakthrough in human lifespan or prove the existence of higher consciousness or reach the mysterious region beyond the physical universe, all these possibilities require our concept of time to be reshaped in a new way.

Everyone knows the old ides, which have sufficed reasonably well until now. Time puts events in order by cause and effect. Time measures the distance from birth to death, for people and the universe as well. Time emerged at the Big Bang, and it has ticked away ever since, for 13.8 billion years.

Yet as familiar as these ideas are, human beings have also lived with the timeless, a region outside creation where God or the gods exist, where we might possibly spend an eternal afterlife. Leaving all spiritual notions aside, the timeless might be the womb of creation, because time didn’t create itself — something like a timeless origin is necessary.

The new view of time holds that both aspects, time and the timeless, are real. In fact, you can view time as a code that the timeless uses for specific purposes. Your DNA is time-encoded, which is why your baby teeth fell out on schedule and you went through puberty or menopause. Cells divide on another schedule, and voluntarily die in the future. There are dozens of biological clocks inside you, governing thousands of chemical reactions at the microscopic level along with master cycles like sleep and monthly menstruation.

Yet the whole scheme of biological time cannot be understood without the timeless, or to give it a simpler name, nonchange. You are the product of both change and nonchange. For example, your brain chemistry is stable and nonchanging, yet thoughts form a whirlwind of change. Your body temperature is aligned with a balance point, homeostasis, that is preserved in the face of change when outside temperatures are torrid or freezing.

Your DNA is fixed and unchanging when it comes to the genes you were born with, yet no two people exhibit the same genetic activity, which dynamically changes with every experience. Having grasped how change and nonchange are both necessary, the big question is “who controls them? How does all this change occur without throwing the body off?” If you know who or what governs time inside us, nonchanged isn’t enough. Amazingly, there has to be a common connecting X factor that is neither in time nor timeless.

Why is it important to move in this direction? There is a seemingly ominous Vedic saying from centuries ago which declares that time devours everything, and in the face of inevitable death, being time’s food is fearsome, but in reality time begins to devour us from the moment of birth. A common theme in the world’s wisdom traditions is the need to escape time by transcending it. If you don’t heed this advice but remain inside a time-bound existence, the best you can do is to bide your time trying to be happier than sad.

Yet no matter how satisfying the story you create, the most miserable life is connected to the most blessed life by being time’s victim. The escape from a time-bound life opens two possibilities. You can transcend ego, desire, and all relationships to fix your mind on the timeless, which is the route taken by ascetics, monks, saints, and yogis. Or you can merge the timeless into the time-bound, which is what the New Testament means by being in the world but not of it.

For the vast majority of people, the second escape route is the only viable. Here are the major steps that follow:

· You align your identity, your sense of self, with the timeless.

· You experience transcendence in your own awareness.

· You cultivate transcendence as daily practice.

· You remain as much as possible in simple awareness, undistracted by the constant activity of thinking.

· You stop paying attention to events that frighten people, particularly aging and death.

· You seek the calm stability of pure consciousness, which is your source.

I’ve couched these steps in general terms without using special vocabulary like meditation, yoga, and the terms common to Eastern spiritual traditions. The essential thing is to start identifying with consciousness, because it holds the key, being beyond both time and the timeless.

Our minds are set up to think in opposites, and you might automatically assume that time is the opposite of the timeless, just as life is the opposite of death. But neither case is like that. In reality, time and the timeless are meshed, interwoven, and merged, just as life is merged and interwoven with death. What we’re talking about is wholeness. By definition wholeness embraces all experiences, all qualities of life, all categories of thought. Silent awareness is whole like the ocean, and thoughts are waves that arise on the surface of consciousness like waves on the sea.

If we are ever to crack the code of time, it must be from the perspective of wholeness. Inevitably we must have one foot in time, but the mind can transcend to a level of awareness where time-bound thinking moves to the background and the timeless moves to the foreground. when this happens, time no longer devours us. Instead, we process our experiences within a new framework where the default is nonchange.

In a very real sense you turn your experiences, including the experience of time, into everything you know as your bodymind. This is analogous to metabolizing the food you eat. In order to nourish you, experiences must be metabolized beneficially. Toxic experiences enter the fabric of the bodymind very differently than beneficial experiences.

This is clear enough at the level of emotions, for example. Someone who is depressed, anxious, overwhelmed by stress, and subject to abusive behavior isn’t metabolizing their life the same way as another person who is emotionally happy, healthy, and fulfilled. Strange as it might sound, time works the same way. Someone who feels rushed, always running, and fearing that there is never enough time isn’t metabolizing time the way a person is who has transcended to experience nonchange, or the timeless, as the basis of life.

Cracking the code of time is therefore not an arcane issue better left to physicists and philosophers. It is vital to every individual as a matter, literally, or life and death — accepting the timeless nature of human awareness deeply changes both.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his latest book, Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth (Harmony Books) offers the keys to a life of success, fulfilment, wholeness and plenty. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

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