Giotto: The Kiss of Judas, detail
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THE EPISTLE OF JUDAS
The morning after I tossed the coins
back at the priests’ feet.
Thirty pieces of silver,
the price of a slave.
I spat on the marble floor.
I was made treasurer
because I was the smartest.
Instantly He recognized my quality.
“Judah-bar-Simon,”
he called as I stood
in the shimmering shade
in my father’s orchard,
praying for the Messiah.
“Judah,” he called, “Follow me.
You are the man I need.”
The blaze of noon around Him
must have blinded me.
I bowed: “Rabbi,
you are the Son of God.
You are the King of Israel.”
It was for His sake I betrayed Him,
to force Him to reveal
his glory and his might —
so that with one wave of His hand
He’d stop the Temple guards, proclaim,
“I the Messiah command you” —
The reign of God would start.
Later, those feeble answers
before Pilate and the high priests:
“You said it.”
“My kingdom is not of this world.”
I cringed in shame for Him.
Instead, when that dumb
ox, Peter Simon,
pulled out a sword and cut off
a servant’s ear —
just the swordsmanship
you'd expect from Peter —
He forbade violence.
Nor did angels
with fiery swords
descend to deliver Him.
And where was John, the beloved?
The first one to run.
A guard snatched at his tunic;
John tore it off and fled
naked into the dark.
Rumor has it that I hanged myself.
I went away — would not defile
myself by mixing with the mob that mocked,
“If you are the Son of God,
come down from the cross” —
true, more than once I wanted to end
forever my tormenting quest.
But I’m a pious man:
the commandment bans
the taking of one’s life.
I joined another holy man,
then another, seeking
the Truth meant to make us free.
But the shadows of those torch flames
still dance before my eyes.
Every night in my mind I cross
the Kedron Valley and climb
that stony path up the Mount.
I slip off my hood.
“Master,” I say,
and I kiss Him.
~ Oriana
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Oriana:
I wish that a major film maker, in the rank of Ingmar Bergman, could produce something like The Seventh Seal, except it would be The Kiss of Judas. But in vain, in vain. Bergman still came from the kind of religious culture, crossbred with modern culture, that made The Seventh Seal possible -- and how wonderful it was to watch Death play chess!
It might take a gay film director and/or script writer to create a Judas for our times. But I see all the difficulties, and have no hope. But how wonderful it would be to combine the themes of betrayal in love and betrayal of an ideology -- and religion is the most ambitious form of ideology.*
“The essence of revolution is betrayal” ~ William Mohr, The Small World and the Big World
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HENRY JAMES AND THE GREAT WAR
~ The onset of war had been a shock to James. On August 10 he wrote to his friend Rhoda Broughton: “Black and hideous is to me the tragedy that gathers. . . . Just across the Channel, blue as paint today, the fields of France and Belgium are . . . about to be given up to unthinkable massacre and misery.” A week later he confided to his close friend Edith Wharton: “Life goes on after a fashion but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep. . . . The season here [Rye] is monotonously magnificent—& we look inconceivably off across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.” A few weeks later he suffered a severe attack of depression and food-loathing, but it lasted only thirty-six hours.
In the final eighteen months of his life James found it difficult to work on his pre-war literary projects. In November 1914 he told Wharton: “I try myself to get back to work—but . . . I crawl like a fly—a more or less frozen fly—on a vast blank wall.” A month later he wrote Wharton again: “one of three books begun & abandoned.” He is referring to A Sense of the Past, The Ivory Tower, and possibly a book on London that he had promised Macmillan. He could also be referring to the third volume of his autobiography, The MiddleYears, which he began in the fall of 1914.
James could not concentrate on literary projects for an obvious reason: he was preoccupied with the war. In September 1914 he told an American friend: “we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the war.” Eight months later he was still intensely interested in the conflict. In April 1915 he wrote Hugh Walpole that “one’s consciousness is wholly that of the Cause, wholly the question of what becomes of it; frankly I take no interest in any other—save, that is, for two or three hours each forenoon, when I . . . push a work of fiction of sorts uphill at the rate of about an inch a day.”
The war affected James’s daily life. His valet Burgess Oakes enlisted. So did the sons of many friends. He knew several young writers who had enlisted, including Rupert Brooke. In February 1915 he visited Brooke, who was on sick leave. James promised Brooke, who died of sepsis two months later while on his way to Gallipoli, that he would write an introduction to Brooke’s letters from America (appearing in 1916, it was the last essay James wrote). In October 1915, James learned that the son-in-law of his neighbor Moreton Frewen had died in
the war.
Wanting to take part in the war effort, James became a quasi-public figure. He served as the chairman in England of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. He attended meetings in Chelsea to organize relief efforts for refugees.
James also visited wounded soldiers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London—Belgian soldiers and later British ones. He told Hugh Walpole, “I have been going to a great hospital (St. Barts’) at the request of a medical friend there, to help to give the solace of free talk to a lot of Belgian wounded & sick . . . & have thereby almost discovered my vocation in life to be the beguiling and drawing-out of the suffering soldier.” He was doing what Walt Whitman had done during the Civil War.
James wrote six essays about the war. In “The Long Wards,” which was written for Wharton’s The Book of the Homeless—published to raise money for refugees—James praises the amiability and good nature of the wounded soldiers. And he asks: “How can the stress of carnage . . . have left so little distortion of the moral nature?” In the essay James makes it clear that he regards Germany as the aggressor. He speaks of “the horrors that the German powers had . . . been for years conspiring to let loose upon the world.” In a letter to Brander Matthews, a professor of theater at Columbia University, he says: “Never has England in all her time, gone at anything with cleaner hands or a cleaner mind and slate.”
James was angry that the United States remained neutral and told the American ambassador that the United States should do more for Britain. In January 1915 he wrote to an American friend that Woodrow Wilson “seems to be aware of nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to make difficulties for us.” By “us” he meant Britain.
On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania was sunk by German torpedoes. James knew several people who had drowned. Two weeks later he wrote Wharton: “I am learning to take for granted that I shall probably on the whole not die of simple sick horror . . . . One aches to anguish & rages to suffocation, & one is still there to do it again.”
Though James was shocked by the war and angered by America’s neutrality, he recognized that the war had helped him in his continual battle with depression. In October 1914 he told his niece Mary Margaret James, “I have been finding London all this month . . . agitating and multitudinously assaulting, but in all sorts of ways interesting and thrilling.” Percy Lubbock, James’s literary executor, recalled that “the challenge of the war with Germany roused him to a height of passion he had never touched before . . . and if the strain of it exhausted his strength . . . it gave him one last year of the fullest and deepest experience.” ~
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/2/henry-james-the-great-war
Oriana:
Alas, he wasn’t able to utilize this rich experience in his art. His health began to decline rapidly. He suffered several strokes, and died on February 28, 1916.
Henry James, charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent
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WITHOUT THE FUTURE TENSE; THE PUZZLE YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW
~ Now that woke and cancel culture have become the words of the day, I again saw my chance and decided to deal with the adverb yesterday. In yesterday, only yester– will interest us.
Not everybody may know that yesterday is one of the most enigmatic formations in the Indo-European language family. On the face of it, everything looks fine, because cognates are not wanting: Dutch gistern, German gestern, Latin heri “yesterday” ~ hesternus “yesterday’s, pertaining to yesterday” (the second Latin word needs no explanation; heri goes back to hesi), and many others. (English y- in yester– developed from g-.) Gothic, a fourth-century Germanic language, had gistra-dagis, an almost exact counterpart of yester-day.
The Gothic Bible is a translation from Greek, but the Greek word gistradagis glossed was aûrion “tomorrow” (not “yesterday”!), and herein lies the main trouble.
The Gothic bishop Wulfila, a talented and most reliable translator, must have known very well what the Greek word meant. The context, with its juxtaposition, is also unambiguous: “…the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast in the oven” (M VI: 30; the text and the spelling are as in the Revised Version). Even a non-specialist will notice the similarity between aûrion and Aurora, while those versed in historical linguistics will recall that English east is related to it (morning, or tomorrow, comes from the east). No doubt, gistra-dagis meant “tomorrow” in this Gothic verse.
We want to know how the same word could acquire two incompatible senses: “yesterday” and “tomorrow.”
The riddle has never been solved to everybody’s satisfaction. More than a hundred years ago, the great historical linguist Karl Brugmann suggested that the Germanic adverb meant “the day next to the present one,” with the context determining the reference. Perhaps his explanation, which is a restatement of the obvious fact rather than an explanation, can be improved. Didn’t the speakers of Old Germanic need more precise names for the day gone and the day to come? We may, I believe, approach the truth if we consider some of our ancestors’ views on time. Note that, unlike Greek and Latin, Germanic had no future tense. The present did all the work, as it still does in such English constructions as if you feel better tomorrow; when you return, give me a call, and I am leaving in two days. While reading a text in an old Germanic language, one often has to figure out whether the reference is to the present or the future. Prophecies obviously refer to the future, but not all situations are so clear.
In such matters, it is useful to step aside for a moment from the facts of language and take into consideration people’s oldest concepts of time. The ancient Greeks believed that the future was open to view (because it was in front of us), whereas the past remained hidden (no one can see what is behind).
Another seemingly unexpected picture emerges from Old Russian chronicles. The Germanic noun kuningaz “king” made its way into Old Slavic and became knyaz’ in Russian, rendered in Latin as princeps and in English and German as prince ~ Prinz. Old Russian historical books mention numerous princes. Those who reigned in the distant past are called front princes (perednie knyaz’ia), and those who came after them are referred to as back princes (zadnie knyaz’ia). Shouldn’t it have been the other way around? Apparently, not: the rulers of the most distant past were at the front because everything began with them: the chronicler viewed history with the eyes of their characters, not with those of his contemporaries. Both examples show that the early ideas of time and its progress might differ from ours in a rather radical way.
