ISIS AND APOCALYPSE; TERRORISM AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; PACIFISM WITHIN ISLAM

Paris will never be taken from us.

*

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole
world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere


~ Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet (b. 1988)


THE END-TIMES BELIEFS OF ISIS

“The armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria . . . After its battle in Dabiq, the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.”

Much of what [ISIS] does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.

To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)

But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

According to Bernard Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad’s earliest conquests were not tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the narrations of the Prophet’s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent time. In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.

Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”

If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”

“Enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.”

The Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world. McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was being led by millenarians who were “talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions” based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”

For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need. Parts of the predictions are based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.

“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted. “You could imagine large battles taking place there.” The Islamic State’s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state’s magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.” A recent propaganda video shows clips from Hollywood war movies set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient weapons.

Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. “Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.

The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the Americans will do nicely.

After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus. An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.

One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.

And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another botched job?

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity to its people.

Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: “No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.”

Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.

Within the narrow bounds of its theology, the Islamic State hums with energy, even creativity. Outside those bounds, it could hardly be more arid and silent: a vision of life as obedience, order, and destiny. [We should not underrate] the religious or intellectual appeal of ISIS. That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the end of time."

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/



Why Paris again? Because, apart from the fact of there existing a number of ISIS sleeper cells already firmly in place there, it is the city of lights, dedicated to the love of life like no other place on Earth — the ultimate symbol of the human love of life — and as such, it is especially antithetical to the ideology of anger and darkness premised on the love of death. ~ Mikhail Iossel

 TERRORISM IS A LARGE-SCALE VERSION OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE


Dr. Tawfik Hamid, author of INSIDE JIHAD, knows of  young terrorists' dreams because he dreamed this way himself during his years of terrorist training.

Terrorism is a large-scale version of domestic violence. Terrorists treat populations the way domestic abusers treat their spouses and/or children. The abuser mentality in both cases makes domination a life goal.

ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haran and Hamas and other devotees of radical Islam dedicate their lives to  Jihad, that is, to establishment of domination by Islam over all the world.

Dictators bully the citizens of their country.

Batterers bully their spouse and children.

Bullies on the playground are the school-age precursors of the same mentality.

Dictators, terrorists, domestic abusers and playground bullies all

    Focus on controlling others

    Are preoccupied with dominance

    Regard their way as right and their target victim's differing ways as wrong

    Begin with verbal abuse: harsh criticism, blame, baseless accusations, name-calling

    Gradually escalate to physical violence

    Can escalate to the point of murder

    See their violence as justifiable and as a legitimate way to deal with differences

    Show little to no insight into what is problematic in their behaviors or motivations

    Rarely accept responsibility for their inappropriate behavior. For instance, their anger is always the other's fault: "I only did it because she/they…"

    Tend toward paranoia, inappropriately distrusting others who are different, blaming their victims, and seeking scapegoats to blame for their own inadequacies.

    Use projection, accusing those they attack for what they themselves in fact do.

The good news is that psychologists increasingly understand how to halt and even how to prevent domestic abuse. Now is the time to begin applying these lessons to halting terrorism.

First, strong police response and legal action keep domestic abusers in check. Police and military surveillance and reprisals will continue to be essential elements to combating Islamic terrorism.

Second, to prevent the development of abuse by parents/spouses in homes, by dictators in countries, and by terrorism internationally, families need skill training. Terrorists at all three levels have been shown to have serious deficits in skills for functioning as cooperative partners. When they want something they become violent in part because they have no idea of how to negotiate collaboratively or how to find win-win solutions. They know only domination or submission.

In addition, when potential victims are clear that bullying in all its forms is unacceptable, and especially when the surrounding culture agrees as well that abuse is unacceptable, victims become confident, which empowers them to more effectively fend off bullies.

1. PARENTING EDUCATION. Children who were abused are at increased risk for becoming abusers themselves. Abusing children teaches children that violence is normal, that dominance and submission are what people do. If globally, all parents were taught skills for positive, emotionally healthy parenting, the world would change. The violence of dictators and terrorism would no longer be tolerated.

2. PARTNERING EDUCATION. Many domestic abusers grew up in families in which parents modeled violence. Parents fought, or one parent verbally and physically beat up on the other. The victim stayed in the relationship instead of leaving or bringing in policing authorities. Children therefore grow up thinking that violence is normal. They also grew up lacking modeling of healthy communication in relationships. 

Abuse is learned at home.

In cultures and countries that produce terrorists. e.g., the Palestinian territories, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, rates of domestic abuse are very high.  Because the culture condones violence against women and children, laws against domestic and child abuse are non-existent.  When a culture accepts violence as normal, families regard violence as normal, as an acceptable way to interact.

It is no wonder then that when some of these young men hear about Jihadists like those in ISIS, they regard beheaders, suicide bombers and men who enter a [public buiding] and start shooting people as superheroes.

In too many parts of the world, violence in the name of Jihad is being taught in religious schools and preached from mosques.

Countries that condone domestic violence and spawn terrorism also tend to be governed by dictatorships. The belief that dominating others via violence is a legitimate way to act pervades homes, the religious arena, and the behaviors of governments toward both their citizens and toward neighboring countries.

Peace also is learned at home.

In families where parenting and partner are cooperative, children grow up expecting relationships to be cooperative, at home at work and in their country. They also learn via parental modeling the skills the respectful talking and responsive listening skills that enable people  to function collaboratively.

For people who grew up in homes where collaborative problem-solving skills were not modeled, resources like marriage self-help learning books and programs that tutor how to fix a relationship are increasingly accessible. These kinds of books and programs need to be translated and disseminated in areas of the Islamic world that currently are spawning Jihadist violence.  Such a project is currently under way in Saudi Arabia, where my book on collaborative skills, Power of Two, is being translated into Arabic with added comments from the Qoran that legitimize it for Sharia observant readers.

An imam in a local Denver mosque who is aware of the high rates of domestic abuse and low rates of cooperative marriage relationship skills in his immigrant following has asked me personally for help teaching the couples in his mosque these skills. This trend also is a positive one.

Knowledgable Muslims abroad such as therapists and community leaders I have worked with from Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia similarly have told me of the dire needs of many their people to learn skills that would be antidotes to domestic violence.  While these countries all have many families that function on the very highest level, a too-significant proportion of their populations desperately need collaborative marriage and parenting education.

Teaching people worldwide the skills for healthy collaborative interacting would cost next to nothing in this internet era. Our homeland security budget would barely grow by a blip if in addition to trying to capture and punish individual terrorists or use our military to slow the spread of ISIS, we focused on how to disseminate information about collaboration and cooperative ways of resolving differences.

