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love and be free
So many religions teach "obey and believe" that the few teaching "love and be free" are seen as radical and dangerous.
If you think you can obey and believe your way to enlightenment, be my guest!
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The Blue Star
I'm posting this for a friend.
The Blue Star
"Show me the place," he said.
I removed my shirt and pointed
to a tiny star above my heart.
He leaned and listened. I could feel
his breath falling lightly, flattening
the hairs on my chest. He turned
me around, and his hands gently
plied my shoulder blades and then rose
to knead the twin columns forming
my ( Read more... ) -
Push Hands
The king of all training techniques in Tai Chi is tuishou (Push Hands).
This is a game that is actually quite easy to explain. We stand facing each other. I place the back of my wrist against yours. When you push, I recede. When I push, you recede. All the while we maintain contact, stay within given boundaries, and refrain from falling.
You're ( Read more... ) -
postcards on Alexander Technique and Taoism
These are notes to myself, but I thought some people might be interested. They are what I've learned taking a series of weekly Alexander Technique lessons starting about a year ago. After an interruption, I'm getting ready to take up lessons again.
The one thing you do actively do in AT (Alexander Technique) is inhibit. You inhibit misuse so that ( Read more... ) -
The Art of Learning
It's been a while since I've updated here. I got a "nudge" from prettypoet43 so I thought I'd write a few lines about what I've been up to.
First, I have been sketching at the Louvre. About twice or three times a week. I walk to the museum, flash my "Friends of the Louvre" card at the ticket collectors, and after walking around in the galleries, plant myself ( Read more... ) -
I see. Why would I need dogma?
This is a quote from André Comte-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality:
... it is probably no coincidence that mystics have so often gotten into trouble with their churches, when they had churches. Al-Hallaj was burned alive: Meister Eckehart and Fénelon were condemned by the pope.... These are not mere misunderstandings. The French ( Read more... ) -
starting anew from the body
I wanted to link to this essay by David Abram, Earth in Eclipse.
He criticizes the Platonic notion that reality is "elsewhere": that what we experience as the world is but a shadow of a purer form in an ideal realm.
This kind of thinking pervades, for example, monotheistic religions which teach that true existence, the eternal existence of one's ( Read more... ) -
words inscribed on the flesh
This week's Internet reading brings two visions of radical self-discipline.
First, Polish memory researcher Piotr Wozniak has cut himself off from almost all social interaction, to conduct a decades-long learning experiment on himself, at the heart of which is a computer flashcard program he invented called Supermemo.
By the mid-'90s, with SuperMemo ( Read more... ) -
What is theology?
I loved this quote from this interview of Marilynne Robinson.
It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself. Often, when I want to ( Read more... )