Visual Poetry.
Don't worry, its not the Camera..its the person behind it that matters.
- Hellmuth Conz
10/05/2009
9/16/2009
8/22/2009
8/17/2009
I believe that today, more than ever, a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.
Henry Rollins
Henry Rollins
7/22/2009
Mutiny of the Soul.
Mutiny of the soul -by Charles Eisenstein.
Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new.
When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I'm not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.
The notion of a cure starts with the question, "What has gone wrong?" But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, "What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?" When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?
The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?"
What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?
The unspoken goal of modern life seems to be to live as long and as comfortably as possible, to minimize risk and to maximize security. We see this priority in the educational system, which tries to train us to be "competitive" so that we can "make a living". We see it in the medical system, where the goal of prolonging life trumps any consideration of whether, sometimes, the time has come to die. We see it in our economic system, which assumes that all people are motivated by "rational self-interest", defined in terms of money, associated with security and survival. (And have you ever thought about the phrase "the cost of living"?) We are supposed to be practical, not idealistic; we are supposed to put work before play. Ask someone why she stays in a job she hates, and as often as not the answer is, "For the health insurance." In other words, we stay in jobs that leave us feeling dead in order to gain the assurance of staying alive. When we choose health insurance over passion, we are choosing survival over life.
On a deep level, which I call the soul level, we want none of that. We recognize that we are here on earth to enact a sacred purpose, and that most of the jobs on offer are beneath our dignity as human beings. But we might be too afraid to leave our jobs, our planned-out lives, our health insurance, or whatever other security and comfort we have received in exchange for our divine gifts. Deep down, we recognize this security and comfort as slaves' wages, and we yearn to be free.
So, the soul rebels. Afraid to make the conscious choice to step away from a slave's life, we make the choice unconsciously instead. We can no longer muster the energy to go through the motions. We enact this withdrawal from life through a variety of means. We might summon the Epstein-Barr virus into our bodies, or mononucleosis, or some other vector of chronic fatigue. We might shut down our thyroid or adrenal glands. We might shut down our production of serotonin in the brain. Other people take a different route, incinerating the excess life energy in the fires of addiction. Either way, we are in some way refusing to participate. We are shying away from ignoble complicity in a world gone wrong. We are refusing to contribute our divine gifts to the aggrandizement of that world.
That is why the conventional approach of fixing the problem so that we can return to normal life will not work. It might work temporarily, but the body will find other ways to resist. Raise serotonin levels with SSRIs, and the brain will prune some receptor sites, thinking in its wisdom, "Hey, I'm not supposed to feel good about the life I am living right now." In the end, there is always suicide, a common endpoint of the pharmaceutical regimes that seek to make us happy with something inimical to our very purpose and being. You can only force yourself to abide in wrongness so long. When the soul's rebellion is suppressed too long, it can explode outward in bloody revolution. Significantly, all of the school shootings in the last decade have involved people on anti-depression medication. All of them! For a jaw-dropping glimpse of the results of the pharmaceutical regime of control, scroll down this compilation of suicide/homicide cases involving SSRIs. I am not using "jaw-dropping" as a figure of speech. My jaw literally dropped open.
Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound -- after all, it validates my professional status -- therefore the problem must be with you."
Unfortunately, "holistic" approaches are no different, as long as they deny the wisdom of the body's rebellion. When they do seem to work, usually that is because they coincide with some other shift. When someone goes out and gets help, or makes a radical switch of modalities, it works as a ritual communication to the unconscious mind of a genuine life change. Rituals have the power to make conscious decisions real to the unconscious. They can be part of taking back one's power.
I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.
A related syndrome comprises various "attention deficit" and anxiety "disorders" (forgive me, I cannot write down these words without the ironic quotation marks) which reflect an unconscious knowledge that something is wrong around here. Anxiety, like all emotions, has a proper function. Suppose you left a pot on the stove and you know you forgot something, you just can't remember what. You cannot rest at ease. Something is bothering you, something is wrong. Subliminally you smell smoke. You obsess: did I leave the water running? Did I forget to pay the mortgage? The anxiety keeps you awake and alert; it doesn't let you rest; it keeps your mind churning, worrying. This is good. This is what saves your life. Eventually you realize -- the house is on fire! -- and anxiety turns into panic, and action.
So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don't have a "disorder" at all -- maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to "Something is dangerously wrong and I don't know what it is." That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you. I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks. Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.
Similarly, Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, and my favorite, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are only disorders if we believe that the things presented for our attention are worth paying attention to. We cannot admit, without calling into question the whole edifice of our school system, that it may be completely healthy for a ten-year-old boy to not sit still for six hours in a classroom learning about long division and Vasco de Gama. Perhaps the current generation of children, that some call the Indigos, simply have a lower tolerance for school's agenda of conformity, obedience, external motivation, right-and-wrong answers, the quantification of performance, rules and bells, report cards and grades and your permanent record. So we try to enforce their attention with stimulants, and subdue their heroic intuitive rebellion against the spirit-wrecking machine.