The time has come to confront terrorism at its roots by addressing and changing the mentality of domination and violence that for too long has provided fertile ground for the spread of domestic violence, tyrannical governments, and terrorism.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/resolution-not-conflict/201109/what-domestic-batterers-can-teach-us-about-terrorism

Oriana: Years ago I read elsewhere about the high rates of domestic abuse in many Islamic countries, but of course it was deemed politically incorrect and ignored.


IS THERE A PACIFIST MOVEMENT WITHIN ISLAM?
ISIS IS GROUNDED IN END-TIMES THEOLOGY

“Islam is a religion that preaches peace,” U.S. President Barack Obama told CBS last September, and likewise President George W. Bush’s mosque speech after 9-11 said “Islam is peace.” Yet there’s continual violence committed in the name of Islam. Analysts are abuzz over a major article in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood, who contends the bloodthirsty Islamic State Caliphate is thoroughly grounded in end-times theology and “governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers.” Wood cites especially the research of Princeton University’s Bernard Haykel.

“Jihad” is a duty of all believers but the term means simply “effort” or “struggle” in the faith. Teachers have called spiritual exertion the “greater jihad” and violent struggle, when necessary, the “lesser jihad.” As with Christianity’s “just war” concept, Muslim authorities have said the holy Quran allows warfare to defend Islam and its followers but forbids wars of aggression: “Fight for the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not be aggressive. Surely Allah does not like the aggressors. . . Drive them out from wherever they drove you out” (2:190-191). Of course, adherents of both religions haven’t necessarily honored such niceties.

TEACHINGS ON NOT HARMING NON-COMBATANTS

Mainstream imams cite this scripture on treatment of civilians: “Allah does not forbid you, regarding those who did not fight you and did not drive you out of your homes, to be generous to them and deal with them justly” (60:8). And they say this verse condemns forced conversions: “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256). The authorities have said codified teachings of Muhammad (Hadith) said when conflict was justifiable protection was required for innocent non-combatants, the aged, children, women, Christian monks, people attending worship, and prisoners of war.

THE RISE OF VIOLENT ISLAMISM

Amid the general mayhem now afflicting the Muslim world, that venerable understanding of Islam is defied by a rising movement that’s attractive to a subset of young Muslims. It claims divine sanction to embrace thievery, torture, mutilation, terrorism, suicide bombing, kidnapping for ransom, sexual slavery, gruesome executions without trial, killing of envoys and guest aid workers, slaughter of worshippers and Jews and Christians, and of fellow Muslims who dissent from those who hold power or belong to rival factions.
In summary, the heritage now under assault does accept violence and warfare as morally justified in some circumstances, but can favor “peace” in the sense of negotiations between nations and social harmony within nations.

UNLIKE THE BUDDHA AND JESUS, MUHAMMAD WAS A MILITARY COMMANDER AND POLITICAL RULER, AND ARMED STRUGGLE HAS BEEN CONTINUAL THROUGH MUSLIM HISTORY.

Some religious believers say “peace” means God mandates strict non-violence or pacifism. Islam has a far weaker pacifist strain than other world religions, according to such scholars as Mark Juergensmeyer. Unlike the Buddha, Jesus, and other spiritual founders, Muhammad was a military commander and political ruler, and armed struggle has been continual through Muslim history. Since Islam recognizes no equivalent of “church-state separation,” military politics is bound up with religion and vice versa.

ISLAMIC PACIFIST MOVEMENT

Some individuals do reject violence in all circumstances. The U.S. has a Muslim Peace Fellowship, and Muslim-American attorney Arsalan Iftikhar wrote a book on “Islamic Pacifism.” A non-Muslim sociologist, New Zealand’s Malcolm Brown, thinks some Quran and Hadith texts “can reasonably be interpreted in pacifist terms.” Followers of mystical Sufi orders emphasize spiritual “jihad” to the near exclusion of war making. In the past Islam’s Shia branch tended toward military quiescence while awaiting the return of the Hidden Imam, but Iran’s violent Khomeini revolution pretty much extinguished that belief.

For pacifists, the good news is there’s one distinct branch of Islam that fully spurns violence. The bad news is that it’s branded heretical by mainstream Islam — not over pacifism but other problems. We’re talking about the Ahmadiyya community, headquartered in London. The small U.S. group has offices in Silver Spring, Maryland. This group claims some 15,000 mosques worldwide, and Oxford’s “World Christian Encyclopedia” counts 9.7 million adherents among the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. However, the Ahmadis are very evangelistic and may be Islam’s fastest-growing faction. The largest concentration is in Pakistan, which brands it non-Muslim and imposes persecution.

The major issue is that founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) is believed to be the end-times Messiah or Mahdi or Imam of the Age mentioned by Muhammad, and the metaphorical Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Since his death, a succession of Caliphs have ruled the movement.

In a 1900 booklet Ahmad declared the following. Muhammad “never took up the sword against anyone except against those who first resorted to it.” The military retaliation of those days “was never meant to be a general rule” and “in this age the circumstances for that command do not exist.” Also, Muhammad said the coming Messiah “will put an end to wars” and Ahmad is that Messiah. “Now that the Promised Messiah has come it is the duty of every Muslim to abstain from jihad with the sword.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/2015/11/is-islam-a-religion-of-peace-2/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Pan+Patheos+111315+%281%29&utm_content&spMailingID=50016538&spUserID=MTEwMzMwODA5NzI1S0&spJobID=801942328&spReportId=ODAxOTQyMzI4S0


 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RADICALIZATION AND HOW TO FIGHT IT

"Sharing ideas with a small, tight-knit group of sympathizers leads to radicalization. This pattern can be broken only by confronting people with diverse opinions and unpleasant facts. This “war” of information cannot be won in Syria, but in the homes, mosques, schools, community centers, and sports-clubs in the US, Canada, Britain, France, and the rest of Europe.

First, during group discussion social comparisons are made. People find out what the opinions are of the other group members. And if it appears that the majority of people with whom you communicate, personally or via social media, is willing to take some risk - for example, travel to Syria - then you want to outdo them. The result is that you are becoming a little more extreme after each chat. A second possibility is that by discussing your dilemma with other people – who tend to be sympathizers - you are more likely to hear more arguments in favor than against. So after interactions with likeminded people a person gets increasingly convinced about the correctness of their risky choice. Other research shows that people indeed take more notice of the opinions of their peers. And the more a person identifies with their group the more prone they are to social influence. It is perhaps not surprising that much Muslim radicalization takes place in prisons where people are exposed to extreme views and deviant positions are absent. Thus the prison is a breeding ground for radicalization.

