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The Gift of Betrayal: A Meditation on Forgiveness
A few months ago, while working with one of my hypnotherapy clients who had been betrayed by his mother, I thought about Charlie*. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Charlie had been my best friend. He was also my betrayer.
We had met at a gathering of men interested in Robert Bly's mythopoetic men's work, which was designed to promote, among other things, renewed trust in male camaraderie. Connecting quickly through humor and a sense of "familiarity" that had no basis in this lifetime, Charlie and I shared interests beyond those of the Gathering, like boating and fishing. Soon we were planning outings on head-boats cruising for rockfish in Chesapeake Bay. For my first birthday during the time we hung out together, he even gifted me, despite his meager income, a beautiful rod and reel designed for use on a boat, equipment that I still have. Such gear and the fishing skills my father had taught me should have made me a fishing ace. However, Charlie's wide grin, framed by his curly blond hair, flashed repeatedly as he bested me time after time on our trips, hauling over the boat's gunwale larger rockfish as well as bigger bluefish. His success and his "ribbing" of me for my comparable ineptitude never bothered me, for I had not had as close and loving a male friend since my college years over 20 years before.
The only area in which I excelled compared to him was in having relationships. I was living with Marcie*, a woman who would be my significant other for eight years before our intractable issues separated us. I also remained connected in a fairly deep way with several previous girlfriends, one of whom, Francine*, was the individual I had seriously dated prior to meeting Marcie. In a context I do not recall, Marcie and Francine had met in my presence; as a result, Marcie concluded with some distress that Francine was still a rival for my affections. It was Charlie who became my confidant about this matter, though he had little useful advice for me. Perhaps that was so because, for reasons I could never fathom, Charlie did not score well with women despite his apparently caring nature, intelligence and reasonably good looks.
Still, over time, he seemed to get closer to Marcie. Coming to the house for one reason or another, he started spending more time with Marcie than he did with me, making her laugh in a way I could not. Though I was beginning to get a bit uneasy over this behavior, it was not really disturbing to me until Marcie took me aside one day to express her concern that Charlie was flirting beyond friendly teasing. I do not remember if I spoke to him about the matter, but I do know that Marcie, with my encouragement, spoke directly to Charlie; he was a bit embarrassed but backed off. I viewed his behavior as simply the result of awkward and inept efforts to connect with a woman.
On my next birthday, Charlie arranged a head-boat trip with me and two of my other male friends. Picking up all of us at my home before dawn so we could travel to the embarkation point in the same car, he was more late than usual with no convincing excuse. When he summarily and a bit condescendingly dismissed my concerns about missing the boat's departure from a dock fifty or so miles away, I thought something was bothering him. But he soon clammed up. An hour and a half later, after scrambling aboard two minutes before the boat's mates pulled in the dock lines, I soon forgot about the matter as the boat glided through mirror-like water and as the rising sun painted the sky in brilliant gold and red.
Around 5:00 p.m., we drove home, tired and a bit scruffy, but glowing with sun-braised skin and the triumph of hauling in an abundance of now freshly filleted rockfish. As we approached my home, I noticed an unusual number of cars parked along the street but dismissed the perception as unimportant. As we made our way to the back entrance, I sensed something strange was going on. Sure enough, when I opened the six-foot high door in the surrounding fence, a chorus of friends yelled, "Happy Birthday!" Marcie had planned and now executed the first of many surprise birthday parties she would stage for me during the following years. Soon it became apparent that Charlie was her accomplice; she had assigned him the task of getting me out of the way so she could set up the festivities secretly.
And, of course, Francine was not there and had not been told about the party. About a month later, when I was visiting her, she suddenly became quiet and looked intently at me, obviously struggling about whether she should say something. In the next moment, she told me that she had known about the birthday party. Startled and horrified, I asked her how she had found out; she told me that Charlie had told her before the party occurred, for he knew from Marcie that Francine would not be invited. When I asked her why she had not told me before now, Francine said that she had not wanted to short-circuit the surprise of the party for me; she added that, although she was hurt, she had said nothing before now because she was afraid that the disclosure would cause a rift between me and Charlie. Now, however, because the secret had made her somewhat distant from me, she needed to tell me.
After acknowledging her understandable hurt mixed with her awareness that her exclusion was also appropriate given how Marcie felt about my relationship with Francine, I went home and told Marcie about Charlie's betrayal. Despite her dislike of Francine, Marcie felt compassion for Francine's pain, as well as anger at Charlie for his cruel disclosure. I noted to Marcie that Charlie also took the risk that Francine could have shared with me her awareness of the party before it took place; if she had done so, and I had then told Marcie, Charlie would have indirectly injured Marcie as well. Suddenly, I realized that Charlie had also passively aggressively flirted with the idea of failing to take me out of the way by his being late for our fishing venture; had we missed the boat, there was nothing to keep us from coming home and thereby upsetting the preparations for the surprise party and consequently hurting Marcie. In the end, for no apparent reason, Charlie had hurt not only me, but also two women I loved.
I was beyond shocked and outraged. What devil had possessed him?
When I confronted him a couple of days later, I was shaking with anger. I outlined the list of cruel actions he had taken and demanded to know what in hell made him be so malicious. In response, he got really angry, mumbling that this was my fault, too; yet his reasoning was at best incoherent. In turn, with tears streaming out of her fierce eyes, Marcie let him know how much he had wounded her. We then asked this obvious miscreant to leave our home immediately.
A couple of days later, Charlie called to ask that I accompany him to see his therapist. I already had wanted to dismiss him altogether, but I agreed reluctantly, not willing to let go of an erstwhile good friend if there existed some mitigating reason for his behavior that he had not been able so far to articulate. After we had arrived at the therapist's office and I had recounted what had transpired, the therapist focused on Charlie, asking him what was going on for him. It took over an hour to do so, but the therapist finally concluded that Charlie's motivation was sheer jealousy of my having loving relationships with women, of my having a career instead of the kind of mundane job he had, of my having more money than he had, and of my living in a beautiful house (owned by Marcie) in an upscale neighborhood so different from the shabby apartment he shared in a lower middle-class area that was becoming prone to crime. In rebuttal, he implied that I, too, was at fault for having what he did not have. His words made no more sense to the therapist than they had to me.
After meeting with the therapist, who I felt validated my view that Charlie was a nasty and spiteful individual, I summarily ended my relationship with my former friend. Over the next year, he made overtures of reconnecting that I abruptly ignored. I considered him untrustworthy, abusive, toxic and, I must admit, a bit crazed. And I had done absolutely nothing to deserve his disrespect and even hatred. "I did nothing wrong" soon became my protective mantra. It was an open-and-shut case of his guilt. After a year, I happily never had any contact with him again and soon pretty much forgot about our connection and disconnection.
That is, until a few months ago while I was figuring out what hypnotherapeutic modality to use with my client who had been betrayed by his mother. Charlie's grinning face suddenly floated into my awareness, and I knew immediately but without any clarity that what I was saying to the client was relevant to what had happened between Charlie and me. That night, feeling perplexed and a bit apprehensive, I decided to investigate the reason for Charlie's appearance.
Soon it was clear that his emergence in my awareness had to do with my rethinking the concept of forgiveness. Forgiveness is usually viewed as releasing the alleged victimizer from blame and guilt and the alleged victim from anger, resentment and vengefulness. However, as I meditated on Charlie's actions and purpose in my life, I developed a more complex understanding of Forgiveness, one that involves four stages, each of which represents a different level of consciousness, the last being the most comprehensive.
Stage 1 Forgiveness
Not long after I had cut off Charlie, I went into Stage 1 Forgiveness. This is the stage in which the aggrieved individual tries to harbor no ill thoughts about or intentions toward the betrayer, as long as the latter is completely gone from the environments frequented by the aggrieved, including his or her inner environment. The reason the aggrieved person gives for being forgiving in this way is that it is not "Christian," "humane," or "civilized" to refrain from forgiving. However, very often, despite often herculean efforts to suppress recollection, something may trigger remembrance of the betrayer along with one's shock, outrage, and bitterness at his or her transgressions. Or those feelings may arise later in similar encounters with other individuals. In my own case, while Charlie, after awhile, did not really make an appearance in my inner world in any substantive way (until a few months ago), what he represented had appeared before he came on the scene, in instances of betrayal regarding loans I generously and naively made to two other very close, supposedly accountable friends in the fifteen years before I met Charlie.
Stage 1 Forgiveness is then mostly an intellectual, politically correct attempt to do the "right thing." From another perspective, it is a veneer of charity barely covering unprocessed feelings that may pop up unexpectedly in diverse ways. This is especially so when the aggrieved feels absolutely justified in his or her anger that borders on self-righteousness. Often, friends or other individuals (like Charlie's therapist) readily acknowledge the unremitting toxicity of the betrayer and thereby enable the black-and-white thinking of the aggrieved.