As I write about the "wrongness" against which we all rebel, I can hear some readers asking, "What about the metaphysical principle that it's 'all good'?" Just relax, I am told, nothing is wrong, all is part of the divine plan. You only perceive it as wrong because of your limited human perspective. All of this is only here for our own development. War: it gives people wonderful opportunities to make heroic choices and burn off bad karma. Life is wonderful, Charles, why do you have to make it wrong?
I am sorry, but usually such reasoning is just a sop to the conscience. If it is all good, then that is only because we perceive and experience it as terribly wrong. The perception of iniquity moves us to right it.
Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.
All of us go through this process, repeatedly, in various realms of our lives; all parts of the process are right and necessary. The phase of full participation is a growth phase in which we develop gifts that will be applied very differently later. The phase of trying to fix, to endure, to soldier on with a life that isn't working is a maturation phase that develops qualities of patience and determination and strength. The phase of discovering the all-encompassing nature of the problem is usually a phase of despair, but it need not be. Properly, it is a phase of rest, of stillness, of withdrawal, of preparation for a push. The push is a birth-push. Crises in our lives converge and propel us into a new life, a new being that we hardly imagine could exist, except that we'd heard rumors of it, echoes, and maybe even caught a glimpse of it here and there, been granted through grace a brief preview.
If you are in the midst of this process, you need not suffer if you cooperate with it. I can offer you two things. First is self-trust. Trust your own urge to withdraw even when a million messages are telling you, "The world is fine, what's wrong with you? Get with the program." Trust your innate belief that you are here on earth for something magnificent, even when a thousand disappointments have told you you are ordinary. Trust your idealism, buried in your eternal child's heart, that says that a far more beautiful world than this is possible. Trust your impatience that says "good enough" is not good enough. Do not label your noble refusal to participate as laziness and do not medicalize it as an illness. Your heroic body has merely made a few sacrifices to serve your growth.
The second thing I can offer you is a map. The journey I have described is not always linear, and you may find yourself from time to time revisiting earlier territory. When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us. Soon many people will follow the paths we have pioneered. Each journey is unique, but all share the same basic dynamics I have described. When you have passed through it, and understood the necessity and rightness of each of its phases, you will be prepared to midwife others through it as well. Your condition, all the years of it, has prepared you for this. It has prepared you to ease the passage of those who will follow. Everything you have gone through, every bit of the despair, has been necessary to forge you into a healer and a guide. The need is great. The time is coming soon.
Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new.
When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I'm not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.
The notion of a cure starts with the question, "What has gone wrong?" But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, "What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?" When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?
The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?"
What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?
The unspoken goal of modern life seems to be to live as long and as comfortably as possible, to minimize risk and to maximize security. We see this priority in the educational system, which tries to train us to be "competitive" so that we can "make a living". We see it in the medical system, where the goal of prolonging life trumps any consideration of whether, sometimes, the time has come to die. We see it in our economic system, which assumes that all people are motivated by "rational self-interest", defined in terms of money, associated with security and survival. (And have you ever thought about the phrase "the cost of living"?) We are supposed to be practical, not idealistic; we are supposed to put work before play. Ask someone why she stays in a job she hates, and as often as not the answer is, "For the health insurance." In other words, we stay in jobs that leave us feeling dead in order to gain the assurance of staying alive. When we choose health insurance over passion, we are choosing survival over life.
On a deep level, which I call the soul level, we want none of that. We recognize that we are here on earth to enact a sacred purpose, and that most of the jobs on offer are beneath our dignity as human beings. But we might be too afraid to leave our jobs, our planned-out lives, our health insurance, or whatever other security and comfort we have received in exchange for our divine gifts. Deep down, we recognize this security and comfort as slaves' wages, and we yearn to be free.
So, the soul rebels. Afraid to make the conscious choice to step away from a slave's life, we make the choice unconsciously instead. We can no longer muster the energy to go through the motions. We enact this withdrawal from life through a variety of means. We might summon the Epstein-Barr virus into our bodies, or mononucleosis, or some other vector of chronic fatigue. We might shut down our thyroid or adrenal glands. We might shut down our production of serotonin in the brain. Other people take a different route, incinerating the excess life energy in the fires of addiction. Either way, we are in some way refusing to participate. We are shying away from ignoble complicity in a world gone wrong. We are refusing to contribute our divine gifts to the aggrandizement of that world.
That is why the conventional approach of fixing the problem so that we can return to normal life will not work. It might work temporarily, but the body will find other ways to resist. Raise serotonin levels with SSRIs, and the brain will prune some receptor sites, thinking in its wisdom, "Hey, I'm not supposed to feel good about the life I am living right now." In the end, there is always suicide, a common endpoint of the pharmaceutical regimes that seek to make us happy with something inimical to our very purpose and being. You can only force yourself to abide in wrongness so long. When the soul's rebellion is suppressed too long, it can explode outward in bloody revolution. Significantly, all of the school shootings in the last decade have involved people on anti-depression medication. All of them! For a jaw-dropping glimpse of the results of the pharmaceutical regime of control, scroll down this compilation of suicide/homicide cases involving SSRIs. I am not using "jaw-dropping" as a figure of speech. My jaw literally dropped open.
Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound -- after all, it validates my professional status -- therefore the problem must be with you."
Unfortunately, "holistic" approaches are no different, as long as they deny the wisdom of the body's rebellion. When they do seem to work, usually that is because they coincide with some other shift. When someone goes out and gets help, or makes a radical switch of modalities, it works as a ritual communication to the unconscious mind of a genuine life change. Rituals have the power to make conscious decisions real to the unconscious. They can be part of taking back one's power.
I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.
A related syndrome comprises various "attention deficit" and anxiety "disorders" (forgive me, I cannot write down these words without the ironic quotation marks) which reflect an unconscious knowledge that something is wrong around here. Anxiety, like all emotions, has a proper function. Suppose you left a pot on the stove and you know you forgot something, you just can't remember what. You cannot rest at ease. Something is bothering you, something is wrong. Subliminally you smell smoke. You obsess: did I leave the water running? Did I forget to pay the mortgage? The anxiety keeps you awake and alert; it doesn't let you rest; it keeps your mind churning, worrying. This is good. This is what saves your life. Eventually you realize -- the house is on fire! -- and anxiety turns into panic, and action.
So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don't have a "disorder" at all -- maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to "Something is dangerously wrong and I don't know what it is." That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you. I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks. Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.
Similarly, Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, and my favorite, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are only disorders if we believe that the things presented for our attention are worth paying attention to. We cannot admit, without calling into question the whole edifice of our school system, that it may be completely healthy for a ten-year-old boy to not sit still for six hours in a classroom learning about long division and Vasco de Gama. Perhaps the current generation of children, that some call the Indigos, simply have a lower tolerance for school's agenda of conformity, obedience, external motivation, right-and-wrong answers, the quantification of performance, rules and bells, report cards and grades and your permanent record. So we try to enforce their attention with stimulants, and subdue their heroic intuitive rebellion against the spirit-wrecking machine.
As I write about the "wrongness" against which we all rebel, I can hear some readers asking, "What about the metaphysical principle that it's 'all good'?" Just relax, I am told, nothing is wrong, all is part of the divine plan. You only perceive it as wrong because of your limited human perspective. All of this is only here for our own development. War: it gives people wonderful opportunities to make heroic choices and burn off bad karma. Life is wonderful, Charles, why do you have to make it wrong?
I am sorry, but usually such reasoning is just a sop to the conscience. If it is all good, then that is only because we perceive and experience it as terribly wrong. The perception of iniquity moves us to right it.
Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.
All of us go through this process, repeatedly, in various realms of our lives; all parts of the process are right and necessary. The phase of full participation is a growth phase in which we develop gifts that will be applied very differently later. The phase of trying to fix, to endure, to soldier on with a life that isn't working is a maturation phase that develops qualities of patience and determination and strength. The phase of discovering the all-encompassing nature of the problem is usually a phase of despair, but it need not be. Properly, it is a phase of rest, of stillness, of withdrawal, of preparation for a push. The push is a birth-push. Crises in our lives converge and propel us into a new life, a new being that we hardly imagine could exist, except that we'd heard rumors of it, echoes, and maybe even caught a glimpse of it here and there, been granted through grace a brief preview.
If you are in the midst of this process, you need not suffer if you cooperate with it. I can offer you two things. First is self-trust. Trust your own urge to withdraw even when a million messages are telling you, "The world is fine, what's wrong with you? Get with the program." Trust your innate belief that you are here on earth for something magnificent, even when a thousand disappointments have told you you are ordinary. Trust your idealism, buried in your eternal child's heart, that says that a far more beautiful world than this is possible. Trust your impatience that says "good enough" is not good enough. Do not label your noble refusal to participate as laziness and do not medicalize it as an illness. Your heroic body has merely made a few sacrifices to serve your growth.
The second thing I can offer you is a map. The journey I have described is not always linear, and you may find yourself from time to time revisiting earlier territory. When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us. Soon many people will follow the paths we have pioneered. Each journey is unique, but all share the same basic dynamics I have described. When you have passed through it, and understood the necessity and rightness of each of its phases, you will be prepared to midwife others through it as well. Your condition, all the years of it, has prepared you for this. It has prepared you to ease the passage of those who will follow. Everything you have gone through, every bit of the despair, has been necessary to forge you into a healer and a guide. The need is great. The time is coming soon.