What can we do against radicalization? And what would an anti-radicalization program look like? The anti-terror coordinator of Europe, Gilles de Kerckhove, recently argued for a counteroffensive against the propaganda of IS. That‘s an excellent initiative because it is important that potential jihadists are confronted with other, more moderate opinions than what they get now through Facebook or Twitter. It is crucial to block this propaganda material from the internet. Also, it seems sensible to give a public platform to young Muslim sympathizers who have good reasons not to join IS. Better still: Why don’t we hear from former Jihadists who returned from the Middle East disappointedly and with much regret?

It might further help to be exposed to diverse opinions, because the more diverse a group is the less it is likely to polarize. When American students discussed their dilemma, first alone and then in a group, they radicalized. But when they discussed the same dilemma with a mix of American and Chinese students they became more cautious -- that's called a "cautious shift" in the decision-making literature.

Governments must ensure that potential Jihadists are confronted with the views of moderate Muslims such imams or opinion leaders from politics, sports, or music. If someone close to you radicalizes, don’t ignore it but start a discussion and ask uncomfortable questions.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/naturally-selected/201502/the-social-psychology-radicalization-and-extremism?collection=1082225
 

Haiku for Paris 

I can't imagine
a God who wants me
to kill you.

~ John Guzlowski

 
detoxifying with beauty

 Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Bonito, 1941

MILOSZ: DREAMS OF SLAVES; MAKE THEM FALL IN LOVE BY TAKING, NOT GIVING

Van Gogh, Lilac Bush, Saint-Rémy, 1889

EVERY SPRING I REMEMBERED LILACS

sweet sticky purple mouths
kissing me back after rain —
not the barren peach trees
fevering Los Angeles. I thought

I should have never left
that pavement ticking with anger,
those clouds like billowing archangels.
I should have married the green-eyed

motorcycle rider I met
in Mazurian woods —
we were married by the wild swans
that swooshed over our heads —

I should have had my Janusz and Danuta,
taught them the leafy legends of their names.
Each morning I’d open the balcony,
gauze curtain like a shining wind.

I tried to check myself, imagining
my husband would have an affair
with a woman dentist, a neighbor
watch soccer full-blast on TV —

and I, like a character in Chekhov,
above a river of lilacs,
would wander through atlases and whisper
the ecstasy of foreign vowels.

But the long street called Childhood
is not on any city map. And yet
every spring I remember lilacs,
chill droplets of rain I’d kiss

from the brief, boundless blossoms —
my heart calm before sorrow,
my face pressed into flowers,
mouth grazing clusters of moist stars.


~ Oriana © 2015

It’s likely that my decision not to have a child had its roots at least in part in my having to come to America at 17, alone. This is widely seen as a leap of courage, and I have to point out that to a great extent it was a mix of ignorance and unusual circumstances. But there is no denying: it was a leap. Yes, into the unknown.

And a lesson that such a leap can be a very mixed experience, not excluding the disastrous aspects.

Once you known that leaping into the great unknown is not some wonderful flight into fascinating adventure with no price attached. Why, you simply grow wings on the way, some optimist has suggested — who I supposed has never plunged, Icarus-like, into the unforgiving waves.

In fact we have no news from those who haven’t survived their leap. As for those who survived badly bruised and injured for life — they quickly learn that the world isn’t all that interested in stories that can’t be clearly labeled as having, say, “a hero’s journey with a happy ending.” Life is not easy so we all need  hope and inspiration, the young need encouragement — you learn to keep things to yourself.

In addition, I had to learn not to speculate too much about the life that would have been mine if I’d stayed. Once I had the thought, “I would have had a ball studying at the University of Warsaw,” there was a disaster in the making. It became very easy to develop the fantasy further — the fantasy that made my actual life look like a tragedy.

And right away I tried to “correct” the idyllic view. Of course there would have been suffering — it doesn’t take reaching any mythical “age of wisdom” to realize that. Suffering happens whether or not you leap. But if you leap, the suffering can be extreme.

That’s how I lost my appetite for leaping. Small leaps, mini-leaps, yes. Another huge leap, no.

Think of this before you judge anyone for not leaping. There are reasons, even if the world always praises the Yes rather than the No. That No may have excellent reasons. Besides, it’s a yes to something else.

That, and you simply can’t have everything. 

 

 Thank you for not leaping. 

BEN FRANKLIN, MILOSZ, AND “THE ACTS OF GOD”
From a video on the life of Ben Franklin: when he was growing up in Puritan New England, when a house caught fire after being struck by lightning, the firefighters just let it burn. They only secured the houses around it. Getting struck by lightning by regarded as divine punishment, and it would be a sin to put out the fire, the ministers preached. And they had great power, until Ben invented the lightning rod -- which caught on with (ahem) lightning speed. So there we have Milosz's observation that it's technology that's the greatest force for secularization — gaining control over the "acts of god."


MAKE THEM FALL IN LOVE BY TAKING RATHER THAN GIVING (why nice people don’t get the love they try to “earn”)

“[There is] a group of people I call Nice Guys and Gals. These people do everything for others. They do everything they believe they are "supposed" to do for their lovers. Yet, time and time again, their partners abandon them, overlook them, mistreat them, and generally fail to love them back.

Nice guys and gals are completely confused by these outcomes. They cannot understand how they can, at least theoretically, do everything right — yet have the situation turn out so wrong. They cannot understand why their good behavior doesn't lead to love and respect. After all, we're all "told" that is how it is supposed to work. Bring someone flowers or cook them dinner and they love you forever... Not quite!

1) Nice People Do Not Make Their Partners Invest
When we do nice things for others, we invest in them and the relationship. Those investments of time, effort, and money tend to build up over time. Those investments also make us feel that our date or mate is valuable, that we love them, and we are committed to that relationship. This is called the principle of "sunk costs". Doing favors for others and treating them well, leads us to value and love them.

Nice folks are on the losing end of this deal. They do all of the "doing". They are the ones waiting on their partner, doing good deeds, buying gifts, paying for meals, etc. As a result, they have a lot of love (sunk costs) for their date or mate. But, their partner has not invested. They have not given a thing. So, they are not at all in love or committed.

Contrast this with the demanding bad boy or diva... They are always making demands and requests of a partner. They require being pampered, waited on, and appeased. They make their partners INVEST. So, their partners have a ton of sunk costs. Thus, their partners fall in love with them and feel committed.