Sometimes, the aggrieved–either plagued by the popping up of irrepressible feelings about the betrayer, upset by the lip service of Stage 1 Forgiveness, or persuaded that being morosely unforgiving is really more harmful to the aggrieved than any betrayal could be–seeks help and deeper resolution from a mental health practitioner. One of the more popular therapeutic modalities today is often called "Cutting Cords." The core of this process, however it may initially be presented, is the notion that psychic cords/connections, like umbilical cords, keep the aggrieved tied to the betrayer. To remedy this situation, the aggrieved, with therapeutic help, first learns to empower himself or herself—to become not only a survivor, but also a thriver, and thus to overcome the feelings of victimization by owning his or her self-worth no matter what the betrayer has done. At this point, it is time to cut those cords (and in one variation, burn off the cut ends). Through visualization, the now supposedly empowered individual gets to use some often impressive cutting device to sever those bindings forever and move on, free, finally, from the betrayer and his or her noxious actions.
Still another modality used today involves having the aggrieved individual really empty out those hostile, otherwise suppressed feelings; he or she does so by screaming profanities while pounding a pillow with fists or using a batoka (foam-covered plastic bat) to whale on a punching bag until the individual is spent. It was the latter modality that I exercised one afternoon, nearly breaking the unbreakable batoka—How dare he do that to me and to two of my other friends! Afterwards, I felt wiped out, but less tense and, paradoxically, more energized to move on from Charlie.
Unfortunately, the positive effects of these processes very often do not last. The negative feelings return or persist to one degree or another, and therefore out goes any sense of a deeper forgiveness of the transgressor. When some of the aggrieved realize that these modalities do not have lasting positive effects, they go on what feels like a pilgrimage to find the Holy Land of Forgiveness, trying along the way this process and that without much success. Such processes might include writing a letter to the betrayer clearly and confidently indicting him or her for his or her misdeeds and then sending it, or, better still, to avoid starting a useless interchange, burning it ritualistically. Another possibility is to visualize confronting the betrayer with his or her transgression and then envision some kind of punishment taking place.
Two other processes are notable here: Soul Retrieval, a shamanic process popularized by Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman, and Calling Your Energy Back, which appears in several variations in New Age/Spiritual Circles. Both processes focus on taking back the power the individual lost to the other person when the betrayal occurred. In soul retrieval the shaman enters the spirit world on behalf of the client and retrieves the lost part of the soul; this aspect of the soul is often imaged in the form of a child who is often reluctant to return to what it conceives to be an uncertain fate with the shaman's client, who had abandoned it many times before in the face of trauma brought by others. Today, many individuals take their own journey of retrieval guided by a shaman in person or on CD.
In Calling Your Energy Back, the individual must be ready to retrieve, own, embody, and ground the energy/power he or she had lost to the betrayer who used it to affect the individual adversely. In some cases, the individual acknowledges that he or she may for various reasons have even given up his or her power or not fought very hard to keep it. In any case, the betrayed person first sees the betrayer in imaginal space, then senses the power he or she lost or gave up and sets the definite intention, invigorated by strong emotion, to take that power back. In continuing this ritual, the betrayed person begins to overcome the sense of betrayal, realizing that the betrayer's actions now have no power to harm him or her.
In the latter two modalities the aggrieved appears to take a small degree of responsibility for what has happened to him or her; for in each process the individual may acknowledge that he or she has given up some of his or her power to the betrayer. Nevertheless, the focus is still primarily on getting away totally from the nefarious betrayer.
Stage 2 Forgiveness
Many of those who start out with Stage 1 Forgiveness do go beyond giving lip service to forgiveness, for they believe that forgiveness is possible and in order only after going through one of the modalities listed above. They reason that only if they get emotionally far enough away from the betrayer can they forgive. Unfortunately, forgiveness developed from these exercises often falls apart, disintegrating because it depends almost exclusively on protecting one's power and building walls against the demonized betrayer. While boundaries are very important, relying solely on them to free oneself from the other person in order to forgive often breeds more fear as one wonders from time to time if the boundaries will hold. And, in fact, often they do not, because all of them derive from a level of consciousness where the concept of victim-and-victimizer prevails.
But, to paraphrase Einstein, the same level of consciousness that created a problem cannot resolve it. When the aggrieved is literally at his or her wits' end after using one or more of the modalities above—which provide mostly temporary relief—the individual may experience a shift in consciousness that pushes her or him into a more compassionate stance, that is, Stage 2 Forgiveness; now the more open individual goes to visit in imagination the world of the betrayer, seeking understanding of how he or she could become such an abusive figure.
When I entered Stage 2 Forgiveness after first demonizing Charlie, I started wracking my brain to understand, from his perspective, the mess he had created; it wasn't hard to see at least some of the conditioning he had endured from his verbally and physically abusive father and smothering mother. A couple of months before the betrayal, I got a hint of what was churning in Charlie, for I accompanied him as moral support when he went to trial for pulling a knife during an altercation with a co-worker. Because Charlie had no priors and had simply brandished the knife, his lawyer was able to convince the judge only to fine him and put him on probation with no jail time. I was uneasy when I heard about Charlie's potential for violence, which should have forewarned me about what he was capable of doing; yet, I did not give it much thought until after I had entered Stage 2. When I did, I felt some compassion for his pain and had a dim awareness of what it was like for him to grow up deprived and thus become jealous of my good fortune. In looking back, however, I now realize that my momentarily legitimate compassion soon tuned into pity and condescension instead of forgiveness. For a part of me was, consciously or not, still in Stage 1 with my not-fully-processed anger and self-righteousness, as is ultimately the case for many of those professing Stage 2 Forgiveness.
Another way Stage 2 Forgiveness can go awry occurs when the aggrieved individual not merely rushes to "forgive" while repressing hostile feelings, but also and immediately focuses exclusively on the frailty, deprivation, lucklessness, and cluelessness of the "poor" man or woman who could not really help being a betrayer. This will happen most often when the alleged victim lacks self-love, fears confrontation, worries about being abandoned, or fears that some transgression of his or her own will be found out. When any of these conditions prevails in the aggrieved, the compassion/forgiveness is as hollow as that in Stage 1 Lip Service Forgiveness.
A variation of the Stage 2 false forgiveness is playing the martyr; the aggrieved engages in a perversion of "turn the other cheek" with the poor, misguided, unfortunate betrayer who cannot help his negative reactions. However, such martyrdom is often really a self-righteous power trip designed to keep oneself innocent and the betrayer guilty.
Stage 3 Forgiveness
In its best form, which at least allows the aggrieved to move in a momentarily compassionate posture beyond his or her own world to visit that of the betrayer, Stage 2 Forgiveness is a step up from the coldness and emptiness of Stage 1 Lip Service Forgiveness. Yet, even when it does not devolve into outright pity, false compassion, or martyrdom, Stage 2 Forgiveness is still divisive, still productive of a "me vs. him or her" mentality: "I am still innocent, and he or she is still decidedly guilty, but now I understand where he or she was coming from."
Several years ago, when I was training to be a practitioner of a type of hypnosis called NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), I discovered in one of its modalities, "Releasing Enmeshment" (RE), what I would now call Stage 3 Forgiveness. Enmeshment in the view of NLPers is being stuck in an unforgiving posture. Releasing Enmeshment (RE) and therefore allowing forgiveness may seem at first glance to be similar to the Cord Cutting I described above, but RE's presuppositions are very different, as I shall explain later. In this process, I induce in the client a closed-eyes, light trance that deepens on its own as the work progresses. Next, I ask her to imagine the betrayer in imaginal (sometimes called etheric) space, noticing the person's overall condition and appearance. Then I ask the client to ask her subconscious to help her conscious mind to sense, see, feel or imagine lines of connection between her and the betrayer. These may appear as cords, ropes, or other modes of connection of varying material, color, thickness, etc. Some of these cords may be connected to the same portion of the body in each person, e.g., eyes to eyes, right thigh to right thigh; the ends of other cords may connect to a different part of each person's body, e.g., right elbow of the client to the solar plexus of the betrayer. All of this symbolic detail helps the client to understand, at a level much deeper than the conscious mind can fathom by itself, exactly how the client is connected, even bound, to the betrayer.
Then I ask the client to imagine feeling each cord in turn with her actual hands and thereby gain more information about the nature of the each connection, i.e., how strong and old it is; what its exact nature is; and, most important, who "plugged" it into whom. After that usually long part of the process is completed, I ask the client to ask the subconscious part that made or accepted a particular connection to disclose its positive intention in doing so. This disclosure is often very revelatory for the client, who thereby deepens her awareness of what has been going on from both sides. Next, I direct the client to ask the subconscious if it is willing to give up continuing what has become a destructive connection if it can be shown how
to get what it needs in a different, constructive way. When the subconscious assents, I ask the client to imagine her Higher Self (which appears humanoid) standing beside her and to view the betrayer's Higher Self forming to stand beside him. Before the process of disconnection occurs, I ask if there is any part of the client unwilling to go along with the disconnection; if there is one or more, I help each part to find a palatable way to assent to the upcoming change.
