All posts by Mike Zonta

Words

Word-built world: beatitude means happiness

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beatitude

/bēˈadəˌto͞od/

“Beatitude” means supreme blessedness or supreme happiness. 

Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin noun beātitūdō (“happiness” or “blessedness”). This is built from the Latin adjective beātus (meaning “happy” or “blessed”) and the suffix -tūdō. The term was famously used in the Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) for the blessings delivered by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount. Wiktionary, the free dictionary +3

For further reading on its linguistic evolution and definitions, check the Etymonline Entry for Beatitude or visit the Wiktionary page on Beatitude. 

Trauma

Gabor Maté: We choose partners with same level of trauma resolution

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Renowned trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté often states that couples unconsciously choose partners who are at the exact same level of emotional development and trauma resolution as they are. Rather than identical traumas, partners usually share complementary wounds—acting as mutual mirrors or triggers for each other’s unresolved childhood pain. Instagram·needtotalk +4

Maté explains that while initial attraction is often based on shared interests or humor, the subconscious also seeks out a partner to “fix” or receive the unconditional love that was missed in childhood. This makes long-term relationships a delicate balance between a supportive “shield” against the world and a “magnifier” that highlights personal insecurities. Facebook·We Need To Talk +2

Because partners share a similar baseline of past hurt, one of three things usually happens in a relationship as they navigate life: 

  • The Trap: Both partners continuously blame each other or expect the other to rescue them from their own unresolved distress. 
  • The Split: If one partner begins doing the “work” to grow and heal, and the other refuses to evolve, the relationship often breaks apart. Intagram·needtotalk
  • The Crucible: If both partners recognize the patterns and take responsibility for their own reactions, the relationship becomes a vehicle for mutual healing and growth. YouTube·GROWTH™ +1

To explore how these unconscious childhood attachment templates dictate adult relationship dynamics, you can read more via the Musixmatch Podcasts discussion.

Would you like to explore how these relationship dynamics manifest in your own life, or are you looking for advice on how to communicate about these triggers?

Rape

Emily Doe (Chanel Miller), Victim Impact Statement (2015)

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The American Yawp Reader

On January 18, 2015, Stanford University student Brock Turner sexually assaulted an unconscious woman outside of a university fraternity house. At his sentencing on June 2, 2016, his unnamed victim (“Emily Doe”) read a 7,000-word victim impact statement describing the effect of the assault on her life. [Note: Chanel Miller identified herself publicly as Emily Doe in September 2019.]

On January 17th, 2015, it was a quiet Saturday night at home. My dad made some dinner and I sat at the table with my younger sister who was visiting for the weekend. I was working full time and it was approaching my bed time. I planned to stay at home by myself, watch some TV and read, while she went to a party with her friends. Then, I decided it was my only night with her, I had nothing better to do, so why not, there’s a dumb party ten minutes from my house, I would go, dance like a fool, and embarrass my younger sister. On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. My sister teased me for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian. I called myself “big mama,” because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.

The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway. I had dried blood and bandages on the backs of my hands and elbow. I thought maybe I had fallen and was in an admin office on campus. I was very calm and wondering where my sister was. A deputy explained I had been assaulted. I still remained calm, assured he was speaking to the wrong person. I knew no one at this party. When I was finally allowed to use the restroom, I pulled down the hospital pants they had given me, went to pull down my underwear, and felt nothing. I still remember the feeling of my hands touching my skin and grabbing nothing. I looked down and there was nothing. The thin piece of fabric, the only thing between my vagina and anything else, was missing and everything inside me was silenced. I still don’t have words for that feeling. In order to keep breathing, I thought maybe the policemen used scissors to cut them off for evidence.

Then, I felt pine needles scratching the back of my neck and started pulling them out my hair. I thought maybe, the pine needles had fallen from a tree onto my head. My brain was talking my gut into not collapsing. Because my gut was saying, help me, help me.

