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Convincing proof that Mitch lives!
How the China Outsources Surveillance
Beijing relies on digital surveillance to detect and stamp out budding opposition before it spills into the streets. But rather than conduct this massive undertaking itself, Lynette Ong explains in the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, the CCP hires “corporations to sniff out ‘sensitive’ words with detection software, to flood the internet with propaganda, and to deal with troublesome posts and posters.”
Read Ong’s essay along with other Journal coverage of digital surveillance in authoritarian regimes, free for a limited time, plus our entire July issue before it goes behind the paywall on July 30.
How the CCP Outsources Surveillance
Beijing knows digital surveillance of the world’s most populous nation is technologically demanding. So the Party has hired corporations to occupy the “public-opinion battlefield” and spot the trouble before it spreads.
By Lynette H. Ong
China’s AI-Powered Surveillance State
The Chinese Communist Party is dreaming an authoritarian techno-dream that is a democrat’s nightmare: ever more fine-grained state control made possible by using AI networks to pry and spy everywhere. But human unpredictability remains a force the party-state cannot tame.
By Valentin Weber
President Xi’s Surveillance State
Chinese authorities are wielding facial-recognition software, big-data analytics, and other digital technologies to control China’s citizens by monitoring and assessing their activities, both online and off.
By Xiao Qiang
The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Subscribe now for full access to the Journal of Democracy archives.
The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being left, so obvious to any impartial observer; the pitiful petitions for the return of love; the bargaining for a different ending; the desperate denial of the end, until the end. And yet it is there, in the pit of helplessness and humiliation, that we may discover the greater dignity that comes from shedding the shiny exoskeleton of pride — the dignity of opening the heart fully and offering it completely, even as it is being flayed by the cool blade of indifference, broken on the blunt edge of an unrequited passion for the possible. (Though, of course, a heart is never broken.)
It is this kind of dignity, the kind found beyond despair, that emanates from Frida Kahlo’s letters to the lover who took her most famous photograph — the Hungarian refugee Miklós Mandl, who became Nickolas Muray upon landing at Ellis Island in the final year of the First World War with an English vocabulary of four dozen words and the unassailable determination to be an artist. He would go on to become a pilot, a pioneer of color photography, and a fencing champion, photographing some of the twentieth century’s greatest luminaries and competing twice for the U.S. Olympic team.
Nick and Frida. (Catalina Island Museum)
She was in her early twenties when she met him while traveling through the United States with Diego in the first years of their tumultuous open marriage. Frida and Nick remained epistolary friends, but as he spent more and more time in Mexico throughout the 1930s, they became lovers.
Although the love letter was her first great art, Frida’s letters to Nick are the most playful and most passionate of all her letters, and also the tenderest. She signed them Xóchitl — “flower” in the indigenous Náhuatl language — and it was at the peak of their love that she began painting her electrically erotic Flower of Life.
Frida Kahlo: Flower of Life, 1938-1943
In a fierce and winking letter penned from Paris, where she had just been introduced to André Breton and his coterie (“you have no idea what kind of bitches these people are”) trying to get her paintings exhibited, she writes to Nick in the last winter of peace before the war, addressing him as “kid” despite his being twenty-five years her senior:
Listen kid, do you touch every day the fire ‘whatchamacallit’ which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don’t forget to do it every day. Don’t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don’t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don’t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and Xóchitl. Don’t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don’t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don’t love her.
He did.
By the end of spring, Nick was engaged to the other woman. Frida had just returned to Mexico when she received the news. Shattered, she wrote to him, first thanking him “a million times” for sending what would become her most iconic photograph, encoded with the bittersweet memory of a morning in the spring of their love, then pouring out her devastation without pride or pretense:
And then she adds a list of requests for how to honor her broken heart, touchingly human and almost childlike in its underlying wish for an undo button:
[…]
About my letters to you, if they are on the way, just give them to Mam and she will mail them back to me. I don’t want to be a trouble in your life in any case. Please forgive me for acting just like an old-fashioned sweetheart asking you to give me back my letters, it is ridiculous on my part, but I do it for you, not for me, because I imagine that you don’t have any interest in having those papers with you.
As she was writing this very letter, she was interrupted by a phone call from a mutual friend informing her that Nick had just gotten married. Frida acknowledges this plainly and adds:
Love,
Frida
Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray (Brooklyn Museum)
By that autumn, Nick was already having troubles in his new marriage as Frida’s relationship with Diego was deteriorating. In October, shortly after the divorce process began as Diego pummeled her with “the worst things you can imagine and the dirtiest insults,” she wrote to Nick:
Still addressing him as “darling” and “baby,” she adds:
I love you,
Frida
He never did forget her. She never stopped wishing the world for him, which may be the deepest measure of love — continuing to desire the other’s greatest happiness, their best possible life, even if it excludes you. It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
Frida and Nick remained lifelong friends, on tender terms until the end.