7/16/2009
x-static Process
I'm not myself when you're around
I'm not myself standing in a crowd
I'm not myself and I don't know how
I'm not myself, myself right now
Chorus:
Jesus Christ will you look at me
Don't know who I'm supposed to be
Don't really know if I should give a damn
When you're around, I don't know who I am
I'm not myself when you go quiet
I'm not myself alone at night
I'm not myself, don't know who to call
I'm not myself at all
(chorus)
I always wished that I could find someone as beautiful as you
But in the process I forgot that I was special too
I'm not myself when you're around
I'm not myself when you go quiet
I'm not myself all alone at night
I'm not myself standing in a crowd
I'm not myself and I don't know how
I'm not myself, myself right now
Don't know what I believe
Jesus Christ will you look at me
Don't know who I'm supposed to be
Someone say if I should give a damn
When you're around, I don't know who I am
I always wished that I could find someone as beautiful as you
But in the process I forgot that I was special too
I always wished that I could find someone as talented as you
But in the process I forgot that I was just as good as you
written by Madonna and Mirwais Ahmadzai
I'm not myself standing in a crowd
I'm not myself and I don't know how
I'm not myself, myself right now
Chorus:
Jesus Christ will you look at me
Don't know who I'm supposed to be
Don't really know if I should give a damn
When you're around, I don't know who I am
I'm not myself when you go quiet
I'm not myself alone at night
I'm not myself, don't know who to call
I'm not myself at all
(chorus)
I always wished that I could find someone as beautiful as you
But in the process I forgot that I was special too
I'm not myself when you're around
I'm not myself when you go quiet
I'm not myself all alone at night
I'm not myself standing in a crowd
I'm not myself and I don't know how
I'm not myself, myself right now
Don't know what I believe
Jesus Christ will you look at me
Don't know who I'm supposed to be
Someone say if I should give a damn
When you're around, I don't know who I am
I always wished that I could find someone as beautiful as you
But in the process I forgot that I was special too
I always wished that I could find someone as talented as you
But in the process I forgot that I was just as good as you
written by Madonna and Mirwais Ahmadzai
6/27/2009
Man in the mirror
"Why not just tell people I'm an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They'll believe anything you say, because you're a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, 'I'm an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight,' people would say, 'Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He's cracked up. You can't believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth'."
—Michael Jackson
6/25/2009
In these dark nights
Embezzled with terror and fear
There rises a flame. Just a flicker.
Of love, bliss and a person who knows.
This person who is me.
He that was abandoned with hands that trembled-
To embrace the massiveness of faith. And hope.
Embezzled with terror and fear
There rises a flame. Just a flicker.
Of love, bliss and a person who knows.
This person who is me.
He that was abandoned with hands that trembled-
To embrace the massiveness of faith. And hope.
6/12/2009
Miles Away
Love,love the song!
I just woke up from a fuzzy dream
You never would believe the things that I have seen
I looked in the mirror, and I saw your face
You looked right through me; you were miles away
All my dreams, they fade away
I'll never be the same
If you could see me the way you see yourself
I can't pretend to be someone else
You always love me more
Miles away
I hear it in your voice when you're
Miles away
You're not afraid to tell me
Miles away
I guess we're at our best when we're
Miles away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
When no one's around, and I have you here
I begin to see the picture, it becomes so clear
You always have the biggest heart
When we're six thousand miles apart
Too much of no sound
Uncomfortable silence can be so loud
Those three words are never enough
When it's long distance love
You always love me more
Miles away
I hear it in your voice when you're
Miles away
You're not afraid to tell me
Miles away
I guess we're at our best when we're
Miles away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
I'm alright, don't be sorry, but it's true
When I'm gone, you'll realize
That I'm the best thing to happen to you
You always love me more
Miles away
I hear it in your voice when you're
Miles away
You're not afraid to tell me
Miles away
I guess we're at our best when we're
Miles away
'Miles Away' - Madonna/Hard Candy
psst! the song was released on my birthday. so the obvious extra admiration, i guess :D
I just woke up from a fuzzy dream
You never would believe the things that I have seen
I looked in the mirror, and I saw your face
You looked right through me; you were miles away
All my dreams, they fade away
I'll never be the same
If you could see me the way you see yourself
I can't pretend to be someone else
You always love me more
Miles away
I hear it in your voice when you're
Miles away
You're not afraid to tell me
Miles away
I guess we're at our best when we're
Miles away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
When no one's around, and I have you here
I begin to see the picture, it becomes so clear
You always have the biggest heart
When we're six thousand miles apart
Too much of no sound
Uncomfortable silence can be so loud
Those three words are never enough
When it's long distance love
You always love me more
Miles away
I hear it in your voice when you're
Miles away
You're not afraid to tell me
Miles away
I guess we're at our best when we're
Miles away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
So far away, so far away
I'm alright, don't be sorry, but it's true
When I'm gone, you'll realize
That I'm the best thing to happen to you
You always love me more
Miles away
I hear it in your voice when you're
Miles away
You're not afraid to tell me
Miles away
I guess we're at our best when we're
Miles away
'Miles Away' - Madonna/Hard Candy
psst! the song was released on my birthday. so the obvious extra admiration, i guess :D
5/07/2009
4/23/2009
Moonshine and Skytoffee
How does my dear comrade spend this all too
brief phase of existence when life is bubbling with
Youth and the Heart is fragrant with Love?
As for me, my life passes moment by moment
in the love of Saramma. And you Saramma?