I shuffled from room to room with a blanket wrapped around me, pine needles trailing behind me, I left a little pile in every room I sat in. I was asked to sign papers that said “Rape Victim” and I thought something has really happened. My clothes were confiscated and I stood naked while the nurses held a ruler to various abrasions on my body and photographed them. The three of us worked to comb the pine needles out of my hair, six hands to fill one paper bag. To calm me down, they said it’s just the flora and fauna, flora and fauna. I had multiple swabs inserted into my vagina and anus, needles for shots, pills, had a Nikon pointed right into my spread legs. I had long, pointed beaks inside me and had my vagina smeared with cold, blue paint to check for abrasions….

…

I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that this sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding. That he was going to go to any length to convince the world he had simply been confused….

Instead of taking time to heal, I was taking time to recall the night in excruciating detail, in order to prepare for the attorney’s questions that would be invasive, aggressive, and designed to steer me off course, to contradict myself, my sister, phrased in ways to manipulate my answers.

…

My damage was internal, unseen, I carry it with me. You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.

… I am no stranger to suffering. You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was “unconscious intoxicated woman”, ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All­ American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake. I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something….

… Finally, to girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought everyday for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you. As the author Anne Lamott once wrote, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” Although I can’t save every boat, I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced, a small satisfaction that justice was served, a small assurance that we are getting somewhere, and a big, big knowing that you are important, unquestionably, you are untouchable, you are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day, you are powerful and nobody can take that away from you. To girls everywhere, I am with you.

Thank you.

Source: Emily Doe, “Victim Statement to Brock Turner,” June 2, 2016. Available online via BuzzFeed: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra

History

Herman Melville: Americans are the new “chosen people”

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Herman Melville famously captured the concept of America as a “New Israel” in his 1850 novel White-Jacket. He wrote, “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world”. This notion reflects a long history of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The Melville Context

While the quote sounds like a celebration of American missionary zeal, Melville often used it with deep irony. In White-Jacket, he critiqued the military, the government, and the authoritarian nature of the American naval system. He recognized the immense promise of the nation but warned heavily against its hubris and cruelty. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The “Chosen People” Concept

The idea of being the “new chosen people” or the “Israel of our time” is one of the most enduring civic conceits in American history: [1]

  • Roots: The metaphor dates back to the Puritans, who viewed their journey to the New World as a biblical Exodus and the Atlantic crossing as a path to a new Promised Land. [1]
  • Revolutionary Era: Preachers and politicians frequently cast the break from Britain as a new Exodus, casting King George III as Pharaoh and the American colonies as God’s chosen. [1]
  • Melville’s Usage: In We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people, Melville contrasts this lofty ideal against the nation’s capacity for violence, viewing it both with “delirious passion” and profound skepticism. [1]

Broader Perspectives

Scholars often examine this paradox of the “chosen” American identity, which elevates the nation to a universal standard while also tempting it with tribalism and violence. For an in-depth breakdown of how this theological metaphor shaped U.S. politics and history, you can read the Americans, the Almost-Chosen People analysis provided by Tablet Magazine. [1, 2, 3]

The concept of a “Chosen Nation” is a powerful political and religious myth. It suggests that a specific country is selected by a divine power to fulfill a special mission on Earth. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Core Characteristics

Nations that claim this identity usually share specific traits:

  • Sacred Mission: Believing they must spread democracy, freedom, or religion.
  • Exodus Narrative: Viewing their founding as a miraculous escape from tyranny.
  • Moral Superiority: Judging their actions as inherently good or divinely sanctioned.
  • Promised Land: Treating their physical territory as a holy or gifted space. [1, 2]

Key Historical Examples

  • Ancient Israel: The original biblical archetype, serving as the foundational model for later Western nations.
  • The United States: Rooted in the Puritan “City upon a hill” metaphor and evolving into Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism.
  • Great Britain: During the Victorian era, the British Empire often viewed its global expansion as a divine duty to “civilize” the world.
  • Apartheid South Africa: Afrikaner nationalism heavily relied on a chosen-people narrative to justify minority rule and separation. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The Double-Edged Sword

This belief system creates a powerful paradox within a society:

  • The Positive: It fosters deep national unity, inspires social reform, and drives monumental national achievements.
  • The Negative: It frequently justifies colonialism, the displacement of indigenous peoples, imperialism, and blind nationalism.
Love

The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet.

