lumpy love
and simply saying
attached not so much to things
as the delight in them.

the light in tonight's
tea
that this morning
hung as fog
a bumper crop
of tasteless trees

branched thoughts
arranged
in holding patterns
limping along
trembling
oh so slightly
in amythic rhythm

because either
everything counts
or it all
falls
away

frank
frantic
amplified
struggle for significance
excitement rep;aces joy

where having enough
means got-to-get more
soothing steady-sate
beyond the wax and wane

and have-a-nice-day smiles
parenthesis and colon sadness
emotion synthesis
pure punctuation language

more traffic control than flow

and a
cosmic fear
me-cramp
gap

between insight

and this conditioned
wrinkled
double-barreled suit

The Certainty Epidemic

We all seem convinced we're right about politics, religion or science these days. What makes us so sure of ourselves?

By Robert Burton
salon.com

Modern biology suggests that despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of primary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of rationality or reason. Feeling correct or certain isn't a deliberate conclusion or conscious choice. It is a mental sensation that happens to us.

Link to complete Salon article

yet Oprah's outreach with Eckhart Tolle to mainstream consciousness, is unparalleled and seems truly significant. (3.5 million copies of the book have been sold since she announced the course.)

Not that Eckhart is saying anything new–but, actually that's the point. His message is simple, practical, and profound. The book is incredibly clear, powerful, and accessible (If you read The Power of Now you know how clear he is.) He is not aligned with any particular religion or tradition, but excludes none.

Here's an excerpt:

At the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought. You no longer derive your identity, your sense of who you are, from
the incessant stream of thinking that in the old consciousness you take to be yourself. What a liberation to realize the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought-or emotion or sense perception-happens.

When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life.And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is about.

I can't imagine that such mainstream exposure over 10 weeks on such a grand-scale to this free online course will not have a palpable impact.

Starts tonight.

and why davke a red box?

George Bernard Shaw

From David Kelsey, The Kvetcher:

 

My night as an interfaith shadchan

Filed Under Interfaith |

I was asked by Amber Sutherland to help her find a Jewish husband. Read all about it in Radar Magazine.

From the Radar story:

A blogger hanging around outside (who personally "wouldn't be interested in marrying anyone who believed in Jesus") said, on the condition of anonymity, "This is a psycho factory. Lots of people here used to be Hasidic. It attracts a lot of freaks in every sense of the term."

Is this "anonymous" blogger of the cow?

Somatoparaphrenia is a type of monothematic delusion where one suddenly denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of ones body. As an example a patient would believe that his own arm would belong to the doctor, or that another patient left it behind. It can sometimes be treated by vestibular caloric stimulation (squirting warm water into the patient's ear in a specific way), although most sufferers will not be aware of this and may request amputation, which is almost always denied as amputating a healthy limb would be a basic violation of the Hippocratic Oath.

From Wikipedia

same same–but different

from reality sandwich:

Ayahuasca and Kabbalah
by Jay Michaelson

Since Aldous Huxley published "The Doors of Perception," most spiritual practitioners have assumed that the point is: All is One. But as more spiritual seekers pursue non-unitive paths – including drinking ayahuasca and smoking DMT – I have a hunch that it is about to change.

In 1954, Aldous Huxley published "The Doors of Perception," a famous essay observing that the effects of mescaline were remarkably similar to the unitive mysticism of the world's great religions, particularly Vedanta, the philosophical-mystical form of Hinduism which Huxley practiced. It caused an immediate sensation. Many in the public were outraged by its pro-pharmacological spirit, and many in the academy accused Huxley (like William James before him) of flattening different mystical traditions, and of disregarding distinctions between "sacred and profane" mystical practice.

(more)