Begging of you to think it over well and bless me
with a sweet,kind reply.
Saramma's own,
Keshavan Nayar.
Original title 'Prema Lekhanam' (By Vaikom Muhammad Basheer) Published as a novelette in 1943
A very happy play performed by PERCH(Chennai) at Ranga Shankara. Congratulation to the director Rajiv Krishnan and the crew.
I seldom come out of the theatre hall smiling to myself ( :
Thank you so much for the lovely show! ( :
--
Meowrr!
4/13/2009
Why the Now is bliss (courtesy-theage.com.au)
For the best part of two years in the early 1980s a man in his mid-30s would sit on a park bench in Russell Square, central London, and in a state of deep bliss watch the world go by.
When winter crept in, Eckhart Tolle, a German-born linguist who had once been thought to hold great academic promise, would retreat into the University of London Library nearby and pore over esoteric books. And word spread among students that this man was no ordinary drifter but a modern mystic who had undergone an extraordinary inner transformation.
A man, indeed, who was spiritually enlightened.
Twenty years later, Eckhart Tolle (pronounced Toll-ee) says that while “there are shifts in intensity”, he remains in the same state of “bliss and peace”.
He no longer sits on a park bench but lives in a high-rise in Vancouver and teaches others how to attain enlightenment, among them Gillian Anderson of The X Files; Cher, who says he “has changed my life”; and Meg Ryan, who introduced Oprah Winfrey to Tolle’s first book, The Power of Now: A Spiritual Guide to Enlightenment.
Last year, Winfrey chose the book for her Favourite Things show, saying she had read it eight times and keeps it on her bedside table. Sales skyrocketed: The Power of Now — with an original print run of 3000 — became No. 1 on Amazon.com and spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, selling more than one million copies in North America. Released in Australia in 2000, it was still on the top 10 list this year, and has been translated into more than two dozen languages.
Tolle’s second book, Stillness Speaks, was released here earlier this month and publisher Hodder Headline says both books are selling well..
When I first met Tolle — a slight man with soft, grey-blue eyes and a goatee beard — he by no means exuded charisma. Rather, the air of a shy professor. He spoke with a faint German accent, his conversation frequently punctuated by staccato laughs so fierce as to make his shoulders shake. Nothing, it seemed, was to be taken too seriously — least of all his international success.
The essence of his teachings, he says, is that the present moment is the most meaningful in life. By aligning with “the now”, he says, “you are also aligned with life itself. You experience coincidences.
“Suddenly just the right thing happens at the right moment. Or you become more intuitive, more creative. Many deep insights and realisations come out of being present.”
Written in a question and answer format, The Power of Now explores perennial spiritual problems: how to overcome the feeling of separation, the meaning of surrender, how to avoid pain. It requires the reader to let go of preconceived ideas and focus less on what he or she does and more on being.
Tolle asks the reader “not to stop thinking, but to step out of being completely entangled in the stream of thinking”. This, he believes, “is the the real meaning of spirituality. People still think spirituality is having certain belief systems — in God or angels — but ‘spiritual’ means to be able to step beyond the conceptual reality in your head. In other words, accessing the dimension of stillness within yourself.”
Does he consider himself enlightened? “Well, one could say that,” he says, and pauses. “But that leads to delusion. When one says I’m enlightened or you are enlightened, that enlightenment is a personal achievement or possession or some kind of attainment.”
He feels his way cautiously. “There is simply a state of peace, clarity and aliveness.”
It wasn’t always so. Brought up near Cologne in Germany as Ulrich Tolle, he had a miserable childhood, largely because his parents constantly argued. “Even aged 10 or 11 I was trying to figure out ways I could commit suicide.”
Refusing to go to school, he was taught at home and learnt several languages, as well as studying philosophy and astronomy. At 19, he moved to London where he worked in a language school teaching businessmen.
But “suffering from depression, anxiety and fear”, he started “searching for answers to life”. Believing these lay in philosophy and literature, he took evening classes, and then went on to King’s College, London. He was 27. “For a moment I thought, ‘I’ve finally made it’. And then after a few weeks I got depressed again.”
One night shortly after his 29th birthday, Tolle says he was in a state of suicidal despair. “I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And this question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved.”
He pauses and reflects. “The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness”, just observing and watching.” He laughs lightly. “I had no explanation for this.”
In his mid-30s he lost interest in research and abandoned academia, drifting for two years, staying with friends or occasionally in a Buddhist monastery, sitting on park benches and sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. His family thought him “irresponsible, even insane”.
It was, though, after this “lost” period that people — former Cambridge students, those he met by chance, friends — started to ask Tolle questions about his beliefs.
More students gravitated towards Tolle over the next five years, and he moved to Glastonbury — the nexus of “alternative living”. In 1993, he arrived in Vancouver. It was there that he wrote the first question in The Power: What is enlightenment?
“I wrote an answer,” he says. “And then a stream of writing happened, which was very empowered, very different from the casual writing I had done before.” It was published in 1997 and has since been described as a “seminal work with a vibrational energy”.
