“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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To say F**k It feels good. To stop struggling and finally do what you wish . . . to ignore what everyone is telling you and just go your own way . . . feels really great.
In this inspiring and humorous book, John C. Parkin suggests that saying F**k It is the perfect Western expression of the Eastern spiritual concept of letting go, giving up, and finding real freedom by realizing that things don’t matter so much (if at all). It’s a spiritual way that doesn’t require chanting, meditating, or wearing sandals. And it’s the very power of this modern-day profanity that makes it perfect for shaking us Westerners out of the stress and anxiety that dominate our daily lives.
So, find out how to say F**k It to all your problems and concerns. Say F**k It to all the “shoulds” in your life, and finally do what you want
no matter what other people think!
At Amazon: F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way by John C. Parkin
More here http://www.thefuckitway.com/
Last night we went out to see Lady Gaga. It was good but not great. The songs she performed where perfect, great dancers, good sound, lights and a nice stage design. What I did not like were the breaks between the songs, it slowed down the show.
For the world to tackle truly important problems, people have to stop looking to religion to guide their moral compasses. Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can — and should — be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life. Video after the cut.
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Skepchick zero’s it down: But please stop believing that you need to give money, time, trust, and love to this vile organization of real-life demons and monsters. You might think your parish is different, that your priest is better, but please remember that that’s what everybody else thought, too. They don’t care about your soul. They don’t care about your life. They don’t care about your kids. They will take your money to buy more gold crosses, and they will rape you and hide the evidence.
Skepchick » The Pope Ignored Child Rape.
Video after the cut…
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As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” – Henry David Thoreau
The Purna Kumbh takes place at four places (Prayag (Allahabad), Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik) after every twelve years, while the Ardh Kumbh Mela is celebrated every six years at Haridwar and Prayag. Over 45 days beginning in January 2007, more than 17 million Hindu pilgrims took part in the Ardh Kumbh Mela at Prayag, and on January 15, the most auspicious day of the festival of Makar Sankranti, more than 5 million participated
Kumbh Mela is attended by millions of people on a single day. The major event of the festival is a ritual bath at the banks of the rivers in each town. Other activities include religious discussions, devotional singing, mass feeding of holy men and women and the poor, and religious assemblies where doctrines are debated and standardized.
Kumbh Mela is the most sacred of all the pilgrimages. Thousands of holy men and women (monks, saints and sadhus) attend, and the auspiciousness of the festival is in part attributable to this. The sadhus are seen clad in saffron sheets with plenty of ashes and powder dabbed on their skin per the requirements of ancient traditions. Some called naga sanyasis may often be seen without any clothes even in severe winter, generally considered to live an extreme lifestyle.
After visiting the Kumbh Mela of 1895, Mark Twain wrote:
“It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination, marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.”
More at Wikipedia: Kumbh Mela
“He had had the boudoir walls covered with bright red tapestry and all round the room he had hung ebony-framed prints by Jan Luyken , an old Dutch engraver who was almost unknown in France.
He possessed a whole series of studies by this artist in lugubrious fantasy and ferocious cruelty: his Religious Persecutions, a collection of appaling plates displaying all the tortures which religious fanaticism has invented, revealing all the agonizing varieties of human suffering – bodies roasted over braziers, heads scalped with swords, trepanned with nails, lacerated with saws, bowels taken out of the belly and wound onto bobbins, finger-nails slowly removed with pincers, eyes put out, eye lids pinned back, limbs dislocated and carefully broken, bones laid bare and scraped for hours with knives.
These pictures, full of abominable fancies, reeking of burnt flesh, echoing with screams and curses, made Des Esseintes’ flesh creep whenever he went into the red boudoir, and he remained rooted to the spot, choking with horror.
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Give someone a fish, and they’ll eat that day. Teach them how to catch a fish and they’ll never go hungry. Proverbs like these remind us how learning skills help us to move towards self-reliance. This is never more true than critical thinking. Memorize the solution to a problem, and you may master that particular problem. Improve your critical thinking and you’ll give yourself the tools to create your own effective solutions to a multitude of unfamiliar problems. Critical thinking refers to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concern with evaluating information as well as on our thought in a disciplined way. When we are willing enable to examine our capabilities thinkers acknowledging problems and weaknesses, this can help us refine our thought processes, so we learn to think and assess information in more comprehensive way that increases our ability to identify and reject false ideas and ideologies.
