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Consciousness
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
November 2010
Summer is getting ready to pack her bags and disappear; she’ll probably break records for the hottest ever. Let’s hope that string theory is right, and in some parallel universe we haven’t made the same blunders, and the earth is doing just fine, thank you, and a hot summer day is just a hot summer day.
November 2010Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
How I Went Punk
Researching the Clash’s lyrics online, I was startled to discover that they rhyme — though the words are impossible to understand! How touching, like putting on your best shirt to visit your blind aunt.
November 2010
The Dog-Eared Page
Thanks
Listen / with the night falling we are saying thank you / we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings / we are running out of the glass rooms / with our mouths full of food to look at the sky / and say thank you
November 2010The Dog-Eared Page
Simply Becoming Aware
That you are, my friend, you know well. Your experience every moment reminds you of it. Simply find out who you are, find out what it is in you that does not depend on the changing circumstances of your bodily or mental existence, that kernel of your consciousness which, in the last analysis, cannot be identified with any of the external circumstances in which you find yourself.
October 2010Quotations
Sunbeams
September 2010If you’re alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you’re quiet, you’re not living.
The Sun Interview
Quiet, Please
Gordon Hempton On The Search For Silence In A Noisy World
Certainly people have their preferences regarding music and other sounds they like to listen to, but I do believe there is an “ideal” soundscape, and I’ve given it a name: “sonesia.” It includes the sounds of wildlife, such as songbirds. It includes the gentle sound of insects and the sound of distant water. (Up close, rushing water can mask the other sonic elements of the environment.) All of these sounds are indicative of grassland, a savannah. That’s where humans evolved, along with songbirds, which are the best indicator of an environment’s suitability for human prosperity: where songbirds live, there is also sufficient food for humans.
September 2010
The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
excerpted from
Letters To Olga
And slowly but surely, I found myself in a very strange and wonderful state of mind: I imagined I was lying somewhere in the grass beneath a tree, doing nothing, expecting nothing, worrying about nothing, simply letting the intoxication of a hot summer day possess me.
August 2010Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Not Another Word
When I signed up for a “silent vipassanâ yoga and meditation retreat” at the Esalen Institute, I didn’t even know what the word vipassanâ meant, but I wasn’t worried about it. I planned to use the week as a personal sabbatical. I’d get up at sunrise and bathe in the hot tubs overlooking the Pacific, then drift into the morning sessions for a bit of yoga or meditation, and spend afternoons writing in the loft of the big blue art barn.
July 2010
The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
excerpted from
The Doors Of Perception
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.
July 2010Quotations
Sunbeams
June 2010When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is easy to miss it.
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