When talking with Tolle, I neither experienced a great sense of awe nor had any momentous revelations. But, as I was leaving, he caught me off guard, and hugged me. It was as though I had been squeezed by a huge force that, nonetheless, trembled like a feather in the wind.
I walked out, and my mind fell quiet. For some reason, I could feel tears in my eyes. Suddenly, everything on that ordinary Kensington Street and in the cafe where I stopped to collect myself, seemed intensely beautiful. I also have no explanation for this. Tolle is now in the limelight. His appearance hasn’t changed much — since “the shift”, he says, he has aged slowly — but his life has.
When I spoke to him last month, he played down the pressures: “I’m not like some gurus who never meet anyone who is not a devotee.” But, he adds, “I do sometimes wear sunglasses when I go out”.
Tolle is keen to emphasise his ordinariness: he says he enjoys simple pleasures — a walk on the beach, shopping in the supermarket, sitting quietly.
He says he doesn’t pay much attention to money, although he jokes that he “should pay more”. He has used his new-found wealth to buy a flat, which overlooks wild parkland, and a car. He says that while he has no intention of setting up an ashram or centre, “it could develop organically”. Still, he has no plans to create an empire or “a heavy commercial structure”.
Munro Magruder, assistant publisher at New World Library, the American publisher that picked up the American rights for Tolle in 1999, says: “The last big best-seller we had was The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra … One of those laws is to practise detachment, but Chopra doesn’t. He is very involved in the business.
(But) Eckhart truly practises detachment. “He’s never asked how many copies of his book we’ve sold, nor enquired about the marketing campaign. He couldn’t care less. He’s only interested in being a teacher, and people resonate with that. He’s the genuine article.”
- Telegraph Magazine
When winter crept in, Eckhart Tolle, a German-born linguist who had once been thought to hold great academic promise, would retreat into the University of London Library nearby and pore over esoteric books. And word spread among students that this man was no ordinary drifter but a modern mystic who had undergone an extraordinary inner transformation.
A man, indeed, who was spiritually enlightened.
Twenty years later, Eckhart Tolle (pronounced Toll-ee) says that while “there are shifts in intensity”, he remains in the same state of “bliss and peace”.
He no longer sits on a park bench but lives in a high-rise in Vancouver and teaches others how to attain enlightenment, among them Gillian Anderson of The X Files; Cher, who says he “has changed my life”; and Meg Ryan, who introduced Oprah Winfrey to Tolle’s first book, The Power of Now: A Spiritual Guide to Enlightenment.
Last year, Winfrey chose the book for her Favourite Things show, saying she had read it eight times and keeps it on her bedside table. Sales skyrocketed: The Power of Now — with an original print run of 3000 — became No. 1 on Amazon.com and spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, selling more than one million copies in North America. Released in Australia in 2000, it was still on the top 10 list this year, and has been translated into more than two dozen languages.
Tolle’s second book, Stillness Speaks, was released here earlier this month and publisher Hodder Headline says both books are selling well..
When I first met Tolle — a slight man with soft, grey-blue eyes and a goatee beard — he by no means exuded charisma. Rather, the air of a shy professor. He spoke with a faint German accent, his conversation frequently punctuated by staccato laughs so fierce as to make his shoulders shake. Nothing, it seemed, was to be taken too seriously — least of all his international success.
The essence of his teachings, he says, is that the present moment is the most meaningful in life. By aligning with “the now”, he says, “you are also aligned with life itself. You experience coincidences.
“Suddenly just the right thing happens at the right moment. Or you become more intuitive, more creative. Many deep insights and realisations come out of being present.”
Written in a question and answer format, The Power of Now explores perennial spiritual problems: how to overcome the feeling of separation, the meaning of surrender, how to avoid pain. It requires the reader to let go of preconceived ideas and focus less on what he or she does and more on being.
Tolle asks the reader “not to stop thinking, but to step out of being completely entangled in the stream of thinking”. This, he believes, “is the the real meaning of spirituality. People still think spirituality is having certain belief systems — in God or angels — but ‘spiritual’ means to be able to step beyond the conceptual reality in your head. In other words, accessing the dimension of stillness within yourself.”
Does he consider himself enlightened? “Well, one could say that,” he says, and pauses. “But that leads to delusion. When one says I’m enlightened or you are enlightened, that enlightenment is a personal achievement or possession or some kind of attainment.”
He feels his way cautiously. “There is simply a state of peace, clarity and aliveness.”
It wasn’t always so. Brought up near Cologne in Germany as Ulrich Tolle, he had a miserable childhood, largely because his parents constantly argued. “Even aged 10 or 11 I was trying to figure out ways I could commit suicide.”
Refusing to go to school, he was taught at home and learnt several languages, as well as studying philosophy and astronomy. At 19, he moved to London where he worked in a language school teaching businessmen.
But “suffering from depression, anxiety and fear”, he started “searching for answers to life”. Believing these lay in philosophy and literature, he took evening classes, and then went on to King’s College, London. He was 27. “For a moment I thought, ‘I’ve finally made it’. And then after a few weeks I got depressed again.”
