Zennish thoughts

Some straight shooting from Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (p. 132):
Zen is not interested in theories about enlightenment, it wants the real thing. So it shouts, and buffets, and reprimands, without ill-will entering in the slightest. All it wants to do is force the student to crash the word-barrier. Minds must be sprung from their [...]

Jelly hell

Not to put a damper on your summer’s day, but i just read the following in the July/August 2008 EcoNews newsletter. It’s a downer, no doubt, but i like Victoria’s Guy Dauncey , who publishes the newsletter, because of his irrepressible optimism. In fact, he’ll be getting a good chunk of my $100 climate change rebate from [...]

Otta-wah-wah

Saturday night, i watched the gravid moon rising behind the main stage of the ottawa folk festival, with colin linden doing a solo blues set and then sarah harmer and her band taking us to midnight.
Then it was a wildish 40-minute bike ride in the dark along the ottawa river, back to friends Mark & [...]

At the NAG

I am, for a moment, reeling, seated here in the main entrance of the NAG – the National Art Gallery. The sheer scale of the thing, the architectural panache, is impressive; but the tip-of-the-pyramid thought that boggles me revolves around the manifold foundation the building rests on. Not literally the concrete and stone, i mean, [...]

Time crunch

So i’ve been reading all this spiritual stuff about living in the present, and how “now” is the only time we ever have, and it began to sink in that science is inextricably based on the concept of linear time, starting at t=0 and progressing forward, through the instantaneous slice of the present moment, and [...]

Mental noise

Eckhart Tolle starts out his CD lecture Through the Open Door with the following:
You didn’t come here to be fed new thoughts, concepts, ideas. Perhaps a few signposts, they are useful. But you didn’t come here to collect more signposts, which say “Rome,” or “Mecca,” or “Enlightenment,” and then carry them home, put them in [...]