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Five years since the Tsunami – The Big Picture – Boston.com
Five years ago, on Boxing Day, December 26th, 2004, a magnitude 9.3 earthquake hit the seafloor of the Indian Ocean, causing tremendous waves of seawater to rush ashore as devastating tsunamis that left 230,000 people dead across 13 different countries – the fifth deadliest natural disaster in recorded history…..
Buddha Wild Monk in a Hut by Anna Wilding
Buddhist monks aren’t usually described as wild(at least not in our urban dictionary), but director Anna Wilding’s intriguing feature documentary debut stirs up the meditation room a bit. Buddha Wild explores what really goes on behind the monastery doors, touching on hot-button issues like the roles of women, racism, and celibacy in a monk’s daily life. Buddha Wild is a refreshing synthesis of Eastern and Western politics and culture, without a nibble of Hollywood cheese.
“The religion of the future should transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both natural and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description… If ever there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.” – Einstein.
Buddha Wild provides viewers with a well-judged glimpse into the monastery world of the Buddhist Monk and the real world of those who follow the precepts and principals of Buddhism. The documentary centers on the life of the Buddhist monks. They are a kind lot of warm hearted and enlightened men. Buddha Wild is a journey of discovery.
The monks were clearly enamored by Ms. Wilding and their generosity of information from taboo subjects exhibits this fact. A well judged mix of seriousness and humor. “Anna Wilding was compelled to make this upbeat film to counteract racism she witnessed in a region”. (Excerpt from cultureunplugged.com)
Behind a ribbon of evening mist, a chill sky distills,
and a melody of far waterfalls like ten silk strings
comes to my pillow to tug my feelings,
keeping me awake in sorrow past midnight.
Xue Tao was well-respected as a poet during the Tang Dynasty, when she lived. She was born either in the Tang capital Zhangan or later on when her father, a minor government official, was posted to Chengdu in present-day Sichuan province. A story about her childhood, perhaps apocryphal, suggests that she was able to write complex poems by the age of seven or eight. She may have gained some literary education from her father, but he died before she had come to marriageable age and she ended up being a very successful courtesan (one of the few paths for women in Tang Dynasty China in which conversation and artistic talent were encouraged). After Wei Gao, the military governor, became her literary patron, her reputation was widespread. She seems to have had an affair with another famous literary figure, Yuan Zhen. Late in life she went to live in seclusion and put on the habit of a Taoist churchwoman. More than one hundred of her poems survive. She is often considered (with Yu Xuanji) to be one of the two finest female poets of the Tang Dynasty.
Spring Gazing
Flowers bloom but we can’t share them.
Flowers fall and we can’t share our sadness.
If you need to find when I miss you most:
when the flowers bloom and when they fall.
I pull a blade of grass and tie a heart-shape knot
to send to the one who understands my music.
Spring sorrow is at the breaking point.
Again spring birds murmur sad songs.
Wind, flowers, and the day is aging.
No one knows when we’ll be together.
If I can’t tie my heart to my man’s,
it’s useless to keep tying heart-shaped knots.
Unbearable when flowers fill the branches,
when two people miss each other.
Tears streak my morning mirror like jade chopsticks.
Does the spring wind know that?
I am aswirl, bird-soul and breeze, amid the cool high mountain trees of the myriad-meaninged knowledge of that thing, savior and destroyer, within. Never has an afternoon passed in such serenity, in life lived so fully, so freely of the maggots of that glob of gross crenulated meat that we call mind. To be here now, wordless, every breath a bringing forth, peering calm and adrift through the interstices of forever.
In 2000, Nick Tosches went in search of something that he was told didn’t exist anymore:The Opium Den (@ vanityfair.com).
“I can’t understand why anybody should devote their lives to a cause like dope. It’s the most boring pastime I can think of. It ranks a close second to TV.” ~ Frank Zappa
“Frank Zappa is probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life. He’s two-bit, pretentious, academic and he can’t play his way out of anything. He can’t play rock n’ roll because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses so funny. He’s not happy with himself and I think he’s right” ~ Lou Reed
Called “the perfect place to die,” the Aokigahra forest has the unfortunate distinction as the worlds second most popular place to take ones life (the first is the Golden Gate Bridge).