Moral of the story—don't be "nice" and do everything. Make your partner invest in you and the relationship too. Remember, when they DO FOR YOU, is when they fall in love. Make them fall in love with you by TAKING, not giving.

2) Nice People Reward Bad Behavior
People learn from the consequences of their behavior. When they perform a behavior and are rewarded, they tend to do the same thing again. In contrast, when they perform a behavior and are punished, they tend to shy away from that behavior in the future. Pretty simple...

Well, nice people tend to treat their dates and mates very well. All the time. EVEN, when they don't deserve it. No matter how a partner is treating them, the nice person will continue to treat them well.

The nice person often "thinks" that such good treatment will one day be recognized. That it will snap the partner out of their bad behavior. Turn the other cheek and all that. But, they fail to recognize what they are TEACHING their partner by treating them well under all conditions.

Not-so-nice people have better boundaries. They only reward partners when they earn those rewards. They also ignore partners when they are disrespectful or bad. This teaches dates or mates what they will and will not tolerate. It lets them know what is expected of them.

As a result, nice people get walked all over. By being nice all the time, they actually encourage others to treat them badly. They reward those who mistreat them and make the behavior more likely in the future. If they were selective in their rewards—and occasionally withholding—they would receive better treatment in return. They would also be more respected by others.

3) Nice People Are Too Available

We all have mental shortcuts that help in our decision-making. One of these shortcuts is the rule of scarcity. Generally, we believe whatever is scarce, or requires work to obtain, is valuable. Whatever is easy to get, or common, is probably cheap. While this is not always true, it is true enough of the time that it becomes a common, unconscious assumption. It is applied to everything ... even people.

Unfortunately for nice people, they are anything but scarce. They are eager to please. They are always agreeable to dropping their life and rushing over to their date or mate. They make time, dote, acquiesce, and try to be as convenient and easy as possible.

Their hope is that this behavior will lead to gratitude and respect. By making themselves available to a partner and removing inconveniences, they hope to make love easier. Instead, however, they come off as needy, get taken for granted, and become overlooked. In other words, they are the opposite of scarce and hard to earn. So, all of the available behavior actually makes them seem low value and worthless.

The bad boy or diva, in contrast, is always "hard to get". They are never available, always canceling plans, and make lovers do things their way. They do nothing but neglect and inconvenience their lovers. Yet, their lovers find them alluring, tempting, and attractive (much to the confusion of "nice" folks).

Nevertheless, the bad boys and divas are scarce. That scarcity makes them SEEM valuable. Their unavailability and breaking plans makes them look confident and important. Making others work to earn their time gives the illusion that their time is valuable. Having to drop everything to steal a moment with them makes others appreciate the time they are "given". It is the illusion of scarcity.

Given that, nice people would do well to inconvenience their lovers once in a while. They would benefit from being scarce. They would look a little more valuable if they didn't drop everything to be at their lover's beck-and-call. If they were a little harder to get, their lovers would find them more enticing.

Does that mean you have to be a jerk or diva to find love? No. But, it does mean that you need to be selective with your time, attention, and niceness. It means you cannot be eager to please, needy, overly-available, or endlessly nice. To create a loving, respectful, and appreciative relationship, you have to know the rules of the game...and play by them.

So, learn from the jerks and divas—but don't emulate them completely. Simply get your partners to invest in you back, as you invest in them. Further, only reward them when they deserve it and ignore them when they don't. Also, make them accommodate you too and don't let your life revolve around them. This will show them that you are a valuable and attractive person with some self-respect. Then, you can still be a decent person and find love...without being so nice others walk all over you.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-attraction-doctor/201211/why-nice-guys-and-gals-finish-last-in-love
 
Ben Franklin knew you need to make people give to you

MILOSZ: HORDES OF PROSTITUTES, COMPENSATORY DREAMS OF SLAVES
Milosz: “The division into soul and body was only one of many attempts at naming this condition that eludes naming [the “physiological-spiritual duality of man”]. This is where all the treatises on ars moriendi belong, on taking leave of the body and finding a haven in the soul, the dance of skeletons, the charnel houses of white bones that used to be one of the attractions of city strolls in Paris, and certainly the brothels on the ground floor of the Sorbonne’s theological schools. Eros and Thanatos: lovely words, but their association simply proves that they both signified something terrifyingly elemental — birth and death.

The question remains: To what extent can one think completely nakedly, that is, rejecting all imagination higher than physiology? One should ask the prostitutes about this, since they have a great fund of knowledge about the comedy and misery of the simplest instincts, but that would be fruitless since in general they are people entangled in their own ambitions and dreams and often sentimental. Simone Weil considered their profession the equivalent of slavery and attributed it solely to poverty, which would certainly have fit London in 1862 as described by Dostoyevski: hordes of prostitutes, many of them minors, the cult of Baal on who altar England was sacrificing her lower classes. Simone Weil’s opinions, exaggerated though they are, still hit the mark when she speaks of the compensatory dreams that are peculiar to slaves; the slave’s incessant search for imaginary solace shields him from reality.

One way or another, consciousness of the body constructs its own fata morgana, and it is impossible to descend to an animal level. Nor is it possible to remain for long in the spiritual realm; the desire to spoil sublimity, to stick out one’s tongue, has belonged to literature for a long time. My favorite scene from Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”: during a theological dispute at the dinner table, a hot potato drops into someone’s codpiece.” ~ “A Year of the Hunter”

So perhaps Dostoyevski, always criticized for his supposedly sentimentalized prostitutes who believed in the power of love, was in fact being realistic?

Later Milosz also mentions the compensatory dreams of the terminally ill, and while he doesn’t condemn those who delude themselves with dreams, he’s not indulgent toward them either. I think that the brain deals with hardship in certain automatic ways not under our control, and beautiful fantasies, images of a different life, may be a kind of poetry that decides between life and despair.

I don’t disparage the body; I don’t believe in body/mind dualism, and the idea of a soul independent of the body, wandering somewhere on its own soul feet or wings, belongs back in the era of tribal shamans (interesting that some cultures did not have the concept of a soul except as breath, e.g. ancient Israel). But the source of my survival is the life of the mind, including the delight in beauty. That nourishment is as important to me as food.

What is mind, or consciousness? It’s not a thing — it’s an emergent process that depends on brain function. At this point, we are not able to go further, and saying that neurons fire together in certain brain regions doesn’t explain very much. But it’s enough to erase the idea of a soul as a thing that inhabits the body and then goes off somewhere after the body is gone. It is high time to  say goodbye to that wishful thinking. But it’s still possible to take solace in using one’s mind, even if the process dies as the brain dies — it ceases as the flame ceases when the fuel is exhausted. The flame doesn’t “go” anywhere — it just ceases. But before then . . . it gives a lovely light.

