... 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 Jesuit Henri-Marie Cardinal de Lubac said as much in his preface to a voluminous anthology of writings entitled The Mysticism of Mystics. A mystic, he wrote, is the very opposite of a prophet: "The prophet receives and transmits the word of God to which he adheres through faith; the mystic is sensitive to an inner light that exempts him from believing. The two are incompatible." This is because, as de Lubac said, "mysticism eats away at myth, and eventually the mystic can do without it; he tosses it away like an empty shell, while remaining indulgent toward those who still need it." What church or revealed religion could admit this?...

Far from being an oxymoron, the notion of atheistic mysticism-- or, as Father de Lubac puts it, mystical atheism-- then becomes self-evident, both as a concept and as a historically observed phenomenon, admittedly more so in the East than in the West. "In its final state of realization," our Jesuit priest went on, "natural mysticism would be naturalistic and verge opon 'pure mysticism'; no longer recognizing any object [I would say: any transcendent object], it could be described as the hypostatized mystical intuition: what appears to us as the profoundest form of atheism." Why not? Leibniz, in a letter written in 1695, had already pointed out that the writings of mystics contained "extremely bold passages..., almost verging on atheism." More radically, Alexander Kojève in his Reasoned History of Pagan Philosophy went so far as to suggest that "all authentic Mysticisms are in fact more or less atheistic." Though extreme, the express something important, namely... that religion and spirituality are two different things. Even the mystical experience, in which both can culminate, dissuades us from conflating the two.

Nietzsche summed it up famously when he wrote, "I am a mystic and believe in nothing." This is not as self-contradictory as it may seem. Mystics are defined are a certain type of experience, comprising self-evidence, plenitude, simplicity, eternity... All this leaves very little room for belief.

They see. Why would they need dogma?
Everything is present. Why would they need hope?
They live in eternity. Why would they need to wait for it?
They are already saved. Why would they need a religion?

Whether they are believers are not, mystics are those who no longer lack God. But is a God who is no longer lacking still God?

By the mid-'90s, with SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80 phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programming, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings. Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions...

Wozniak's days are blocked into distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period, an exercise period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a second creative period. He doesn't get up at a regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks. If excitement over his research leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts to sleeping in the day. When he sits down for a session of incremental reading, he attends to whatever automatically appears on his computer screen, stopping the instant his mind begins to drift or his comprehension falls too low and then moving on to the next item in the queue. SuperMemo graphs a distribution of priorities that he can adjust as he goes. When he encounters a passage that he thinks he'll need to remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced repetition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain indefinitely."Once you get the snippets you need," Wozniak says, "your books disappear. They gradually evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge."

In May 1911, the New York Public Library HAD been reopened in its new Beaux-Arts marble temple at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Now diligently working on his next project, Charles Fort walked to the library every morning, five days a week. He trudged up the flank of white polished steps, took a seat at one of the wide oak desks in the reading room beneath the gilt and coffered ceiling, removed his coat and slid it carefully over the back of his chair.

He read meteorology, natural history, shipping reports and science journals, squinting through his glasses as he turned page after page. With some regularity, he turned to the sheet of paper on the table and scratched a pencil note of some neglected phenomenon. All his notes were written on various grades of pulpy paper that were then ripped against a ruler into small rectangles. Some slips were torn from old correspondence; some were thin onion skin. Each piece was about 1½ by 2½ inches. Fort's handwriting was on a severe diagonal, lower left to upper right, tightly capturing the essence of each report with abbreviations. When he needed extra room for his pencil scrawl, a slip was torn long, then folded to match the dimensions of the other notes. An extremely elaborate note might require an entire sheet of paper, pleated and fixed with a paper clip so it ended up the same size. He managed to assemble 40,000 notes, by his own estimate, deliberately seeking information of the widest possible diversity: 'astronomy, sociology, psychology, deep-sea diving, navigation, surveying, volcanoes, religion, sexes, earthworms'.

In this way the entire world could be reduced to a row of 1½ by 2½ inch scraps, then stored away in Fort's pigeonholes that edged the walls of his apartment. After lunch, he walked home from the library and sorted his precious phenomena by date, then cross-referenced them with a second set of slips organised in broad categories. In the afternoon, he sat at the table and wrote.