Legendary Artist Sheila Hicks, at 92, on the Secret to Creative Vitality
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Art, Georgia O’Keeffe believed, springs from “the desire to make the unknown known… and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” We seem to have drifted lightyears away from that motive force, the majority of our epoch’s cultural production aiming to render the market maximally known — its profitably proven preferences, its self-interests, its moral fashions — in order to cater the creation to it, to virtue-signal enough to go viral.
In every era, there are those who do what they do from a place of exuberant creative vitality unconcerned with validation, those who refuse to mistake the conditions of their culture for givens and choose to make what they want to see exist — the singular, the untested, the unexampled — for the world to take or leave. The price is often profound loneliness, the reward profound peace.
Art from Sheila Hicks: Seize, Weave Space, Nasher Sculpture Center.
Sheila Hicks is a living emblem of that defiant, wildly countercultural courage to create rather than cater.
For the better part of a century — since before the splitting of the atom, before the signing of the Civil Rights Act, before the invention of laser and duct-tape and the Internet — she has been making koans out of fiber, material poems that reach something beyond meaning, something that, like nature’s needless beauty, simply is. Although her work has been exhibited in every major museum and she has been profiled by every major magazine, the recognition hover like an afterthought, agreeable and irrelevant as a stranger’s perfume, over her tactile universe of feeling.
Sheila Hicks: Fugue, 1969-1970 (silk, flax, cotton)
At ninety-two, Hicks opens the door to her life and work — which are so clearly one — in a feisty Time Sensitive conversation, in which she keeps pushing back against being classified as an artist. With an eye to how labels and categories invariably commodify what they contain, reducing process to product, she reflects:
It is a sentiment not dissimilar to what legendary cellist Pablo Casals, at ninety-three, articulated about the secret of creative vitality and what Rachel Carson advised an spiring writer: “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.”
Holding up a large baton completely covered in an intricate pattern of colorful fabric and thread, Hicks adds:
Sheila Hicks at her home in Paris. (Photograph: Agathe Karsenti for The Slowdown.)
Complement with some abiding advice on being an artist from Bowie, Beethoven, and M.C. Richards, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s classic existential epiphany about what it means to create.
For of Hicks, watch her singular spirit come abloom in this tender short film:
Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books of all time.
“Fearlessness is what love seeks [which] exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future,” Hannah Arendt wrote in another of them, “hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
But upon closer inspection, now — this elementary particle of eternity, this tiny and total locus of the living moment, this constant that is never the same — turns out to be more elusive than a neutrino, passing through us ghostly and ungraspable, yet leaving in its wake the purest sum of what we are.
Like love, now is an entirely subjective experience built on a meaningful interaction between systems. Like love, it is not a state but a process — a dynamic creation that enlists all of our past experience and the entire pattern of predictive perceptions we call reality. Like love, it is more like music than like mathematics.
Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Jo Marchant takes up this elemental mystery in her excellent investigation In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment (public library), weaving together physics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural anthropology to expose the warp and weft of our aliveness, locating in the living now “the origins of both life and mind, the driving force that powers behaviours, perceptions, choices and decisions, that ultimately carves out self and time.”
She writes:
Two centuries after the vitalism debate sundered science into warring camps over the search for a “vital spark” that makes matter alive, we are finding that conscious minds — that crowning achievement of matter — are made of time and bodies undone by it, that it is the fundamental substrate of our aliveness. If the moment is the vital spark of time, the science of now — divisive, thrilling, inconclusive — is the vitalism debate of our time.
It began when Einstein defeated Bergson in their historic debate. Relativity rendered the flow of time, and the immediacy of the moment nested within it, not a given of physical reality but a function of the vantage you take. “The baggage of consciousness,” Einstein himself called our sense of time in a letter to his best friend. Like all radical ideas, relativity sent the ideological pendulum in the opposite direction and the ancients’ notion of eternalism — the idea that time is absolute, the same in all directions, and all existence simply is, without dynamic being that flows from past to present to future — was revived in the modern model of the block universe, configuring spacetime as an unchanging four-dimensional block. Marchant describes the implications of that model:
If the physicists are right, our attachment to the specialness of the present moment is just another example of how our limited perception deceives us, like thinking the sky turns or the Earth is flat.
Causality, this model implies, is simply an interpretation based on our limited perception: “The flow from past to future… rather than being a fundamental feature of the universe… emerges as a secondary consequence of our inability to see the full picture.”
Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)
Then there is the predictive coding model, under which “what we perceive — the vibrant, changing, three-dimensional reality all around us — isn’t the external world at all, but a guided prediction, or as some have described it, a ‘controlled hallucination’… a prediction built from our history, both recent impressions and a lifetime of experience.”
