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As I pointed out in Ishmael, we Takers are a desperately lost and needy people. It was this neediness, I think, that first made us yearn to be loved by God (an idea completely foreign to the animist mentality) and that made us dream of eternities of bliss after lifetimes of emptiness. If anything, our sense of neediness has grown even more overwhelming in recent decades. In addition to needing to be loved by God and to save our souls, we nowadays need to deepen our spiritual awareness, to raise our consciousness, to wield supernatural powers, to bend spoons with our minds, to grow our brains, to enhance our performance, to draw on the right side, to believe in the value of our creativity, to become more cosmic, to learn to fly, to investigate past lives, to have out-of-body experiences, to achieve lucid dreaming, to learn healing massage, to amplify our archetypes, to make our fantasies concrete, to explore our myths, to get rid of toxic introjects, to find our personal sacred site, to heal our inner child, to improve our experiential focusing, to be rebirthed, to take part in intrapsychic activities, to have a primal, to engage in cognitive restructuring, to indulge in cosmic play, to tune in to the godhead, to spend time on the astral plane, to have an intuition workout, to enhance our ch'i, to contact our spirit guide, to tap into the hypnogogic state, to increase our thanatological awareness, to have a soul reading, to visit a sacred energy vortex--and this hardly scratches the surface. Providence

New book from Daniel Quinn! If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways "One of the most troublesome questions I've been asked--and it's been asked hundreds of times--is: 'Where do these strange ideas of yours come from?' In the beginning, I thought it was just the usual where-do-you-get-your-ideas? question that all authors receive. My readers soon set me straight. Read more ... Excerpt 1 Excerpt 2 Excerpt 3

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UNIT 4 Vision and "The Invisibility of Success"

Quinn thinks we can't "win" just by defending the environment. Why does he believe this? Do you agree?
As the basis for a paper or research project, have students find examples of products that have come to be the way we know them because a series of individuals have "improved on something, then put it out there for others to improve on."

According to Quinn, people imagine that our distant descendants will have different gadgets and wear different clothes but will think just the way we do. Review the Star Trek films with this question in mind: Aside from gadgetry and imaginary science, do the captain and crew of the Enterprise think differently from the way we do?

Aside from the "Star Trek" future, what other possible futures does Hollywood see for humanity?

Quinn says each of you contains a complete set of the memes that are the conceptual building plans for our culture. Suppose the whole human race disappeared except for you and your classmates. Would you know how to go about rebuilding society? How would you begin? Compare this to what happens in post-apocalyptic movies like The Stand, Waterworld, and The Postman.

Back to UNIT 3 Vision and "The Invisibility of Success"

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Ahead to UNIT 5 Genes and Memes