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7/23/13

Turtles All the Way Down: "Nothing" Is the Most Important Question in the World

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Why does this blog article exist? Because its author poured himself a cup of coffee the other morning and sat down in front of the computer to read a book review. Where did the book review come from? From the reviewer who wrote it, silly. Where did the book come from? Its author wrote it. This is becoming tedious.

Okay, how about this?

7/16/13

John Wren-Lewis' Endarkenment

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Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of everywhere into here. (Children's nursery rhyme)

As a professor and humanist psychologist, John Wren-Lewis was in the forefront of a 1960s Death of God movement before his experience. He saw mysticism as "an escape into fantasy" and a shirking of "creative struggle." He was a "skeptic about all things mystical," and "saw mysticism as a ' failure of nerve'." Then something happened.

American Amnesiac Michael Boatwright Wakes Up Speaking Swedish

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What if some morning you wake up in a motel room and don't know who you are?  You don't know how to access your bank accounts to survive. You don't know if you have a job. You don't know if you have a wife. If so, what is her name? The names of your children? What is your country?  You look in the mirror and don't recognize yourself. You talk in a language  not your native tongue.

7/4/13

Gettysburg 4th of July 1913 Reunion Between Yankees & Rebels

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100 years ago today. We are creatures of time and time is a kind of amnesia. Most of what falls into the past is lost to us while that which is recalled becomes filtered through the present. Baz Luhrmann's 2013 movie The Great Gatsby is an example. With its modern-music sound track the film seeks to please modern sensibilities rather than lead viewers into how the world was seen then. For some, TV commercials and movie stars are the way the world is, without question, without doubt. Yet we are descended from ancestors whose stories and lives are unknown to us--from 1861 to 1865 mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, lost over 700,000 loved ones in the American Civil War.  Their world was fragile, not to be trusted.  It is a war that defined the United States of America and today its citizens go about their daily business without knowing whence they came.

7/2/13

Meditation, Neuroplasticity, & Happy-Wiring the Brain

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All at once the roshi, the room, every single thing disappeared in a dazzling stream of illumination and I felt myself bathed in a delicious, unspeakable delight. . . . For a fleeting eternity I was alone--I alone was.