Then, I invite the client to do one of two actions: one is to unplug from a part of her body the cord put into her by the betrayer and put the now unplugged end into the same part of the body of the betrayer's Higher Self, e.g, from the client's right hand to the right hand of the betrayer's Higher Self. The other action is to unplug a cord the client had connected, for instance, to the heart of the betrayer and then attach the now unplugged end to heart of the client's Higher Self. The idea is that, either way, the client and the betrayer will each get from her/his own Higher Self what she/he was inappropriately getting from the other person.
After all the connections are redirected to the Higher Selves, the next step is to ask the client to declare that each individual is now free from the other to pursue her/his own direction. The other person may respond, positively or negatively, and then they separate. While this process is done in imaginal space, it may have a significant impact on both parties in the waking world. For instance, the client may find that the energy between her and the other person has changed so that they may reconcile with apologies on both sides for the misguided connections that had been made. Or the client may feel powerfully at ease with the awareness and ending of her part in the former enmeshment and thus be able to let go of the other person with true compassion if the other person has a need to continue in his old posture.
The ways in which this modality and level of Forgiveness is different from the previous two levels may already be obvious. First, there is no divisive, holier-than-thou attitude on the part of the so-called victim; in fact, no real victim is acknowledged since the problem between the parties is co-created—each choosing to make or accept all of the troublesome connections. (This is so even if the one casting himself or herself as victim cannot see or acknowledge the fact of the co-creation.) The discovery and owning of the co-creation of what were or became toxic connections and the acknowledgment of making some of them oneself is often deeply transformative for the formerly aggrieved individual. Second, the acknowledgment of an original positive intention behind the accepting or making of a connection, even if it was or turned into a negative one, keeps the parties away from blame and self-blame, the latter usually militating against acknowledgment of co-creation and thus affirming the victim-vs.-victimizer level of consciousness.
Third, the manner of the disconnection is changed from the rather violent one of aggressively cutting cords to a more caring one of redirecting the flow of energy to and from the Higher Self for each individual. Unlike in the cord-cutting scenario of Stage 1 Forgiveness, the originally aggrieved person does not summarily cast the erstwhile betrayer away to a fate totally unknown and uncared about. The formerly aggrieved individual cares enough about the other that he helps the other find in the other's Higher Self what the other can no longer get from the formerly aggrieved person. This action is truly compassion, truly forgiveness, going beyond the mere stepping into the other's world found in Stage 2 Forgiveness.
Finally, the metaphor of redirecting energy involves the taking of significant self-responsibility, much more than does the notion of cutting cords. Picture the snipped cords still waving around, ready to attach in the same way to another person and thus attracting once again negative enmeshment. In this metaphor, should the individual with a waving, severed cord make an entanglement with another person, the entangler usually does so subconsciously without taking any responsibility for doing so. After all, the first person, in cutting cords, has already gotten rid of any possibility of further entanglement, hasn't he?
I did not undergo a Releasing Enmeshment process with Charlie's image, partly because for very many years I did not know about this modality and its presuppositions, partly because I had forgotten about Charlie, and partly because, when Charlie's face did float into my awareness a few months ago, I was already equipped to go into Stage 4. Yet it would be worthwhile to do the process of Stage 3 Forgiveness, for I am sure I would learn more about how we were connected subconsciously. Still, by entering into Stage 4, some of what would have been revealed in Stage 3, would also emerge in this final stage, though with an added layer of awareness, as you shall see below.
Stage 4 "Forgiveness"
Stage 3 Forgiveness may seem like the ultimate forgiveness because it absolves the other person's actions from being wholly responsible for the mess; because it shows mercy and compassion; and because it overcomes the coldness, pity, blame and self-blame that variously mar Stages 1 & 2. Nevertheless, there is, as I alluded to above, a fourth stage, one that goes beyond all that has been said so far because it undermines the very notion of conventional forgiveness with a more embracive concept.
In Stage 3 forgiveness, the formerly aggrieved person ultimately sees that there is enough accountability to go around; but what she does not see is that she actually asked on the soul level for the alleged betrayer to do what he did. In other words, the betrayal did not occur by chance; instead, the parties chose and planned the situation–just about every aspect of it (while always leaving room for in-the-moment, even significant changes). Achieving this awareness is Stage 4 Forgiveness. Here I present once again in one of my posts the Sethian notion that we create our own reality—no exceptions. Moreover, what happens to us when with others is always a co-creation, no matter if our lower level consciousness is appalled by and totally disbelieving of that fact.
These co-creations are the result of soul contracts made by the individuals during the Pre-Birth Planning phase of their Inter-Life experience. Each agrees to play a role for the other that will bring the other the experience the other needs to deepen his or her understanding of how to use energy. Often this involves one person's being the "bad guy" for the other, though this role can also serve the Bad Guy's development.
I am reminded here of two of the characters in Neale Donald Walsch's The Little Soul and the Sun. While in Heaven during his Interlife experience, the Little Soul is imaged as a little boy who wants not so much to know about Forgiveness as to thoroughly experience it; but God tells him that in Heaven there is no need for Forgiveness; in fact, He says, the only way to do that is to incarnate and experience in it the three-dimensional world where someone does something to him that he can then forgive. Up steps the Friendly Soul imaged as a little girl; she offers to contract with the Little Soul to help him experience what forgiveness is. When the Little Soul asks why she would help him, she replies that he has forgotten that they have helped each other countless times to experience fully what they may at first only know intellectually. But then she grows quieter and says that there is one thing they must remember: she may have to make her energy so dense and dark to do the horrible thing to him—which he would then have a chance to forgive—that both of them may forget who they really are: light beings lovingly helping each other understand the ins and outs of energy manifestation.
When I entered Stage 4 Forgiveness regarding Charlie's betrayal, I pushed myself counter-intuitively to ask, "Why did I ask him to betray me?" When I broached that question to my Inner Self, I encountered simultaneously two opposing feelings. The first was incredulity that I could even ask such an apparently stupid question, since, while in a less expansive consciousness, I knew that I was a totally innocent victim. The second feeling was one of relief and relaxation, for a wall dropped away so I could see my part of the contract we had made.
I began to see that in several ways, Charlie's presence and actions in my life provided a mirror to me of some of my own questionable actions at the time, actions that I was willfully blind to. So, I reflected, if I summoned him to be a mirror, then that means I am a betrayer, too. Wow, that was hard to acknowledge, but the awareness gradually became clearer, if at first not more palatable. I realized that I had not fully ended my romantic relationship with Francine, something I denied to myself, but which Marcie picked up and grieved over. For a few months, I would insist on visiting Francine on Friday nights, as Marcie cried with fear that I would not return. I told myself that if I did not get physical with Francine, I was doing nothing wrong despite the romantic feelings I still had for her, which she tried to draw out of me without a lot of resistance from me.
However, the possibility of my becoming aware that I was, indeed, betraying Marcie was dimmed by the downright exhilaration of having two lovely women wanting me at the same time. As I look now at that fact, I am aware that until just before I met Francine, I was almost as unsuccessful with women as was Charlie. In not wanting to remind myself of that fact, I likely distanced Charlie in some unclear way, contributing to his sense of being isolated and "different" from me, and thus provoking him to some degree to retaliate. And I may well have had a bit of condescension in my voice when I tried to give him relationship advice. While my present acknowledgment of my contribution to his perspective and actions does not absolve him of understanding why he summoned me to cut him off, nevertheless, as I contemplated what Charlie was mirroring back to me, I gradually understood that he had been right in his inarticulate, but spot-on declaration that I, too, was "at fault."
Had I not been able now to discover what I have outlined in the last paragraphs and had I still felt uneasy about what had happened between me and Charlie, I might have sought out a hypnotherapy colleague to help me go back to the contracting period in the Other World. In doing so, I would have been privy not only to the contract's details, but also to what we took from a past life (lives) together to develop further our awareness of the dos and don'ts of energy manipulation. And, depending on whether my Higher Self believed that I had discovered, through knowing the details, the core wisdom generated by the contract or, in contrast, believed that there was more for me to learn from going on with it, I would have either ended the agreement on my side or re-contracted in imaginal space with Charlie to make some changes, an action that would have positively affected us both on the earth plane.
Even though I did not then have the awareness that I have now, in a couple of months I did, indeed, bring much more closure to the relationship with Francine. (And, of course, Francine and Marcie were also co-creators, for their own reasons, of their experiences with me and Charlie and with each other.) But if I had accepted then that I had co-created Charlie's betrayal of me, I would have owned more easily my own darker side and its effects on Charlie and the women and possibly have mitigated those effects. Moreover, Charlie and I might possibly have deepened our friendship; or, at the very least, had he not been able to step out of his own limiting beliefs, I would have wished him well and been very grateful to him as I pursued my own journey.