When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in solitude and the better part of her middle age in South America with the woman she loved for seventeen years, who had taken her own life three years earlier.

Across their stations, across their age difference, across the abyss of possibility between their era’s parameters of permission, Elizabeth and Alice fell deeply and enduringly in love — a love that comes abloom on the pages of Megan Marshall’s delicious biography Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (public library).

Soon, they were beginning each day with a ritual refrain: “Good-morning I love you.” The “blue blue blue” of Alice’s eyes became the sky of a new world shimmering with new life. More poems poured out in a spring than had in a decade. They swam together in the Galápagos, admiring the flamboyance of flamingos, and in the Greek Isles, admiring the poppies and their thousand shades of red. Whenever they were separated by Elizabeth’s itinerant life as a public poet, she sent Alice “love — housefulls, churchfulls, airportsfull” and carried her photograph in her breast pocket. She revised her will to leave everything except her books to Alice.

Elizabeth Bishop

After five years together — years of extraordinary creative vitality for the poet, but also years of savage struggle with alcohol — Alice, exhausted by Elizabeth’s increasingly out-of-control drinking to the point of collapse, met a young man who soon proposed.

“I want you to be happy and good and loved,” Elizabeth told her in a touching reminder that the deepest measure of love is wanting the best possible life for the other person. But she was heartbroken.

She coped the way all artists do.

What began as mostly prose became, seventeen drafts and several titles later — “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” “The Art of Losing Things” — one of the greatest poems ever written:

ONE ART
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

When she learned that Alice had decided to accept the proposal, Elizabeth was devastated. With the helpless vulnerability of love laid bare, which neither pride nor prejudice can touch, she wrote to her:

I DO want you to be free, darling — that wouldn’t ever make me stop loving you… You can always have me back if ever you should want me… truly.

And then she sent her the poem.

Elizabeth Bishop (Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries)

Nobody knows what beckoned Alice back — the poem, the way a badly sprained ankle signaled Elizabeth’s fragility and made Alice shudder at the thought of losing her, or simply the inexplicable gravitational pull of love that eludes, always eludes, theory.

“I like being with you more than anyone else in the world,” Alice wrote to Elizabeth that summer.

They remained together until death did them part — one awful October evening, a cerebral aneurysm left Elizabeth’s body for Alice to find on their bedroom floor.

Years earlier, in her most intimate poem that she never published, Elizabeth had looked to death as dreadful only for separating her from Alice:

BREAKFAST SONG
by Elizabeth Bishop

My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold filthy place
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I’ve grown accustomed to?
— Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie!
But no, I know it’s true.
It’s just the common case;
there’s nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.

Inside the tragedy, a triumph: It is miracle enough to have found blue.

Books

How to Be More Alive: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke knew this: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” he wrote. Alice James — William and Henry James’s equally brilliant sister, whose chromosomes confined her to the margins of her time — knew this: “It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” she wrote as she approached her untimely death.

An epoch before them, while the Western world was grappling intellectually with Montaigne’s unnerving assertion that the subject, the substance, the very purpose of philosophy is to learn to die, the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659–1719) was attesting to it with his life and articulating with piercing precision the fundaments of the art of living lensed through death.

Samurai by Japanese artist Yoshitoshi from his series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1885-1892. (Available as a print and more.)