More @ http://atlasobscura.com
BALKAN BAROQUE: SYNOPSIS
Experimental fiction. The autobiography, both real and imaginary, of Marina Abramovic, Body Art artist. The film composes the life aesthetic of a woman in her era, with a personal history strongly marked by the Yugoslavia of Tito, everyday violence, the experience of physical and psychic limits… The voluntary evocation of the past makes something more secret, more intimate crop up: an unknown evolution that is embodied in fictions felt like authentic fragments of truth. Balkan Baroque jumps from one identity to another, from a true story to an imagination, from a dream to a ritual… – the language of the body often taking over from the word, interrupting it or, on the contrary, stimulating it.
Take a look at http://www.ubu.com/film/coulibeuf.html
Breaking news: If your morning shower doesn’t wake you up, this sure might: Dangerous bacteria may be spraying out of your shower head and right into your face, … Study finds dangerous bacteria in shower heads
Those people that worrie about getting sick and die from taking a shower should look at the stuff they put in their mouth, and their general lifestyles. That’s whats going to kill you and make you sick. Human body heads home to chemical waste dump, Idiots!
More here:
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=0z&pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=shower+head&oq=shower
To add a religion or supernatural enthusiasm to your life is to diminish your life. What you gain in ceremony, ritual, fellow feeling, and the comforts of a metaphoric system you lose in integrity, freedom, and dignity. Against the epic metaphor of religion is the Buddha’s better epic metaphor that all Buddhas must be killed – that religion itself is the danger. Not only are you not to believe in gods, according to the Buddha, you are not to believe in systems that distance you from a personal reckoning with the facts of existence. Personal means personal: to chant with robed monks robs you of your inheritance just as surely as praying to a bearded god does.
www.theatheistsway.com
The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods: Living Well Without Love
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
“A zen master’s life is one continuous mistake.”
The comming days I will attend a 3 day Zen Sesshin with Brad Warner in the Pagode Phat Hue Temple (Frankfurt). I have no idea what to expect, I will just go there and Sit down… Updates will follow later.
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| Zen Sesshin |
Now reading: Brad Warner “Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip
Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the
True Dharma”.
Zen teacher and punk bassist Brad Warner had a tough year: He lost his dream job, his mother died, his grandmother died, and his marriage fell apart. In “Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate”, Brad follows the form of his first two books, mixing his real-life adventures with Buddhist philosophy and pop culture examples. He applies the Buddha’s teachings to his own real-life suffering, deconstructing the popular image of the Buddhist Master.
How does a “real” Zen Master deal with death, divorce, job loss, and personal discord? How does he perform the work of trying to help others get over their tough times while going through some pretty heavy pain of his own? How do you sit and meditate while your world crumbles all around you? Warner also explores whether real Buddhism exists in the West, travelling around North America in search of authentic Buddhist practice. ‘While I’ve found shining examples of the Buddha’s way in prisons and at heavy metal shows‘, he writes, ‘I’ve also seen sad perversions of Buddhism in temples and among those supposedly propagating the Way in America. Authentic Buddhism doesn’t always come packaged the way we imagine it should’. This isn’t another esoteric book about the ancient, venerable, and exotic philosophy of Buddhism. It’s a book about what it means to live your life as a real human being. According to Warner, although Zen does not offer the kind of pie-in-the-sky ‘ultimate solutions’ many religions and cults promise, it does provide a real and exceptionally practical way to deal with what life dishes out to all of us. In fact, he says, Zen practice and philosophy provides the only truly rational and realistic way to live a balanced and happy life.
The bassist for the punk band Zero Defects, Brad Warner is a Zen priest, filmmaker, and Japanese monster-movie marketer living in Los Angeles. The author of Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality: Punk Rock Monster Movies & the Truth About Reality and Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye, he is also is also the director and producer of Cleveland’s Screaming, a documentary about the Ohio punk scene. He teaches Zen in Santa Monica and writes a monthly column for Suicidegirls.com.