Still, beyond all the mirroring he provided of my own darkness, the greatest gift Charlie gave me through his betrayal was the chance to experience forgiveness fully and concretely. He did for me what the Friendly Soul had done for the Little Soul, giving me the opportunity to experience and then truly let go of blaming, victimization, black-and-white thinking, self-righteousness, resentment, anger and vengefulness; for I now see that these feelings were always beside the point, even though I had first to experience them until their uselessness to heal me brought me to a place where a shift of consciousness was possible. And, perhaps, given that Charlie probably felt that I, in turn, had betrayed him by cutting him off so self-righteously, he, too, will discover or has already discovered that in the three-dimensional world, the true meaning of forgiveness most often arises from first experiencing, often very painfully, what it is not.
What is left for me to do, clearly and sincerely, is to thank him: "Charlie, thank you for agreeing to be the 'bad guy' in my life at the time; thank you for being willing to sacrifice our friendship to provide an opportunity for both of us to grow in consciousness." Given my belief that we are all always linked intimately at the soul level, I have no doubt that Charlie is somehow aware of my change of heart, of my moving beyond any conventional notion of forgiveness, given that he had done only what on the level of Spirit I had asked him to do.
So, Dear Reader, what has my post invoked in you? What memories of being betrayed arise, asking for resolution through a more expansive consciousness? What have you learned on your own about the essence of forgiveness?
*Everyone referenced in this post has a fictitious name to preserve his or her privacy.
Source of Linked Hands Image: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3574/3397030047_f2442c1bcd.jpg


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subset: commoncrawl


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Tagged: White Sox
White Sox SP Philip Humber Embraces Fantasy Dream Week
One of the top stories for the White Sox last season was the breakout season by former first round pick Philip Humber. Selected by the Mets with the third pick of the 2004 draft, Humber dealt with injuries and never met expectations when he was traded for Johan Santana in 2008. The trade did not exactly work out for the Twins, as Humber moved to the White Sox and aside from him the only other key contributor is their former centerfielder Carlos Gomez, who proved to be a part-time player.
Last season, Humber finally got a crack at sticking in the Big Leagues. He made 26 starts and 28 appearances. Though his record was just 9-9, more impressive was his 3.75 ERA and 1.18 WHIP despite pitching in a hitter's ballpark. What separates Humber from most pitchers is his devastating curveball. In fact, he ranked fourth in Major League Baseball last season with a .159 opposing average against his curveball.
If there is an area for Humber to improve, it's his stamina. In his first full season in the Big Leagues, Humber experienced a major drop off after the fifth inning, as his ERA spiked from 2.96 to 6.34. At that point, his control fell a bit and his opposing average spiked to .305. Of course, the increased workload may explain the trend.
Humber has a dream week in fantasy baseball, as he opens with a start against an overzealous Orioles offense that lacks much plate discipline. He aced that test, allowing just one run to score in 5.1 innings of work, while fanning 7 batters. Next, he hurls in Seattle's cavernous Safeco Field, against a mediocre Mariners offense.
Fantasy managers should plug Humber for both starts this week. For more fantasy baseball insight visit BloombergSports.com.


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Friday, February 10, 2006
Yes yes... I know... more muffins!
Raspberry Lemon Muffins are moist with a bit of crunch on the top of the big mushroom crowns coming from raw sugar sprinkled on before baking. These are just your typical muffins, flavored with lemon yogurt and zest, with some raspberries folded in. I used frozen berries, so while I was mixing them in they did defrost a bit and turned bits of the batter a funky purplish color! I probably should have used muffin liners, but didn't think about it at the time. In a couple muffins where raspberries were on the outside they wanted to stick, but they did pop out after sitting for a few minutes. I might try these with all pastry flour next time just to see the difference in texture.
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I bought some dried cherries at Trader Joe's for dinner tonight. Dried Cherry-Toasted Almond Turkey Salad Sandwiches have lots of flavors mixing to create quite a tasty meal. Nutty whole wheat pitas take the place of sandwich bread to hold in the turkey salad. The binder is a mixture of sour cream and plain yogurt spiced with ground ginger and crushed red pepper. Crisp celery adds a nice crunch along with the toasted almonds. Dried cherries and golden raisins mix well with the chunks of juicy turkey breast. The meal was quick to make and not as messy to eat as with sandwich bread... I served some baked tortilla chips along side to complete the meal.
8 comments:
Wow a fabulous double delight. Thanks for sharingReplyDelete
The muffins sound wonderful. So you would substitute cake flour for all of the ap next time?ReplyDelete
Mmmm, muffins! You can never make too many muffins as far as I'm concerned.ReplyDelete
I've never used pastry flour. I love how experimental you are, it's very inspiring.
- Anonymous2/11/2006 12:38:00 PM
that made me hungryReplyDelete
those muffins look delicious. just like the berry scone i picked up the other day... i will have to try those!ReplyDelete
Muffins anytime that's what I say. Plus these look very delicious indeed.ReplyDelete
ruth - I didn't get any muffins but Jeff said they were very good!ReplyDelete
fran - I ment whole wheat pastry flour =)
teresa - Thanks!
Jeffy - Next time I'll try to snag a muffin for ya!
stacey - Berry scones? Sounds tasty!
Valentina - I agree! Thanks!
I LOVE muffins... thank you for sharing this recipe and please don't stop posting muffin recipes!!ReplyDelete


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Ryan Gosling really does know how to heat things up.
In addition to being talented and gorgeous, it turns out the actor is also an expert in the kitchen.
Gosling's longtime partner Eva Mendes made the revelation about his culinary abilities on Instagram.
"Ryan is an amazing chef AND baker," the actress replied to a fan who asked if Gosling could cook. "For reals. Incredible. No joke."
There you have it. Ryan Gosling is perfect.
The "Drive" actor's chef skills come in extra handy as Mendes admitted her abilities are limited in that department.
"I'm not sure that what I do is cooking," she added. "Its more like steaming veggies and juicing and making rice. He really cooks. I survive."
Mendes and Gosling have been together since meeting in 2011 while filming "The Place Beyond the Pines." The couple share two daughters, Esmeralda, 5, and Amada, 3.
Since they began dating and starting a family, Gosling has gone on to much acclaim by starring in films such as "The Big Short," "La La Land" and "First Man." Mendes has mostly retreated from the spotlight having last appeared on the big screen in the 2014 film "Lost River," which Gosling also happened to write and direct.
The 45-year-old recently spoke out about her hiatus and why she's chosen to take a break from her film career.
"As a mother now, there are many roles I won't do. There are many subject matters that I don't want to be involved with, so it limits my choices and I'm fine with that," Mendes wrote in January. I have to set an example for my girls now," she reveals.
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How Journalists Got the Cheese Lobbying Story Wrong
On November 7, The New York Times ran a front-page story by Michael Moss exposing what appears to be yet another sinister example of bureaucratic hypocrisy in the tainted world of food regulation. The USDA, according to Moss, has assumed the contradictory role of warning Americans against a high-fat diet while, at the same time, promoting the consumption of heart-clogging cheese products. Worse, as Moss implies, American taxpayers are the ones funding this corporate-friendly doublespeak.
Michael Moss is an ace reporter. His work on the meat industry for the Times has been unmatched. I'm a fan. In the case of this cheese story, though, Moss obscured an important point, one that dampens the outrage you might have felt if you'd received Michael Pollan's tweet that "our tax dollars [are] at work promoting Domino's Pizza."
The point of this post is not to impugn Moss's actual reporting, but rather to clarify a misunderstanding that, due to a single false implication, has taken hold of the journalistic establishment. If you'd like to stop reading now and move on to a more savory topic, here's the takeaway: Your tax dollars are not at work promoting Domino's pizza. (Could somebody tweet that for me?)
Your tax dollars are not at work promoting Domino's pizza. (Could somebody tweet that for me?)
At the center of Moss's story is a marketing outfit known as Dairy Management. Dairy Management, which started in 1994, serves one god: dairy sales. Funding for Dairy Management's domestic marketing campaign does not come from the USDA, but rather from private producers who tax themselves to pay for the organization's marketing strategies. The funds that result are called "checkoff" funds.
The USDA's job with respect to Dairy Management—a job defined by the Dairy Production and Stabilization Act of 1983—is to make sure all producers pay the tax, that nobody freeloads, and that marketing campaigns are legal. Occasionally, the USDA will choose board members for Dairy Management, but the vast majority of the board is comprised of dairymen. Moss wrote nothing to directly counteract any of these facts.
The problem with the piece was more subtle. Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort, was one of the first to grasp it. Moss, argues Bishop, produced "a misleading story" by encouraging "readers (and quite a few journalists) to believe that the U. S. Department of Agriculture spent your money to promote unhealthy concoctions containing bushel baskets of cheese."
At the crux of Bishop's thorough vivisection of the Times article is the claim by Moss that Dairy Management "received several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department." Readers could reasonably conclude from this remark that their tax dollars were at work promoting Dairy Management-Domino's agreements that led to stuffing a typical pizza with four times more cheese.