It is worth remembering here that what gives science its loveliness and potency, and what distinguishes it from philosophy, is the passion for building models of how nature works calibrated by the rigor of testing them against reality. And yet time may be the only region where the models are truly and fundamentally untestable because the modeler is a captive of time. Einstein’s equations gave us the mathematical foundation for the Big Bang, but not even Einstein could travel back to the beginning of time to see if the model was true. This may be why, to me, the most compelling — as well as the most poetic — portion of Merchant’s investigation is the most empirical: an fMRI study that analyzed the patterns of brain activity in people watching a movie, which has a built-in timeline, or simply resting, capturing one image per second and comparing how these images — these portraits of the moment — differ from one another in order to render the experience of time’s passage. Marchant details the astonishing revelation:
What this “harmony” means is that at any single moment, our spontaneous brain activity is made up of multiple, overlaid patterns and rhythms, which are related yet change over different timescales: just like our experience of Now. Each moment of neural activity is influenced by what’s happened in both the near and further past, and in turn influences what will happen in the near and further future. The results “suggest a human capacity to spread out from the immediate present tense of sensation, towards an overall temporal landscape,” Lloyd concludes. This explains how we can navigate fast-changing events yet at the same time hold on to stable threads of where we’re going and who we are.
An epoch before neuroimaging, Virginia Woolf intuited this truth when she considered the “moments of being” that make us who we are, intuited the musicality of being alive: “The whole world is a work of art [and] we are parts of the work of art,” she wrote in her breathtaking epiphany in the middle of the garden, “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
Looking through the kaleidoscope of the various models, Marchant considers the essence of the light:
And yet it may be more important even than that, underpinning not just our world but who we are.
Our lives, Marchant argues, are only really alive, only ever real, as the moment lives itself through us:
[…]
Now has objective meaning as the expanding boundary at which reality is continually created. What’s coming into being includes not just the contents of the universe but its very structure. As new events occur, new universe — new space-time — is being born.
With an eye to all the different models of physics she examines in the book — relativity, the block universe, enactivism, and predictive coding among them — she ends where we ought to always begin: the discipline of not mistaking the model for the thing itself:
Because there is no commons of now, the moment is the measure of our loneliness in time, but also the only region of space where we flower into being fully ourselves in a constant bloom of becoming.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
Marchant writes:
This is not a negation of our being but an affirmation of it — a liberation from the tyranny and tedium of selfing we mistake for being:
[…]
Our experience of Now, I’m convinced, is not a hallucination. With every detail we choose to attend to, to breathe life into, we’re helping to write into existence both ourselves and the world… What if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but, as Wheeler put it, “in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us”? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle.
Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .
Perhaps, with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.
Holden Caulfield: Egotistical Whiner or Melancholy Boy Genius?
From Jesus-Figure to Incestuous Impulses, 13 Critics Weigh In
Emily Temple July 2, 2018 (LitHub.com)
Here are some things we’ve been talking about in the Literary Hub office lately: Is Holden Caulfield a tragic hero or an unbearable whiny teen? Is he misunderstood? Is he relevant to youth today? Is The Catcher in the Rye even any good? Does it matter, if it has meant something to generations of readers? Do we only like it because our parents did? Why do we talk about it so much more than Nine Stories, which is objectively superior? (To each his own, is my take—but I, having never liked The Catcher in the Rye or its deeply phony narrator, also don’t think we should keep things in the canon just because they’ve always been there.)
If nothing else, we can all at least agree that Holden Caulfield is still (though decreasingly) a cultural touchstone in this country, in part because parents keep giving the book to their children and in part because so many students are still required to read it in school. Accordingly, over the years there have been hundreds, and maybe thousands, of critical essays written about Salinger’s work in general, and The Catcher in the Rye in particular, and Holden Caulfield in even more particular. The critics, much like the population at large, do not come to much of a consensus. For instance, some have compared Holden to Jesus. Some, on the other hand, have argued that the book is about his desire to have sex with his little sister. Some consider Holden a model for American youth. Some fear he is its downfall. We will all have to decide for ourselves, but for a little guidance, below you can look through what some writers and critics have said about Holden, organized roughly from most glowing to least impressed.
Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, in The Fiction of J. D. Salinger:
After the reader recovers from the releasing of Holden’s invective (e.g., “Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey, in the whole crumby history of the school”) and of his exposé of phoniness (e.g., a Radio City Christmas complete with what has been identified as the movie of James Hilton’s Random Harvest), he goes on to appreciate the pathos of Holden’s loneliness and frustration.