Available at Amazon Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma. You can read an excerpt here.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Strange fact about Kellogg (From Kellogg Cornflakes )
Kellogg, the cereal company says: …Phelps’s behavior—caught on camera and published Sunday in a British tabloid—is “not consistent with the image of Kellogg.”
This is the same company that for decades has been encouraging children to start the day by inhaling sugar by the spoonful. It’s also the company that still proudly bears the name of the man who advocated yogurt enemas and pouring carbolic acid on the clitoris to prevent women from experiencing sexual pleasure.
Mister Kellogg was an especially zealous campaigner against masturbation; this was an orthodox view during his lifetime, especially the earlier part. Kellogg was able to draw upon many medical sources who made claims such as that “neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism,” credited to one Dr. Adam Clarke. Kellogg strongly warned against the habit in his own words, claiming of masturbation-related deaths “such a victim literally dies by his own hand,” among other condemnations.
Kellogg worked on the rehabilitation of masturbators, often employing extreme measures, even mutilation, on both sexes. In his Plain Facts for Old and Young,he wrote
A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision, especially when there is any degree of phimosis. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.
and
In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid [phenol] to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement. ”
He also recommended, to prevent children from this “solitary vice”, bandaging or tying their hands, covering their genitals with patented cages, sewing the foreskin shut and electrical shock.
Idiot !
Stumbled on at the Agitator / the Onion
Pin-upicoon Bettie Page (85) died.
by William Irwin.
Designed for philosophers as well as readers with no particular philosophical background, the essays in this lively book are grouped into four amusing acts. Act One looks at the four Seinfeld characters through a philosophical lens and includes Jerry and Socrates: The Examined Life? Act Two examines historical philosophers from a Seinfeldian standpoint and offers Plato or Nietzsche? Time, Essence, and Eternal Recurrence in Seinfeld. Act Three, Untimely Meditations by the Water Cooler, explores philosophical issues raised by the show, such as, Is it rational for George to do the opposite? And Act Four, Is There Anything Wrong with That?, discusses ethical problems of everyday life using Seinfeld as a basis. Seinfeld and Philosophy also provides a guide to Seinfeld episodes and a chronological list of the philosophers cited in this book.
More details
Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing
By William Irwin
Contributor William Irwin
Published by Open Court, 2000
ISBN 0812694090, 9780812694093
224 pages
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Differenence – Malcolm Gladwell.
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking–the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of “thin slices” of behavior. The key is to rely on our “adaptive unconscious”–a 24/7 mental valet–that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
The Tipping Point: “The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.
For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a “Connector”: he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere “wasn’t just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston,” he was also a “Maven” who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day–think of how often you’ve received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.
Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the “stickiness” of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger.
at Amazon: Blink and The Tipping Point
Simulacra and Simulation – Jean Baudrillard
In “Simulacra and Simulations”, Baudrillard assumes the proliferation of images in advanced capitalism, with the expansion of commodities and the relentless advance of technologies of visualization and simulation.
In the essay, Baudrillard describes a movement from “representation” (of something real) to “simulation” (with no secure reference to reality). This movement from representation to simulation changes the relation between sign and referent, so that we lose the connection, once presumed to exist, between sign or image and the reality to which both were thought to refer. To develop this argument Baudrillard asks us to think about situations where the simulating sign or image usurps the priority of the reality it is supposed to “serve”.
Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map
of course is our own mortality. Faced with that question, pretty much everything that isn’t truly important fades away. Steve Jobs of Apple put it best in his Commencement address at Stanford in 2005:
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Found at Zen Habits
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of America’s greatest philosophers. In his essay, Self Reliance, Emerson stressed the importance of individualism and the importance of living by your conscious. A man should not conform or live a life of false consistency.They should march to the beat of their own drummer.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude after own own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The “Positivity Blog” recently had a rather compelling overview of Bruce Lee, Productivity Guru.
And from the same site this lame article: gandhis-top-10-fundamentals-for-changing-the-world, but then I would fight Gandhi….
