Dance

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane,

- by those who couldn't hear the music.

Intoxicated By The Wine Of Love

Intoxicated by the Wine of Love.

From each a mystic silence Love demands.

What do all seek so earnestly? 'Tis Love.

What do they whisper to each other? Love.

Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts.

In Love no longer 'thou' and 'I' exist,

For Self has passed away in the Beloved.

Now will I draw aside the veil from Love,

And in the temple of mine inmost soul,

Behold the Friend; Incomparable Love.

He who would know the secret of both worlds,

Will find the secret of them both, is Love.

... Farid ud-Din Attar

Impossible Is Nothing

"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they have been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact; It is an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration; It is a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing" ... Richard Bullock

There Is No "I" Or "You"

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz 

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: 

I love you as certain dark things are loved, 

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries 

hidden within itself the light of those flowers, 

and thanks to your love, darkly in my body 

lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, 

I love you simply, without problems or pride: 

I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no "I" or "You", 

so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, 

so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

... Pablo Neruda

Ramadhan In America

Sleeping and Prayers

"And during part of the night forsake sleep by prayer, beyond what is already incumbent upon thee; maybe thy Lord will raise thee to a position of praise and glory" ... al-Isra' 17:79

Abu Hurairah (ra) narrated that the Prophet (saw) said, "Whoever fast in the month of Ramadhan out of sincere Faith (i.e. belief) and hoping for a reward from Allah, then all his past sins will be forgiven, and whoever stood for the prayers in the night of Qadr out of sincere Faith and hoping for a reward from Allah, then all his previous sins will be forgiven" ... [Bukhari]

Abu Hurairah also (ra) narrated that the Prophet (saw) said, "Our Lord, blessed and exalted is He, descends every night to the nearest heaven when the latter one-third of the night remains, (and) says, 'Is there any one who calls upon Me so that I may accept of him, who asks of Me so that I may grant him, who seeks forgiveness of Me so that I may forgive him?'" ... [Bukhari]

What Hidden Sweetness

There's hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness.

We are lutes, no more, no less.

If the soundboxes stuffed full of anything, no music.

If the brain and belly are burning clean with fasting,

every moment a new song comes out of the fire.

The fog clears, and new energy makes you run

up the steps in front of you.

Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.

When you're full of food and drink,

Satan sits where your spirit should,

an ugly metal statue in place of the Kaaba.

When you fast, good habits gather

like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Solomon's ring.

Don't give into some illusion and lose your power,

but even if you have, if you've lost all will and control,

they come back when you fast,

like soldiers appearing out of the ground,

pennants flying above them.

A table descends to your tents, Jesus' table.

Expect to see it, when you fast,

this tablespread with other food,

better than the broth of cabbages.

... Mevlana Jalalludin Rumi

Pilgrim

I Now Walk Into The Wild...

After reading the book several times on the way from Singapore to Seattle, I finally watched the movie Into The Wild yesterday after class. I have quoted this from Lord Byron in my earlier entries, but it was how the movie began and I wish to share it here again:

"There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more" ... Lord Byron.

I know it is cliche to say that the book is way better than the movie, but this one rings the same tune. However, to be able to see the emotions of Chris on his last days embodied on the screen, are moments to behold and it relays the affect of the book to the reader. The fatalistic journey to find oneself was probably succinctly captured in the first chapter of the book through the postcard sent by Chris to Wayne:

"April 27th 1992
Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the Yukin Territory. But I finally got here.
Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long time before I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know that you're a great man.
I now walk into the wild..."

Scrambles Amongst The Alps

"Still, the last sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling the remembrance of happier times. There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say: Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are not without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end"

... Scrambles Amongst The Alps, Edward Whymper

"Sensation" And "Perception"

"The kinds of codings, griddings, and positionings with which cultural theory has been preoccupied are no exception to the dynamic unity of feedback and feed-forward, or double becoming. Gender, race, and orientation are what Ian Hacking calls "interactive kinds": logical categories that feed back into and transform the reality they describe (and are themselves modified by in return). Ideas about cultural or social construction have dead-ended because they have insisted on bracketing the nature of process. Id you elide nature, you miss the becoming of culture, its emergence (not to mention the history of matter). You miss the continuum of interlinkage, feed-forward and feedback, by which movements capture and convert each other to many ends, old, new, and innumerable. The world is in a condition of constant qualitative growth. Some kind of constructivism is required to account for the processual continuity across categorical divides and for the reality of that qualitative growth, or ontogenesis: the fact that with every move, with every change, there is something new to the world, an added reality. The world is self-augmenting. Reality "snowballs", as William James was fond of saying. Perhaps "productivism" would be better than constructivism because it connotes emergence. "Inventionism" wouldn't be going too far, for even if you take nature in its narrowest sense, it has to be admitted that it is inventive in its own right. There is a word for this: evolution. There is no reason not to use the same word for the prolongation of "natural" processes of change in the emergent domain of "culture". Is a constructivist evolutionism conceivable? An evolutionary constructivism?...