But nervous cynicism and neurosis are not enough for fiction in depth, and the next step for a reader should be to realize that Holden Caulfield is actually a saintly Christian person (there is no need to call him a Christ-figure). True, he has little notion of the love of God, and he thinks that “all the children in our family are atheists.” But (1) he himself never does a wrong thing: instead of commandments, Holden breaks only garage windows (when his brother dies), and the no-smoking rule in the Pencey dormitory. (2) He sacrifices himself in a constant war against evil, even though he has a poignantly Manichean awareness of its ubiquity (“If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the [ubiquitously scrawled dirty words] in the world.”) And more importantly, (3) his reward is to understand that if one considers humanity, one must love it. The text for Holden’s behavior is his insistence — oddly enough, to his Quaker friend Childs on absolute primitive Christianity: “Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. . . . I think any one of the Disciples would’ve sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.
For Jesus and Holden Caulfield truly love their neighbors, especially the poor in goods, appearance, and spirit.
Verdict: Holden’s so good, he’s basically Jesus.
Tobias Wolff, in a 2008 interview with NPR:
[Holden]’s a very, very funny fellow. And he’s very acute in spotting phonies. The problem with Holden is that, to him, everyone, after a while, seems phony. As funny the book as it is, and reading through it again recently, I found it devastatingly sad.
. . .
His younger brother who he has idolized for his innocence -the way he now does his sister Phoebe – has died. And he ruminates on the – on going to his grave and being caught in a downpour and thinking of leaving his brother there underground in this terrible day. And later, he himself is walking along the street in New York. And it should be festive. It’s around Christmastime. The shoppers are out. And he is broken into a sweat. Every time he steps off the curb, he thinks I’m going to go down and down forever. No one will ever see me again. This kind of calls up that image of his brother in his grave. And he starts praying to his brother – Allie, don’t let me disappear. Don’t let me disappear. There’s such terror there. The humor that has sustained so much of this novel begins to unravel at the end and you’re left with this naked soul in pain and in conflict. Finally, you see not with the world but with himself.
. . .
When I first read it, I felt as if [Holden was] a confederate of mine, you know, a teammate in this skepticism about the worthiness of adult life, and now I look at him, in a way, like his old teacher, Mr. Antolini, who pats his head while he’s asleep. Then Holden wakes up from that and imagines that the man has made a pass at him he can’t even accept that, that avuncular affection that the man is overcome by. And I have that avuncular affection for Holden and I have a degree of sorrow, really, that I couldn’t possibly have felt at that time.
Verdict: Our Great American Teenager.
William Faulkner, in a 1958 address to the English Club of the University of Virginia:
I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will—must—someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who—he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.
Verdict: Holden as tragic hero.
Louis Menand, in “Holden Caulfield at Fifty“:
Supposedly, kids respond to The Catcher in the Rye because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book.
. . .
Holden talks like a teenager, and this makes it natural to assume that he thinks like a teenager as well. But like all the wise boys and girls in Salinger’s fiction—like Esmé and Teddy and the many brilliant Glasses—Holden thinks like an adult. No teen-ager (and very few grownups, for that matter) sees through other human beings as quickly, as clearly, or as unforgivingly as he does. Holden is a demon of verbal incision. . . .
”You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way.” The secret to Holden’s authority as a narrator is that he never lets anything stand by itself. He always tells you what to think. He has everyone pegged. That’s why he’s so funny. But The New Yorker’s editors were right: Holden isn’t an ordinary teenager—he’s a prodigy. He seems (and this is why his character can be so addictive) to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life.
. . .
Holden, after all, isn’t unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees that people are phonies because he is unhappy. What makes his view of other people so cutting and his disappointment so unappeasable is the same thing that makes Hamlet’s feelings so cutting and unappeasable: his grief. Holden is meant, it’s true, to be a kind of intuitive moral genius. (So, presumably, is Hamlet.) But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it.
Verdict: Holden as sorrow king; not a mirror but a model.
Alfred Kazin, from “J. D. Salinger: Everybody’s Favorite,” 1961:
I am sorry to have to use the word “cute” in respect to Salinger, but there is absolutely no other word that for me so accurately typifies the self-conscious charm and prankishness of his own writing and his extraordinary cherishing of his favorite Glass characters.
Holden Caulfield is also cute in The Catcher in the Rye, cute in his little-boy suffering for his dead brother, Allie, and cute in his tenderness for his sister, “Old Phoebe.” But we expect that boys of that age may be cute—that is, consciously appealing and consciously clever. To be these things is almost their only resource in a world where parents and schoolmasters have all the power and the experience. Cuteness, for an adolescent, is to turn the normal self-pity of children, which arises from their relative weakness, into a relative advantage vis-à-vis the adult world. It becomes a role boys can play in the absence of other advantages, and The Catcher in the Rye is so full of Holden’s cute speech and cute innocence and cute lovingness for his own family that one must be an absolute monster not to like it.
Verdict: Cute.