I would like to suggest that for the oldest Germanic speakers, who did (and did very well!) without the future tense, the concept of and hence the word for tomorrow did not exist. The same was probably true of all the most ancient Indo-Europeans, who originally had no tenses but only grammatical aspects: they could describe the way this or that action was performed, divorced from the temporal framework. This approach is easy to understand. Both 'I have put the butter into the refrigerator', and 'I put the butter into the refrigerator' refer to the past but characterize the past moment from a different perspective. In similar fashion, I speak and I am speaking refer to the present but also from different viewpoints. Given this picture of the world, adverbs of time are not always needed or, if they exist, their message is less precise than we expect. The Old Germanic languages developed the past tense and, predictably, an adverb like yesterday. Tomorrow and other references to the day after (and this is the core of my hypothesis) emerged later, perhaps much later.
If my suggestion is correct, for many centuries, yesterday (the same of course holds for its closest cognates) meant what they still mean to us and nothing else. Under the circumstances, it could occasionally become a default name for “any day next to the present one, an adjoining day.” Judging by the extreme rarity of the sense “tomorrow,” this usage struck the speakers of Germanic as inconvenient, perhaps even unnatural. Since in the extant Gothic text, gistradagis occurs only once, we cannot judge how common it was in Wulfila’s language. Not inconceivably, pressed for an exact gloss (the Greek adverb made him do so), he used the word for “the day passed” and assumed that his readers would understand the reference from the context. One wonders how Wulfila would have translated Macbeth’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
(A postscript: yore in the phrase in days of yore is not related to yesterday.)
The title of this post (“the future in the past”) refers to constructions like “I knew that they would do well”: would, not will, because the future is viewed from the vantage point of the past. Odd, isn’t it? Our modern concepts of time and tense would probably have puzzled Wulfila no less than his gistradagis puzzles us. ~
https://blog.oup.com/2021/03/the-future-is-in-the-past/?utm_campaign=1478683699113882032&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid%20social&utm_content=media%20post%20with%20link&utm_term&fbclid=IwAR10cMQzwbLNDrNss1pmUKFBdcJKhDU_7eu93an8D2Wkv4ON59MXrKvppp4
An example of eternal gistradagis: Thor and his magic hammer
~ It is well known in both conceptual history and anthropology that premoderns had radically different and often circular conceptions and experiences of time. Levi-Strauss engages with it and Reinhard Koselleck's whole oeuvre is about that. Take a word like revolution for instance. Now it means a singular event in time that definitively separates the past from the future, but it is actually describes from the word rotatio or a circular motion. Many words exhibit this semantic transition into modern linear time. I have published multiple articles on this. Even now time is profoundly malleable and social dynamics are constantly shaping time. There is a battle about how to define the past and the future, and what processes link them. ~ Thomas Derek Robinson
Oriana:
I remember being puzzled by the multiplicity by tenses in English. I couldn’t see any advantage in saying “I have traveled in Europe” versus “I traveled in Europe.” But with time I got the nuance, if that’s the word. “I’ve been to Paris” now sounds natural to me, whereas “I was in Paris” seems incomplete, begging for an indication of time (e.g. “last June”) and/or reason — “on a business trip.” In Polish, “I was in Paris” sounds perfectly complete as is. The simple past rules. Usage is everything.
But no “tomorrow” — no indication of the future at all? True, tomorrow isn't here yet. The past may be already gone, but we have memories, and other kinds of evidence that certain things did happen. The past can be very vivid and precious. I can see how it would be even more so many centuries ago . . . while the very idea of a future is fragile, whether because of personal mortality or the belief in the imminent end of the world.
Perhaps daring to imagine the future is a relatively recent phenomenon . . . Life needs to be secure enough before dreams of the future can arise.
"tomorrow is cast in the oven"
Mary:
The difficulty with the future in linear time is that it's always a speculation. This is indeed more true in modern times, particularly since the industrial revolution, with its railroads and assembly lines. Instead of the surety that all things repeat in endless and regular cycles, we have the observable truth that things do not return to a set point, that irreversible and unexpected changes happen a lot, and even changes we might expect never look like we imagined they would.
The speed of change is also important.
Old ideas and assumptions seem ever more fragile when even 50 years can make ordinary life so different it changes behaviors in significant ways.Think of how cell phones and the internet have changed our lives, erasing distance and increasing connectivity, leaving us more mobile while maintaining more connection than was ever possible before. These are changes we are still adjusting to and learning how to use. Think of how zoom became such an important tool when the pandemic forced physical isolation. It helped us to carry on with meetings and work in a new way, on a new technological platform. And this new way of conducting business has become more than an adjustment; it has opened up new possibilities and ways of working that we find have advantages over the old, in person ways to gather and proceed.
One of my favorite examples of a major physical change that has created many changes in thinking and behavior is the miniaturization of computers. In just about 50 years they went from taking up a whole floor to something we all carry in our pockets, and use every day. We can literally be connected all the time, and just about anywhere (though there are some remote places that are off grid). This can be both a plague and an opportunity, protect us and leave us vulnerable in ways not experienced before . It's ironic that one vulnerability here is such a low tech one....the life of the battery. Every new vista has its own limits.
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M. IOSSEL ON WHAT THE RUSSIANS ARE FEELING RIGHT NOW
~ I was asked what people in Russia feel and think right now as all these foreign companies are pulling out of Russia and the whole western world seems to be united against them.
What many, if not most of them feel now is a sense of soaring pride, and thinking is not quite their great forte in moments like this.
Yes, they feel proud that the entire soullessly pragmatic, money-obsessed, inherently weak and cold and heartless western world is united against them right now, for they know that, as they are being told by the unstoppable state propaganda, this is happening because, in their inescapable and ultimately necessary and soul-ennobling material impoverishment, they are the sole eternal carriers of the world's transcendental spirituality and goodness and love -- yes, love. It is with love and out of that infinite spirituality and goodness that they believe they are now fighting against the entire world of decadence and immorality and, through their dear bunker-bound leader, are threatening to kill everyone on the planet, along with themselves: a fitting outlet for the millennia-old Russian messianism.
For a very long time, post-Soviet Russia has been casting about in search of a national idea — and now, here it is: killing everyone in the world out of the endlessness of their love for it. ~
a related post by Mikhail Iossel:
Life is always a torturous undertaking for someone with an inflated sense of self-worth.
That's the tragedy of Russia: it has never felt being a good country was good enough for it. It never could settle just for that. It always thought of itself as great -- indeed, the greatest. But it never had what it takes to be great -- and because of its resentment over not being the greatest, it never could be merely good, either. It never was good to the rest of the world, much less its own people. It's always been a deeply unhappy country with a bitter broken heart and feverishly inflamed, angry mind.
Terri:
No one in Russia wonders why all of these businesses are suddenly closing up? What are they being told?
Mikhail:
They are being told that the whole world is against them because they are the carriers of transcendental spirituality and goodness and the West is mired in soulless pragmatism; and that makes Russian people feel proud, because they have noting else to feel good about themselves.
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The world needs to stop the new Hitler.
Yet the truth is that at this point, only Ukraine can defeat Putin.
Danusha Goska:
Even using the word "war" on social media is a crime. Rather, Putin's war must be described as a "special military operation." Some have responded by circulating, on social media, the cover of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" with a new cover: "Special Military Operations and Peace."
Oriana:
One big unknown is how China is ultimately going to react. For now there is one hopeful sign: China stopped supplying airplane parts for Russian planes.
Soviet-Chinese friendship poster from the 1950s. The sign says “Always together!” Happy, smiling children are a frequent feature of fascist propaganda.
But frankly, I continue to be astonished that a man who publicly stated that the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now the cause of a true catastrophe in the twenty-first century that has the world speaking of WW3 again.
Why on earth was Putin so desolate about the fall of the Soviet Union? What prompted him to make such an extreme statement? I think the answer lies in the fact that the Soviet Union was feared. And being feared appealed to the undersized, physically unattractive future dictator, perhaps more than anything else. To make Russia great again meant to him making Russia feared again, at any cost, alas.
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RUSSIA’S BRAIN DRAIN
~ It's not a question of whether people want to leave Russia, Oleg Itskhoki, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Insider. It's a matter of when they will — and whether they can.
"People want to leave in mass quantities now, but there are severe restrictions on mobility as a result of sanctions," he said, citing "closed embassies, closed skies for flying.”
"So, in fact, fewer people will be able to leave even if more people are trying harder to leave now," he added. "This is particularly relevant for educated, informed people."
Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine last week, Western countries enacted a wave of sanctions that left Russia isolated and financially restricted. Foreign governments have even left Russians physically isolated: At least 33 foreign airlines have stopped flying to Russia, and most European countries have prohibited Russian planes from entering their airspace.
That's as thousands of Russians have fled the country in the past week, The Telegraph reported. Most of the people leaving are those who can afford to, including Russia's well-educated urban middle class. But the country has barred its citizens from leaving with more than $10,000 in tow, in an attempt to keep them — and their money — homebound.
It's a problem that's plagued Russia for years: The country's "brain drain" is its mass emigration of highly trained and highly educated citizens to new regions, particularly Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the US. As of 2019, as many as 2 million people had left Russia since Vladimir Putin became president, and many are entrepreneurs, creatives, and academics, the Atlantic Council, an international-affairs think tank, found.