“Do you understand the process? The Harrow is starting to write. When it’s finished with the first part of the script on the man’s back, the layer of cotton wool rolls and turns the body slowly onto its side to give the Harrow a new area. Meanwhile those parts lacerated by the inscription are lying on the cotton wool which, because it has been specially treated, immediately stops the bleeding and prepares the script for a further deepening. Here, as the body continues to rotate, prongs on the edge of the Harrow then pull the cotton wool from the wounds, throw it into the pit, and the Harrow goes to work again. In this way it keeps making the inscription deeper for twelve hours. For the first six hours the condemned man goes on living almost as before. He suffers nothing but pain. After two hours, the felt is removed, for at that point the man has no more energy for screaming. Here at the head of the Bed warm rice pudding is put in this electrically heated bowl. From this the man, if he feels like it, can help himself to what he can lap up with his tongue. No one passes up this opportunity. I don’t know of a single one, and I have had a lot of experience. He first loses his pleasure in eating around the sixth hour. I usually kneel down at this point and observe the phenomenon. The man rarely swallows the last bit. He turns it around in his mouth and spits it into the pit. When he does that, I have to lean aside or else he’ll get me in the face. But how quiet the man becomes around the sixth hour! The most stupid of them begin to understand. It starts around the eyes and spreads out from there. A look that could tempt one to lie down under the Harrow. Nothing else happens. The man simply begins to decipher the inscription. He purses his lips, as if he is listening. You’ve seen that it’s not easy to figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds. True, it takes a lot of work. It requires six hours to complete. But then the Harrow spits him right out and throws him into the pit, where he splashes down into the bloody water and cotton wool. Then the judgment is over, and we, the Soldier and I, quickly bury him.”

peramble

catachrestic

One of the running jokes of the film is that Francis always orders food for all of them, deciding what each person will eat. "Peter will have the cookies," Francis says to the waiter in the dining car. And when Peter protests, insisting on choosing his own dessert, what he ends up choosing anyway is... cookies.

At the end of their quest, when they've arrived at their mother's current humanitarian project at the foothills of the Himalayas, she gets them settled in a room, and, saying goodnight, announces to each of the brothers what he'll be having for breakfast the next day. It's a punchline moment straight out of physical comedy, because she uses exactly the same tone of voice, the same verbal formula, as Francis does each time he orders for his brothers.

That's when we understand that this habit started with her, that it was her misguided idea of mothering: making menu choices and other decisions for her sons. We can also reconstruct the past: when she went off on her humanitarian missions, the boys felt abandoned and Francis had to step into her shoes, taking up her bossy habit so they can be reminded of the motherly affection they long for. We also suddenly understand why the brothers have never learned to make their own  decisions, or to be affectionate, but instead wander from one lukewarm project to the next, from one failed relationship to the next.

octoberxswimmer

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 something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that -- popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies -- because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

1. does free will exist?
2. what is free will?
3. if I had free will, how would I choose to spend my life, my day, this hour?

When I awoke later that afternoon I was shocked to discover that I was still alive... Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise... Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But I realized "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." ...

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

I loved that bit I've put in bold print; its language made me think of a post I wrote in this blog three years ago which starts like this:

This moment is the full expression of the creative impulse behind the origin of the universe.

Where is my center? Under my skin and muscle I am an intricately articulated skeleton, able to move in space and time by an act of will. In the core of my bones I am marrow. But marrow is not my center.

Maybe 100 trillion living cells make up my body, each containing DNA, protein-synthesizing instructions in quaternary code. Each DNA molecule contains instructions for building 100,000 different proteins. Please don't ask me how I make my daily hemoglobin-- I'm just the spokesman for this vast enterprise.

My center is itself extruded from a place outside time and space. I am a projection from the timeless realm. And thus projected, I can shine the beam of my flashlight back into the ideal realm to contemplate mathematical truths and pure geometric forms.

edit: May 25, 2008, the New York Times has published an article about Dr. Taylor.

