“ The story goes that Albert Einstein liked to sleep 10 hours a night - unless he was working very hard on an idea; then it was 11. He claimed that his dreams helped him to invent. ”
“ You feel resistance because your body does not know it can make a choice that is not painful. ”
—Carrie of Hot Yoga Downtown, Albuquerque, NM
“I can find no way to paint hands and faces quickly, though I often go to a lot of trouble to make it look like I can.” —Robert Genn
Hands and faces
The major platforms of our our souls in this physical world.
Naturally, we find them difficult to emulate.
“Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning says.
Each night I awaken from the mist of meaning, and profound words formulate,
and I repeat them,
but fail to write;
and so,
When I awaken each morn,
I resume daily consciousness essentially where I left off before falling asleep,
only to realize as rain pours onto my body in the shower,
that I hit upon something momentous
but now forget the words,
retaining only,
that feeling.
“ Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it. ”
—Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, p. 29
“ The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘desultory’ as ‘skipping from one subject to another, disconnected, unmethodical.’ It may be an unmethodical method, but it’s a useful one. Here’s why: Our minds are capable of far more multi-tasking and multi-tracking than we think. The critical sense that goes with the processes of art-making moves forward on both prior experience and intuition. Quick looks and automatic decisions, devoid of long-term contemplation and recrimination, often produce decent results. Going from one project to another heightens the faculty. ”
—Robert Genn
“ Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for that of the world. ”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Are we arrogant? Or is it a problem of vocabulary…
Then I voiced the question that haunts me: Does peyote swing open the door to a different layer of consciousness, where ‘God’ can be known, or does it merely spark chemical reactions?
‘There is the claim that the use of hallucinogens will increase magical thinking so you think there are more connections than reality would show,’ Halpern conceded. ‘And it’s so nice to believe that science can explain everything. But do we really have to understand the machinations, the steps in which a person ends up communing with God? Is that going to serve a useful purpose to operationalize a human experience? To what end?’
I could almost hear his loyalties ripping down the middle as he gave his impassioned speech. John Halpern the Harvard doctor knew that the whole purpose of science is to ‘operationalize’ human experience, to dissect it in order to understand it. And yet, he clung to the mystical. ‘We are spiritual beings,’ he said, ‘and to deny it does not make it go away.’
—Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, p. 109, pp. 3-4
In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding ‘existence,’ which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals in existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however.
I’ve lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether—if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. That is clearly a source of confusion. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we have no experience whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only the slightest likeness or affinity. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.
So my advice is this—don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. ‘Let your works so shine before men,’ etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be in the fashion of any particular moment.
—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p. 178-9, pp. 2-1
“ I believe the act of creating art feels like a conversation with spirit, a deeper energy of understanding. We are more than this physical flesh and bone. Perhaps my fascination with all that is beautiful, adorned, and embellished is a reflection of who we are on the inside. It is a more adequate portrayal of who we are at a soul level. Julia Cameron (New York writer/artist) expresses this idea so eloquently; ‘We are ourselves works of art, and as we work to bring forward the art within us, we express our inner divinity’ (‘Walking in this World’ by Julia Cameron p.40). ”
—Sarah Hickey
“ Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass
not singing. Have you ever heard
The silence where birds are dead
yet somehow something pipest like a bird? ”
—James Elroy Flecker, “The Gates of Damascus”