The feeling of having a feeling is what Leibniz called the "perception of perception". That raises another thorny issue: the identity or difference between the terms "sensation" and "perception". It gets thornier. Leibniz notes that the perception of perception "occurs without characters and therefore that memory does also". Add memory to the issues of sensation and perception. Then pause. Memory, sensation, perception occurring without "characters"? In other words, without properties? Without determinate form or content? What about memory without content? One answer might be that it is just pastness, a pure pastness that would be the condition of emergence for determinate memory. But that would make the past contemporary to the present of sensation and perception. Leibniz goes on to say that although the perception of perception is without characters, it does carry a "distinguishing sense of bodily direction". Distinguishing bodily direction without a determinate form? In other words, without distance? That could only be tendency, pure tendency. Tendency is futureness: pure futurity. So there is a futurity that is contemporary with the past's contemporaneousness with the present.

All of this is to say that feedback and feed-forward, or recursivity, in addition to converting distance into intensity, folds the dimensions of time into each other. The field of emergence of experience has to be thought of as a space-time continuum, as an ontogenetic dimension prior to the separating-out of space and time (adopting the same approach as with nature-culture). Linear time, like position-gridded space, would be the emergent qualities of the event of the world's self-relating."

... Parables For The Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions), Brian Massumi

Impersonal Passion

(About being named after the dead in Jewish practice)... "To any devotee of the greater truth of the external, this is a dispiriting observation. At least I can change my looks, or somewhat, can embroider my skin with tattoos, sport a new moustache, buy myself triumphantly globular breasts, wax away my currently unfashionable chest hair, pluck my eyebrows into a quizzical crescent, and generally wrestle my undoctored appearance to the ground before I raise it up revamped in my preferred image. And it's far easier, more socially manageable, to undertake these acts of vanity than it is to effect that other vanity of changing my given name.

For my name is only formally my property. It stems from other people; they gave it to me, but their imperious gift has arrived with no receipt by which I can discreetly exchange it. The same is true of my looks; and yet I have more latitude, depending on my wealth, to change my appearance than to change my name: why?"

... Impersonal Passion, Denise Riley

Greatest Happiness Principle

"According to the Greatest Happiness Principle, as above explained, the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality, and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those who in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added their habits of self-consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison. This, being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.

Against this doctrine, however, arises another class of objectors, who say that happiness, in any form, cannot be the rational purpose of human life and action; because, in the first place, it is unattainable: and they contemptuously ask, what right hast thou to be happy? a question which Mr. Carlyle clenches by the addition, What right, a short time ago, hadst thou even to be?"

... Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I shan't be gone long -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan't be gone long -- You come too.

... Robert Frost

Gathering Leaves

Spades take up leaves

No better than spoons,

And bags full of leaves

Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop,

And who's to say where

The harvest shall stop?

... Robert Frost

The Dream Called Life

A dream it was in which I found myself.

And you that hail me now, then hailed me king,

In a brave palace that was all my own,

Within, and all without it, mine; until,

Drunk with excess of majesty and pride,

Methought I towered so big and swelled so wide

That of myself I burst the glittering bubble

Which my ambition had about me blown,

And all again was darkness. Such a dream

As this, in which I may be walking now,

Dispensing solemn justice to you shadows,

Who make believe to listen; but anon

Kings, princes, captains, warriors, plume and steel,

Aye, even with all your airy theatre,

May flit into the air you seem to rend

With acclamations, leaving me to wake

In the dark tower; or dreaming that I wake

From this that waking is; or this and that,

Both waking and both dreaming; such a doubt

Confounds and clouds our moral life about.

But whether wake or dreaming, this I know,

How dreamwise human glories come and go;

Whose momentary tenure not to break,

Walking as one who knows he soon may wake,

So fairly carry the full cup, so well

Disordered insolence and passion quell,

That there be nothing after to upbraid

Dreamer or doer in the part he played;

Whether tomorrow's dawn shall break the spell,

Or the last trumpet of the Eternal Day,

When dreaming, with the night, shall pass away.

... Edward Fitzgerald

Virtue

"A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is above him . He learns that his being is without bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his own, though he has not realized it yet. He ought. He knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render account of it. When in innocency, or when by intellectual perception, he attains to say, -- 'I love the Right; Truth is beautiful within and without, forevermore. Virtue, I am thine: save me: use me: thee will I serve, day and night, in great, in small, that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;' -- then is the end of the creation answered, and God is well pleased .