Economists told Insider Russia's military action against Ukraine — and subsequent Western sanctions — was going to make this problem worse in the long term. And brain drain, along with general isolation, is likely to dramatically reverse the country's advancements from recent years, they said.
"In the long run, brain drain might be the most important problem for Russia," when it comes to its economic future, Nikolai Roussanov, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Insider.
It's too early to see the influence of the latest Western sanctions on Russian brain drain, Roussanov said. But he added that it was inevitable for the exodus that began in the past few years to ramp up.
"We've seen a slow trickle over the last decade of people leaving," he said, adding that it would "accelerate, especially as foreign academic institutions break off their relationships with Russian ones — tech, finance, too."
Roussanov and Itskhoki said young Russians who work in these industries would simply follow foreign institutions out of the country to continue their collaborations, also influenced by their opposition to war.
"Educated people do not like living in a dictatorship with censorship and other limitations of basic human rights, and this results in brain drain," Itskhoki said.
Their departure will compromise the health of the Russian economy, Roussanov said.
Brain drain "will, of course, have extremely negative consequences on the human capital of the country, which drives growth through innovation and creation," he said, adding that it would also "reduce consumption demand because these are the people that do a lot of consumer spending, and they will not support that once they leave."
Itskhoki said brain drain was not Russia's "most acute" problem.
But it "is indeed a catastrophe in many different ways, an economic catastrophe being only one of them," he said, adding that the country's economy was also worse than it was just 20 years ago.
"There was zero economic growth on average over the last 12-plus years, and fewer and fewer opportunities for young people," he said. "Younger cohorts were being disproportionately squeezed out and did not have the opportunities that people did during the first decade of the 2000s.”
Itskhoki said the nature of Russia's invasion of a neighboring European democratic country was why government sanctions and company departures had been so immediate and widespread. This positions Russia for "economic, political, academic, cultural, and other isolation of the type we have not really seen," he said, adding that Russia could in the near future resemble Iran, whose economy Western sanctions have crippled.
"This would be incredibly costly and painful for ordinary Russians," Itskhoki said. "The duration of this isolation can be decades."
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Masha Gessen on the thousands of educated Russians leaving Russia before a new Iron Curtain makes it impossible:
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Oriana:
The twentieth century was certainly extraordinary. Moon landing still wows me. Add to this cultural evolution, such as effective contraception and women's access to education and jobs, antibiotics, internet, decline in religion, gay marriage . . . but also, alas, two world wars. The best of times and the worst of times.
Add to this the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and basically the demise of Communism as a charismatic ideology (which in practice ended up as fascist dictatorships). But perhaps the experiment had to be tried because the time was ripe for it, just as much later the time was ripe for going to the Moon.
And the rise and fall of the Thousand-Year-Reich, fortunately after only eleven years. Idealism taken to extreme seems to be the ultimate source of evil.
I'm sure that the twenty-first century, though it had an unfortunate start, will prove extraordinary also, with its own highs and lows.
THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE
MIMICRY
We are born helpless. We can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t feed ourselves, can’t even do our own damn taxes.
As children, the way we’re wired to learn is by watching and mimicking others. First we learn to do physical skills like walk and talk. Then we develop social skills by watching and mimicking our peers around us. Then, finally, in late childhood, we learn to adapt to our culture by observing the rules and norms around us and trying to behave in such a way that is generally considered acceptable by society.
The goal of Stage One is to teach us how to function within society so that we can be autonomous, self-sufficient adults. The idea is that the adults in the community around us help us to reach this point through supporting our ability to make decisions and take action ourselves.
But some adults and community members around us suck. They punish us for our independence. They don’t support our decisions. And therefore we don’t develop autonomy. We get stuck in Stage One, endlessly mimicking those around us, endlessly attempting to please all so that we might not be judged.
In a “normal” healthy individual, Stage One will last until late adolescence and early adulthood.3 For some people, it may last further into adulthood. A select few wake up one day at age 45 realizing they’ve never actually lived for themselves and wonder where the hell the years went.
This is Stage One. The mimicry. The constant search for approval and validation. The absence of independent thought and personal values.
We must be aware of the standards and expectations of those around us. But we must also become strong enough to act in spite of those standards and expectations when we feel it is necessary. We must develop the ability to act by ourselves and for ourselves.
SELF-DISCOVERY
In Stage One, we learn to fit in with the people and culture around us. Stage Two is about learning what makes us different from the people and culture around us. Stage Two requires us to begin making decisions for ourselves, to test ourselves, and to understand ourselves and what makes us unique.
Stage Two involves a lot of trial and error and experimentation. We experiment with living in new places, hanging out with new people, imbibing new substances, and playing with new people’s orifices.
In my Stage Two, I ran off and visited fifty-something countries. My brother’s Stage Two was diving headfirst into the political system in Washington DC. Everyone’s Stage Two is slightly different because every one of us is slightly different.
Stage Two is a process of self-discovery. We try things. Some of them go well. Some of them don’t. The goal is to stick with the ones that go well for a while and move on.
Stage Two lasts until we begin to run up against our own limitations. This doesn’t sit well with many people. But despite what Oprah and Deepak Chopra may tell you, discovering your own limitations is a good and healthy thing.
You’re just going to be bad at some things, no matter how hard you try. And you need to know what they are. I am not genetically inclined to ever excel at anything athletic whatsoever. It sucked for me to learn that, but I did. I’m also about as capable of feeding myself as an infant drooling apple sauce all over the floor. That was important to find out as well. We all must learn what we suck at. And the earlier in our life that we learn it, the better.
So we’re just bad at some things. Then there are other things that are great for a while, but begin to have diminishing returns after a few years. Traveling the world is one example. Sexing a ton of people is another. Drinking on a Tuesday night is a third. There are many more. Trust me.
Your limitations are important because you must eventually come to the realization that your time on this planet is limited and, therefore, you should spend it on things that matter most.
That means realizing that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.
That means realizing that just because you like certain people doesn’t mean you should be with them.
That means realizing that there are opportunity costs to everything and that you can’t have it all.
There are some people who never allow themselves to feel limitations—either because they refuse to admit their failures, or because they delude themselves into believing that their limitations don’t exist. These people get stuck in Stage Two.
These are the “serial entrepreneurs” who are 38 and living with mom and still haven’t made any money after 15 years of trying. These are the “aspiring actors” who are still waiting tables and haven’t done an audition in two years. These are the people who can’t settle into a long-term relationship because they always have a gnawing feeling that there’s someone better around the corner. These are the people who brush all of their failings aside as “releasing” negativity into the universe or “purging” their baggage from their lives.
At some point we all must admit the inevitable: life is short, not all of our dreams can come true, so we should carefully pick and choose what we have the best shot at and commit to it.
But people stuck in Stage Two spend most of their time convincing themselves of the opposite. That they are limitless. That they can overcome all. That their life is that of non-stop growth and ascendance in the world, while everyone else can clearly see that they are merely running in place.
In healthy individuals, Stage Two begins in mid- to late-adolescence and lasts into a person’s mid-20s to mid-30s. People who stay in Stage Two beyond that are popularly referred to as those with "Peter Pan Syndrome"—the eternal adolescents, always discovering themselves but finding nothing.
COMMITMENT
Once you’ve pushed your own boundaries and either found your limitations (i.e., athletics, the culinary arts) or found the diminishing returns of certain activities (i.e., partying, video games, masturbation) then you are left with what’s both a) actually important to you, and b) what you’re not terrible at. Now it’s time to make your dent in the world.
Stage Three is the great consolidation of one’s life. Out go the friends who are draining you and holding you back. Out go the activities and hobbies that are a mindless waste of time. Out go the old dreams that are clearly not coming true any time soon.
Then you double down on what you’re best at and what is best for you. You double down on the most important relationships in your life. You double down on a single mission in life, whether that’s to work on the world’s energy crisis or to be a bitching digital artist or to become an expert in brains or have a bunch of snotty, drooling children. Whatever it is, Stage Three is when you get it done.
Stage Three is all about maximizing your own potential in this life. It’s all about building your legacy. What will you leave behind when you’re gone? What will people remember you by? Whether that’s a breakthrough study or an amazing new product or an adoring family, Stage Three is about leaving the world a little bit different than the way you found it.
Stage Three ends when a combination of two things happen: 1) you feel as though there’s not much else you are able to accomplish, and 2) you get old and tired and find that you would rather sip martinis and do crossword puzzles all day.
In “normal” individuals, Stage Three generally lasts from around 30-ish-years-old until one reaches retirement age.
People who get lodged in Stage Three often do so because they don’t know how to let go of their ambition and constant desire for more. This inability to let go of the power and influence they crave counteracts the natural calming effects of time and they will often remain driven and hungry well into their 70s and 80s.
LEGACY
People arrive into Stage Four having spent somewhere around half a century investing themselves in what they believed was meaningful and important. They did great things, worked hard, earned everything they have, maybe started a family or a charity or a political or cultural revolution or two, and now they’re done. They’ve reached the age where their energy and circumstances no longer allow them to pursue their purpose any further.
The goal of Stage Four then becomes not to create a legacy as much as simply making sure that legacy lasts beyond one’s death.
This could be something as simple as supporting and advising their (now grown) children and living vicariously through them. It could mean passing on their projects and work to a protégé or apprentice. It could also mean becoming more politically active to maintain their values in a society that they no longer recognize.