Marion Nestle: The Plot to Sell Cheese
That's disgusting. But it's not the point. The point is that although Moss is correct that Dairy Management receives millions from the USDA, his mistake (and the source of the false implication) came in not noting until several paragraphs later that those millions (about five) do not fund domestic programs like the Domino's crust-stuffing gambit. In actuality, those USDA funds are designated "to promote dairy interests overseas"—in other words, opening foreign markets to U.S. dairy.
So in the end Moss's story was not about the USDA using taxpayer dollars to fund a cheesy agreement between Dairy Management and Domino's Pizza. Instead it was about the dairy industry paying for marketing services—services that happen to be regulated by the USDA—designed to sell more cheese.
And of course that's not much of a story.


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First and Seccond Grade League
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Digestion Formula for Vata*
Vata Digest is the classical Ayurvedic formula known as Hingvastak. This vata-soothing combination of herbs for digestion supports the entire digestive process and is especially useful for those with vata predominant constitutions or vata digestive imbalances. Vata is cold, light, and dry, qualities that in excess can inhibit proper digestive function and create discomfort, like gas, bloating, and hard stools. Vata Digest contains vata balancing herbs that are heating, grounding, and oily. They effectively counter the opposing vata qualities, creating balance. Vata Digest's heating quality enkindles the digestive fire, stimulates a healthy appetite, and helps ensure that nutrients are properly absorbed and assimilated. Its grounding quality helps calm the excessive air movement in the system that is characteristic of vata. The oil quality of the herbs supports the natural lubrication of the intestines, assisting in thorough and healthy elimination. To stimulate the appetite, consider taking before eating, and to support digestion, take after a meal.*
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Take daily before meals to support healthy digestion. Especially useful for those with vata constitutions or vata imbalances.*
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High pitta, acute diarrhea, not for use by pregnant women
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1–2 tablets, once or twice daily, or as directed by your health practitioner.
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text:
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An Afghan soldier killed one U.S. marine and wounded another before being shot to death in return fire Sunday in southern Afghanistan, the latest in a series of attacks against foreigners blamed on government forces within their own ranks.
Nearly 20 such attacks this year have raised the level of mistrust between the U.S.-led coalition and their Afghan partners as NATO gears up to hand over security to local forces ahead of a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops.
In another sign of deteriorating security, the United States is considering abandoning plans for a consulate in the country"s north because the building chosen was deemed too dangerous to occupy. The U.S. spent $80 million on the project despite glaring security deficiencies in the former hotel, according to a copy of a document drafted by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Those problems — including shoddy construction that would lead to a "catastrophic failure" of the building in a car bomb attack — were overlooked and waivers to strict State Department building rules were granted as officials rushed to open the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif as a sign of America"s long-term commitment to Afghanistan, the diplomatic memo shows.
While Mazar-i-Sharif was considered relatively safe when the project was approved in 2009, the memo said, a number of incidents in the city indicate that is no longer the case, including an attack last April on a nearby United Nations compound in which a mob stormed the facility and killed seven foreigners — three workers and their guards.
Winning over the ethnic Tajik and Uzbek minorities who dominate the north, was one of the reasons the U.S. wanted a consulate there. But the site picked was doomed from the start, the embassy documents show.
The compound shared a perimeter wall with local shopkeepers and was surrounded by tall buildings that could be used for an attack, the memo said. The distance between the compound"s buildings and the outer wall also was not up to U.S. standards, it added.
In the event of an emergency, there wasn"t even enough space to land a single helicopter, so one would have to land on a nearby street, the memo said.
Neighborhood security also was in question. The compound was near a large mosque that is often the center of large protests in the city, and a nearby truck stop and pickup spot for day laborers provided easy cover for surveillance or attack, it said.
The memo, which was first reported in the Washington Post, said the "security vulnerabilities" at the site and increased threats in Mazar-i-Sharif were overwhelming.
"Consequently, establishing a diplomatic presence at the current location is no longer believed to be tenable and the search for an alternative site has been initiated," it said.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Gavin Sundwall declined to comment on the report, saying only that "the security situation has evolved in Afghanistan and any decisions we make are driven by our responsibility to ensure the safety of our personnel."
Persistent violence has threatened to undermine President Barack Obama"s effort to show progress in stabilizing Afghanistan at a NATO summit later this month in Chicago. Obama traveled to Afghanistan on May 1 to sign a long-term strategic partnership governing the relationship between the two countries through 2024.
The Afghan soldier opened fire on international troops in the Tarekh Naver in the Marjah district, a former Taliban stronghold that was the site of a major offensive by coalition forces in 2010, said a spokesman for the governor of Helmand province.
A senior U.S. defense official in Washington said Sunday that the victim was a U.S. Marine in Helmand province, and that one other Marine was wounded. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the attack is under investigation had no other details.
The shooting marks the second recent killing of a U.S. Marine in Helmand by an Afghan soldier. Lance Cpl. Edward Dycus was shot in the head by an Afghan soldier in Helmand"s Marja district while on guard duty on Jan. 31 and died the next day.
The provincial governor"s spokesman, Daud Ahmadi said the service member was killed in a gunfight between NATO forces and an Afghan army soldier, with one service member killed and another wounded.
The insider threat to foreigners trying to mentor and strengthen Afghan security forces has existed for years but has grown more deadly.
The U.S.-led coalition routinely reports each time an American or other foreign soldier is killed by an Afghan in uniform, but the military is underreporting the number of overall attacks. It was reported earlier this month that the coalition does not report attacks in which the Afghan wounds — or misses — his U.S. or allied target. It also doesn"t report the wounding of troops who were attacked alongside those who were killed.
The number of such attacks have been on the rise. So far this year there have been 19 attacks killing 12 soldiers, compared to 21 last year killing 35 coalition service members, according to NATO figures.
That compares with 11 fatal attacks and 20 deaths the previous year. In 2007 and 2008 there were a combined total of four attacks and four deaths.
U.S. officials say that in most cases the Afghans who turn their guns on their allies are motivated not by sympathy for the Taliban or on orders from insurgents, but rather act as a result of personal grievances against the coalition.
Also Sunday, a NATO service member was killed by a bomb in eastern Afghanistan, the alliance said, raising to 139 the number of foreign troops deaths so far this year.
The heads of the House and Senate intelligence committees claimed Sunday that the Taliban has actually grown stronger since 33,000 more U.S. troops were deployed to Afghanistan in 2010.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, offered the pessimistic report on CNN"s "State of the Union" after a fact-finding trip to the region where they met with President Hamid Karzai.
When asked if the Taliban"s capabilities have been degraded, Feinstein said: "I think we"d both say that what we"ve found is that the Taliban is stronger."
More than 1,800 U.S. troops have been killed in the decade-long war. About 90,000 service members remain deployed, down from a peak of more than 100,000 last year.


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Very aromatic blend formulated with oils that are highly grounding. Still can help soothe and ease the transition from the fast pace and worries of your day into a relaxing evening. Still is particularly helpful when we have taken on more than we feel we can handle and are overwhelmed.


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Should a Christian consume content related to spirits and death?
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[Bourbon Chicken is a flavorful chicken dish named for the bourbon whiskey ingredient. The dish is commonly found at Cajun, Chinese, and American BBQ themed restaurants. The various recipes includes soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger, and bourbon in the base, and the chicken is marinated in this sauce.]
Yesterday we cooked with red wine, today we'll use bourbon. This is a superb chicken recipe from Food.com!
Bourbon Chicken
- olive oil
- 4 chicken breasts, chopped into chunks
- 1 red pepper, sliced thinly (about 200g)
- 1 carrot, cut into sticks
- 0.55 lbs. broccoli florets
- 2 green onions, sliced thinly
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- 1 teaspoon ginger, grated
- 1/2-1 teaspoon red pepper flakes (add to your personal taste.)
- 1/3 cup apple juice (just over a 1/4 cup)
- 1/2 cup bourbon (when I use bourbon for cooking, just as when I use wine, I prefer a quality bourbon, something I would normally like to drink, like Blanton's or Maker's Mark)
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/3 cup soy sauce
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons ketchup
- 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
- 1 tablespoon cornflour
- Heat a little oil in a pan, cook chicken in batches, until browned all over, set chicken to one side.
- Heat a little more oil in the same pan, add pepper, garlic and ginger, cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring.
- Add red pepper flakes, juice, bourbon, water, soy, sugar, ketchup and vinegar, stir to combine, bring to the boil.
- Return chicken to pan with carrot and broccoli, reduce heat and simmer for about 20 Min's.
- Mix a little water with the cornflour, add to sauce and stir until mixture thickens.
- Serve over rive and sprinkle with green onions.
Yields 4 servings; Prep time – 10 minutes; Total time – 35 minutes


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Three scientists at universities in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Oregon whose research helped transform cancer treatment will share one of the richest prizes in medicine and biomedical research.
