Quote #8

"Questioning is the track on which the centered person moves."

I don't know who said this.

From someone in my program

Out of its context, which was a response to a question I had posed to her-

Hydrogen and oxygen atoms bind at the level of energetic charge to embody wetness, water molecules form, vapor condenses, clouds become heavy with potential for rain, the droplets surrender to the embrace of gravity and fall to first saturate the earth and then to run together. Rivulets become streams which carve their own beds, co-creating a landscape as the drive toward more unity creates river systems moving torrents of water toward an unbounded ocean. And at every instant the system is dynamically alive; every aspect is simultaneously arising and shifting to the next phase of expression, infinitely re-turning to itself as a self-organizing, self-renewing, self-disclosing whole.

Embedded in the whole system, the wetness doesn't know itself, but what if that aspect of being could wake up and become aware of the miracle I see when a wave crashes to the shore, or a fine mist of evening fog bathes my face in its own Presence? What if the wetness had only one purpose, which was to touch my Original Face, and be praised? From that perspective praise might be in the form of my own interior awareness - I aware of wetness as wetness; and then a conversation of appreciation for the mutual caress of mist and my permeable skin where an exchange is always taking place; and then a weather report or a hydrologist’s analysis of a watershed system expressing the same capacity for self-disclosure in the form of empirical data. I suspect there is always rejoicing in heaven whenever and however we dance in the mist.

The Anxious Mind.

An interesting article in the NYTimes, about research positing that anxious people are born with a predisposition towards anxiety.

There are discussions about how to deal with anxiety as well. As somebody with a fairly high level of anxiety, (historically...I don't think I'd fit in the most anxious group, but I'd certainly fit in the next one) though, there's something to be said about actively engaging your anxiety.

Over the last six years I've begun to use anxiety as a sort of red-flag. When I get anxious about something, it locates an issue I've got to deal with psychologically, and is often helpful in tagging shadow material, something I don't know that I'm worried about. This has also led me into meditation, both sitting, and energy-based (qi gong, t'ai chi, yoga, etc) and has been instrumental in my growth as a person for sometime.

My anxiety levels are much, much lower now than they were six years ago, but I'm not, as the article seems to suggest is the only cure, simply managing them. I've used them to head directly at those things that make me fearful, and as a way to locate areas of tension in the body.

I can't imagine I'd be the only one for which this would be extremely helpful.

Dreams of Intimacy

So I had a dream the other night, after coming back from my retreat for school, where I fell in love with one of my classmates (I'm not entirely serious.) In the dream, I was sitting at a table in a restaurant with a classmate from college who I was actually totally obsessed with, but in the dream the two of them were conflated; it was both of them.

We were talking, and then we stood up and embraced, and I felt the most powerful intimacy, that we were both open to each other, not hiding from each other, and I think, really, this is a great way to explain intimacy--it is the feeling of not holding back, of being fully open with another person. You wouldn't find that in the dictionary, though. It's the feeling of being fully present with somebody who is being fully present with you.

I think it's this sense of intimacy that's really missing from our modern sense of the word, which too often assumes a sexual relationship. There was nothing sexual about the embrace in the dream, we were just both present to each other.

It was beautiful.

Ice and frightening.

Skip maybe just to the second half if you're impatient.

One Party Democracy

An Op-Ed from Thomas Friedman, which picks up on something I had been talking about here, in regards to the political differences between the US and China, and how health care is being dealt with.

Reading the title I had thought Friedman was going to talk about how much both parties are so influenced by corporate money that in effect the government had turned into a corporatocracy, but perhaps later.

READ

An Op-Ed in the NYTimes, from Harold Bloom, this century's most prominent literary critic, someone himself who I need to read a few times to begin to understand.

Get Lost. In Books.

More than ever in this time of economic troubles and societal change, entering upon an undergraduate education should be a voyage away from visual overstimulation into deep, sustained reading of what is most worth absorbing and understanding: the books that survive all ideological fashions.

There is general agreement on the indispensable canon: Homer, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Milton. From the 19th century until now, keeping only to English and American authors, a slightly more arbitrary selection might include Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Yeats and Joyce in England and Ireland. Among the Americans would certainly be Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne; and in the 20th century, Faulkner and the major poets: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane.

Many of these authors are difficult and demand rereading, but that doubles their value. A freshman may have read Shakespeare before, but the richest and most available of all writers is also the most profound and elliptical. Rereading “Hamlet” and “King Lear” should teach a student Shakespeare’s mastery of the art of leaving things out.

To think well you must rely, in part, upon memory, and possessing Shakespeare and Joyce, Montaigne and Whitman means that you can recall much of the best that has been written.

Whatever our current travails, we now have a literate president capable of coherent discourse, but too many other politicians are devoid of syntax and appear to have read nothing. Aggressive ignorance in aspirants to high office is another dismal consequence of the waning of authentic education.

Harold Bloom, a professor of English at Yale and the author of the forthcoming “Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence,” has been teaching since 1955.