Stage Four is important psychologically because it makes the ever-growing reality of one’s own mortality more bearable. As humans, we have a deep need to feel as though our lives mean something. This meaning we constantly search for is literally our only psychological defense against the incomprehensibility of this life and the inevitability of our own death. To lose that meaning, or to watch it slip away, or to slowly feel as though the world has left you behind, is to stare oblivion in the face and let it consume you willingly.
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Developing through each subsequent stage of life grants us greater control over our happiness and well-being.
In Stage One, a person is wholly dependent on other people’s actions and approval to be happy. This is a horrible strategy because other people are unpredictable and unreliable.
In Stage Two, one becomes reliant on oneself, but they’re still reliant on external success to be happy—making money, accolades, victory, conquests, etc. These are more controllable than other people, but they are still mostly unpredictable in the long run.
Stage Three relies on a handful of relationships and endeavors that proved themselves resilient and worthwhile through Stage Two. These are more reliable. And finally, Stage Four requires we only hold on to what we’ve already accomplished for as long as possible.
At each subsequent stage, happiness becomes based more on internal, controllable values and less on the externalities of the ever-changing outside world.
Later stages don’t replace previous stages. They transcend them. Stage Two people still care about social approval. They just care about something more than social approval. Stage Three people still care about testing their limits. They just care more about the commitments they’ve made.
Each stage represents a reshuffling of one’s life priorities. It’s for this reason that when one transitions from one stage to another, one will often experience a fallout in one’s friendships and relationships. If you were Stage Two and all of your friends were Stage Two, and suddenly you settle down, commit and get to work on Stage Three, yet your friends are still Stage Two, there will be a fundamental disconnect between your values and theirs that will be difficult to overcome.
Generally speaking, people project their own stage onto everyone else around them. People at Stage One will judge others by their ability to achieve social approval. People at Stage Two will judge others by their ability to push their own boundaries and try new things. People at Stage Three will judge others based on their commitments and what they’re able to achieve. People at Stage Four judge others based on what they stand for and what they’ve chosen to live for.
Transitions between the life stages are usually triggered by trauma or an extreme negative event in one’s life. A near-death experience. A divorce. A failed friendship or a death of a loved one.
Trauma causes us to step back and re-evaluate our deepest motivations and decisions. It allows us to reflect on whether our strategies to pursue happiness are actually working well or not.
WHAT GETS US STUCK
The same thing gets us stuck at every stage: a sense of personal inadequacy.
People get stuck at Stage One because they always feel as though they are somehow flawed and different from others, so they put all of their effort into conforming into what those around them would like to see. No matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.
Stage Two people get stuck because they feel as though they should always be doing more, doing something better, doing something new and exciting, improving at something. But no matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.
Stage Three people get stuck because they feel as though they have not generated enough meaningful influence in the world, that they have not made an impact in the specific areas that they have committed themselves to. But no matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.
One could even argue that Stage Four people feel stuck because they feel insecure that their legacy will not last or make any significant impact on future generations. They cling to it and hold on to it and promote it with every last gasping breath. But they never feel as though it is enough.
To move beyond Stage One, you must accept that you will never be enough for everybody all the time, and therefore you must make decisions for yourself.
To move beyond Stage Two, you must accept that you will never be capable of accomplishing everything you can dream of and desire, and therefore you must zero in on what matters most and commit to it.
To move beyond Stage Three, you must realize that time and energy are limited, and therefore you must refocus your attention toward helping others take over the meaningful projects you began.
To move beyond Stage Four, you must realize that change is inevitable, and that the influence of one person, no matter how great, no matter how powerful, no matter how meaningful, will eventually dissipate.
And life will go on. ~
https://markmanson.net/four-stages-of-life\
Mary:
The four stages of life seem to be a journey towards the discovery of what is "enough." It is a path from feeling inadequate and overwhelmed to concentrating on what is most important and most possible, and finally at coming to peace with our own temporality. Nothing lasts forever, and yet there is fullness enough, richness enough, satisfaction enough, in committing to the work you have chosen, and doing your best with that commitment. No star lasts forever, but they burn bright while they are here, shedding light and splendor into the dark spaces between them.
Oriana: Beautifully put. Mary, you are a bright star. Keep shining.
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Italy, garden of Pier Franceso Orsini, 1952
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Stage Two, Self-Discovery, is the main theme presented in the movie discussed below.
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD: PURSUING SELF-DISCOVERY
~ Julie (Reinsve, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes last year for her portrayal of this character) is a Norwegian woman nearing 30 years of age. She is the heart of this coming-of-age film, a type of film generally attached to teenagers and other kids on the cusp of grownup understanding. Julie, of course, is no child, any more than she is the worst person in the world (a phrase that gives a hint as to the film’s tongue-in-cheek humor), but she is a young person in search of the key that will unlock the entrance to her adult life. In the film’s opening scenes, we observe as Julie switches professional career paths with the same frequency she changes her hair color. Eventually, she takes a temporary job at a bookstore, which, ironically, becomes one of the constants in her life. Julie is one of those people for whom life happens while she is busy making other plans.
Structured in 12 chapters along with a prologue and epilogue, The Worst Person in the World was written especially for Reinsve by writer/director Joachim Trier (with his longtime collaborator and co-scriptwriter Eskil Vogt). Julie’s restlessness is anchored by a self-confidence that Reinsve conveys guilelessly and brilliantly. Several great set-pieces (a dance scene, a magic mushrooms episode, a within-the-social-limits flirtation with a stranger at a party she crashes, and an amazing Run Lola Run-reminiscent sequence in which Julie races across town while everyone around her remains motionlessly in place) help define the character. An unexpected and touching third-act denouement furthers Julie’s emotional growth and quells her gyroscopic sense of direction.
Like Julie, however, this film does not depend on outside validation to prove its worth. In the end, we learn enough about Julie to see that she is much like us, yet never enough to be fully known. Life will always be a relentless process of becoming. ~
https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2022-02-18/the-worst-person-in-the-world/
from another source:
~ The opening scene gives a quick sketch of Julie (Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve in a stellar performance), a person of contradictory impulses born into a middle-class family. In university, she can dump one course in favor of another in a heartbeat. And she takes the same approach with boyfriends.
Julie is not damaged by trauma, nor is she crippled by doubt or anxiety. This sets her apart from recent fictional women, such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge's main character in the British comedy series Fleabag (2016 to 2019), which say that extraordinarily bad choices must have a source in extraordinary suffering.
Julie's troubled relationship with her parents could explain or even excuse her behavior, but Trier never draws a direct link, so she may never fully shrug off responsibility for her actions.
If Julie is unlikeable, it is because Trier planned it that way. Depending on your viewpoint, she is selfish and sociopathic, a modern woman exercising her freedoms, or a hopeless romantic — sometimes all of these things.
Reinsve's sensitive portrayal, however, makes it hard to blame her. It feels wrong to fault a woman who expresses such cathartic joy when she puts herself first — even if it comes at the expense of others. ~
https://www.straitstimes.com/life/entertainment/at-the-movies-a-woman-follows-her-heart-others-pay-the-price-in-the-worst-person-in-the-world
I found it somewhat difficult to focus on Julia, who rapid career changes and confused love life don’t particularly engage me. But in the second half of this movie, I found myself falling in love with Julia’s first partner, Aksel. He has the sweetest face and says the sweetest words to a woman who hardly seems to deserve them. Arguably, he is the movie’s most engaging character. (And that beautiful, sensitive, Norwegian Christ-like face —beyond words.)
He tells Julia that he has no doubt she’d be a good mother — that there is nothing to fear, the child will be all right. Even though Julia’s accidental pregnancy ends in a convenient miscarriage, I can only imagine how wonderful it must be for an insecure woman to hear that someone has no doubt you’d be a good mother.
This may seem an old-fashioned question, but it remains very real. It’s part of how women judge men — would So-and-so be a good father? and I’m sure men likewise would reject the idea of a woman whom they can’t imagine as a good mother. That a man trusts that a particular woman would be a good mother is still one of the fundamentals of human relationships.
By the way, it’s Axel who’s worried about the fact that he and Julia are at different stages of life. He has certainly found himself in his career as a comic novel writer, and wants a stable relationship, while Julia wants to keep on exploring. This is the opposite of the stereotype that it’s the man who is afraid of commitment. Here it’s the woman who can’t seem to settle down. Of course she has the excuse of youth.
It’s also a high compliment to be told that one has been someone’s greatest love — again, I wonder how someone seemingly so self-centered could indeed be perceived as “wonderful.” But one can’t expect love to be rational. I can’t understand Julia’s attracted to the beaky-nosed barista, so unlike the quiet, soulful Aksel — but other people’s attractions are often puzzling. Love, like the soul of another, is a dark forest.
Aksel also says that no one is really ready to become a parent — it happens and you cope as best you can. He even says that the greatest failure in his life has been to make Julia realize how wonderful she is. I’d rephrase it as having the capacity to cope with no matter what comes. But Aksel is emotionally generous to a fault.
I am not sure how I will remember this movie. Right now, I can think only of Aksel’s doomed tenderness, which finally makes Julia realize what she has lost — all in an apparent pursuit of love and happiness. Perhaps if she had learned to appreciate tenderness — but it’s useless to speculate about someone in midst of trying out new experiences, to which youth is entitled, regardless of the inevitable heartbreaks. Indeed we mature mainly through suffering.
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Ukrainian couple saying goodbye at the train station in Lviv*
THE DARK SIDE OF MINDFULNESS
Whether you are a school teacher, a hospital worker, a Google programmer, a US Marines officer or even a UK politician, you’ll have been encouraged to embrace mindfulness by colleagues and supervisors. Even my smartwatch regularly reminds me to take a “mindful minute”.