- Paul Trynka Iggy Pop’s life has been one of extraordinary highs and terrifying lows. Infamous for his wild ways, he is also a towering figure of the rock scene – hugely influential, charismatic and provocative. Every ‘mad, bad, dangerous to know’ rock star owes a debt to him, and the stories of his shocking behaviour are legendary. But Iggy Pop is also, to a large extent, a construct, the alter ego of the quietly spoken and intriguing Jim Osterberg: the kid voted ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ by his classmates. So what turned this charming, well-mannered, straight-A student into a poster child for rock ‘n’ roll debauchery? Iggy Pop: Open up and Bleed reveals the truth behind the myths. Former MOJO editor Paul Trynka tracked down the star’s friends, family, lovers and fellow musicians, conducting over two hundred and fifty interviews, unearthing countless new stories about Iggy’s rollercoaster life, his music and his often misunderstood friendship with David Bowie. From this impeccable research he creates a fascinating portrait of a man at war with the world and with himself. The book also features dozens of never-before seen photos.
@ Amazon and @ Zweitausendeins (German translation)
Edward Lorenz was the pioneer in the creation of chaos and strange attractor theory. He also showed how small actions could lead to major changes in what became known as the “butterfly effect.
Dr. Ian Malcolm – There. Look at this. See? See? I’m right again. Nobody could’ve predicted that Dr. Grant would suddenly, suddenly jump out of a moving vehicle.
Dr. Ellie Sattler – Alan? Alan!
Dr. Ian Malcolm – There’s, another example. See, here I’m now by myself, uh, er, talking to myself. That’s, that’s chaos theory.
(quote from Jurassic Park)
More @wikipedia:
Edward Lorenz
Chaos theory
Strange attractor
Osiris is the Egyptian god of life, death and fertility with similarities to Dionysus. In the beginning of Spring a procession would take place were women would parade with an large phallus to celebrate the resurrection of euhm life (?). (See “The Golden Bough” by Sir James Frazer) or @ wikipedia
Holy Week in Seville (Semana Santa en Sevilla) is one of the most important traditional events of the city. It is celebrated in the week leading up to Easter, one to two weeks before the city’s other great celebration, the Feria, and is amongst the largest religious events within Spain, internationally renowned for its drama. The week features the procession of pasos, floats of lifelike wooden sculptures of individual scenes of the events of the Passion, or images of the Virgin Mary showing restrained grief for the torture and killing of her son. Some of the sculptures are of great antiquity and are considered artistic masterpieces.
more: @wikipedia
In 1983, he published Het verdriet van België (“The Sorrow of Belgium”), which is probably his most famous book.
more @wikipedia
by Lon Milo DuQuete. Two millennia ago, a charismatic Jewish teacher emerged from the sands of Roman Palestine. His wise, sometimes enigmatic teachings, his ability to heal the sick, and the miraculous feats he performed before the eyes of his many followers brought him fame, admiration and adoration, as well as resentment and ultimately, death. Yet, in the score of centuries that passed, his life’s story has been told and re-told more than that of any man who has ever lived. Who was this Jesus? Was he the King of the Jews? The Son of God? A prophet? A politician? A religious teacher? Was he an individual caught up in a drama much greater than himself, perhaps divinely inspired to fulfill an age-old prophecy? In his first novel, bestselling author Lon Milo DuQuette tells a remarkable tale of what might have been… Through the magic of his narrative, DuQuette brings to life the historical and cultural milieu from which Jesus, John the Baptist, and the woman known in the Gospels as Mary Magdalene arose. The streets and temples and homes of ancient Galilee appear vividly before us, as do the priests, soldiers, merchants, wandering prophets, and Gnostic initiates of the time. (Amazon)
great documentary about the life of Iggy Pop (Jim Osterburgh). follow Iggy as he describes his early life, his first band “the iguanas”, of course through his time with the stooges, his solo career and then back to the Stooges again. This film is from 2004 and Iggy is with not yet in his 60′s.
(sorry for the stupid popup add, its megavideo’s work)
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
- Lao-Tzu
Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
- Chuang Tzu
by Henry David Thoreau Walden (also known as Life in the Woods) by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau’s life for two years and two months in second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau called it an experiment in simple living.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Walden
- Colin Wilson This work presents the life and work of one of the most influential psychological theorists of modern times. George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff is one of the most enigmatic figures of our time. He attracted legends as easily as disciples. But behind the Gurdjieff myth lies a solid corpus of thought, the importance of which is only now being generally recognized. At its heart was the idea of ‘the war against sleep’, the fact that man, in Colin Wilson’s words, is like ‘a grandfather clock driven by a watch-spring’. This brilliant and much praised examination of a psychologist and teacher of genius has established itself as the most important and accessible account for the general reader of Gurdjieff’s life and work.
