The afternoon of Tuesday 12 July saw me at x2net cybercafe (where I'm writing this) after a long absence.
About halfway through there came a faint but clear whiff of scent from my left, and there wasn't anyone along that row of seats. And definitely not from any woman whom you might expect to touch herself up, as it were, since x2n is invariably haunted by macho male gamers practically all the time,
This time I was unable to put a name to it though I fancy it might have had a note of Oil of Wintergreen.
This is the first encounter in months since that wave of 'scentings' around end of 2010 and I wonder if this had anything to do with my last Sacred Heart Prayer a couple of weeks ago.
There is nothing in the universe that you are not. ~ Rumi
Friday, July 15, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 7 Trappism
Task: Don't talk to anyone.
It sounds easy enough not to talk, but try it and see.
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Richard Maurice Bucke
Richard Maurice Bucke (18 March 1837 – 19 February 1902), often called Maurice Bucke, was an important Canadian progressive psychiatrist in the late nineteenth century.
It sounds easy enough not to talk, but try it and see.
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Yes I shall, after I've had breakfast. :-)
Meanwhile this exercise reminds me of that Great Silence, an epiphany I encountered around September 1969, 12 years after I got hooked on Zen Buddhism when I chanced upon a book in the air-conditioned school library, a Malayan first in 1957. I was just 12 at the time.
One of the earliest terms I came across that described the experience was 'Cosmic Consciousness' coined by Maurice Bucke.
More evocative perhaps is the Tibetan Buddhist (Vajrayana) Ground Luminosity.
Then there's the Chinese classic: The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao / The name that can be named is not the eternal name...
NTM the many Christian sources.
NTM the many Christian sources.
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Richard Maurice Bucke
Richard Maurice Bucke (18 March 1837 – 19 February 1902), often called Maurice Bucke, was an important Canadian progressive psychiatrist in the late nineteenth century.
An adventurer in his youth, he went on to study medicine, practice psychiatry in Ontario, and befriend a number of noted men of letters in Canada, the U.S., and England.
In addition to writing and delivering professional papers, Bucke wrote three book-length studies: Man's Moral Nature, Walt Whitman, and – his best known work – Cosmic Consciousness, a classic in the modern study of mystical experience.
Here's a link to apparently all 36 chapters from the book, which is still in print:
This is an attempted scientific study of illuminated individuals. Bucke provides three dozen very consistent examples of 'cosmic consciousness.' Some of these are the usual suspects, ajavascript:void(0)nd others are contemporary case-histories which Bucke collected. Bucke proposed that these enlightened figures are evolutionary jumps, the predecessor of a more advanced species.
Ground luminosity (Wyl. gzhi'i 'od gsal) —
Sogyal Rinpoche writes:
Ground luminosity (Wyl. gzhi'i 'od gsal) —
Sogyal Rinpoche writes:
- In Dzogchen the fundamental, inherent nature of everything is called the "Ground Luminosity" or the "Mother Luminosity." This pervades our whole experience, and is therefore the inherent nature of the thoughts and emotions that arise in our minds as well, although we do not recognize it...
- What happens at the moment of death, for everyone, is this: The Ground Luminosity dawns in vast splendor, and with it brings an opportunity for total liberation—if, and only if, you have learned how to recognize it.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 6 The Prison of the Self
Task: Attempt to escape
Around the time Descartes made known his famous edict 'I think, therefore I am', ... historians talk(ed) of 'an epidemic' of depression in Europe.
Oliver Cromwell, John Bunyan and John Donne were among its (famous) victims.
Cohen then quotes Death Be Not Proud by John Donne.
Depressed? Now all you need to do is find the cure, he cheerfully exhorts.
...
Around the time Descartes made known his famous edict 'I think, therefore I am', ... historians talk(ed) of 'an epidemic' of depression in Europe.
Oliver Cromwell, John Bunyan and John Donne were among its (famous) victims.
Cohen then quotes Death Be Not Proud by John Donne.
Depressed? Now all you need to do is find the cure, he cheerfully exhorts.
...
Cohen's erudite commentary runs all of two pages and compounds the issue, perhaps on purpose. He seems to concentrate on figures of the past, leaving out such famous depressives as Winston Churchill and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon.
The UN's WHO (World Health Organization) has reason to predict that depression would be the third largest cause of death by 2020, following heart disease and cancer, since depressed people tend to feel suicidal. (Elsewhere I learned that viral diseases cause the greatest number of deaths worldwide)
I have been depressed on three separate occasions with varying degrees of severity and recovered from them in different ways. The last time I felt sufficiently unhappy to seek help was in 2003 after which I joined the local Catholic church.
Apparently the sense of isolation that Cohen refers to was a probable cause of my illness, for I have not had a return of the 'melancholy' since.
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