Image: an example of "skeleton art" that Milosz mentions: Ars bene moriendi, France, 1480


WILLIAM MORRIS: THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEA OF ENJOYING YOUR WORK AND BUYING BEAUTIFUL THINGS EVEN IF THEY ARE EXPENSIVE
“Until we have better collective taste, we will struggle to have a better economy and society.”

“The 19th-century designer, poet and entrepreneur William Morris is one of the best guides we have to the modern economy – despite the fact that he died in 1896 while Queen Victoria was still on the throne.

Morris was the first person to understand two issues which have become decisive for our times. Firstly: the role of pleasure in work. And, secondly: the nature of consumer demand. The preferences of consumers – what we collectively appreciate and covet and are willing to pay for – are crucial drivers of the economy and hence of the kind of society we end up living in. Until we have better collective taste, we will struggle to have a better economy and society. It’s a huge idea.

The fact that he was always reasonably well-off did not blunt his empathy for financial hardship. Personally and politically Morris was an instinctively warm and generous man. But it did bring a useful perspective: he was acutely aware that there are some key problems which are not caused by shortage of money and which more money won’t solve. So he could never be persuaded that financial growth in and of itself could be the sure sign of improvement, whether in an individual or a national life.

He saw himself as an artist and a poet. He was simply interested in making things for his own satisfaction and maybe for the enjoyment of a few friends. He was not seeking to sell his paintings or be paid for writing poems. Morris’s friends used to call him ‘Topsy’ – because of his volatile, occasionally fiery, temper.

The experience of building and fitting out his house taught Morris his first big lesson about the economy. It would have been simpler (and maybe cheaper) to have ordered everything from a factory outlet. But Morris wasn’t trying to find the quickest or simplest way to set up home. He wanted to find the way that would give him – and everyone involved in the project – maximum satisfaction. And it fired Morris with an enthusiasm for the medieval idea of craft. The worker would develop sensitivity and skill and enjoy the labour. It wasn’t mechanical or humiliating.

He spotted that craft offers important clues to what we actually want from work. We want to know we’ve done something good with the day. That our efforts have counted towards tangible outcomes that we actually see and feel are worthwhile. And Morris was already noticing that when people really like their work, the issue of exactly how much you get paid becomes less critical. (Though Morris always believed, in addition, that people deserved honorable pay for honest work.) The point is you can absolutely say you are not doing it purely for the money.

In 1861 – still in his mid twenties – Morris started a decorative arts business. [He and his partners] set up a factory making wallpaper, chairs, curtains and tables. They were very proud not only of the elegant designs but of the quality of the workmanship that went into all their products. They believed that factories should be attractive places, and they were keen for clients and others to come and take a tour and see for themselves the healthy pleasant environment in which the goods were produced.

The factories and machines of the Industrial Revolution had brought mass production. Prices were lower, but there was a loss of quality and a dependence on routine, deadening labor in depressing circumstances. It can seem as if it is inevitable that the low price must triumph. Surely, the logic of economics dictates that the lower price will necessarily win. Or does it?

For Morris the key factor is, therefore, whether customers are willing to pay the just price. If they are, then work can be honorable. If they are not, then work is necessarily going to be – on the whole – degrading and miserable.

So, Morris concluded that the lynchpin of a good economy is the education of the consumer. We collectively need to get clearer about what we really want in our lives and why, and how much certain things are worth to us (and therefore how much we are prepared to pay for them).

An important clue to good consumption, Morris insisted, is that you ‘should have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’. This is a crucial attitude.

Morris wished for people to see their purchases as investments and buy items sparingly. He would have preferred for someone to spend £1000 on an intricate, hand-made dining set that would last for decades and grow to become a family heirloom, than for each generation to buy its own cheap alternative.

For Morris himself, the business did not work out terribly well. There was healthy demand from the well-to-do. The Morris lines of furniture, wallpaper, fabrics and lamps continued to sell for many years. But he didn’t manage to break into the wider, bigger markets that he aspired to. The point wasn’t to provide more elegance and luxury for the rich. The big idea was to bring solid, well-designed, finely produced articles to the mass consumer. Morris wanted to transform the ordinary – not the elite – experience of buying things.

One of his last creations was a utopian story called News from Nowhere. In it he imagines how, ideally, a society would develop. He learns a lot from Marxism: this is a society with strong social bonds, in which the profit motive is not dominant. But he pays equal attention to the beauty of life: the expansive woodlands, the lovely buildings, the kinds of clothes people wear, the quality of the furniture, the charm of the gardens.

Morris directs our attention to a set of centrally important tests that a good economy should pass.”

How much do people enjoy working?

Does everyone live within walking distance of woods and meadows?

How healthy is the average diet?

How long are consumer goods expected to last?

Are the cities beautiful (generally, not just in a few privileged parts)?

The economy can (with fatal ease) feel as if it is governed by abstract, complex laws concerning discounted cash flows and money supply. His point is that, nevertheless, the economy is intimately tethered to our preferences and choices. And that these are open to transformation. It may not be necessary (as Marx thought) to bring factories and banks and all the corporations into public ownership; and it may not be necessary (as Milton Friedman and others claimed) to wind back government impact on markets. The true task in creating a good economy, Morris shows us, lies much closer to home.

http://thephilosophersmail.com/capitalism/the-great-philosophers-william-morris/

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. ~ Henry David Thoreau

THE BENEFITS OF JUST ONE EXTRA HOUR OF SLEEP
“A small experiment conducted by curious BBC journalists divided a small pool of volunteers into two groups. For a week, one group slept for six and a half hours a night while the other slept for seven and a half. During the second week, the two groups swapped, and researchers administered a number of blood tests and cognitive tasks. The blood tests revealed that around 500 genes were switched on or off by that additional hour of shut-eye -- for the better. The changes in genetic expression due to extra sleep helped protect against diabetes, cancer, inflammation and stress, the BBC reported.

A 2008 study showed that adults who slept for seven hours a night had a 33 percent lower chance of having calcium deposits build up in their arteries than adults who slept for only six hours a night. The boost to overall heart health that provides is akin to dropping 16 points in systolic blood pressure, Health.com reported. Speaking of blood pressure: A 2012 study found that in short-sleeping people with hypertension or prehypertension, getting an extra hour of sleep significantly decreased their blood pressure levels.