The immediate outcomes of this popular form of meditation are meant to be reduced stress and risk of burnout. But listed alongside these benefits, you’ll often find claims that mindfulness can improve your personality. When you learn to live in the moment, the proponents say, you will find hidden reserves of empathy and compassion for those around you. That’s certainly an attractive bonus for an organization hoping to increase co-operation in its teams.
The scientific research, however, paints a more complicated picture of mindfulness’s effects on our behavior, with emerging evidence that it can sometimes increase people’s selfish tendencies. According to a new paper, mindfulness may be especially harmful when we have wronged other people. By quelling our feelings of guilt, it seems, the common meditation technique discourages us from making amends for our mistakes.
“Cultivating mindfulness can distract people from their own transgressions and interpersonal obligations, occasionally relaxing one’s moral compass,” says Andrew Hafenbrack, assistant professor of management and organization at the University of Washington, US, who led the new study.
Such effects shouldn’t discourage us from meditating, stresses Hafenbrack, but may change when and how we choose to do it. “While some have viewed it as a panacea, mindfulness meditation is a specific practice with specific psychological effects,” he says. And we need to be a bit more… well, mindful about those effects.
CALM AND CALLOUS?
There are many forms of mindfulness, but the most common techniques involve either focusing on your breathing or paying intense attention to the sensations in your body. There is some good evidence that these practices can help people to cope better with stress, yet a handful of studies over the past few years have shown that they can also have some unexpected and undesired effects. Last year, for example, researchers from the State University of New York showed that mindfulness can exaggerate people’s selfish tendencies. If a person is already individualist, then they become even less likely to help others after meditation.
Hafenbrack’s new study examined whether our state of mind at the time of meditating, and our social context, might influence its effects on our behavior.
In general, mindfulness seems to calm uncomfortable feelings, he says, which is incredibly useful if you feel overwhelmed by pressure at work. But many negative emotions can serve a useful purpose, particularly when it comes to moral decision making. Guilt, for example, can motivate us to apologize when we have hurt someone else, or to take reparative action that might undo some of the damage we’ve done. If mindful meditation leads us to ignore that emotion, it could therefore prevent us from righting our wrongs, suspected Hafenbrack.
To find out, he designed a series of eight experiments involving a total sample of 1,400 people using a variety of methods. In one, the participants were asked to remember and write about a situation that had made them feel guilty. Half were then asked to practice a mindfulness exercise which directed their focus to their breathing, while others were told to allow their minds to wander freely.
Afterwards, the participants were asked to take a questionnaire that measured their feelings of guilt. They also had to imagine that they had been given $100. Their task was to estimate how much they would be willing to donate to the person they had wronged for a birthday surprise.
As Hafenbrack had suspected, the participants who had done the mindfulness meditation reported less remorse – and they were substantially less generous towards the person they had wronged. On average, they were willing to donate just $33.39, while those who had simply let their minds wander were willing to give $40.70 – a nearly 20% difference.
In another experiment, Hafenbrack divided participants into three groups. Some practiced mindful breathing, while others were told to let their minds wander and a third group browsed the web. The participants were then asked to write a letter of apology to a person they had wronged, which two independent judges then rated, according to whether the individual took responsibility for the actions and whether they offered to make up for the wrongdoing. (A high-quality heartfelt apology would include both elements.)
In line with Hafenbrack’s hypothesis, the people who had practiced mindfulness offered less sincere apologies than those in either of the control conditions. This again suggested that the practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends.
The remaining experiments suggest that this is true in many different situations, including business decision making that might affect social justice. The participants in one experiment, for example, had to imagine that they were the CEO of a chemical company that dealt with hazardous materials. They were then asked to state their endorsement for a new environmental policy that would help to reduce air pollution. Participants who had just practiced mindfulness were much less likely to support the reparative measure.
The Buddha pill
It’s important to recognize that these studies examined the effects of mindfulness exercises in very specific contexts, when guilt was salient in the participants’ minds. “We shouldn’t over-generalize and conclude that mindfulness makes you a worse person,” Hafenbrack says.
His results might, however, encourage us to be a bit more thoughtful about when we apply it. We should think twice about using it after a disagreement with a friend or colleague, for example, particularly if you already know that you were in the wrong. “If we 'artificially' reduce our guilt by meditating it away, we may end up with worse relationships, or even fewer relationships,” he says.
Miguel Farias, an associate professor in experimental psychology at Coventry University, UK, says that he welcomes any studies that carefully and precisely detail the effects of mindfulness. “I certainly think that we need to start looking at the nuances.” In his book The Buddha Pill, co-written with Catherine Wikholm, he describes how mindfulness interventions in the West are often presented as a “quick fix”, while ignoring much of the ethical guidance that was part of the original religious tradition – which may be important for ensuring that the practice brings about the desired changes to people’s behavior.
Working with Ute Kreplin at Massey University in New Zealand, Farias recently examined the available studies on meditation’s consequences for altruism and compassion, but found limited evidence for meaningful positive changes across individuals. “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.”
LOVING KINDNESS MEDITATION
At the very least, Hafenbrack’s research suggests that casual meditators might turn to other contemplative techniques besides mindful breathing and body scans during times of interpersonal conflict. He’s examined a technique known as ‘loving-kindness meditation’, for example, which is inspired by the Buddhist practice of Metta Bhavana. The practice involves contemplating people in your life – from friends and family to acquaintances and strangers – and cultivating good wishes and feelings of warmth for them.
In his study on guilt, Hafenbrack found that – unlike mindful breathing – loving-kindness meditation increased people’s intentions to make amends for their wrongs. “It can help people feel less bad and focus on the present moment, without having the risk of reducing the desire to repair relationships,” he says.
Humans are complex beings with many different needs; it is only right that we should use multiple techniques to shape our emotions and behavior. Sometimes that involves looking inwards, to ground our thinking in our bodies, and other times we need to look outwards, and remind ourselves of our essential connections to the people around us. There really is no other way to take responsibility for our behaviors and ensure that our relationships continue to flourish. ~
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220302-how-mindfulness-can-make-you-a-darker-person
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THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS
~ For two thousand years, Judas has been Christianity’s primary image of human evil. Now, however, there is an effort to rehabilitate him, the result, partly, of an archeological find. In 1978 or thereabouts, some peasants digging for treasure in a burial cave in Middle Egypt came upon an old codex—that is, not a scroll but what we would call a book, with pages—written in Coptic, the last form of ancient Egyptian. The book has been dated to the third or fourth century, but scholars believe that the four texts it contains are translations of writings, in Greek, from around the second century. When the codex was found, it was reportedly in good condition, but it then underwent a twenty-three-year journey through the notoriously venal antiquities market, where it suffered fantastic abuses, including a prolonged stay in a prospective buyer’s home freezer. (This caused the ink to run when the manuscript thawed.) The book was cracked in half, horizontally; pages were shuffled, torn out. By the time the codex reached the hands of restorers, in 2001, much of it was just a pile of crumbs. The repair job took five years, after which some of the book was still a pile of crumbs. Many passages couldn’t be read.
And then there was the strangeness of what could be read. In the twentieth century Bible scholars repeatedly had to deal with ancient books—the Dead Sea scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library—that surfaced from the sands of the Middle East to wreak havoc with orthodoxy. These books said that much of what we call Christian doctrine predated Christ; that the universe was created by a female deity, and so on. The 1978 find—called the Codex Tchacos, for one of its successive owners, Frieda Tchacos Nussberger—was even more surprising, because one of its texts, twenty-six pages long, was entitled “The Gospel of Judas.” It wasn’t written by Judas. (We don’t know if there was a historical Judas Iscariot.) It was a story about Judas, and in it the great villain, the Christ-killer, was portrayed as Jesus’ favorite disciple, the only one who understood him.
The Codex Tchacos, like the Nag Hammadi library, was the work of an ancient religious party, mostly Christian, that we call Gnostic. In the second century, Christianity was not an institution but a collection of warring factions, each with its own gospels, each claiming direct descent from Jesus, each accusing the others of heresy, homosexuality, and the like. In the fourth century, one group, or group of groups, won out: the people now known as the proto-orthodox, because, once they won, their doctrines became orthodoxy. The proto-orthodox were centrist. They embraced both the Hebrew Bible and the new law proclaimed by Jesus; they said that Jesus was both God and man; they believed that the world was both full of blessings and full of sin. Of the many gospels circulating, they chose four, called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which, by reason of their realism and emotional directness—their lilies of the field and prodigal sons—were most likely to appeal to regular people.
The Gnostics were different—visionary, exclusionary. They scorned the Hebrew Bible; they said that the world was utterly evil; they claimed that the key to salvation was not faith or good behavior but secret knowledge, which was their exclusive property. The Gospel of Judas is entirely in line with this view. In it, most people have no hope of getting to Heaven. As for Jesus, he was not a man but wholly divine, and therefore Judas didn’t really have him killed. (Only a mortal can be killed.) According to some commentators, this Jesus asked Judas to release him from the human form he had assumed in order to descend to earth. Judas did him a favor.
That supposed exoneration of Judas was the most exclaimed-over aspect of the Gospel of Judas. Far more shocking, however, was the book’s portrait of Jesus. We know Jesus from the New Testament as an earnest and charitable man. Here, by contrast, he is a joker, and not a nice one. Three times in this brief text, he bursts into laughter over his disciples’ foolishness. The first time, he comes upon them as they are celebrating the Eucharist. What’s so funny? they ask him—this is what we’re supposed to do. Maybe according to your god, Jesus says. But you represent our God, they say. You’re his son. Jesus now turns on them. What makes you think you know me? he asks them. “Truly I say to you, no generation of the people that are among you will know me.” In other words, Jesus tells them that they are strangers to him. The next day, they ask him about Heaven, and he laughs at them again. Forget about Heaven, he says. No mortal will go there. In response, the disciples “did not find a word to say.”