"Read poetry: it's quite hard," the poet Don Paterson crisply suggested. To do so requires us to claim that imaginative space, and to live with Keats's "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts", rather than rush to conclude and summarise. Part of what Eliot called "the shock of poetry" lies in the fact that what it offers is often both instinctively recognisable and at the same time resistant to interpretation - a three-dimensional experience for the imagination, not a mere scanning of captions. And just as poetry's subject is life in all its manifestations, so it exacts from the reader an equal attention to the human gift of language - meaning, tone, overtone, music, pattern, memorability, the power to move and delight.

The theme I call “making smaller circles” relates to incremental refinement of a technique or idea until the external manifestation is hardly visible, but the potency is profound. In the martial arts the way this works is to take a large movement, like a boxer’s jab, and to practice it until the correct body mechanics are not consciously considered, but they have a certain feeling. Once you have that feeling you can use it as a beacon and slowly condense the distance the fist travels. In time your body mechanics will get more and more potent and so less physical movement will be necessary. Ultimately a great fighter can do things that are nearly invisible to the untrained eye. There is nothing mystical here, just incremental refinement.

Actually, I was first struck by this idea when studying the chess games of Michael Adams. I had to play him in a closed tournament in New York City, and analyzing his games I began to notice that he often seemed to pay absolutely no heed to the center. Usually the first principle a young chess player learns is “Control the center!” And here was a world class GM ignoring it altogether! After many days of studying his games I began to understand that Adams was controlling the center with complete detachment. He had made the circles so small, you couldn’t see them ... but they were there. In fact, Adams often had complete central domination while seeming to ignore it altogether.

I had just delivered a winning pitch (for a new animated series) to a few hundred industry professionals, and a colleague came up to congratulate me. Later, she would say, "you are so lucky to have had an American education. You were so confident up there."

I think she was rueful that her schooling at the hands of Irish Catholic nuns had taught her to be be self-effacing, to speak in a non-imposing (i.e. mousy) voice, and to constantly seek permission and approval.

But I wanted to say, "are you kidding?! my heart was pounding up there, I thought I was going to faint!"

Indeed, throughout my presentation, I felt fluttery fear. But I realized I had two possibilities: I could perform this fear: stammering a hundred miles an hour in a high-strung nasal voice, which, frankly, nobody wanted to hear, or: I could slow my breathing, slow my speech, and lower my voice, which might seem insincere, a put-on and an act, but which would be more enjoyable for everyone.

So I went with option two: assuming the image of confidence, projecting the "I know what I'm doing" and "we're all loving this, aren't we?" attitude. I even made a few spontaneous quips.

And they ate it up with a spoon!

Donnersmarck develops a powerful image of the parasitism of the communist regime in East Germany. Everything that is valuable in this world, all that is vibrant and creative, all the emotional warmth and depth, is to be found in the lives of Dreyman and his artistic friends. The communist state can only sit back and passively observe all this—the lives of others. False to the core, the party officials feed like vampires on the life blood of the people under their rule.

I had lunch of fresh fig salad, braised vegetables and meat, and chocolate cake with P. the blue-eyed American who speaks fluent Chinese, is partner in a Taiwanese law firm, and runs triathalons in his spare time.

C, my globe-trotting, art-collecting high school pal who now runs her family's accessories business, had me over to her office for a five-course lunch prepared by their private chef. (crab-claws, marinated beef, braised tofu, veggies, strawberries, yum!)

With L we had a beautiful Italian dinner: fried calamari with creamy polenta, hand-cut parpadelle with veal ragu, and red wine. She told me about her annus mirabilis, in which she had her first baby, and raised a staggering billion dollars for her investment fund.

The night before I had lunch with A, my choreographer friend and long time collaborator, he'd just been honored with a prestigious achievement award from the Hong Kong government. He told me about innovative projects he's been doing, like choreographing for a blind dancer ("she puts her hands on my body to follow my movements; she has such a sensitive touch.") and doing dance therapy with psychiatric patients. My friend W, a butoh dancer, was also at lunch and we decided then and there to put on a performance in August.

I had dinner with P and walked his three dogs with him along the Hong Kong waterfront, and hung out at his place listening to Plain White T's Hey There Delilah again and again.