Continue reading Holden Caulfield: Egotistical Whiner or Melancholy Boy Genius?Healing the Father Wound You Never Knew You Had
July 7, 2026 (menalive.com)
I have been a marriage and family therapist for more than fifty years and have written seventeen books including best-sellers like Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places and The Enlightened Marriage. I have helped thousands of individuals and couples find the love of their lives and have the relationship they’ve always wanted. Yet, my own love life was a disaster. If you come to my website, MenAlive, you will see my welcome video, “Confessions of a Twice-Divorced Marriage Counselor.”
You will learn about my first two marriages and how they ended in divorce. All relationship breakups are confusing and painful, but even more so when you have been making your living helping other men and women find real lasting love. The good news is that I discovered the secret for finding the right partner and having a great marriage. My wife, Carlin, and I have been happily married for 46 wonderful years.
It took me a long time to realize that the key to having a successful love life was a hidden wound I didn’t even know I had. Millions of men and women suffer from a father wound, a wound that has become so pervasive in our society that most people don’t even know they have it or that they need to heal it in order to have relationships that are truly satisfying and successful.
You can learn about our healing journey in our book, The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why The Best is Still to Come and take your own self-paced journey to success in my on-line course, “Navigating the 5 Stages of Love.”
My business card reads, “Jed Diamond, PhD, Healing Men and the Women Who Love Them since 1969.” That was the year after I completed my initial graduate training and began working as a mental health professional. 1969 was also the year our first son was born. When I held him in my arms shorty after his birth, I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where men were fully healed and engaged with their families throughout their lives.
Discovering and Healing the Family Father Wound
Although I have written 17 books, it took me a long time to deal with my father wound. My Distant Dad: Healing the Family was my 15th published book. The book began with the following two epigraphs:
“A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit. His absence may be literal through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more often it is a symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he may not have acquired.”
–Dr. James Hollis
“Kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their dad. And if a father is unwilling or unable to fill that role, it can leave a wound that is not easily healed.”
–Roland Warren
The first chapter began with the following memory:
I was five years old when my uncle drove me to the mental hospital. I was confused and afraid.
“Why do I have to go?” I asked my Uncle Harry.
He looked at me with his round face and kind eyes. “Your father needs you.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I was beginning to cry and I clamped my throat tight to stop the tears.
He turned away and looked back at the road. In our family, we didn’t talk about difficult issues.
It took me a long time to understand what happened to my father and to overcome the silence and denial that clouded my life for many years beginning at age five.
I went with my uncle to visit my father every Sunday for a year. It took me most of that time to realize he was not in an ordinary hospital but was in a mental hospital. It took many years to learn that my father had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved.
I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and I could do to prevent it from happening to other men and their families. It isn’t just males who have “a hole in their soul in the shape of their father.”
I knew that my mother grew up without a father in the home. Like my own father wound, it took years before I learned about the nature of my mother’s early life. She and her younger sister were born in Toledo, Ohio. When my mother was five years old, her father died suddenly. My grandmother and her two small children were forced to move to Savanah, Georgia with my grandmother’s father and stepmother. That family wound was denied and hidden, but impacted all aspects of my mother’s life, including her four dysfunctional marriages.
Healing the Family Father Wound
Here are some of the things that indicate that the family father wound may be undermining your relationships:
- Your present relationship is not working well.
You may be having constant fights that never seem to get anywhere or there may be angry silences that can last for days, weeks, or months. Your relationship may be wonderful one moment than turn bad the next. As the Eagles song, “Victim of Love,” says:
“You’re walkin’ the wire, pain and desire, looking for love in between.”
- Looking back on past relationships, you recognize a similar pattern.
This isn’t the first time a relationship has started out well but eventually went south. We often think we had just picked the wrong partner, but now realize there is something deeper, something more hidden.
- Reflecting on your family of origin, you feel a certain resonance.
Your parents’ relationship may not be the same as the ones you have experienced, but there definitely are similarities.
- Your father was absent physically or emotionally.
You may have lost him through death, divorce, or dysfunction. His absence impacts your mother, yourself, and other members of your family. You begin to suspect that you have been, “looking for love in all the wrong places,” (the title of my second book).
- There is a longing, a hunger that you feel.
Falling in love feels like you have finally filled an inner void, that you have found that magical partner that will make everything all right, but it never seems to work.
I share my father’s and my own healing journey in my book, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. I also developed an on-line course that anyone can take to explore your own father wound, how it may be impacting your life now, and what you can do to heal. You can learn more about the course, “Healing the Family Father Wound” here.
If you would like to read more articles about life and love, please consider subscribing to my free weekly newsletter: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
“The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy” by Georgine Milmine
Mrs. Josephine Curtis Woodbury (image from longyear.org)
CHAPTER XXIII
JOSEPHINE CURTIS WOODBURY AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL—BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF PEACE—MRS. EDDY WITHDRAWS HER SUPPORT—”WAR IN HEAVEN”
Mrs. Eddy’s absence from Boston made it possible for some of her ambitious leaders there to exercise a stronger personal influence than they could ever have done had she been at her old headquarters in Commonwealth Avenue. This opportunity was seized, and abused, so Mrs. Eddy thought, by one of her most prominent aids, Josephine Curtis Woodbury.