Dr. Peter Nowell of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Janet Rowley of the University of Chicago and Dr. Brian Druker of Oregon Health and Science University will receive the $500,000 annual Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research next month, the medical center announced Tuesday. The prize, one of the largest in medicine and science in the United States, is awarded to those who have changed the course of medical research.
Medical center officials called the trio "visionary scientists" whose work has given hope to cancer patients around the world. The researchers will officially receive the award May 17 at a ceremony at the medical center.
"These individuals exemplify the extraordinary impact that painstaking research can have on the lives of countless individuals," said James J. Barba, president and CEO of Albany Medical Center.
Nowell's research at Penn in Philadelphia was the first to show a genetic defect could be responsible for cancer, His work has led to numerous discoveries in the growth of cells related to cancers and other disorders.
Rowley's discoveries of chromosome abnormalities in leukemia secured a common agreement among scientists, physicians and the general public that cancer is, in fact, a genetic disease.
Druker, an oncologist in Portland, Ore., used earlier work by Nowell and Rowley to develop a lifesaving treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia that specifically targets the leukemia cells without harming healthy cells.
The Albany Medical Center Prize was established in 2000 by the late Morris "Marty" Silverman, a New York City businessman who wanted to encourage health and biomedical research.
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BOSTON (AP) — Alex Rodriguez is not ready to rejoin the New York Yankees. The team said Rodriguez has a strained left quadriceps and won't be able to return this week in Texas, as had been planned. Instead, he will remain on the disabled list and go back to Tampa, Fla., "for rest and treatment," the Yankees said in a statement issued before their game against the Boston Red Sox on Sunday night. "He's going to be out for a while," manager Joe Girardi said after the Yankees lost 8-7 in 11 innings. "So we'll just deal with it and continue to play." Only a day before, it appeared A-Rod was on target to return from offseason hip surgery early this week. Now, it's unclear when he might be back. "I haven't really talked to the doctors about it. You never know how quick a guy's going to heal," Girardi said. "Until they walk through that door and they're ready to play, I don't count on 'em. It's kind of like the trade rumors." It's the latest blow to the depleted Yankees, missing several injured stars almost all season. Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson came back and quickly got hurt again. Rodriguez didn't even finish his rehab assignment. Rodriguez and Girardi had said they were hoping the third baseman would be back for Tuesday night's game against the Rangers. But the three-time MVP was moved from third base to designated hitter for Saturday night's rehab game with Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre after feeling tightness in his quad and went 0 for 4 with three strikeouts. He was sent Sunday to New York-Presbyterian Hospital to be examined by team doctor Christopher Ahmad, and an MRI showed a Grade 1 strain — the least serious level. It's the same injury that landed Jeter on the 15-day DL after his one-game return from a broken ankle. Jeter was injured July 11 and won't be back until late this month, at the earliest. Before the quadriceps injury, the original plan was for Rodriguez to rejoin the Yankees on Monday in Texas. Girardi then told reporters at Fenway Park at about 5:50 p.m. on Sunday that Rodriguez might make his 2013 debut on Tuesday. "I would be surprised if he played Monday. Tuesday's possible," Girardi said. But at 7:37 p.m. — about a half-hour before first pitch — the Yankees sent reporters an email saying the nearly 38-year-old Rodriguez "will not be joining the team for its series in Texas." Rodriguez had surgery on his left hip in January and hasn't played a major league game this season. His 20-day minor league rehab assignment expired on Sunday, and the Yankees had to activate him or leave him on the disabled list. The team said it might petition Major League Baseball for another rehab assignment because of the new injury. "I think we're all a little bit anxious to see how he looks physically and how he's moving," Girardi said before the results of the MRI were announced. "I've talked to people that have seen him and said he ran good yesterday. … I am anxious to see. He hasn't played in a while and he's almost 38. You kind of want to see what you've got." Rodriguez told reporters in Scranton, Pa., on Sunday that he expected to work out on Monday and be back in the lineup Tuesday. He wasn't sure if he would play third or DH upon his return, he said. If Rodriguez can regain his MVP form — rather than the one that got him benched during the 2012 playoffs — his return would be a boost for a lineup that has been without most of its biggest stars. Jeter went back on the disabled list Friday and has played only one big league game all season. Teixeira (wrist surgery), Granderson (broken pinkie), infielder Kevin Youkilis (back surgery) and catcher Francisco Cervelli (broken hand) are also out. During the offseason, Rodriguez's name surfaced in an investigation of Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic in Florida linked with the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs. He met with investigators from Major League Baseball earlier this month.
Yankees say A-Rod won't rejoin team in Texas
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Shortcut Rugelach
Rugelach are usually made with a cream-cheese dough that's rolled into a crescent shape around a filling. This simplified version uses prepared puff pastry, and the results are every bit as good, in half the time.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
- Yields:
- 4 dz.
- Cook Time:
- 15 mins
- Total Time:
- 35 mins
- Cal/Serv:
- 90
- 1 package frozen puff-pastry sheets
- 1 c. dark seedless raisins
- c. walnuts
- c. sugar
- 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
- 1 large egg white
- Step 1Remove 1 puff-pastry sheet from freezer; let stand at room temperature, about 20 minutes, to thaw as label directs.
- Step 2While pastry is thawing, in food processor with knife blade attached, blend raisins, walnuts, 2/3 cup sugar, and 3/4 teaspoon cinnamon until raisins and walnuts are finely chopped.
- Step 3In small bowl, lightly beat egg white with 1 teaspoon water. In another small bowl, mix 2 teaspoons sugar with 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon. Set both bowls aside.
- Step 4Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease large cookie sheet. Remove second puff-pastry sheet from freezer; thaw as above.
- Step 5Meanwhile, on lightly floured surface, with floured rolling pin, roll thawed puff-pastry sheet into a 14- by 12-inch rectangle. Cut pastry crosswise in half to make two 7- by 12-inch rectangles. Divide raisin mixture into fourths. Sprinkle one-fourth of raisin mixture (rounded 1/2 cup) on 1 rectangle, leaving 3/4-inch border along a 12-inch side. Repeat with another one-fourth of raisin mixture on second rectangle. Lightly brush border on each rectangle with some egg-white mixture. Roll each pastry rectangle, jelly-roll fashion, starting from 12-inch side with filling; pinch seam to seal.
- Step 6Brush rolls with some egg-white mixture, and sprinkle with half of sugar-cinnamon mixture. Cut each roll crosswise into 12 (about 1-inch-thick) pieces. Place pieces, about 1 1/2 inches apart, seam side down on cookie sheet. Bake cookies 15 to 17 minutes, until puffed and golden. With pancake turner, remove cookies to wire rack to cool. Repeat, using second puff-pastry sheet and remaining ingredients. Store cookies in tightly covered container.
Access Our Library of 10K Triple-Tested Recipes
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The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.
That progenitor is former University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell. The architect of "supply-side economics" is now a professor at Columbia University, but I knew him through his connection to my Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, back before Mundell's research on currencies and exchange rates had produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.
Mundell, then, was more concerned with his bathroom arrangements. Professor Mundell, who has both a Nobel Prize and an ancient villa in Tuscany, told me, incensed:
"They won't even let me have a toilet. They've got rules that tell me I can't have a toilet in this room! Can you imagine?"
As it happens, I can't. But I don't have an Italian villa, so I can't imagine the frustrations of bylaws governing commode placement.
But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)
"It's very hard to fire workers in Europe," he complained. His answer: the euro.
The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession.
"It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians," he said. "[And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business."
He cited labor laws, environmental regulations and, of course, taxes. All would be flushed away by the euro. Democracy would not be allowed to interfere with the marketplace – or the plumbing.
As another Nobelist, Paul Krugman, notes, the creation of the eurozone violated the basic economic rule known as "optimum currency area". This was a rule devised by Bob Mundell.
That doesn't bother Mundell. For him, the euro wasn't about turning Europe into a powerful, unified economic unit. It was about Reagan and Thatcher.
"Ronald Reagan would not have been elected president without Mundell's influence," once wrote Jude Wanniski in the Wall Street Journal. The supply-side economics pioneered by Mundell became the theoretical template for Reaganomics – or as George Bush the Elder called it, "voodoo economics": the magical belief in free-market nostrums that also inspired the policies of Mrs Thatcher.
Mundell explained to me that, in fact, the euro is of a piece with Reaganomics:
"Monetary discipline forces fiscal discipline on the politicians as well."
And when crises arise, economically disarmed nations have little to do but wipe away government regulations wholesale, privatize state industries en masse, slash taxes and send the European welfare state down the drain.
Thus, we see that (unelected) Prime Minister Mario Monti is demanding labor law "reform" in Italy to make it easier for employers like Mundell to fire those Tuscan plumbers. Mario Draghi, the (unelected) head of the European Central Bank, is calling for "structural reforms" – a euphemism for worker-crushing schemes. They cite the nebulous theory that this "internal devaluation" of each nation will make them all more competitive.