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws . It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst his baubles, is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's actions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and thought, -- in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the essence of all religion , let me guide your eye to the precise objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of some of those classes of facts in which this element is conspicuous...

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie, -- for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance, -- will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate..."

... Ralph W Emerson, speech delivered before the senior class, Cambridge, July 1838

Dust

For those who, in the past decade, have loved the sounds of Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Queen and Fleetwood Mac, now comes a brand new band from Goldsmiths, London called Royworld whom I discovered whilst at Denver's Virgin Megastore. Their album was released on June 2, 2008 on Virgin Records. This is their first single released earlier in May 2008 entitled Dust.

Laughter

"The Renaissance conception of laughter can be roughly described as follows: Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint. Therefore, laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as seriousness. Certain essential aspects of the universe are accessible only to laughter." ... Rabelais in the History of Laughter, Michail Bakhtin

What is laughter? What is laughter?
It is God waking up! O it is God waking up!
It is the sun poking its sweet head out
From behind a cloud
You have been carrying too long,
Veiling your eyes and heart.

It is Light breaking ground for a great Structure
That is your Real body - called Truth.

It is happiness applauding itself and then taking flight
To embrace everyone and everything in this world.

Laughter is the polestar
Held in the sky by our Beloved,
Who eternally says,

"Yes, dear ones, come this way,
Come this way towards Me and Love!

Come with your tender mouths moving
And your beautiful tongues conducting songs
And with your movements - your magic movements
Of hands and feet and glands and cells - Dancing!

Know that to God's Eye,
All movement is a Wondrous Language,
And Music - such exquisite, wild Music!"

O what is laughter, Hafiz?
What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?

It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up!

... Laughter, Hafiz of Shiraz

"Seeing" And "Reading"

When most I wink, then do my eyes best see,

For all the day they view things unrespected,

But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,

And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.

Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright

How would thy shadow's form form happy show

To the clear day with thy much clearer light,

When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!

How would, I say, mine eyes be blessèd made,

By looking on thee in the living day,

When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade

Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!

All days are nights to see until I see thee,

And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

... Sonnet 43, William Shakespeare

Ontological Argument

"Whatever method of proof I use, I am always brought back to the fact that it is only what I clearly and distinctly perceive that completely convinces me. Some of the things I clearly and distinctly perceive are obvious to everyone, while others are discovered only by those who look more closely and investigate more carefully; but once they have been discovered, the latter are judged to be just as certain as the former. In the case of a right-angled triangle, for example, the fact that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the square on the other two sides is not so readily apparent as the fact that the hypotenuse subtends the largest angle; but once one has seen it, one believes it just as strongly.

But as regards God, if I were not overwhelmed by philosophical prejudices, and if the images of things perceived by the senses did not besiege my thought on every side, I would certainly acknowledge him sooner and more easily than anything else. For what is more manifest than the fact that the supreme being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists?"

... Meditationes de Prima Philosophia: Fifth Meditation, René Descartes

Internal Emotions

"Internal emotions affect us more intimately, and consequently have much more power over us than the passions which occur with them but are distinct from them.

To this extent it is certain that, provided our soul always has the means of happiness within itself, all the troubles coming from elsewhere are powerless to harm it. Such troubles will serve rather to increase its joy; for on seeing that it cannot be harmed by them, it becomes aware of its perfection.

And in order that our soul should have the means of happiness, it needs only to pursue virtue diligently. For if anyone lives in such a way that his conscience cannot reproach him for ever failing to do something he judges to be the best (which is what I here call ‘pursuing virtue’), he will receive from this a satisfaction which has such power to make him happy that the most violent assaults of the passions will never have sufficient power to disturb the tranquillity of his soul."

... René Descartes

Defining Religion

"The classic paragraph (as defined by Clifford Geertz), on which a generation of students was trained (on what religion is), posits that: a religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Within the last decade this formulation has fallen badly out of favor, largely as a result of Talal Asad's critique, which involves two telling points. The first proceeds from his observation that Geertz made interiority the locus of the religious (as indicated by his nouns: symbols, moods, motivations, conceptions). This works well for certain styles of religiosity: above all (and not coincidentally), Protestantism, which thus becomes the implicit model of religion per se. There are, however, things one intuitively wants to call "religion" - Catholicism and Islam, for instance - that are oriented less toward "belief" and the status of the individual believer, and more to embodied practice, discipline, and community. Under Greetz's definition, such concerns and traditions tend to be ignored, distorted, rendered aberrant, or relegated to the margins of the religious...

Any definition that privileges one aspect, dimension, or component of the religious necessarily fails, for in so doing it normalizes some specific traditions (or tendencies therein), while simultaneously dismissing or stigmatizing others. Asad calls specific attention to the need to include both practice and discourse. As he made clear, one also has to get beyond models that privilege interiority and understand that religious subjects are also bound in moral communities that enjoy their allegiance and serve as a base of their identity (thus, Durkheim). Further, communities are governed - sometimes more and sometimes less strictly - by institutional structures that direct the group and command their members' obedience (thus, Weber).

