Quotations To Share
“The great thing then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” — William James
Conflict Resolution As A Yoga Practice
Conflict resolution, when done in a structured, intentional, loving, and disciplined way, is a deep and profound yoga. Ideally, one ends up feeling much more connected, rather than lonely and separated from, with the person or people one was conflicting with, with one’s deepest self, with humanity at large, with the natural world, and with Divinity, after having done so.
Meditation Retreat at The California Vipassana Center
Two weeks ago I returned from a ten-day meditation retreat that I did over New Year’s, from December 29th 1994 to January 8th 1995. Going there was like being a monk for two weeks. or like being in a non-violent prison. The schedule was to wake up at four am, sit in meditation for two hours, eat and rest, sit for three hours, eat lunch at eleven am, rest, sit meditation for four hours, eat fruit, sit for an hour, watch a video-tape discourse on Buddhist teaching and on the theory of meditation starring the head teacher guy from Burma, sit another half hour, optionally ask any questions we had for the assistant teachers (Americans), and then go to sleep, usually at around 9:15 pm.
Bioenergetics Physical Release Work
This last Saturday, I did a workshop derived from a therapeutic school called Bioenergetics. This work involves physical catharsis of old trapped energy, and activating physical vitality and energy.
Being Real
I make it my aim, wherever possible, to be genuine with people and to be real in my communications. To my mind, in the end, being real in this way is the only real way for people to be close.
Shiva
I associate this focused, dark, unsentimental feeling with the Hindu God Shiva. He represents the cataclysmic, destructive, and violent elements of the universe and is not all sweetness and light, but he is not “evil” and oppositional to the Divine as the Western monotheistic Satan is. So when I am feeling ferocious, but in a spiritual self-aware respectful and refined way, I think of Shiva.
A Different Drummer: Friedrich Nietzsche and Morality
Sigmund Freud evidently believed that Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had a more “penetrating self-knowledge” than any other human being has ever had. If Freud’s analysis is accurate, perhaps it explains why Nietzsche’s written output so closely reflects aspect of the human psyche; like our minds, his philosophy is powerful but occasionally difficult to untangle, given apparent contradictions and complications. From among the strands of his thought, however, emerge coherent patterns. For example, although the ideas involved are convoluted, Nietzsche repeatedly asserted that a morality rooted in notions of good and evil originated in weakness, is destructive, and is arbitrary. Instead of morality, Nietzsche affirmed a value system that was based on embracing the worldly, the paradoxical, and the “evil” of noble strength and joyous independence.
Søren Kierkegaard and Abraham Maslow Confront Hegelianism
“In healthy people only is there a good correlation between subjective delight in the experience, impulse to the experience, or wish for it, and “basic need” for the experience (it’s good for him, and society, in the long run). Only such people uniformly yearn for what is good for them and others. This unity, this network of positive intercorrelation falls apart, however, as the person gets psychologically sick. Then what he wants to do may be bad for him, and his is impulses, desires, and enjoyments then become a poor guide to living. So far as philosophical theory is concerned, many historical dilemmas and contradictions are resolved by this finding.”
The Human Body as Objectification of Will in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer
In the cosmology of the ninetieth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the pure Will-in-itself, like the Christian God, the Hindu Brahman, or the Buddhist Nirvana, exists outside of space and time, beyond the realm of human comprehension or perception. It does, however, phenomenologically manifest itself, almost pantheistically, in our realm as both the unified totality of all of the objects of the physical universe, and as the will to exist and to act that propels these objects along their respective courses.
Two Philosophies and Two Levels of Insight
I am happy because yesterday I arrived at a new understanding of what the ultimate reality of the universe – the essence that people have labeled “God” – may be. I know that theories about the universal oneness are spurned by mainstream Buddhism, but I am still going to share here the idea that…