While the exact number of hours of sleep you need is hard to pinpoint, cutting it short might limit rapid eye movement or REM sleep specifically. REM sleep kicks in about 90 minutes after you fall asleep and then about every 90 minutes after that, for periods of time that lengthen throughout the night. Your longest period of REM sleep, then, will be closer to the morning —  and a blaring alarm might nip it in the bud. That's bad news, considering REM sleep is the phase of slumber most closely linked to learning and memory.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/one-extra-more-hour-sleep-benefits_n_4182623.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular


ending on beauty

HOME

A brief shower, then a tie-dye sky
and a sheaf of golden Jesus clouds
over Point Loma, that peninsula of the setting sun.

Cecilia and I have been trying
to settle an amazing question:
“Where is home? This late

in the season I should know:
home is where you stretch your arms
to the world and forgive it all.
 

F*CK FEELINGS; WHY DARWIN JUMPED; THE CRETAN ZEUS WAS A DYING AND RISING GOD; NIETZSCHE: WHY WE CAN’T GET RID OF GOD

HALLOWEEN BIRCHES
                            for Sarah

Moonlight was silvering
the palm tree on my lawn.
It lit up the long arc of one frond.

After many years in California,
my first thought: A weeping birch?
I have a birch tree on my lawn?

And birch groves left behind a lifetime
ago came to me, bowed and flowed —
silver branches of that Celtic night

when the blindfold of time slips loose
and we see behind and to the side —
just as now that I can barely walk,

memories of mountain hikes
come rustling: Angel’s Landing,
Mammoth Crest, Red Cones.

Surprised by the brilliant crescent,
I walked on. The last of Halloween
children dressed as flame-red

devilkins or pink ballerina angels
were shooed by mothers into cars.
Only the souls of trees walked with me,

birches and beeches, pines and maples
joined sycamores and liquidambar.
Silently I whispered to them:

remember me. They replied:
It’s not important to be remembered —
only to be beautiful.

~ Oriana © 2015

This poem reflects the shift in my attitude from achieve! achieve! to less compulsive, relaxed productivity and more enjoyment of beauty. It took me a long time to understand that we belong to our moment — and that transience is fine. So what if we will be forgotten? That’s an excellent thing to remember whenever we catch ourselves putting a lot of effort into some dubious project — at the cost of making ourselves unhappy with stress and missing the beauty of existence. 

 

Love is not a feeling. Love, unlike pain, is put to the test. One does not say, “That was not a true pain because it passed away so quickly. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

 Being yourself — isn’t it over-rated? ~ Sarah L.

First of all, a static self doesn’t exist anymore than the soul does. The “self” is not a thing. Our consciousness is a process — different neural networks compete for dominance. I like the idea of a “higher self” — not that it exists as a fixed thing, but it’s an ideal of calmer, more rational function.

It seems that the tide is finally turning away from the idea of self-expression at any price. Thank goodness for the new book, F*ck Feelings — a much needed call not for emotional repression, but for a healthy measure of self-control. The authors, a father and daughter team, encourage the reader to stop and think about the consequences of simply emoting, especially when it comes to anger. Great ideas tend to have a stunning simplicity. Imagine, after decades of rhetoric glorifying feelings and putting them ahead of reasoning, here comes a therapist who says: STOP AND THINK ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES.  

 We’ve been told so long that we’re irrational beings that some have taken it as a license to dispense with what flickers of rationality may nevertheless lurk in the psyche. It’s strangely reminiscent of religion’s put-downs of human reason as impotent.

Now and then anger is positive because it gives us the energy to stand up to a bully. But most of our anger tends to be about things we cannot control, and ranting about them only keeps us focused on the negative. Worse, if we express anger without regard for consequences, we may end up harming ourselves and others.

Buddhism is wise here: “witness” your anger. Then ask yourself what good — or harm — might come from expressing it. Will your marriage be improved if you attack your spouse who’s probably under too much stress already? Is there perhaps some other action you could take?

If you focus on doing something productive, you are more likely to end up feeling proud of who you are, and others will enjoy being around you. No one likes an angry screamer.

FOCUS ON DOING, NOT FEELING
 
(Oriana: As friends go, I vastly prefer people who are "doers." A "feeler" may be good for giving you empathy, but a doer will often push for a solution, for action -- and that can be invaluable, to be given a kick out of merely feeling into doing something. And doers are often shining examples of success.)

“A profanity-filled new self-help book argues that life is kind of terrible, so you should value your actions over your emotions.”

“Michael explains that, when people act only on their feelings, it can lead to an unreasonable, knee-jerk response: ‘Thinking before you speak — thinking of the consequences and where it’s going to get you and how it fits with your values — is a lot better than venting and then regretting what you’ve said.’ When you don’t let your feelings direct what you do, you start thinking and seeing your problems from a much more practical point of view.”

~ Put down the talking stick. Stop fruitlessly seeking ‘closure’ with your peevish co-worker. And please, don’t bother telling your spouse how annoying you find their tongue-clicking habit—sometimes honesty is less like a breath of fresh air and more like a fart. That’s the argument of Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett, the father-daughter duo behind the new self-help book F*ck Feelings.

The first step is accepting what you can’t control. So many people who come to [a therapist]  want something they can’t have. They want a happy relationship that’s never going to be happy, or they want opportunities that are not easy to come by.

So it's [about] accepting what you can't control, the factors that are out of your hands, and seeing what you can do with what you can control. And learning to be proud of yourself not just for accomplishing what you can, and not beating yourself up for what you can't. Not seeing yourself as a failure, when you haven’t really failed because it’s not something that you could have controlled in the first place. And admiring your ability to withstand a feeling of rejection, and the frustration and the pain, and keep going on towards a more reasonable goal while being a good person. That’s also what’s emphasized so heavily. Figuring out your own values and sticking to them.

You assume that your feelings are going to tell you, since you’re unhappy, that you did something wrong. But that if you can do an inventory based on your own values, you're really doing a good job. And you’re doing a good job in spite of the fact that you’re miserable. That deserves higher praise. I think that’s sort of a basic paradox—that to live with pain and still be a decent person and make a living is a much higher achievement. It’s what you do when you’re not happy that’s so telling.

Interviewer: One thing that surprised me—at one point you say, if you have an asshole parent, that as an adult you shouldn’t worry so much about forgiving them if you were traumatized by your childhood. Could you explain the thinking behind that?