Mrs. Woodbury had been associated with Mrs. Eddy since 1879, and had been one of her foremost healers and teachers. She had written a great deal for the Journal, had preached and lectured as far west as Denver, had organised classes and church societies, and had conducted a Christian Science “academy” at the Hotel Berkshire, in Boston.
Mrs. Woodbury was clever, self-confident, given to theatrical display, ready with her tongue and pen, and she possessed an amazing personal influence over her adherents. In short, she was the only Christian Scientist in Boston who ever bade fair to rival Mrs. Eddy in personal prominence. Like Mrs. Eddy, she was ambitious, and delighted in leadership. She, too, could send her students hither and yon, and keep them dancing attendance upon her telegrams. Some of them lived in her house and went to Maine with her in the summer; they sat spellbound at her lectures, and put their time and goods at her disposal.
Mrs. Woodbury’s group of students and followers were, on the whole, very different from the simple, rule-abiding Christian Scientists who had been taught directly under Mrs. Eddy’s personal supervision. Mrs. Eddy’s own people never got very far away from her hard-and-fast business principles, while Mrs. Woodbury’s students were distinctly fanciful and sentimental, and strove to add all manner of ornamentation to Mrs. Eddy’s stout homespun. There were two or three musicians among them, and a young illustrator and his handsome wife, and most of them wrote verses. Some of Mrs. Woodbury’s students went abroad with her, and acquired the habit of interlarding the regular Christian Science phraseology with a little French. Mrs. Woodbury and her students lived in a kind of miracle-play of their own; had inspirations and revelations and premonitions; kept mental trysts; saw portents and mystic meanings in everything; and spoke of God as coming and going, agreeing and disagreeing with them. Some of them affected cell-like sleeping-chambers, with white walls, bare except for a picture of Christ. They longed for martyrdom, and made adventures out of the most commonplace occurrences. Mrs. Woodbury herself had this marvel-loving temperament. Her room was lined with pictures of the Madonna. When she went to Denver to lecture on Christian Science in 1887, her train was caught in a blizzard; in relating this experience, she describes herself as “face to face with death.” Her two children fell into the water on the Nantasket coast; Mrs. Woodbury “treated” them, and they recovered. She writes upon this incident a dramatic article entitled “Drowning Overcome.”
Mrs. Woodbury and her students thus succeeded in giving to Mrs. Eddy’s homely “Science”—pieced together in dull New England shoe towns and first taught to people who worked with their hands—an emotional colouring which was very distasteful to Mrs. Eddy herself. Never was any woman less the religieuse. “Discovering and founding” Christian Science had been her business, performed, in spite of all her flightiness, in a businesslike manner, and her success was eminently a businesslike success. With yearnings and questings and raptures, Mrs. Eddy had little patience, and Mrs. Woodbury’s romantic school, with its spiritual alliances, annoyed her beyond expression.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Woodbury’s students inevitably found their miracle. In June, 1890, Mrs. Woodbury gave birth to a son whom her followers believed was the result of an “immaculate conception,” and an exemplification of Mrs. Eddy’s theory of “mental generation.” Mrs. Woodbury named her child “The Prince of Peace,” and baptised him at Ocean Point, Me., in a pool which she called “Bethsada.” “While there,” writes Mrs. Woodbury, “occurred the thought of baptising little Prince in a singularly beautiful salt pool, whose rocky bottom was dry at low tide and overflowing at high tide, but especially attractive at mid-tide, with its two feet of crystal water. A crowd of people had assembled on the neighbouring bluffs, when I brought him from our cottage not far away, and laid him three times prayerfully in the pool and when he was lifted therefrom, they joined in a spontaneously appropriate hymn of praise.”
Mrs. Woodbury would not permit the child, who was called Prince for short, to address her husband as “father,” but insisted that he address Mr. Woodbury as “Frank” and herself as “Birdie.” The fact that he was a fine, healthy baby, and was never ill, seemed to Mrs. Woodbury’s disciples conclusive evidence that he was the Divine principle of Christian Science made manifest in the flesh. It was their pleasure to bring gifts to Prince; to discover in his behaviour indications of his spiritual nature; and they professed to believe that when he grew to manhood he would enter upon his Divine ministry.