No wonder, for Jesus has just denied what is said to have been his sole mission on earth, the salvation of humankind. Later, he relents, a little: he says that some few mortals may be admitted to Heaven. The text is hard to read here, but it appears that this elect is limited to the Gnostics.
Jesus’ dealings with the disciples occupy about half of the surviving pages of the Gospel of Judas. The rest consists of a lecture that Jesus gives on cosmology—an account quite different from the Bible’s. Briefly, the real God did not create the earth, but he spawned an angel, who created thousands of other angels. Twelve “aeons” and seventy-two “luminaries” also came into existence, and each luminary was supplied with five firmaments, for a total of three hundred and sixty. This cosmos, as grand as it sounds, is described by Jesus as “corruption,” but apparently it is not as bad as the earth, which was brought into being by a violent demiurge, Nebro, and his stupid assistant, Saklas. The text goes on in this vein. N. T. Wright, in his book “Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth about Christianity?” (2006), says that as a churchman—he is the Bishop of Durham—he often gets letters that sound like the Judas gospel’s explanation of the universe: “Some are handwritten, in which case they are mostly in green ink. Some are typewritten, page after page of interminable cosmological speculation, with increasing amounts of block capitals and underlinings.”
What use could this bizarre document be to modern Christians? Plenty. Many American religious thinkers are more liberal than their churches. They wish that Christianity were more open—not a stone wall of doctrine. To these people, the Gospel of Judas was a gift. As with the other Gnostic gospels, its mere existence showed that there was no such thing as fixed doctrine, or that there wasn’t at the beginning.
That implicit endorsement of tolerance was probably what American scholars valued most in the Judas gospel, but the discovery gave them something else as well: righteous glee. What a joy to have an ancient document in which the man singled out in the Bible as Christianity’s foremost enemy turns out, arguably, to be Christ’s best friend. Hooray! The higher-ups don’t know everything! This was also the appeal of the new gospel to the political left. For people who claimed that the world was ruled by groups that controlled by marginalizing other groups, the Gospel of Judas was like a keystone being hammered into place. Men had silenced women, colonialists had silenced the colonized, and now we saw the Christian Church establishing itself by silencing other Christian voices.
The gospel’s enthusiasts had a narrower political purpose, too. The most important fact about Judas, apart from his betrayal of Jesus, is his connection with anti-Semitism. Almost since the death of Christ, Judas has been held up by Christians as a symbol of the Jews: their supposed deviousness, their lust for money, and other racial vices. The Bible scholar Louis Painchaud has said that the current fad for rehabilitating Judas is a consequence of collective guilt over these slanders and, above all, over the Holocaust. This must be true, at least in part. For anyone seeking to defend and protect the Jews, disproving Judas’s guilt would seem a good place to start, and here was an ancient gospel that appeared to support such a revision.
A number of people made special efforts to see that these lessons were learned. The restoration, translation, and publication of the Gospel of Judas were paid for, in large measure, by the National Geographic Society. This was an extremely expensive project, and the society wanted the gospel valued accordingly—that is, as a bombshell. In the same month, April of 2006, that the society published the first English translation, it also aired a television special and brought out a book—Herbert Krosney’s “The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot”—proclaiming the document’s utterly revolutionary character. “It could create a crisis of faith,” one expert said on the TV show. In both that show and the Krosney book, a lot of sensationalist formulas—the voice from the beyond, the race against time, the some may call it treason—get a vigorous workout.
The trumpet calls were not confined to the mass media. Even the gospel’s translators may have felt the need to augment its revisionist credentials. When Jesus, in the gospel, tells the disciples that no mortal, or almost none, will be saved, one assumes that Judas will be an exception, and that’s what National Geographic’s translators said in the first English edition. But then a number of other scholars took a look at the Coptic text and objected that this was a misreading. The translators must have seen their point, because in the second edition of their version, published last year, the line has been changed—to mean the opposite. Jesus now says to Judas, “You will not ascend on high” to join those in Heaven. In other passages, too, the second edition tells a widely different story from the first.
In fairness, no expert can tell us exactly what the Coptic said. That is not just because of the terrible condition of the codex; even when the words are there, they are often enigmatic. But, as April DeConick, a professor of Biblical studies at Rice University, pointed out in the Times in 2007, there was a troubling consistency to a number of the mistranslations in the first edition: they improved Judas’s image. If the gospel was truly the earth-shaking document that the National Geographic Society claimed it was—if it promoted Judas from villain to hero—then to have him denied admission to Heaven would be decidedly awkward.
Other scholars have solved the nosalvation problem—Judas’s and ours—in other ways. In “Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity” (2007), Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, two prominent scholars of Gnosticism, refuse to believe that Judas is not going to be rewarded for his services to Christ. In a retranslation of the Judas gospel, by King, that they append to their book, Judas is told that he’s going to Heaven, and that’s that. There is not even a note to explain this departure from the revised National Geographic translation, which, as the authors acknowledge, they saw prior to its publication.
“The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed” (2006), by Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, came out too early to have to deal with the National Geographic team’s second thoughts, but Ehrman, in his writings on the gospel, obviously did worry about the statement that just about nobody would be saved. He claims it’s not true that Jesus said that; then he says it’s true; then he says it’s not true—all on a single page. But never mind, he concludes: “Some of us have a spark of the divine within, and when we die, we will burst forth from the prisons of our bodies and return to our heavenly home . . . to live glorious and exalted lives forever.” I like that quiet “some.” Maybe not most of us, maybe not you or me, but some of us.
Cumulatively, the commentaries on the Judas gospel are amazing in their insistence on its upbeat character. Jesus ridicules his disciples, denounces the world, and says that most of us will pass away into nothingness. Hearing this, Judas asks why he and his like were born—a good question. Jesus evades it. The fact that liberal theologians have managed to find hope in all this is an indication of how desperately, in the face of the evangelical movement, they are looking for some crack in the wall of doctrinaire Christianity—some area of surprise, uncertainty, that might then lead to thought.
The supposedly good new Judas of the Codex Tchacos of course reawakened interest in the bad old Judas of the Bible. Was he really a villain, or just a scapegoat? Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, has labored for years in the service of historical justice. With Sandra M. Gilbert, she wrote “The Madwoman in the Attic” (1979) and the three-volume “No Man’s Land” (1989-94), basic sourcebooks for those who, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, were trying to put together a history of women writers omitted from the Anglo-American canon. Since that time, she has written on the literature of the Holocaust and of American racism. Now she has produced “Judas: A Biography” (Norton; $27.95). Refreshingly, the book takes a cold view of the Gospel of Judas. Why all this fuss, Gubar asks, about a positive representation of Judas? There have been many such representations of him, she says, together with negative ones. That winding history is the subject of her book.
In the beginning, Judas had no defenders: as Gubar sees it, each successive Evangelist makes him look worse. By the time of John, in the final Gospel, he is called the Son of Perdition, the same words that Paul had used to describe the Antichrist. Also, John adds what will become a crucial detail: Judas’s professional connection with money. He keeps the “common purse”—the small fund that Jesus and the disciples used for their ministry—and he pilfers from it.
It wasn’t just Judas who was being condemned here. Jesus and all his disciples were Jewish, and they saw themselves as faithful Jews. If they disagreed with the priests of the Temple on certain matters—notably, their belief that Jesus was the Messiah—so did many other Jewish sects of the time. The Christian Jews held to their Jewishness for decades after Christ’s death. Then a change occurred. For a century after the Roman invasion of Judea, in 63 B.C., many Jews believed that this was only a temporary affront. They mounted rebellions against Roman rule, but when the fiercest of these, the Great Jewish Revolt (66-73 A.D.), resulted in a total rout of the Jews, and in the burning of Jerusalem’s Second Temple—which was not only the headquarters of the Jewish religion but also the seat of the Jews’ law courts and the repository of their literature—the people lost heart, and the followers of Christ began to feel that it would be prudent to make friends with the Romans, by disassociating themselves from the Jews. Furthermore, most of their converts were coming from among the Gentiles. Why confuse them by making them think they were joining a Jewish organization?
For these reasons, among others, a small, pious Jewish sect began to claim that it was itself a religion, distinct from—even opposite to—Judaism. Such a decision was, of course, accompanied by considerable anxiety. How to walk away from one’s origins, one’s mother? One way was to identify Judaism with a special, external evil, and this is where Judas came in. In early Christian documents, he is like something out of a monster movie.
Judas’s physical repulsiveness was generalized to the Jews—for who were they, as St. Jerome said, but “the sons of Judas”?—and so was the love of money that prompted him to betray Jesus. “Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade?” St. John Chrysostom preached.
In the Renaissance and after, Gubar believes, portrayals of Judas become more secular, and more nuanced. Some artists, she says, show Judas and Christ as friends, and more. To make this point, she focuses on two paintings of the Judas kiss, the action by which Judas identified Christ for the police. In Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ” (1602-03), she writes, the subject is not so much the betrayal of Christ by his disciple but the victimization of both by the state: “We see Jesus as well as Judas overwhelmed by repressive modes of social control that define both of them as delinquent, criminal, outcast, anathema to the morally bankrupt but highly effective policing authority of the civic state.” What is the state enforcing here?