Monti and Draghi cannot credibly explain how, if every country in the Continent cheapens its workforce, any can gain a competitive advantage.
But they don't have to explain their policies; they just have to let the markets go to work on each nation's bonds. Hence, currency union is class war by other means.
The crisis in Europe and the flames of Greece have produced the warming glow of what the supply-siders' philosopher-king Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction". Schumpeter acolyte and free-market apologist Thomas Friedman flew to Athens to visit the "impromptu shrine" of the burnt-out bank where three people died after it was fire-bombed by anarchist protesters, and used the occasion to deliver a homily on globalization and Greek "irresponsibility".
The flames, the mass unemployment, the fire-sale of national assets, would bring about what Friedman called a "regeneration" of Greece and, ultimately, the entire eurozone. So that Mundell and those others with villas can put their toilets wherever they damn well want to.
Far from failing, the euro, which was Mundell's baby, has succeeded probably beyond its progenitor's wildest dreams.


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Gotham Gazette's Reading NYC Book Club held a conversation on January 27 at the New Amsterdam branch of the New York Public Library with Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker staff writer whose articles about New York politics have been collected in a new book, "The Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit." An edited transcript appears below.
Elizabeth Kolbert (reading from her book): Before I worked in Albany, I had always wanted to be a political reporter, perhaps because I had no real idea what the job entailed. I arrived there on December 31, 1986, the eve of Mario Cuomo's second inaugural, and almost immediately was assigned to covered a scandal involving an assemblywoman named Gerdi Lipschutz. A 63-year-old former dental assistant from Queens, Lipschutz had served in the Legislature for six terms and had risen to the chairmanship of the Assembly Majority Steering Committee. At the behest of her county's Democratic organization, she had also, prosecutors revealed, maintained two "no-show" employees on her legislative payroll. First, her indignant colleagues shunned her; later, they voted to strip her of her seniority and deprive her of her legislative stipend - or "lulu" - and collectively called on her to resign. On her last day in office, it fell to me to follow her out to her car in the Capitol's underground garage. I can still recall the baleful look that she shot me when I asked her if she had any final observations to share about her situation.
In principle, Albany is a state capital much like any other, with struggles that are no more or less edifying; as a practical matter, anyone who has ever spent much time there knows different. (William Kennedy, Albany's Virgil, who has described the city as "a state of mind," notes that "wickedness has been our lot for more years than any man alive can remember.") I ended up reporting on Albany for five legislative sessions. During that time, the State Senate Minority Leader, Manfred Ohrenstein, was indicted on 564 counts of grand larceny and conspiracy, and the Assembly Speaker, Mel Miller, was indicted on 19 counts of conspiracy and mail fraud. Both cases were eventually dismissed. (Shortly after I left, the state's chief judge, Sol Wachtler, was charged with extortion after demanding a payoff from his ex-girlfriend and threatening to kidnap her daughter.) The commanding officer of the New York State militia was discovered not only to have accepted bribes and falsified official documents but also to have been a bigamist, and two janitorial workers were reprimanded for having had sex - repeatedly - on a desk at the headquarters of the New York State Department of Transportation. The state's drug-treatment commissioner was forced to resign after allegations that he had steered contracts to friends who failed to provide any actual drug treatment. He became a pushcart vender and on warm days sold hot dogs in front of the Capitol. He called himself the Knishener.
Late last month [April 2003], I went back to the capitol to see how Albany would handle this year's $12 billion budget gap, the worst since the Great Depression. On the first day I spent in the city, the state's legislative leaders emerged from a meeting with Governor George Pataki to say that they still hoped to reach an agreement with him on a spending plan, which was interpreted to mean that they had reached an impasse. On the second day, the governor asserted, "In times of challenge, New Yorkers have always stood together in making the right decisions," which was understood to signal a complete breakdown in negotiations. By the end of the week, the Legislature had approved a $93 billion budget that violated just about every condition Pataki had laid down. The governor has labeled it "patently unconstitutional." At one point, standing in the Capitol's Red Room, he declared, "I will do everything in my ability to prevent this plan from becoming law, including exercising my veto powers." Depending on how things play out, the struggle between the governor and the legislature will either merely prolong the state's fiscal problems or, more likely, compound them.
Gotham Gazette: So what's wrong up there?
Elizabth Kolbert: They get reelected and keep going up there every year. That doesn't provide a great deal of accountability. It's particularly screwed up because there are traditions that have allowed a complete abrogation of responsibility.
People have a lot of theories as to why that is the case. Redistricting is a big one. They carve up the districts so that the Democrats control the Assembly and the Republicans control the Senate and it will ever be thus.
Chances for Reform?GG: What are the immediate prospects for reform?
EK: I really don't know. You've got to think a lot of the members are really, really concerned. They have no real clout and almost nothing to do. A lot of them are not bad people.
GG: What about the reforms that have been enacted so far -- will they make any difference?
EK: You mean like having to show up to vote? I think it will make a marginal difference. Senate Minority Leaders David Patterson - and he's a nice guy, he's a smart guy -- said that in all the years he's been in Albany-- he's counted -- something like maybe 75,000 bills have passed through the Senate and in only four cases was the outcome of the bill in doubt. When a bill gets to the floor, it is going to pass. That is just an Albany rule. If it is not going to pass, it doesn't get to the floor.
So it's really the committee system that is broken. Bills only get reported out of committee when they're going to get to the floor. That is not how it should be. And that reform they haven't talked about yet.
Book club member: How do we as constituents do anything when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Governor George Pataki and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno are the three people who control things?
EK: I don't think the legislature is passing a lot of bills that don't have support. When you go to Albany, you pass through the Assembly chamber. The Democratic majority goes into that room. And when they go in there, the assemblyman says, "I can't vote for that bill. It will kill me in my district." That debate goes on. So there is influence in that sense.
Book club member: Is it worse today?
EK: I got there in 1987 and I think it was better then because, to be honest, the caliber of people was better.
Book club member: What's the first step toward actually changing this?
EK: There was talk of a constitutional convention. I do think people demanding a certain level of accountability would help -- a lot of people marching up there.
There are two things that legislators are afraid of. One is their money, their campaign money, which Shelly [Silver] controls, of course, and the second is votes. But you have to convince them that this is the issue they're not going to get elected on.
People are always talking about having referendums and initiatives to get things done. It sounds nice on paper, and it sounds nice talking here - and maybe it would be a good idea -- but a lot of the proposals in California are very destructive. They're contradictory.
That's popular democracy but it also can be manipulated. So it's not entirely clear to me that that would solve the problems.
Rudy, Mike and NYC vs. AlbanyGG: How did you decide to spend your life covering New York politics?
EK: I kind of stumbled into it. I was a junior reporter at the New York Times - low man on the totem pole - and I got sent to Albany one year. I was incredulous at first. It's depressing on a civics level. But the personalities and the human comedy are quite interesting. And I do want to say about Mario Cuomo, that while he was a nut in some ways, he was a brilliant orator and he had a lot of ideas.
I don't know that it's that fascinating any more. Whatever you want to say about the current governor, he's not a rhetorician
GG: Why did you call your book "The Prophet of Love"?
EK: The Prophet of Love is the title of a profile on Rudy Giuliani, which is a bit ironic. And it just seemed like an appropriate title for the book.
Book club member: Can we talk about how Albany's control of the city came about?
EK: The city is a creation of the state.
Mike Miscione: In 1870 they passed what is known as the Tweed charter, which also became known as the home rule charter, that gave New York City much more control of the finances and activities of New York City. That led to the greatest scandal in the history of the City of New York - the Tweed Ring scandal, which was personified in the construction of the Tweed Courthouse. So people are always saying "New York control," but this can be a cautionary tale of what happens when you give control to the City of New York. At the time, the State of New York, which was largely Republican controlled, did a lot of very progressive, very important things in New York City, and they were able to do that because they were isolated from Tammany control.
EK: Your point is well taken. If you look back really far back - or maybe not even that far back, I don't want to be too despairing - New York has had visionary government at various points and had visionary leaders. You look at things like the [water] reservoir system, a major accomplishment for its time. We live off the vision of a lot of the people who came before us. So, I think there have been moments of inspiration and genius.
I think that Mayor Bloomberg when he pushes for the stadium is trying to be part of that tradition. I'm not sure he's got the right take on it, but I think he is aware that, if it weren't for the people who had really thought 50 or 100 years ahead, the city would be completely different and much worse.
GG: In the book there are three profiles of Rudy Giuliani. You leave him on a high note. It's how he handled September 11. Since then, he's gone up and seems to be coming back down. What do you think is ahead for him?
EK: I wish I knew. I know the Republicans are going to try to get him to run against Hillary Clinton. He says he's not going to run against Hillary. He clearly would like to go right to the White House. Whether he does need to do anything between or whether he's having a good time making an absolute fortune, I don't know.