Six months before the birth of Prince, Mrs. Woodbury paid a visit to Mrs. Eddy, and she seems to imply that the venerable leader oracularly foretold the coming of her child. “In January,” writes Mrs. Woodbury, “I enjoyed a visit with my ever-beloved Teacher, who gave comfort in these words, though at the moment they were not received in their deeper import: ‘Go home and be happy. Commit thy ways unto the Lord. Trust him, and he will bring it to pass.’ ” This may have suggested to the faithful the visit of Mary to Elizabeth; but if there was any miracle-play of this sort in progress, Mrs. Eddy had certainly no intention of playing Elizabeth to Mrs. Woodbury’s Mary. When word was brought her of the birth of Mrs. Woodbury’s “little Immanuel,” as he was often called, she was far from being convinced. “Child of light!” she exclaimed indignantly. “She knows it is an imp of Satan.” In the libel suit which Mrs. Woodbury later brought against her Teacher, a letter to her from Mrs. Eddy was read in court, in which Mrs. Eddy said: “Those awful reports about you, namely that your last child was illegitimate, etc. I again and again tried to suppress that report; also for what you tried to make people believe; namely, that that child was an immaculate conception, . . . and you replied that it was incarnated with the Devil.”
Mrs. Eddy was the more vexed with Mrs. Woodbury because she herself had undoubtedly taught that in the future, when the world had attained a larger growth in Christian Science, children would be conceived by communion with the Divine mind; but she probably had no idea that any one of her students, ambitious to “demonstrate over material claims,” would actually attempt to put this theory into practice. She was wise enough, moreover, to see that such extravagant claims would bring Christian Science into disrepute, and she vigorously denounced Mrs. Woodbury’s zeal.
Besides her school in Boston, Mrs. Woodbury had a large following in Maine, where she usually spent the summer. In 1896 Fred D. Chamberlain began a suit against her for the alienation of his wife’s affections—his wife being a pupil of Mrs. Woodbury’s. At this time, the Boston Traveller, in discussing Mr. Chamberlain’s charge, took up the question of the claims that were made for Mrs. Woodbury’s son, Prince. The Traveller asserted that some of Mrs. Woodbury’s students had been induced against their will to buy stock in an “air-engine” which Mr. Woodbury was exploiting, and published interviews with George Macomber and H. E. Jones, both of Augusta, Me., who stated that their wives had believed that Mrs. Woodbury’s child was immaculately conceived, had desired to make presents to it, and had urged their husbands to buy stock in the air-engine. The Traveller also made the statement that Evelyn I. Rowe of Augusta had applied for a divorce from her husband upon the ground of non-support, saying that he gave all his earnings toward the education and support of Mrs. Woodbury’s son, Prince, whom Mr. Rowe believed to have been immaculately conceived. After the publication of this, Mrs. Woodbury promptly sued the Traveller for criminal libel, and lost her case.
All this notoriety brought matters to a crisis between Mrs. Woodbury and Mrs. Eddy. Although Mrs. Eddy had found Mrs. Woodbury very useful, she had long distrusted her discretion, and had endeavoured in various ways to put a check upon her. Mrs. Woodbury had first become a member of Mrs. Eddy’s church in 1886. When the Mother Church was reorganised, it was necessary, in order that Mrs. Eddy might cull out such persons as were distasteful to her, for all the old members to apply for admission and be voted upon, just as were the new candidates. Mrs. Woodbury was admitted only upon the condition that she would undergo a two years’ probation, and she had some difficulty in getting back even upon those terms. Several months before her admission on probation, she wrote to Mrs. Eddy, begging her to use her personal influence in her behalf. To this petition Mrs. Eddy replied:
Continue reading “The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy” by Georgine MilmineHeraclitus: A hidden connection is better than an obvious one
Google AI:
Heraclitus fragments are a collection of over 100 surviving quotes, aphorisms, and philosophical thoughts from the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–475 BC). His original written work has been lost to history; instead, these famous fragments survive today as indirect quotes, critiques, and references preserved by later classical and Christian writers.
This thought comes from Fragment B54 of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. It translates in Greek to “ἁρμονία ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων” (Harmonia aphanês phanerês kreittôn), meaning an unapparent (hidden) connection is stronger/better than an obvious one. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Heraclitus is pointing to the deep unity of opposites. On the surface, the world seems made of separate, warring dualities—day and night, hot and cold, living and dying. But underneath, there is a hidden, underlying harmony and structure (the Logos) that connects them and makes the whole system work. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
It suggests that truth, beauty, and wisdom aren’t always visible at first glance. It requires effort and deep thought to see the unseen bonds that unite the universe, and this deeper, hidden truth is always more profound than what we see on the surface.
Modern thinkers across philosophy, psychology, physics, and art frequently return to Heraclitus’ concept of the hidden connection. They use it to explain how complex systems function beneath surface appearances.
Depth Psychology: Carl Jung
Carl Jung heavily adapted Heraclitus’ philosophy into his psychological frameworks.
- Enantiodromia: Jung used this Heraclitean term to describe how an excess of one psychological force inevitably turns into its opposite (e.g., repressed emotion bursting out as rage).