Michael: If you find that your parent is one of those people who is really just a jerk, it's sort of like forgiving a cockroach for being a cockroach, or a snake for being a snake. Forgiveness tends to assume that people had a choice and made a bad choice. Whereas, what I think you run into more often is somebody who didn't really have a choice, they're just bad.

The one you want to forgive is God, for having to live in a world where jerks have as many kids as anyone else. It’s less personal. I think in some ways it frees you up more to realize that [your parent] did what they did because they’re built that way.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/fuck-feelings/403792/?utm_source=SFFB
   
Feelings have become such a sacred cow, I'm glad someone is finally pointing out that expressing them can be harmful. On the other hand, it's also a wonderful pleasure to be with the kind of person around whom it's safe to be completely yourself, including whining and being infantile for a while. Usually the venting quickly self-terminates, because of the joy of being with the right person. Also, the complaints about what we can't control suddenly seem outrageously funny — so you vent in a funny, comedic way. But the listener has to be totally on your side, not someone who can suddenly attack you. That's what's wrong with most parents and spouses -- they have an agenda and are trying to "bring you up.” This is their mission from god. They assume they have the right to punish you.

And it’s not just you whom those parents and spouses can’t fully value. They don’t value anyone enough to just let the person be. They don’t see another person as a human being of great complexity, worth, and uniqueness. They may keep their mouth shut in front of the boss, but that’s only because of fear, not because they value the boss as a human being. But — “we are the victims of victims.” People who aren’t capable of valuing others were themselves not valued.

Imagine how different marriage would feel between two totally supportive adults. Imperfect, flawed adults, but ones who don’t wage marriage as warfare but as a cooperative project. Is it that difficult to be totally supportive? On the contrary, it’s a great pleasure.

One terrible thing about getting attacked and put-down is that you internalize it. Pretty soon, you don’t need another person; you become a master at attacking and demeaning yourself. When Louise Hay says, “Immediately stop criticizing yourself,” that alone is worth the price of her book.

Jan van der Heyden, View of Delft
From the website:

THINK BEFORE YOU VENT

    Think Beyond The Catharsis

Don’t ask yourself whether your statement will make you feel better, introduce more honesty into the world, or punish those who deserve it. All of those outcomes, while glorious, are fleeting, while the resentment, bitterness, and anger that follow can last a lifetime.

    “Nobody’s Ever Died From Bottling Up Feelings…

…but plenty of people have died from unbottling them,” is another saying we use even more frequently than the fart metaphor. Don’t think for a moment that suppressing your feelings will harm your health or fill your life with pointless frustration; venting your feelings, on the other hand, is a good way to get punched, evicted, and generally put in harm’s way.
If your marriage turns out to be sexless, you’ve been the victim of child abuse, or you’ve generally had and unlucky and unhappy life, then you certainly have the right to feelings of resentment. There’s no benefit from telling yourself that you should feel good about experiencing so many bad things.

On the other hand, as you’ve already guessed, we wouldn’t tell you to express those angry feelings unless they can do you some good in the long run, and, usually, they can’t. As we say in our fart metaphor, beyond the immediate relief, venting ugly feelings then poisons the air for you and everyone around you.”

“Thinking before you speak — thinking of the consequences and where it’s going to get you and how it fits with your values — is a lot better than venting and then regretting what you’ve said.”

“Goals take into account that there’s a lot you don’t control, and wishes don’t. Wishes are about what you want...whether you have any control or you don’t. When I ask somebody to think about their goals, [I’m] really asking them to think hard about what they do and don’t control.” 

**

Feelings are transient. They are typically are about the moment and not about “delayed gratification,” so they also tend to interfere with self-discipline. As one athletic man who's in great shape told me, “If I listened to my feelings, I'd never exercise.”

**

The great breakthrough of cognitive-behavioral therapy was the discovery that thoughts and emotions are connected. Wrong-headed thinking can lead to emotions that hurt us rather than help us. “I should be able to attain complete serenity by meditating” is a relatively minor example of thinking that can make you feel like a failure when traditional meditation turns out to be difficult for you — perhaps impossible. You SHOULD be able to attain complete serenity?” Says who? Once you get rid of this assumption, there is no reason to feel bad. Now you’re free to do something that effortlessly relaxes you — perhaps it’s swimming, or strolling in a park.

Therapists report that patients come to them saying things like, “I DESERVE unconditional love.” And the therapist is too polite to coo back, “Oh yeah?” — but perhaps that would save a lot of time. The miracle is that when you stop thinking idiotic thoughts, you stop being paralyzed by idiotic emotions.

Trouble is, a lot of idiotic notions are promoted by advertising and psychobabble. Sometimes it seems that the culture seems hell-bent on preventing people from growing up.

New Age drivel has added new fuel. “I used to be a prince in my past life,” a man once confided in me. “I don’t know how to cope with hardship. I'm just not used to it.” Poor ex-prince! What a handicap!

**

As with everything else, the “fuck feelings” movement can be taken too far. It’s a welcome corrective to unhealthy obsession with feelings, especially negative feelings, and its emphasis on action in areas you CAN control is sheer wisdom. Is it a call for emotional repression? Only if pushed too far. I see it as a call for emotional moderation and not spouting everything that pops into your head. That’s what children do and we forgive them because they haven’t yet developed rational thinking and self-control. But it’s actually more rewarding to be adults. You get to accomplish things, not just throw food at the ceiling.

WHY DARWIN JUMPED: DARWIN’S FAILED ATTEMPT TO OUTWIT HIS AMYGDALA

"At one point of his career, Darwin wanted to test his survival reactions and see if he could control them in the face of danger. He undoubtedly asked himself, “Just how strong are my survival instincts? Can my modern brain take charge?” He went to the reptile house at the London Zoo and put his face against the glass cage containing a puff adder, a highly venomous African snake, intending to provoke the snake into trying to bite him. He was determined, he wrote in his diary, not to flinch or move.

Suddenly the snake lunged at him, hitting the glass barrier. Darwin described his reaction: “. . . as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity.”

It made no difference, he wrote, knowing that the snake could not reach him through the glass. His thoughts were powerless; instinct propelled him with “. . . An imagination of a danger which [he] had never experienced.”

The snake’s attempt to bite Darwin launched a primitive reaction beginning with visual stimuli registering the snake’s movement and ending with a message to the brain’s AMYGDALA. The result was Darwin jumping or, put another way, survival behavior. The cortex had no role in the reaction. Darwin could not control the reflex, even though the glass between him and the snake meant the danger was not genuine. His instinctive jump backward was automatic, happening without thought or awareness of what he was doing."