Born to an uncommonly elderly father who had already outlived the era’s life expectancy twofold, Tsunetomo grew up so sickly that the family doctor deemed him unlikely to live past twenty. And yet despite his precocious proximity to death — or perhaps precisely because of it — he became a samurai. Four centuries before Bruce Lee emerged as the philosopher-fighter of the modern world, Tsunetomo came to see that a true warrior trains both the body and the mind. Sensing that strength springs from sinew and spirit entwined, he apprenticed with a Zen priest and a Confucian scholar, took work as a scribe, fell under the spell of poetry, and eventually became a Buddhist priest and teacher himself.

Anchoring his teachings, transcribed by one of his disciples under the title Hakagure (public library) — perhaps best translated as Umbral Leaves — is the idea that death is the beating heart of bushido, the Way of the warrior, and yet we are wired to turn away from the very thing that makes us strong, constantly caging ourselves in denial. He writes:

We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like… But… if by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

He offers a daily practice, potent and brutal as the birth of galaxies, to translate the cerebral understanding of life into the art of living:

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease… And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.

Our difficulty living and our difficulty dying, Tsunetomo intimates, spring from the same source — a troubled relationship with time, haunted by our constant self-expatriation from the only thing ours for the keeping: the naked now. Lamenting that “everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else,” he writes:

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

Centuries later, the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh — a modern samurai of the human spirit — would arrive at the same elemental truth in his surprising library epiphany about the meaning of life:

To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.

Complement with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living and Nathaniel Hawthorne on how not to waste your life, then let this poem teach you how to live and how to die.

Quotes, Sufi

Elif Shafak on the voices within

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(Shafak in 2021)

“On the Sufi path, first you discover the art of being alone amid the crowd. Next you discover the crowd within your solitude – the voices inside you.”

~ Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British award-winning author and political scientist who writes in both Turkish and English. Her work has been translated into 56 languages and nominated for major literary awards. Shafak is known for her global perspective and blending of Eastern and Western narrative traditions. Her writing is rooted in her feminist education and knowledge of Sufism and Ottoman culture.  (Wikipedia.org)

Born October 25, 1971 (age 54 years), Strasbourg, France

Spouse Eyüp Can (m. 2005)

Consciousness, Spirituality

Compassion in Action, Part II, with Ram Dass (1931 – 2019)

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New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jul 4, 2026 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1988. It will remain public for only one week.  Ram Dass’ own path has led him to look for God in every person and situation. Following this path, his life of service has included working with refugees, with the blind, and with the dying. In this moving, two-part program, he examines the delicate state of awareness in which one acts compassionately for social change while also accepting the world exactly as it is. Ram Dass (a.k.a. Richard Alpert, PhD) is a spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, The Psychedelic Experience (coauthored with Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary), Grist for the Mill (coauthored with Stephen Levine), Journey of Awakening, Miracle of Love and How Can I Help?

AI

Michael Wooldridge: “The Singularity is Bullshit”

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Johnathan Bi Mar 11, 2025 Interview with Michael Wooldridge I made this video as a fellow of the Cosmos Institute, a 501c3 academy for philosopher-builders. Read the Cosmos Institute Substack ► https://bit.ly/3XK5T7k Subscribe to the Cosmos Institute on YouTube ► @cosmosinstituteaixhf Follow Cosmos’ founder and my friend Brendan McCord on X ► https://bit.ly/3Y9pFLb You can read the full transcript here: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnath… Companion Interviews:

Further Reading:

Timestamps 00:00 0. Introduction 02:45 1. The Singularity Is Bullshit 14:28 2. Alan Turing 25:55 2.1 Alan Turing: The Turing Test 32:22 3. The Golden Age 39:29 4. The First AI Winter 41:25 5. Expert Systems 51:35 6. Behavioral AI 57:08 7. Agent-Based AI & Multi-Agent Systems 1:05:45 8. Machine Learning 1:08:18 9. LLMsJohnathan Bi discusses the long history of artificial intelligence research and development with AI pioneer Michael Wooldridge. They examine past hype cycles, overlooked technological paradigms, and practical strategies for regulating AI applications rather than general mathematical principles.