- The Shadow: Jung argued that our conscious persona (obvious) is deeply bound to our unconscious shadow (hidden), forming a hidden psychological harmony.
- Synchronicity: He proposed that meaningful coincidences are connected by an unseen, non-causal principle that binds the inner mind to the outer world. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Quantum Physics: David Bohm
In theoretical physics, the search for the fundamental nature of reality mirrors this ancient fragment.
- Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm proposed that the universe has two layers: the explicate order (the obvious, separate physical objects we see) and the implicate order (a hidden, unbroken wholeness connecting everything). [1, 2, 3]
- Quantum Entanglement: Modern physics shows that two particles can remain instantly connected across vast distances. This is a literal, scientifically proven “unapparent connection” ruling physical reality.
Philosophy and Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida
20th-century postmodern thinkers looked at how language and meaning are constructed. [1, 2]
- Trace and Différance: Derrida argued that words do not have fixed, obvious definitions.
- Absent Meanings: Instead, a word’s meaning relies on its hidden relationships to all the words it is not. The obvious text is entirely dependent on an invisible web of language.
Apple’s Design Philosophy: Steve Jobs
The concept also heavily influences modern technology, design, and user experience. [1, 2]
- Complex Simplicity: Jobs famously sought “simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
- Invisible Tech: The goal of modern design is often to hide the complex, warring components (circuits, code) behind an elegant, seamless interface, creating a powerful but invisible harmony. [1]
The parallel between quantum physics and ancient mysticism lies in the breakdown of a fragmented world. Both frameworks reveal that the universe is an unbroken, interconnected web where the observer and the observed are inseparable. [1, 2]
During the 1970s, physicists like Fritjof Capra popularized these striking intersections in his landmark book, The Tao of Physics. He argued that the mathematical descriptions of modern physics lead directly to a worldview shared by Eastern mystical traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
1. Entanglement and the Web of Reality
In classical physics, objects are independent. In quantum physics, quantum entanglement proves that two subatomic particles can become permanently linked. A change in one instantly dictates the state of the other, even if they are light-years apart. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
- The Mystical Parallel: This mirrors the Vedic concept of Indra’s Net. In this Buddhist and Hindu metaphor, the universe is a vast net stretching infinitely in all directions. At every node of the net sits a glittering jewel. Each jewel reflects all the other jewels in the cosmos simultaneously.
- The Shared Concept: Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is a reflection of the whole. [1, 2]
2. The Observer Effect and the Illusion of Subjectivity
In the quantum realm, a particle exists as a wave of probabilities until it is measured. The act of observation forces the wave function to collapse into a definite particle. The observer creates the reality by looking. [1, 2, 3]
- The Mystical Parallel: In Advaita Vedanta and various schools of Mahayana Buddhism, the idea of an objective world independent of mind is an illusion (Maya). Mystics argue that subject (the looker) and object (the looked at) are a single, continuous reality.
- The Shared Concept: Consciousness is not a passive bystander. It is actively participating in forming reality. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
3. Wave-Particle Duality and the Coexistence of Opposites
Light behaves as both a continuous wave and a localized particle, depending on how you measure it. This fundamental paradox baffled early physicists because it defied traditional logic. [1, 2, 3]
- The Mystical Parallel: This is the core engine of Taoism, represented by the Yin and Yang. Taoism states that reality is a fluid flow of opposing forces that appear contradictory but are actually complementary parts of the same underlying truth.
- The Shared Concept: Truth cannot be captured by rigid “either/or” categories. It requires an embrace of “both/and” paradoxes. [1]
4. Cosmic Dance and the Quantum Vacuum
To classical eyes, empty space is a void. Quantum field theory reveals that the quantum vacuum is actually a churning, dynamic ocean of energy where particles are constantly flashing into existence and destroying one another in fractions of a second. [1, 2, 3]
- The Mystical Parallel: This matches the Hindu concept of the Dance of Shiva (Nataraja). Shiva’s dance symbolizes the continuous cosmic cycle of creation and destruction that sustains the universe.
- The Shared Concept: What we perceive as solid matter is actually a dynamic, vibrating pattern of endless energy exchange. [1, 2, 3]
Key Concepts Compared
| Quantum Physics Concept | Mystical Counterpart | Core Philosophical Agreement |
|---|---|---|
| Quantum Entanglement | Indra’s Net (Buddhism/Hinduism) | All parts of the universe are non-locally interconnected. |
| The Observer Effect | Neti Neti / Maya (Vedanta) | Subject and object are an undivided, participatory unit. |
| Wave-Particle Duality | Yin and Yang (Taoism) | Ultimate reality is made of complementary paradoxes. |
| Quantum Field Vacuum | The Dance of Shiva / The Tao | Form emerges from a dynamic, invisible sea of energy. |
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