One night shortly after his 29th birthday, Tolle says he was in a state of suicidal despair. “I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And this question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved.”
He pauses and reflects. “The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness”, just observing and watching.” He laughs lightly. “I had no explanation for this.”
In his mid-30s he lost interest in research and abandoned academia, drifting for two years, staying with friends or occasionally in a Buddhist monastery, sitting on park benches and sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. His family thought him “irresponsible, even insane”.
It was, though, after this “lost” period that people — former Cambridge students, those he met by chance, friends — started to ask Tolle questions about his beliefs.
More students gravitated towards Tolle over the next five years, and he moved to Glastonbury — the nexus of “alternative living”. In 1993, he arrived in Vancouver. It was there that he wrote the first question in The Power: What is enlightenment?
“I wrote an answer,” he says. “And then a stream of writing happened, which was very empowered, very different from the casual writing I had done before.” It was published in 1997 and has since been described as a “seminal work with a vibrational energy”.
When talking with Tolle, I neither experienced a great sense of awe nor had any momentous revelations. But, as I was leaving, he caught me off guard, and hugged me. It was as though I had been squeezed by a huge force that, nonetheless, trembled like a feather in the wind.
I walked out, and my mind fell quiet. For some reason, I could feel tears in my eyes. Suddenly, everything on that ordinary Kensington Street and in the cafe where I stopped to collect myself, seemed intensely beautiful. I also have no explanation for this. Tolle is now in the limelight. His appearance hasn’t changed much — since “the shift”, he says, he has aged slowly — but his life has.
When I spoke to him last month, he played down the pressures: “I’m not like some gurus who never meet anyone who is not a devotee.” But, he adds, “I do sometimes wear sunglasses when I go out”.
Tolle is keen to emphasise his ordinariness: he says he enjoys simple pleasures — a walk on the beach, shopping in the supermarket, sitting quietly.
He says he doesn’t pay much attention to money, although he jokes that he “should pay more”. He has used his new-found wealth to buy a flat, which overlooks wild parkland, and a car. He says that while he has no intention of setting up an ashram or centre, “it could develop organically”. Still, he has no plans to create an empire or “a heavy commercial structure”.
Munro Magruder, assistant publisher at New World Library, the American publisher that picked up the American rights for Tolle in 1999, says: “The last big best-seller we had was The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra … One of those laws is to practise detachment, but Chopra doesn’t. He is very involved in the business.
(But) Eckhart truly practises detachment. “He’s never asked how many copies of his book we’ve sold, nor enquired about the marketing campaign. He couldn’t care less. He’s only interested in being a teacher, and people resonate with that. He’s the genuine article.”
- Telegraph Magazine
4/08/2009
Prayer
Im ninalu.. (if they were locked)
Daltey Nadivim (doors of the generous)
Daltey Nadivim
Daltey Marom (doors on high)
Im ninalu ..
Staring up into the heavens
In this hell that binds your hands
Will you sacrifice your comfort?
Make your way in a foreign land?
Wrestle with your darkness
Angels call your name
Can you hear what they are saying?
Will you ever be the same?
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Remember remember and never forget
All of your life has all been a test
You will find the gate that's open
Even though your spirit's broken
Open up my heart
And cause my lips to speak
Bring the heaven and the stars
Down to earth for me
Im ninalu
Daltey Nadivim
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
El- Hay (god is alive)
El- Hay Marumam Al Keruvim (god is alive, elevated upon cherubs)
Kulam Be-Ruho Ya'alu (everybody in his spirit will rise)
Wrestle with your darkness
Angels call your name
Can you hear what they are saying?
Will you ever be the same?
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
El- Hay (god is alive)
El- Hay Marumam Al Keruvim (god is alive, elevated upon cherubs)
Madonna featuring Isaac(from the album Confessions on a..)
Daltey Nadivim (doors of the generous)
Daltey Nadivim
Daltey Marom (doors on high)
Im ninalu ..
Staring up into the heavens
In this hell that binds your hands
Will you sacrifice your comfort?
Make your way in a foreign land?
Wrestle with your darkness
Angels call your name
Can you hear what they are saying?
Will you ever be the same?
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Remember remember and never forget
All of your life has all been a test
You will find the gate that's open
Even though your spirit's broken
Open up my heart
And cause my lips to speak
Bring the heaven and the stars
Down to earth for me
Im ninalu
Daltey Nadivim
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
El- Hay (god is alive)
El- Hay Marumam Al Keruvim (god is alive, elevated upon cherubs)
Kulam Be-Ruho Ya'alu (everybody in his spirit will rise)
Wrestle with your darkness
Angels call your name
Can you hear what they are saying?
Will you ever be the same?
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu im ninalu
Mmmmmm
Im ninalu Im ninalu
El- Hay (god is alive)
El- Hay Marumam Al Keruvim (god is alive, elevated upon cherubs)
Madonna featuring Isaac(from the album Confessions on a..)