At Amazon: G. I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep
- by Rafael Lefort.
Book Description
When The Teachers of Gurdjieff was first published some 25 years ago, it made a very considerable stir. George Gurdjieff was one of the most famous mystics before the war, a teaching master who had many fashionable and influential pupils. He had a striking appearance and manner of teaching, one that was to prove influential. The meaning of his teaching and the sources of it were a puzzle. How did he come by his knowledge? What was to become of it? These were questions that engaged many seekers.
Yet, with the rapidly changing focus of our era in all things, not least spiritual, this is in some real part a book of another time. From the time of Gurdjieff’s operations to the early ’70s, many in the West were discovering, for the first time, the older religious and spiritual traditions of the East. After his death, Gurdjieff’s followers were running groups in “the fourth way”; travelers set out to India, Tibet, Japan, Turkey and other parts east to find their Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, Sonoran Shamen, and the rest. Schools began, seekers sought and found, sought again, found again.
Today, everything is available and exposed on the table, and anybody can connect with any technique at any time. And the possibilities are endless, highly intellectual, highly emotional, highly sensual. How many different forms of yoga, zen philosophy are there, and is a lifetime enough to find a proper combination, or is the answer closer at home.
This book offers, among the adventures of the search and the souks of Baghdad and Aleppo, striking and timeless advice to those interested in finding spirituality. Its appeal is far beyond that of one seeker in one era, but offers us information, today, on how to evaluate different forms of teaching, how to study, and even some tantalizing information on the role of Jesus.
Excerpted:
You are scrabbling about in the sand, attracted by pieces of mica to knit together and make a window, not realising that the sand itself is capable of being transformed into the purest glass.–
From The Teachers of Gurdjieff
At Amazon: The Teachers of Gurdjief
Iggy Pop: I’ll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh… and, uh… heartless manipulators, about music… that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it’s a… it’s a term that’s based on contempt; it’s a term that’s based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that’s rotten about rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t know Johnny Rotten.. but I’m sure, I’m sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise… is in fact… the brilliant music of a genius… myself. And that music is so powerful, that it’s quite beyond my control. And, ah… when I’m in the grips of it, I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn’t feel anything, and you didn’t want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?
Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) is the first novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
This semi-autobiographical work follows antihero Ferdinand Bardamu through his involvement in World War I, colonial Africa, and post-WWI America (where he works for the Ford Motor Company), returning in the second half of the work to France, where he becomes a medical doctor and sets up a practice in a poor Paris suburb, the fictional La Garenne-Rancy. The novel also satirizes the medical profession and the vocation of scientific research. The disparate elements of the work are linked together by recurrent encounters with Léon Robinson, a hapless character whose experiences parallel, to some extent, those of Bardamu.
As its title suggests, Voyage au bout de la nuit is a dark, nihilistic novel of savage, exultant misanthropy, leavened, however, with an ebulliently cynical humour. Céline expresses an almost unrelieved pessimism with regard to human nature, human institutions, society, and life in general. Towards the end of the book, the narrator Bardamu, who is working at an insane asylum, remarks:
…I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare,”
The answer is 42 !! AFTER pondering the weighty question of the mass of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have come up with an answer: 42.
That is, our galaxy weighs three times 10 to the power of 42kg – a number written as 3 followed by 42 zeroes, which has echoes of author Douglas Adams’s fictional answer to the question of life, the universe and everything in his series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Gangrene – Black Venus by Jeff Geeraerts.
The Great African novel from Flanders
The first part of the Gangrene cycle, Gangrene – Black Venus, is set in the Belgian Congo at the end of the 1950s. These are the years before independence, when the colony experienced its finest hour. Against this backdrop, Geeraerts portrays a colonial civil servant who frees himself from the oppressive constraints of the Western bourgeois mentality. In his own words, the protagonist says, ‘I am at once a heathen and God. God does not exist. I am God.’