~ Theodore George, M.D., “Darwin Tries to Outwit His Amygdala,” in “Untangling the Mind: Why We Behave the Way We Do”, 2013

I wish this book were more lively since it deals with important issues: subcortical reactions and the mayhem they may produce due to irrational fear and/or anger. T. George also discusses the brain's reward system, addiction, psychopathy, and depression (“shut-down”).


The fear of snakes is supposed to be hard-wired in primates, but I think in this case we have the primary subcortical reflex of moving back when we see something coming at us. Another example of a subcortical reflex is the automatic extension of arms when we are falling. Obviously it’s useful to break the fall with hands (and arms, if needed) in order to protect the head.


IN CRETE, ZEUS WAS THE DYING AND RISING GOD
 
“In Acts 17 Paul is walking through this city, Athens, and he sees idols there. This pisses him off so, naturally, he goes talk to the Epicureans and Stoics in the area, and they were all, “WTF?” Like, to them he was speaking gibberish. Look:

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols [the horror!]. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.

So Paul starts talking about the God he‘s discussing. And as he’s defending it, he uses a couple quotes. Right here:

~ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ~

Who is Paul quoting there? In the original text…in whom do we live? In whom do we move? In whom do we have are being? We’re the offspring…of whom?

Zeus.

No, really.

Here’s the first quotation in context, in Epimenides’s Creatia:

They fashioned a tomb for thee [O Zeus], O holy and high one-
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.

Let’s stop there. What is this tomb for? And why is Epimemides calling Cretans “liars”?

Well, it’s because the Cretans thought that Zeus was born, lived a mortal life, and died. They also had a tomb for him, and many apparently believed that he was reborn every year. But in saying Zeus was a dying god with mortality, they were pretty close to atheists for the rest of the Greek world, who insisted, as Epimenides did in this poem — that Zeus wasn’t dead, and that he will be alive forever.

Zeus. Literally talking about Zeus. About worshipping Zeus, about Zeus’ commands, about his laws and everything he rules over…Zeus. So, to the listening crowd, when Paul said, “We are his offspring,” he was literally saying “We are Zeus’s offspring.”

The weakness of the arguments — the argument for Zeus and the one for the Christian God — both seem transparent.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/barrierbreaker/the-apostle-paul-said-that-god-and-zeus-were-kinda-the-same-thing/

 

Oriana:

Poor Saint Paul. For him, everything depended on the “fact” of the resurrection. If we resurrection did not in fact happen, then “we are lost.” No we aren’t. We live as before, focusing on this life rather than worrying that one day we’ll die. It’s been observed that people who are most afraid of dying are those who’ve never really lived. When we live a full life, we feel such gratitude for the richness that there is no room to resent having to go when the time comes.

The fact that Paul was deeply influenced by the Greek culture — there’s nothing surprising about that. Apparently there is no such thing as an “original” religion. There are only variations on a limited number of central themes. And some eras are more hospitable to some variations than to others.

Paul Tillich seemed revolutionary when he promoted the idea that god is not a person — not an invisible man in the sky. Rather, god is being itself, and/or “the ground of being.” Here Tillich’s theology gets so abstract that it becomes useless, in my opinion. The average farmer will continue praying to the invisible man in the sky to send rain for his crops while the average child will pray for no rain so that the game will not be canceled. Will this continue for centuries, or will it come to a sudden end when enough people realize there is no one up there, and religion becomes confined to the lunatic fringe, waiting, as usual, for the end of the world?

Meanwhile the only sensible solution that combines the personal and impersonal idea of the divine is found in Hinduism. God is a pervasive spirit, but can have specific incarnations. If you want to pray to Kali or Aphrodite, you are welcome — just allow others to pray to Ganesha if that suits them better. And those who’d rather play with their pets are being pious too. In theory at least, this tolerance is beautiful — in practice, we know that any religion has its dark side, and it’s the most religious countries that are most backward and violent. Somehow there is no escaping the perception that the universe works just fine without a god or gods, personal or impersonal — and the end of religion might well be worth it if it results in the end of suicide bombings and other acts of hate committed in the name of a god of mercy.



“I FEAR, WROTE NIETZSCHE, “THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING RID OF GOD BECAUSE WE STILL BELIEVE IN GRAMMAR.” [“TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS”] The grammar of dream interpretation, whether Freudian or Jungian, is a crust of dead theology. We deaden the outer surfaces of our creative response to dreams in order to protect ourselves from the creative power the dreams bring back to us.” ~ Greg Mogenson, “God Is a Trauma.”

Mogenson is referring to the brain’s power to create reality — a power too often squandered on brooding over the past or fantasizing about the future — the negative and positive inflation of vicarious living, rather than actively creating our life in the present. To quote Mogenson: “The ‘right’ interpretation is the most daring interpretation. Dream interpretation is the space project of an ever-opening consciousness. Interpretations are trajectories, arrows of longing, satellites in the surrendered heaven of man’s creating will.”

Nietzsche both lamented and celebrated the death of god as a tyrant of the soul, an obstacle to soul-making and metaphor-making. “Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead’, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations.”

To Nietzsche religious faith meant “not wanting to know the truth.” Freedom is the opposite of belief. “If there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to ‘believe’ — or a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live — well, they will know it tomorrow.”

But our belief in grammar, though weaker now, still holds and will hold as long as we need to communicate (although I’ve graded hundreds of essays which showed no belief in grammar — that was before the automatic spell-check and grammar-check). I think this is in line with “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged. What you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.”

True: we have evolved to see patterns even where there are none, to connect the dots. The belief in cosmic justice is our default setting — it takes skeptical thinking to see randomness and coincidences.

I agree that it takes a cognitive effort to see that much depends on mere chance — though we can make the best of whatever chance brings our way. And we can still reject an immoral, outdated religion, and venture to find and/or create our own journey.

ending on beauty
 
THE BLUE WIND-FLOWERS

To be spellbound — nothing’s easier. It’s one of the oldest tricks of the soil and springtime: the blue wind-flowers. They are in a way unexpected. They shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses. The glimmer and float, yes, float, and that comes from their color. That sharp violet-blue now weighs nothing. Here is ecstasy, but low-voiced. “Career” — irrelevant! “Power” and “publicity” — ridiculous! They must have laid on a great reception up in Nineveh, with “pompe” and “Trompe up!” Raising the rafters. And above all those brows the crowning crystal chandeliers hung like glass vultures. Instead of such an overdecorated and strident cul-de-sac, the wind-flowers open a secret passage to the real celebration, which is quiet as death. 

~ Tomas Tranströmer