In my own migraine auras, I would sometimes see — vividly with closed eyes, more faintly and transparently if I kept my eyes open — tiny branching lines, like twigs, or geometrical structures covering the entire visual field: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs. Sometimes there were more elaborate patterns, like Turkish carpets or complex mosaics; sometimes I saw scrolls and spirals, swirls and eddies; sometimes three-dimensional shapes like tiny pine cones or sea urchins...

Much later still, when I first saw photographs of the Alhambra, with its intricate geometric mosaics, I started to wonder whether what I had taken to be a personal experience and resonance might in fact be part of a larger whole, whether certain basic forms of geometric art, going back for tens of thousands of years, might also reflect the external expression of universal experiences. Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture... Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty?

Whether or not this is the case, there is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.

In other words, fractals are not just in the world, they are what the mind generates in its attempt to map the world. Because the mind generates patterns which it then projects onto the world, those patterns that the mind cannot generate will never be perceived in the world.

Humans uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche.” We have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. We have uniquely long childhoods, and even beyond childhood we continue to play more than other species. Our predilection for the patterned cognitive play of art begins with what developmental psychologists call protoconversation, exchanges between infants and caregivers of rhythmic, responsive behavior, involving sound and movement, in playful patterns described as “more like a song than a sentence” and as “interactive multimedia performances.” Without being taught, children engage in music, dance, design, and, especially, pretend play....

Because the world swarms with patterns, animal minds evolved as pattern extractors, able to detect the information meaningful to their kind of organism in their kind of environment and therefore to predict and act accordingly. Pattern occurs at multiple levels, from the stable information of spatial conditions and physical processes to highly volatile information about individuals and their moods, actions, and intentions.

Dominique Ropion who created the fragrance for Sisley worked on the classical chypre theme, setting the radiant floral heart in the voluptuous duskiness of oakmoss and patchouli. Its smouldering form is shrouded in enough floral sweetness to temper the sensuality of spicy, woody notes...

The fresh top notes spill into layers of spices, interspersed with hints of rose that grow darker and richer as the fragrance dries down. The heart shimmers with floral nuances, exhibiting the chilly crispness of iris one moment and the honeyed sweetness of mimosa the next. The transition from floral opulence to woody darkness takes place in a harmonious manner, and when one finds oneself sinking into the raw silk warmth of the base, the sensation is nothing short of captivating.

Mozart wrote everything with such ease and speed as might at first be taken for carelessness or haste. His imagination held before him the whole work clear and lively once it was conceived. One seldom finds in his scores improved or erased passages. ~ Franz Niemetschek

Seeing objects as external is a mistake;
Like a dream, they are empty of concreteness.

This mind, as well, is a mere movement of attention that has no self-nature,
a gust of wind, empty of identity, like space.

All things, like space, are equal.

'Mahamudra' is not some entity that can be shown.
the mind's suchness is itself the state of Mahamudra...

when you see and realize its nature,
All that appears and exists is Mahamudra,
The great all-encompassing Dharmakaya,
Naturally and without contriving, allowed simply to be,

This unimagined Dharmakaya,
Letting it be without seeking is the practice of meditation.

nobody_

Drinking a mug of hot wine with a friend, on the wood terrace of an Alpine chalet, after a morning of skiing on fresh powder-- that was delicious, compared to my sitting here now in front of my computer!

With so much against us, we writers need routine to stay grounded. This sentiment is echoed in almost every book I’ve read on writing–and is echoed in every conversation with writers I admire. They get up. They sit in the chair. They write. They do it again. And again. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

Even though I should’ve internalized this knowledge long ago, I was giddy when I came across This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley. Perhaps it was the title–yes! This is the year! Perhaps it was the day. Yes! It’s New Year’s Eve! I mean, I don’t even have an idea for a novel. Well, I do, but those are just ideas. Make those ideas into a novel, in a year? Wow! I’ll buy some of that! Even though I’d read it all before, I was genuinely invigorated reading the book with my cup of coffee outside the Coffee Bean; especially section one of the book, titled The general disciplines that every writer needs;” the first of which was to write every day. His reason for this rule: “getting the work done and reconnecting with your unconscious mind.” Yes. This is vital.