Watch this film. I say no more. An hour and a half, but — watch this film !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgwF0tpioTU&feature=youtu.be
You need more downtime than you think
Came across this article from Scientific American via SchwartzReport, and decided to post it even before reading it.
You need more downtime than you think
Research on naps, meditation and the habits of exceptional people reveals how mental breaks increase productivity
By Ferris Jabr
www.salon.com/2013/10/16/your_brain_needs_more_downtime_than_it_thinks_partner/
Is autism actually a step forward?
My friend Keliu Lindelien (author of Gift from my Son) said to me years ago that she thought that perhaps autism was suppression of left-brain functioning. It causes problems — to put it mildly! But perhaps more is going on here than physical malfunctioning, with or without environmental insults such as adulterated foods, electromagnetic pollution, and too many vaccinations too soon and too closely spaced.
Perhaps, as this Guardian article suggests, something more is going on.
http://guardianlv.com/2013/06/autism-a-leap-in-the-evolution-of-consciousness/
Michael Ventura – What you believe in your bones
I find particularly compelling these lines: “I was green, but had enough sense to know that opinion is not belief and that it can be hard to learn what you believe. Not what you want to believe, or think you believe, or feel you’re supposed to believe, but what, in your bones, you really believe – believe without even knowing you believe.”
MICHAEL VENTURA
LETTERS AT 3AM –
ARTICLES OF FAITH
I was 18, about to be 19, and learning the meaning of necessity. My task was to contribute to the support of my mother, my siblings, and myself. We’d rented a one-bedroom in the Bronx, but I wanted to work in Manhattan. I’d ride the Woodlawn line to Grand Central Station and read the want ads at a funky diner there, nursing a cup of coffee purchased for a dime (no refills).
I’d been a Times Square counter man on the night shift. That hadn’t worked out. But I knew I’d find a day-shift job because I could type. Back then, if you were presentable and typed 100 words a minute, there was always work, so it didn’t take long before I secured a position suitable to my skill set: $70 per week take-home, no sick days, no benefits, but, in that era, and for how we lived, $70-per would just do.
Continue reading Michael Ventura – What you believe in your bones
Pope Francis shakes up the church
Pope Francis is shaking up the church, it seems. High time.
In this struggle between religious conservatives and religious liberals we can see the same struggle that is playing out in secular culture. It is a very human thing to be torn between rules and principles, between obedience and conscience, between definition and exploration.
Like liberty versus equality, probably the tension between the two opposite tendencies can be bridged only by fraternity — that is to say, love. The struggle is naturally going to raise terrific tensions, and we will see how it plays out. There are no guarantees that the story will play out happily, but it may.
This Washington Post article via SchwartzReport, as so often.
The essence of the inner life — beyond tag lines
Paul Rademacher looks at the challenges of describing the spiritual quest to a society that thinks in terms of advertising slogans. He starts with the Public Relations guy at a conference who asked him “what is the benefit of consciousness and spirituality?”
“He was young, intelligent and on the cutting edge of marketing. It was a litmus test and I knew I couldn’t answer his question. It was embarrassing. How do you begin to quantify the benefits of the inner life in an elevator pitch?”
Well, how?
http://blog.lucidgreening.com/tag-lines/
You Never Imagined Any Such Power
Cambridge University Press is publishing The Letters of Ernest Hemingway in a multi-volume series. Volume Two contains his letter from 1923 through 1925. (Pretty important years!) I’m loving volume two of the letters. You can learn a lot from someone’s letters. Consider this from July, 1923, in a letter to Greg Clark of the Toronto Star: (My italics):
“The tragedy is the death of the bull—the inevitable death of the bull, the terrible, almost prehistoric bull that runs with a soft, light run, can whirl like a cat, is death right up until he is absolutely dead himself and is stupid and brave as the people of any country and altogether wonderful and horrifying. You never imagined any such power. Well the whole thing is his life and death and the horses, picadors and occasional toreros he takes off with him are only incidental. It’s not like the French duel. I saw 3 matadors badly gored out of 24 bulls killed.”
Here in a short pithy paragraph is what drew and fascinated him. And that sentence that I italicized is the essence of his fascination, I think. If it were widely understood, an awful lot of critical bullshit would have been saved for the roses. You never imagined any such power.