Paulo noticed the creature’s swift and frantic breathing and the drop of red staining the ground beneath, but above all he saw the bird’s uppermost eye, wide open and fixed on his. That single eye reflected panic and despair on a scale he had never before witnessed. It was both tiny and enormous, and with every passing moment it seemed to expand, encompassing the trees, the landscape, the sky. That look stilled the wind and darkened the day and, at a glance, transformed a moment of ecstasy into a bottomless pit of guilt."From "The Algorithm of Power", Part 3: The Paulo Fontana Story

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself--he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice.

Desire changes its character by 180 degrees. Often, when first aroused, it is felt as the desire to have. The desire to touch is, partly, the desire to lay hands on, to take. Later, transformed, the same desire becomes the desire to be taken, to lose oneself within the desired. From these two opposed moments come one of the dialectics of desire; both moments apply to both sexes and they oscillate. Clearly the second moment, the desire to lose oneself within, is the most abandoned, the most desperate, and it is the one that Caravaggio chose (or was compelled) to reveal in many of his paintings.

“When you have “failed better” enough times, you will surely succeed because you have dialectically honed you skills to the level where you are vastly superior to your competitors. Knowing how to “fail better” is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities in life. As you learn the mistakes of each failure, your knowledge, resilience and talent grow enormously. Eventually you stand transformed, ready to be an astonishing success, tested in the fire, prepared to rise up from the ashes of defeat, to follow the wondrous Phoenix to the highest peaks.”

“The gifts of the Master are these: freedom, life, hope, new direction, transformation, and intimacy with God. If the cross was the end of the story, we would have no hope. But the cross isn't the end. Jesus didn't escape from death; he conquered it and opened the way to heaven for all who will dare to believe. The truth of this moment, if we let it sweep over us, is stunning. It means Jesus really is who he claimed to be, we are really as lost as he said we are, and he really is the only way for us to intimately and spiritually connect with God again.”

Here is where most preachers make their mistake. They are afraid that by preaching the gospel to clearly, it will be their fault if people ask them to send. They imagine that the gospel is food for the Carnel-minded. True enough, too many of the gospel does not become the smell of death and death but that is not the fault of the Gospel. That happens only because men do not except-do not believe-the Gospel. Faith is not merely thinking, "I believe." Your whole heart must be seized by the gospel and come to rest in it. When that happens, you were transformed cannot help but love and serve God.

Myth Number 4: Social Media Is the Shiny New Thing. Two Years from Now, That Bubble Will Burst Yes, it is the shiny new thing. No, two years from now, that bubble will not burst. There is no bubble. What social media represents is an evolution in the field of communications, just as the Internet and mobility before it. The tools will change, the platforms will evolve, but the way in which people communicate with other people through digital networks and electronic devices has been fundamentally transformed through the development of social media. We did not grow tired of the telephone, of the...

Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise’s thigh, it was a warming. Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything. But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch’s mark, the blot of Lise’s body that reminded you of what she had been -a plump, awkward girl- before the lithesome beauty took her place. It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation.

Can the purpose of a relationship be to trigger our wounds? In a way, yes, because that is how healing happens; darkness must be exposed before it can be transformed. The purpose of an intimate relationship is not that it be a place where we can hide from our weaknesses, but rather where we can safely let them go. It takes strength of character to truly delve into the mystery of an intimate relationship, because it takes the strength to endure a kind of psychic surgery, an emotional and psychological and even spiritual initiation into the higher Self. Only then can we know an enchantment that lasts.

What if all your hard work never pays off? What if I am the outsider to my friends and family? What then? What if all the good you’ve done has been transformed into evil and greed? What if those you help the most, stabbed you in the back? What then? Should I trust again?What if life is unfair, painful and cruel? What if Death invites you to join its tribe? What if death makes you feel at peace and alive! What then? Should I take death’s hand and walk away? What then?