Book club member: What about running for governor?
EK: He runs a very good rhetorical campaign and could do a job of that. I really don't know whether he could be a good governor. He might well be. Governor is an executive position just like mayor. It's less newsworthy. You're not in the news. It might be kind of tedious.
I think an Eliot Spitzer- Giuliani race would be a fascinating race. I'd like to be there for that.
Book club member: Would you say the state is unmanageable?
EK: No, I wouldn't say the state's unmanageable. Why the city was always called ungovernable was because you actually have to deliver services. You actually have to run things. When you run the state, you really are not running very much. That's one of the reasons why it avoids scrutiny and why it doesn't make the news.
A lot of it is just passing through money. You send your taxes to Albany and they get sent right back -- to Mike Bloomberg to spend on schools and on Medicaid. It's a huge amount of money that is passed around and divvied up, which is why the budget is really all the state focuses on for months and months. And that is where their power comes from: sucking in a tremendous amount of money - look at your state tax dollars - and then redistributing it. They are not out there plowing the road. They are not out there picking up the garbage.
Howard Koeppel: I'm fascinated by the dynamic between the city and the state. We here in the city are always saying, "Oh, we've been shortchanged by Albany," and I don't doubt that. By the same token, though, I've traveled all around the state. In towns like Buffalo and Niagara Falls, main streets are boarded up and the economies are in shambles. Is the balance right, in terms of financing, or is the balance off? Who really deserves more? How can we, in good conscience, ask for more money when these places are in such dire condition?
EK: That's a very good question. New York's argument often boils down to, "We have X percent of the students and we don't get X percent of the money." Now, the guys in Albany would point out that the city raises its money in very different ways from the suburbs and small cities and that that money is, as they like to say in Albany, basically "fungible." So when we spend money it goes into one big pot and you can spend it for education or not, it doesn't matter. If you do all the calculations it's very, very difficult to decide whether the city is getting shortchanged or not.
People would argue up and down and from one end to the other. Certainly, as you point out, the city is economically in a lot better shape than a lot of these other cities so you would be hard-pressed to say, "Let's just take money from Buffalo and give it to New York City." But, in terms of the money the city sends to Albany, the city generates a lot of the money - all the major corporations are here and they're sending money to Albany -- so how do you apportion that?
Hilarious HillaryGG: In your writing about Hillary Clinton you focus on the fact that she wasn't from New York, came here, and had a lot of trouble. You mentioned the St. Patrick's Day parade, that she didn't see the potential danger in that. You go through a couple of other things. So, why do outsiders have such a tough time navigating New York politics?
EK: There are two pieces about Hillary in here. One is when she is a senator and it's pretty complimentary to her. I think she's worked very hard for New York and is in a difficult position as a minority senator. I've followed her around for a long time and she's very involved in almost ridiculously nitty-gritty issues.
But to go back to her original campaign, she did some totally hilarious things. She wore that Yankees baseball cap. She said that she had passed through Elmira as a kid — I mean it was just laughable.
New York politics is very complicated -— ethnically very complicated. It has a long, long history; you're stepping into a lot of battles, and the St. Patrick's Day parade was a great one. She said, "Oh, yeah, I'd love to march in the St. Patrick's Day parade," completely unaware of 10 years of court battles. Many, many things that in other places would be pretty non-controversial in New York are wildly controversial. That's the function of being such a polyglot city and having so many wonderful controversies, and why it's great to write about New York.
But she is a student of things and she's very methodical; she methodically learned about New York. But before, she just didn't instinctively get it. She didn't realize, "Oh my God, there's a minefield here and there's a minefield there." So she found out a lot about them by simply stepping on them, and it was hilarious.
She's a Midwestern girl, from Illinois. She said, and I think it was true, that she related to upstate, that it was much more Midwestern. And she's very popular upstate. I once went with her to a meeting of, she said it was the farm advisory board. She sat around with a bunch of farmers and seemed very genuinely interested in the dairy issues. And there she was.
Book club member: What is it about New York State that attracts so many carpetbaggers?
EK: Well, we're willing to elect them.
The Education Of Michael Bloomberg
GG: The other newcomer, who's not so new to New York City, but to politics, is the mayor. He wasn't incredibly popular when he started, and I was wondering about your thoughts on how he's managed to recover and learn to better navigate the city's politics.
EK: His problem, if you want to call it a problem, is that he came into politics and said (he's never told me this but people around him would say this and act this way): "This a city, it's like any other organization, it's an employer of 250,000 people, and it should be run like a business, rationally with certain rational principles."
What he ran up against was that people didn't really want government to be organized rationally. It is organized the way it's organized because of enormous numbers of constituencies and enormous numbers of interests. He came up against that, and it was an education at every turn. I think he has learned that politics and running a government are not like running a privately held corporation. He's much more sensitive to that right now.
The question is, is that good or bad, because obviously, you have to be willing to go up against a lot of these interests if you want to get something done. That is the problem with running New York City: with every single move you make, there are many entrenched interests, sentimentally entrenched and financially entrenched, and there's tremendous resistance to change. Every garden will be fought over, every corner will be fought over. "We will fight you in the trenches, we will fight you in the streets." What's great about New York is that people really care about it, but from the standpoint of making systemic change—even if everyone sees that something is broken—you have 500,000 ideas on which way to fix it.
So sometimes, you can argue, the mayor - whoever that is -- has to say, "We are doing it this way," and has to put all of their political capital behind it. To a certain extent, he did that with the schools and the chips will fall where they will. Was it the right way to do it? Once again, I don't know. But it was a way to do it, and he did do it.
GG: You have a chapter about the budget and how the mayor addressed the budget deficit. Do you think the mayor has carried us through the financial hard times?
EK: He did, and he paid a huge price for that. He started by telling everybody he was raising property taxes by 18 percent, and ever since then he's told everyone they're going to get a rebate. But if he hadn't been willing to bite that particular bullet - property taxes are considered a pretty big bullet to bite in New York City -- the city would have been in pretty bad shape. It turns out the economy picked up so it wasn't year after year of bleeding red ink. But he had to get through that year, and it wasn't an easy year. He looked at the numbers and he did what he had to do and that, I think, is the kind of quality about him that is valuable.
Book club member: The City Council had to go along with it
EK: Yes, but the City Council doesn't take the hit in the way that the mayor takes the hit. Because of the Financial Control Board and all of that from the city's fiscal crisis, the city can be taken into receivership very easily. The mayor knew that, and the council knew that. If we don't get out of this year close to a balanced budget, the Financial Control Board is going to take over. That's a huge hammer.
Past Mayors, The Future Of This MayorGG: What are your thoughts on the mayor's race?
EK: Bloomberg has so much money and he's done a reasonable job. There's not a tremendous animosity toward him that someone could marshal—even if people don't love him, he's fine.
Henry Stern: Bloomberg is really an honest mayor. Every generation forgets how hard it is to get honest mayors, someone who is not accommodating people's hanky-panky because of their communal connections. We had many mayors doing that. Koch was an exception. So were Giuliani and Bloomberg. Young people have no idea of the "good old days" when jobs were filled by political patronage.
EK: A lot of people would take exception to the particular history that you just offered but your basic point is that reform administrations run into a lot of trouble. This one may well have too except that Michael Bloomberg happens to have $4 billion to his name. If he didn't, he would be in a very different situation because he too would be reliant on the interests that finance campaigns. To his credit, he availed himself of that independence but that means that for electoral purposes he is—I don't want to say unbeatable—but very, very, hard to beat.
GG: What parts of that history would you revise?
EK: I don't consider myself an expert on this at all but obviously people would take issue with the characterization of the Koch administration. People would also take issue with the characterization of the Giuliani administration.
Henry Stern: The people Koch appointed turned out to be exceptionally honest and hard working. But there were people he held over from the Abe Beame administration. Those involved in corruption, Koch didn't appoint them, they were the preexisting clumps and previous county leaders who were an entirely different power structure.
EK: I don't want to demean his administration in any way but it ended in the graft scandal, so I don't think that many people would call it a reform administration. I personally don't think of Giuliani as a reform mayor. There was a tremendous political patronage operation so I don't think you can call that a reform administration.
I'm no expert but I think if you asked most historians, in New York City politics, reform administrations come once in a blue moon, and I think that Mike Bloomberg may indeed be one of them.
I'll Be Back
GG: We can't help but notice that you have moved out of New York, and that your last articles have been about the presidential race, "The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism," and global warming. Are you planning any more pieces on New York, or did your experiences in politics and hanging out with those restaurant inspectors chase you from the city for good?
EK: My husband teaches college in Williamstown, Massachusetts at Williams College and for many years he commuted to Williams from New York. Then we did a switcheroo, and I commute to New York from Williams. So, I took a sort of hiatus from New York City politics. But it's true that after a while you need a break from New York politics. It's been a long run. But I think for the mayoral election I will be back.


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