A proper definition must therefore be polythetic and flexible, allowing for wide variations and attending, at a minimum, to these four domains:

(1) A discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself a similarly transcendent status;

(2) A set of practices whose goal is to produce a proper world and/or proper human subjects, as defined by a religious discourse to which these practices are connected;

(3) A community whose members construct their identity with reference to a religious discourse and its attendant practices; and

(4) An institution that regulates religious discourses, practices, and community, re-producing them over time and modifying them as necessary, while asserting their eternal validity and transcendent value.

All these four domains - discourse, practice, community, and institution - are necessary parts of anything that can properly be called a "religion". Each can be developed and emphasized to differing degrees and can relate to the others in various ways."

... Bruce Lincoln

Was ist Aufklärung?

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! (Have courage to use your own understanding!)

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me. The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous. Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the leading-strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided. Now this danger is not in fact so very great, for they would certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls. But an example of this kind is intimidating, and usually frightens them off from further attempts..."

... intro to What Is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant

Structures Of Feeling

"Such changes can be defined as changes in structures of feeling. The term is difficult, but 'feeling' is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of 'world-view' or 'ideology'. It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have to always include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between this and formal systematic beliefs are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences. An alternative definition would be structures of experience: in one sense a better and wider word, but with the difficulty that one of its senses has that past tense which is the most important obstacle to recognition of the area of social experience which is being defined. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a 'structure': as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. These are often recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations. By that time, the case is different: a new structure of feeling will usually already have begun to form, in the true social present."

... Marxism And Literature, Raymond Williams

"Sacred" And "Profane"

Taken from one of my first text - to illustrate the insurmountable difficulty in the field of the study of comparative or sometimes known as the history of religions, "(W)e are faced with rites, myths, divine forms, sacred and venerated objects, symbols, cosmologies, theologoumena, consecrated men, animals and plants, sacred places, and more ... and each category has its own morphology - of a branching and luxuriant richness. We have to deal with a vast and ill-assorted mass of material, with a Melanesian cosmology myth or Brahman sacrifice having as much right to our consideration as the mystical writings of St. Teresa or a Nichiren, an Austrian totem, a primitive initiation rite, the symbolism of the Borobudur temple, the ceremonial costumes and dances of a Siberian shaman, the sacred stones to be found in so many places, agricultural ceremonies, the myths and rites of the Great Goddesses, the enthroning of an ancient king or the superstitions attaching to precious stones. 

Each must be considered as a hierophany in as much as it expresses in some way some modality of the sacred and some moment in its history; that is to say, some one of the many kinds of experience of the sacred man has had. Each is valuable for two things it tells us: because it is a hierophany, it reveals some modality of the sacred; because it is a historical incident, it reveals some attitude man has had towards the sacred...

... That is really all the material available to a historian of religions: a few fragments from a vast oral priestly learning (the exclusive product of one social class), allusions found in traveller's notes, material gathered by foreign missionaries, reflections drawn from secular literature, a few monuments, a few inscriptions, and what memories remain in local traditions. All the historical sciences are, of course, tied to this sort of scrappy and accidental evidence. But the religious historian faces a bolder task than the historian, whose job is merely to piece together an event or a series of events with the aid of the few bits of evidence that are preserved to him; the religious historian must trace not only the history of a given hierophany, but must first of all understand and explain the modality of the sacred that that hierophany discloses. It would be difficult enough to interpret the meaning of a hierophany in any case, but the heterogeneous and chancy nature of the available evidence makes it far, far worse."

... Patterns In Comparative Religion, Mircea Eliade

The Desire To Be

"The man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being... (R)eligious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power... (T)he completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit... (D)esacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies."

... Mircea Eliade

Not In The Beginning

"The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you were going to say at the end, do you think you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for relationships, is also true for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we do not know what will be the end."

... Michel Foucault

The Difference Is...

The difference is a polished

blade, edgewise to the eye.

On one side gleams the sun

of time, and on the other

the never-fading light,

and so the tree that stands

full-leaved in broad day

and the darkness following

stands also in the eye

of Love and is never darkened.

The blade that divides these light

mirrors both — is one.

Time and eternity

stand in the same day

which is now in time, and forever

now. How do we know?

We know. We know we know.

They only truly live

who are the comforted.

... Wendell Berry

The Script

Was introduced to this Irish band from Dublin by a good friend. Have been enjoying their debut album. These are not the official videos but these two sampler songs are for you to enjoy :)

The Man Who Can't Be Moved.


We Cry