She finds an answer in Lodovico Carracci’s “The Kiss of Judas” (1589-90), a lost painting that survives in a copy by a follower. She calls this canvas “possibly the most startling recreation of the Passion scene,” and it is indeed a surprise: a frankly erotic portrayal, with Jesus, in an off-the-shoulder robe, looking beautiful and dazed as Judas embraces him. The picture sends Gubar into an erotic reverie: “It is Judas’s right hand that gives the picture its extraordinary poignancy, for the fingers hold Jesus’ neck with delicacy, the brush of Judas’s fingertips barely touching Jesus’ skin. . . . I linger on the glamorous lassitude of the
ephebe or androgyne and his rapt mate.” Jesus and Judas are “enraptured
by distinct visions of excess,” she says. In other words, they are
having sexual fantasies about each other. Given this, the arrest becomes
an act of homophobia.
Judas’s physical repulsiveness was generalized to the Jews—for who were they, as St. Jerome said, but “the sons of Judas”?—and so was the love of money that prompted him to betray Jesus. “Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade?” St. John Chrysostom preached.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gubar writes, Judas was revised according to the leading political passion of the day. He becomes a revolutionary, bent on throwing the Romans out of Judea. This Judas believed that Jesus had the same intention; that’s why he joined up with him. Then he had to listen to a lot of sermons about love and turning the other cheek. In this reading, Judas betrays Jesus in order to force his hand, get him to launch the revolution. That scenario has been popular with twentieth-century filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, in “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel.
In the twentieth century, it does not need to be said, anti-Semitism achieved a climax. Some historians have claimed that the image of Judas in the European mind was central to the Nazis’ decision to exterminate the Jews—that he was, in Gubar’s words, the “muse of the Holocaust.” The Nazis did stress Judas’s Judaism, and tried to forget Christ’s. In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English writer who eventually married one of Wagner’s daughters and took German citizenship, published a book claiming that Jesus was not Jewish. Galilee, Chamberlain wrote, was inhabited in ancient times by heathen tribes, and Jesus was descended from them. German theologians took to making the same argument, and this made it easier to kill Jews.
Gubar believes that the image of Judas as a man who would do anything for money lurks behind Nazi propaganda films, above all the popular “Jew Süss” (1940), a tale of the eighteenth-century German Jewish banker Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who gained control of the finances of the duchy of Württemberg—the movie shows him leering, pop-eyed, as he pours coins out of a money bag—and was later hanged. This film was screened for the S.S. and for the citizens of occupied towns before special “actions” against the Jews.
By the same token, postwar recoil from anti-Semitism (and, no doubt, the widespread abandonment of faith in the twentieth century) was good for Judas’s reputation. Several distinguished writers—Kazantzakis, Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago—present him, or seem to, either as a hero, of the resistance-fighter sort, or as a suffering witness. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master & Margarita” (1966-67), written before the Second World War, Judas is just a young man, who, after receiving his pay from the Temple, goes off, in sandals so new that they squeak, to rendezvous with a woman. Meanwhile, Pontius Pilate, pained that he washed his hands of Jesus and wanting to punish someone for this, mobilizes his secret police, who get Judas’s lady to lead them to him. They butcher him. Significantly, this happens in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Judas turned Jesus over to the authorities. As the episode ends, Judas’s body lies forsaken in the dirt, but a ray of moonlight shines on one of the dearly bought sandals “so that each thong. . . was clearly visible. The garden thundered with nightingale song”—a scene both poignant and dry.
Yet it is Gubar who raises a crucial question unasked in most of the recent writings on Judas: Why shouldn’t we entertain the idea of an archetypal betrayer? In Gubar’s view, the original, Biblical Judas may have had a bad influence on our politics, but he does represent something true about our lives. He testifies, she says, to the “distressing nature of the human condition,” our “capacity for faltering and sinning” and then for despair and self-hatred—which, somehow, don’t prevent us from faltering and sinning again. Many of us, on many occasions, are not going to love one another. If this widely acknowledged fact is personified by one figure in the New Testament, why shouldn’t it be?
The alternative is to revise the Bible. Some religious scholars think that this is a good idea. Regina M. Schwartz, in her book “The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism” (1997), argues that the Old Testament’s endorsement of violence—the fruit, she says, of monotheism, with its intolerance—has been so destructive that we should delete it from the text and “produce an alternative Bible . . . embracing multiplicity instead of monotheism.”
All this, I believe, is a reaction to the rise of fundamentalism—the idea, Christian and otherwise, that every word of a religion’s founding document should be taken literally. This is a childish notion, and so is the belief that we can combat it by correcting our holy books. Those books, to begin with, are so old that we barely understand what their authors meant. Furthermore, because of their multiple authorship, they are always internally inconsistent. Finally, even the fundamentalists don’t really take them literally. People interpret, and cheat. The answer is not to fix the Bible but to fix ourselves. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/03/betrayal-2
Carravaggio: The Taking of Christ, 1602
Oriana:
The article on the Gospel of Judas has some astonishing parts — imagine Jesus laughing and saying to his disciples, None of you shall enter heaven; no mortal can enter heaven. When you have the time, I recommend the Bishop Spong video on Judas as a literary fiction fueled by the Judaic tradition, going back to Joseph being sold into slavery for 20 pieces of silver, and other pieces of treachery. The bible loves to echo past events, and the writers of the Gospels took great pains to find all the echoes they could. Too bad that the fiction of Judas inspired so much anti-Semitism.
Regardless, Judas will always haunt those of us who grew up hearing the story over and over. Can Judas be blamed, doing what was predestined? Was he a mere tool, and, given his love of the Master, himself the one betrayed even more than Christ?
But more than anything, it’s the manner of the betrayal that lingers in our psyche. A kiss is a token of affection, or, between lovers, of erotic love. To use it for the purpose of treason is indeed especially disturbing. And then there are those psychologists who say, “Only someone you love can betray you.”
Yes, there is a universal, archetypal aspect to the Kiss of Judas. Jung would probably say that it's the reason it speaks to us so powerfully.
We can’t resolve all this tension, so those of us who were brought up with the story end up “living the question,” as Rilke would put it.
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Those who are interested in Judas as a fictitious figure combining various Hebrew "traitor" narratives will enjoy this lecture by Bishop Spong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdDUkkX6PNA
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UNUSUAL GENES IN PEOPLE WHO LIVE TO BE 105 AND BEYOND
~ New research, published in the Aging, Geroscience and Longevity: A Special Issue of the journal eLife, examines the genomes of semi-supercentenarians (people who’ve lived to be 105 and beyond) and has discovered what may be the key to their unusually long lives: Their DNA is exceptionally good at repairing itself.
The researchers recruited 81 volunteers for genetic analysis from across Italy. Some participants were semi-supercentenarians and others were supercentenarians (people who are 110 years old and beyond). Researchers compared the genetic makeup of the older volunteers with those of 36 healthy people from the same areas who were 68 years old, plus or minus 5.9 years.
The study’s first author Paolo Garagnani of the University of Bologna explains:
“Aging is a common risk factor for several chronic diseases and conditions. We chose to study the genetics of a group of people who lived beyond 105 years old and compare them with a group of younger adults from the same area in Italy, as people in this younger age group tend to avoid many age-related diseases and therefore represent the best example of healthy aging.”
The authors of the study collected blood samples from both groups and conducted whole-genome sequencing. Additionally, they compared their findings with the conclusions drawn in previously published research describing the genetic makeup of 333 Italian people older than 100 years and 358 who were approximately 60 years old.
IT’S ALL IN THE GENES
In the semi-supercentenarians and some supercentenarians, the researchers discovered five unusual genetic changes that were often present in two genes, COA1 and STK17A, data that was consistent with the previous research.
Most intriguing, the genetic variations appear to be linked to increased activity of the STK17A gene in some tissues, a gene involved in three critical cell repair activities: managing cells’ response to DNA damage, prompting badly damaged cells to die off, and controlling the amount of dangerous reactive oxygen species in a cell. Cells unable to perform these types of repair activities are more likely to become cancerous.
The COA1 gene is involved with energy production by promoting communication between the cell nucleus and mitochondria. The researchers believe that the genetic variants they detected reduce the level of COA1 activity, which in turn reduces energy production as well as aging. (One of the leading theories of aging is that energy production produces reactive oxygen species that damage cells and promote aging.)
Finally, the researchers noted that the genetic variants they identified are also linked to increased expression of he BLVRA gene in some tissue. This gene is also involved in the elimination of dangerous reactive oxygen species.
Senior author of the study Claudio Franceschi of the University of Bologna concludes:
“Our results suggest that DNA repair mechanisms and a low burden of mutations in specific genes are two central mechanisms that have protected people who have reached extreme longevity from age-related diseases.” ~
https://bigthink.com/health/semi-supercentenarians-dna-repair/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1Ec4jXHkEpD8Vhw1kVEkMjlvczYMrteoseggDOkqMcI5ECqX28op-XsaU#Echobox=1645510016-1
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EPSTEIN-BARR VIRUS MAY BE THE LEADING CAUSE OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS
“The hypothesis that Epstein-Barr Virus (aka herpesvirus 4) causes MS has been investigated by our group and others for several years, but this is the first study providing compelling evidence of causality,” said Alberto Ascherio, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard Chan School and senior author of the study. “This is a big step because it suggests that most MS cases could be prevented by stopping EBV infection, and that targeting EBV could lead to the discovery of a cure for MS.”