How I feel about you.
because I wasn't with you all these many years..
Because I didnt let you be you
Taking my own demons and old ghosts to crusades- Lost,
Mostly. Won none.
But now you're here..
So fleeting yet
So real
I've found you My
Dear
but to call you a 'something' again, would be such wrong
cos that would be me who wrote your passionate songs
there we go again with my stupid ol flub Of
making you into all me.
To: The peace that passes all understanding.
Because I didnt let you be you
Taking my own demons and old ghosts to crusades- Lost,
Mostly. Won none.
But now you're here..
So fleeting yet
So real
I've found you My
Dear
but to call you a 'something' again, would be such wrong
cos that would be me who wrote your passionate songs
there we go again with my stupid ol flub Of
making you into all me.
To: The peace that passes all understanding.
4/02/2009
Is this really summer? Bangalore weather is sure crazy. Its summer and I get to see flowers of colors i didnt know existed! On every alternate tree! damnn,where's my Camera when I need it?
3/26/2009
Cults and their Onslaught
We know of all kinds of Cuults and deenominations AND other forms of Fanaticisms.. Religious fanatics,moralists,political cults and fanatics,and da da da da das and yayayayayas! but then there are also the rock and roll fanatics, religious rock music fans and death metal/ heavy metal/ soft metal/neo metal/contemporary metal and also gold metal-oh yes..these are the genres-and people who listen to music of such genres and understand them are so very..hm,.COOL(im sure theres a metal slang for the word 'cool', but lemme just stick to the language i can comprehend best.) So! these are people who are respected and looked up to when it comes to music in all its credibility. Aaand, this doesnt end there.. like all people belonging to cults that take their ideologies and preferences too far- it must be imposed on every Jane-Doe! These higher strata of music listeners shall presume it their birthright to spew every profanity there is, on others who dont think their sense of self need be derived from a music genre. I mean, will you take a minute to estimate what kind of person will want to derive their sense of self from something as distinct to them as 'music'.. musicians apart.. But tell me, hows it that a twenty- something , be so friggin identified with John Lennon whose era they did not even belong to! What kind of realism are you talking about! It amuses me, really- How can anybody be so vain to live in their head so conveniently their entire lives, and have the conviction to impose such similar off the wall theories and tastes on someone else? Or tag a person uncool just because they dont share your ideas about music and wish to take music lightly-as a form of entertainment(pop music fans buck up!)! I see this as a form of delicate violence -- Nourishing your sense of self from an ideology, holding on to it forever(since apparently it looks like you havent figured out who you are! what would u be without the doors' number that you use as a "aww, my favorite quotee" or using Morrison's views about himself as "your" own view about yourself!!(Check! Whose a wanna be here really? It don’t matter who the heck you’re trying to ape-you want to be someone you’re not-that’s that-even if that’s Mick Jagger,hell yeah! You are a frigging wannabe!).. actually there is a word for all this. its called 'bi-polar disorder'.. Its where your foundation and knowledge of who you are is so weak, and rootless that you derive it from an external source that is,well,sadly, as fickle as your friggin 'about me' definitions. And honey, did you ever notice any blonde or boy band reacting to your "Such sad losers!" comment...eess, its probably beeecause they knew they'd have the last laugh! har har. Oh, sure! Varun Gandhi is a rock fan! lets have him for PM!
3/19/2009
Sexy Plexi!
The first verse of the song just wont stop playing in my head! and for good reasons i believe :D
Oh how I love Jack and his lyrics! JACK I have a crush on you :D I do i do i do!
Sexy sexy made up of plexi disasters
Pushing and pulling conservative rolling
Unlike plastic, easier to see through
Just like glass with no ring
Softer and sadder you sing
Sexy sexy do your thing
Learn to be shy and then you can sting
Plexi, plexi bend don't shatter
Once you're broken shape won't matter
You're breaking your mind
By killing the time that kills you
But you can't blame the time
Cause its only in your mind
Quickly quickly grow and then you'll know
It is such an awkward show to see
And everyone you wanted to know
And everyone you wanted to meet
Have all gone away
Well they've all gone away
And now you're
Breaking your mind
By killing the time that kills you
But you cant blame the time
Cause its only in your mind
You're breaking your mind..
Oh how I love Jack and his lyrics! JACK I have a crush on you :D I do i do i do!
Sexy sexy made up of plexi disasters
Pushing and pulling conservative rolling
Unlike plastic, easier to see through
Just like glass with no ring
Softer and sadder you sing
Sexy sexy do your thing
Learn to be shy and then you can sting
Plexi, plexi bend don't shatter
Once you're broken shape won't matter
You're breaking your mind
By killing the time that kills you
But you can't blame the time
Cause its only in your mind
Quickly quickly grow and then you'll know
It is such an awkward show to see
And everyone you wanted to know
And everyone you wanted to meet
Have all gone away
Well they've all gone away
And now you're
Breaking your mind
By killing the time that kills you
But you cant blame the time
Cause its only in your mind
You're breaking your mind..
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