In a fluent, evocative style, Geeraerts describes the obsessive love of this white colonial for a black woman. The protagonist leaves western civilisation further and further behind him and descends into an orgiastic, quasi-mystic way of life, combining ritual and instinct, violence and eroticism. His life consists of hunting, sleeping, eating, drinking and copulating: man in his most primitive state. He writes, ‘I shed my culture gradually, piece by piece, and felt myself nearing the blissful state of innocence.’ Gangrene – Black Venus is not just a colonial novel, it is primarily the story of a romantic ideal. It is about man’s longing to find paradise in nature, a paradise where he can experience his freedom to the full. Geeraerts then demonstrates the consequences of this freedom in a most ruthless manner.
Gangrene – Black Venus is one of the most talked-about novels from post-war Flanders. The controversy surrounding the publication was astounding. First the Belgian government awarded the novel the national prose prize, then that self-same government seized the book in order to investigate its lascivious character.
Applauded as brilliant, then decried for ‘extolling of racism and pornography’; however shocked conformist Belgium might have been, no-one could really deny that seldom had a writer approached such a sensitive subject with such monumental daring. Thirty-five years after the publication of Gangrene – Black Venus, Geeraerts revised all four parts of the legendary cycle.
Although the cultural climate has changed entirely, none of the books has lost anything in impact. They retain an all-pervading authenticity that still shocks to this day.
is a form of Mahyna Buddhism notable for its emphasis on praxis and experiential wisdom, particularly as realized in the form of meditation known as zazen, in the attainment of enlightenment as experienced by the Buddha Siddh?rtha Gautama. As such, it de-emphasizes both theoretical knowledge and the study of religious texts in favor of what it terms a “special transmission outside the scriptures” that points to each individual practitioner’s inherent Buddha-nature. Satori (awakening) has always been the goal of every school of Buddhism, but that which distinguished the Zen tradition as it developed in China, Korea, and Japan was a way of life radically different from that of Indian Buddhists.In China social circumstances led to the development of a temple and training-center system in which the abbot and the monks all performed mundane tasks. These included food gardening or farming, carpentry, architecture, housekeeping, administration, and the practice of folk medicine. Consequently, the enlightenment sought in Zen had to stand up well to the demands and potential frustrations of everyday life.
The fundamental Zen practice of zazen, or seated meditation, recalls both the posture in which the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, and the elements of mindfulness and concentration which are part of the Eightfold Path as taught by the Buddha. All of the Buddha’s fundamental teachings
In 12th-13th century Japan there lived a man named Fujiwara no Teika (sometimes called Sadaie), a well-regarded poet in a society that prized poetry. At one point in his life he compiled the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (often known simply as the Hyakunin Isshu), which means “A Hundred Poems by A Hundred Poets” (literally “A hundred people, one poem [each]”).
This collection of a hundred poems is known to almost all Japanese, and over the years it has been translated by many different people. One of the early translators of the collection was William Porter. His translation, first published in 1909, was titled “A Hundred Verses from Old Japan”.
Total running time: 0:49:02, read by Kevin Steinbach @ Librevox
Hyakunin Isshu @ Wiki
The secret to living a long life, says Ukranian goat herd Grigoriy Nestor, is never having sex with women. Nestor is 116 years old, unmarried. “People that were not married like me live longer. People who get married just argue all the time, and that’s not good for your health….People who know too much always come to a nasty end. Better to stay stupid and not wonder too much about anything.”
A wisdom found here
O! the heart of N.O.X. the Night of Pan.
{Pi-Alpha-Nu}: Duality: Energy: Death.
Death: Begetting: the supporters of O!
To beget is to die; to die is to beget.
Cast the Seed into the Field of Night.
Life and Death are two names of A.
Kill thyself.
Neither of these alone is enough.
Aleister Crowley – Book of Lies
– Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
Actually, Nietzsche never issued this famous proclamation in his own voice but rather put the words in the mouth of a character he called the madman and later in the mouth of another character, Zarathustra.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche endorsed the words. “God is dead” is often mistaken as a statement of atheism. It is not, though Nietzsche himself was an atheist. “Dead” is metaphorical in this context, meaning belief in the God of Christianity is worn out, past its prime, and on the decline. God is lost as the center of life and the source of values. Nietzsche’s madman noted that himself came too soon. No doubt Nietzsche, too, thought he was ahead of his time in heralding this news.