MS is a chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system that attacks the myelin sheaths protecting neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Its cause is not known, yet one of the top suspects is EBV, a herpes virus that can cause infectious mononucleosis and establishes a latent, lifelong infection of the host. Establishing a causal relationship between the virus and the disease has been difficult because EBV infects approximately 95% of adults, MS is a relatively rare disease, and the onset of MS symptoms begins about 10 years after EBV infection. To determine the connection between EBV and MS, the researchers conducted a study among more than 10 million young adults on active duty in the U.S. military and identified 955 who were diagnosed with MS during their period of service.
The team analyzed serum samples taken biennially by the military and determined the soldiers’ EBV status at time of first sample and the relationship between EBV infection and MS onset during the period of active duty. In this cohort, the risk of MS increased 32-fold after infection with EBV but was unchanged after infection with other viruses. Serum levels of neurofilament light chain, a biomarker of the nerve degeneration typical in MS, increased only after EBV infection. The findings cannot be explained by any known risk factor for MS and suggest EBV as the leading cause of MS.
Ascherio says that the delay between EBV infection and the onset of MS may be partially due to the disease’s symptoms being undetected during the earliest stages and partially due to the evolving relationship between EBV and the host’s immune system, which is repeatedly stimulated whenever latent virus reactivates.
“Currently there is no way to effectively prevent or treat EBV infection, but an EBV vaccine or targeting the virus with EBV-specific antiviral drugs could ultimately prevent or cure MS,” said Ascherio.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/epstein-barr-virus-may-be-leading-cause-of-multiple-sclerosis/
Oriana:
The crucial points:
“The team found a much higher rate of EBV infection among people who developed MS than among controls. Out of the 801 MS cases, only one person tested negative for EBV in their last sample collected before MS onset. The team calculated that people infected with EBV were 32 times as likely to develop MS as uninfected people.
However, EBV in itself is not sufficient to trigger MS. Other unknown factors certainly play a role.”
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/study-suggests-epstein-barr-virus-may-cause-multiple-sclerosis
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RISK FACTORS FOR MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS
~ It's considered an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system attacks its own tissues. In the case of MS, this immune system malfunction destroys the fatty substance that coats and protects nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord (myelin).
Age: MS can occur at any age, but onset usually occurs around 20 and 40 years of age. However, younger and older people can be affected.
Sex: Women are more than two to three times as likely as men are to have relapsing-remitting MS.
Family history: If one of your parents or siblings has had MS, you are at higher risk of developing the disease.
Certain infections: A variety of viruses have been linked to MS, including Epstein-Barr, the virus that causes infectious mononucleosis.
Race: White people, particularly those of Northern European descent, are at highest risk of developing MS. People of Asian, African or Native American descent have the lowest risk.
Climate: MS is far more common in countries with temperate climates, including Canada, the northern United States, New Zealand, southeastern Australia and Europe.
Vitamin D: Having low levels of vitamin D and low exposure to sunlight is associated with a greater risk of MS.
Certain autoimmune diseases: You have a slightly higher risk of developing MS if you have other autoimmune disorders such as thyroid disease, pernicious anemia, psoriasis, type 1 diabetes or inflammatory bowel disease.
Smoking: Smokers who experience an initial event of symptoms that may signal MS are more likely than nonsmokers to develop a second event that confirms relapsing-remitting MS.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/multiple-sclerosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20350269
Oriana:
One interesting thing about MS is that pregnancy leads to a sharp drop in symptoms, or even total remission. This may be due to high levels of progesterone (and possibly also other hormones, like estriol, a weak estrogen) during pregnancy. Progesterone reduces inflammation and promotes myelination, and can be safely used by non-pregnant women (and men, since it's an androgen). It's sad (but not surprising) that progesterone has been neglected in favor of very expensive therapies.
Another possible treatment is intermittent fasting. We badly need human trials on the benefits of fasting for MS, and possibly for all autoimmune diseases (and we're discovering that practically all chronic diseases have a significant autoimmune element).
Mary:
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THE PROFOUND BENEFITS OF FASTING
promotes blood sugar control by decreasing insulin resistance
Decreasing insulin resistance can increase your body’s sensitivity to insulin, allowing it to transport glucose from your bloodstream to your cells more efficiently.
Coupled with the potential blood sugar-lowering effects of fasting, this could help keep your blood sugar steady, preventing spikes and crashes in your blood sugar levels.
Keep in mind though that some studies have found that fasting may impact blood sugar levels differently for men and women.
For instance, one small, three-week study showed that practicing alternate-day fasting impaired blood sugar control in women but had no effect in men
fights inflammation
Research shows that inflammation may be involved in the development of chronic conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.
Some studies have found that fasting can help decrease levels of inflammation and help promote better health.
One study in 50 healthy adults showed that intermittent fasting for one month significantly decreased levels of inflammatory markers.
Another small study discovered the same effect when people fasted for 12 hours a day for one month.
What’s more, one animal study found that following a very low-calorie diet to mimic the effects of fasting reduced levels of inflammation and was beneficial in the treatment of multiple sclerosis, a chronic inflammatory condition
improves blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels
Heart disease is considered the leading cause of death around the world, accounting for an estimated 31.5% of deaths globally.
Some research has found that incorporating fasting into your routine may be especially beneficial when it comes to heart health.
One small study revealed that eight weeks of alternate-day fasting reduced levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol and blood triglycerides by 25% and 32% respectively.
Another study in 110 obese adults showed that fasting for three weeks under medical supervision significantly decreased blood pressure, as well as levels of blood triglycerides, total cholesterol and “bad” LDL cholesterol.
may boost brain function and prevent neurodegenerative disorders
Though research is mostly limited to animal research, several studies have found that fasting could have a powerful effect on brain health.
One study in mice showed that practicing intermittent fasting for 11 months improved both brain function and brain structure.
Other animal studies have reported that fasting could protect brain health and increase the generation of nerve cells to help enhance cognitive function.
Because fasting may also help relieve inflammation, it could also aid in preventing neurodegenerative disorders.
In particular, studies in animals suggest that fasting may protect against and improve outcomes for conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s.
However, more studies are needed to evaluate the effects of fasting on brain function in humans.
aids weight loss by boosting metabolism
Some research has also found that short-term fasting may boost metabolism by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which could enhance weight loss.
In fact, one review showed that whole-day fasting could reduce body weight by up to 9% and significantly decrease body fat over 12–24 weeks.
Another review found that intermittent fasting over 3–12 weeks was as effective in inducing weight loss as continuous calorie restriction and decreased body weight and fat mass by up to 8% and 16% respectively.
In addition, fasting was found to be more effective than calorie restriction at increasing fat loss while simultaneously preserving muscle tissue.
increases growth hormone secretion
Several studies have found that fasting could naturally increase HGH levels.
One study in 11 healthy adults showed that fasting for 24 hours significantly increased levels of HGH.
Another small study in nine men found that fasting for just two days led to a 5-fold increase in the HGH production rate.
Plus, fasting may help maintain steady blood sugar and insulin levels throughout the day, which may further optimize levels of HGH, as some research has found that sustaining increased levels of insulin may reduce HGH levels.
could extend longevity
Several animal studies have found promising results on the potential lifespan-extending effects of fasting.
In one study, rats that fasted every other day experienced a delayed rate of aging and lived 83% longer than rats that didn’t fast.
Other animal studies have had similar findings, reporting that fasting could be effective in increasing longevity and survival rates.
However, current research is still limited to animal studies. Further studies are needed to understand how fasting may impact longevity and aging in humans.
may aid in cancer prevention and increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy
Animal and test-tube studies indicate that fasting may benefit the treatment and prevention of cancer.
In fact, one rat study found that alternate-day fasting helped block tumor formation.
Similarly, a test-tube study showed that exposing cancer cells to several cycles of fasting was as effective as chemotherapy in delaying tumor growth and increased the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs on cancer formation.
Unfortunately, most research is limited to the effects of fasting on cancer formation in animals and cells.
Despite these promising findings, additional studies are needed to look at how fasting may influence cancer development and treatment in humans.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fasting-benefits
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from another source:
~ Given that fasting is a potential remedy for longevity, it has been the subject of many studies. The American Heart Association has stated that regular fasting is associated with lower rates of heart failure and improved metabolism. Thus, fasting could be the key to a long, healthy life. Many studies show that those who fast routinely have an almost 45 percent lower mortality rate compared to those who don’t fast during the follow-up period.
It has been suggested that fasting, if done right, can have the following health benefits:
Decreased resting heart rate (HR)
Decreased blood pressure (BP)
Improvements in pumping action of the heart
Lowered levels of LDL or bad cholesterol
Reduced level of fasting insulin
Increased insulin sensitivity
Fasting for a short time can produce ketosis, which helps weight loss
Reduced production of inflammatory substances (such as HOMA-IR and C-reactive protein) in the body
Ketosis during fasting triggers several responses, including decreased inflammation, improved blood sugar regulation and better response to physical stress
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Fasting can slow down aging, prevent the development of diabetes, thyroid disorders, hypertension and heart disease and increase the chances of a long and healthy life. It also promotes weight loss. A healthy body weight automatically translates to healthier joints and a great body image.
https://www.medicinenet.com/what_are_the_health_benefits_of_fasting/article.htm
Oriana:
I’m thrilled to learn that fasting can lower heart rate and blood pressure.
And, speaking from personal experience, I am happily surprised how easy it is to skip breakfast as part of intermittent fasting. (Personally, I just eat a very tiny breakfast.)
Be sure to sip water while fasting. “Dry fasting” may lead to dangerous dehydration. Dark urine indicates dehydration.
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ending on beauty:
WINTER TREES
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
~ William Carlos Williams
photo: Ed Byrne
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