Debbie Foster

We want to be reconciled, somehow, to loss and failure, injustice and human suffering. We are hoping for a truth that will take the edge off our despair.

According to Buddhist principles, in seeing ourselves, our emotions and thoughts, exactly as they are right now, and in not trying to make them go away or improve or change them, we have the opportunity to befriend ourselves and cease suffering. This no-escape witnessing, when we can do it with “precision and gentleness” (the gentleness is key),

Sex can teach us to relish the tumult of true equality. It can show us that the self need not remain imprisoned behind the eyes. And it can prove, if anything can at this late date, that there is a realm beyond rational exchange, a realm in which the profligacy of play is its own recompense.

She lost track of herself hours ago, and now she's just out there, saying things.

"It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self/ Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads / to a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through," wrote Mark Strand for his friend Joseph Brodsky…

There is no action that takes place between humans in which secrets do not play a part, whether it be a game of cards or the selling of a cow. The advantage is always to the one who is shrewder in what secret to reveal and when.

The fact that Freud's structural model of the mind provides psychological fuel for narratives as different as The Iliad and Forbidden Planet strongly suggests that it captures essences, core dispositions, deep truths. And it continues to be relevant in an ever-changing, modern context.

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.

The take-home point of this and the rest of Bem’s studies is that our behavior seems to be conditioned not only by what we have learned or been exposed to in the past but also, to some small but significant extent, by what we will learn or be exposed to in the future.