AddThis
8/26/18
Poppa Neutrino: The Happiest Man In The World
Poppa Neutrino was the free spirit (or lunatic according to some) who sailed across the Atlantic with his family on a raft made of trash scraps.
In his book The Happiest Man in the World, Alec Wilkinson chronicles the life of Poppa Neutrino. Poppa was then preparing for a solo journey across the Pacific. You can listen on NPR.
You can check out the DVD featured on the picture above at this site. Here are earlier links in Mind Shadows: Poppa Neutrino: "The road to the mystical is triadic. To get through the doorway is nomadic." and 72 Year Old To Cross The Pacific On A Raft of Scraps as well as another project by Poppa Neutrino
Below is a video of Poppa and other comments.
Poppa Neutrino, born William David Pearlman, was born in 1933 in Fresno, California and died in 2011 in New Orleans, of congestive heart failure. Musician, raft builder and free spirit, he looked around, saw others slaving for dollars, chained to a mortgage, and eight work hours a day, and turned his back on all of it. At his funeral a New Orleans Jazz band played. Some seek a quantity of years, others the quality. He had the quality.
If he was crazy then what about the social narrative on normalcy? What about the rest of us who sacrifice the best years of our lives believing that narrative?
8/19/18
Steven Pinker on Free Will & The Fear of Determinism
There was a young man who said "Damn!"
It grieves me to think that I am
Predestined to move
In a circumscribed groove:
In fact, not a bus, but a tram.
"One fear of determinism is a gaping existential anxiety: that deep down we are not in control of our own choices. All our brooding and agonizing over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains. If you suffer from this anxiety, I suggest the following experiment.
(Steven Pinker,"The Fear of Determinism," in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Nature. NY: Vintage, 2002.)
8/15/18
Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio
Non-Duality is the term for a view of the world as not two, nor one but undivided and without a second—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead a totality which is wholly subjective. Oneness, or unity, itself implies something outside, which is not the case and why those terms are not used instead. If there is one, there must be another. But with non-duality there is no second. The view derives from Eastern belief, principally Hindu advaita, which literally means without duality. It also finds support in Buddhism (Zen, for example, where form is emptiness and emptiness form as stated in the Heart Sutra).
A central tenet of non-duality is that self—that which we call our self—does not exist. The evidence is offered by a methodology.
8/11/18
The Duel Over von Trautmansdorf's Moustache
“In Hamburg in 1834, a handsome young army officer named Baron von Trautmansdorf challenged a fellow officer, Baron von Ropp, to a duel. The precipitating offense was a poem that von Ropp had written and circulated among his friends about von Trautmansdorf's moustache, stating that it was thin and floppy and hinting that it might no be the only part of his physique to which those adjectives could be applied.
8/5/18
Here Lies The Heart: Mercedes de Acosta and Ramana Maharshi
Descended from the legendary Dukes of Alba, daughter in a wealthy Cuban family, Mercedes de Acosta was born in 1893 in New York, raised near Fifth Avenue, and had a beautiful sister Rita de Acosta who was a model for artists John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini. Married to painter Abram Poole, Mercedes was socialite, poet, playwright, Hollywood set and costume designer as well as script writer. She knew many of the greats of her day: Bessie Marbury, Rodin, Edith Wharton, Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Elenora Duse, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Elsa Maxwell, and Krishnamurti. Near the end of her life, she met and befriended Andy Warhol, and introduced him to many of the people who would count in his career.
Consuelo (Hatmaker) Sides, whose husband had been the World War I French flying ace Charles Nungesser, accompanied Mercedes on her passage to India. After arriving, de Acosta met former President Woodrow Wilson's daughter, Margaret, a devotee at Sri Aurobindo's ashram.
8/2/18
Robert Robinson: An African-American's 44 Years In The Soviet Union
Some years ago, I read Black On Red: My 44 Years Inside The Soviet Union, a book by Robert Robinson, An African-American who lived in Detroit during the Depression. I had to read it again, for it is about as gripping an autobiography as one can find. During 44 years in Soviet society, Robert Robinson found that the deepest discrimination was against blacks and orientals. In his book he notes that in the USA people may or may not condone institutional and racial discrimination but they do recognize that it exists. In the USSR, officially and socially, such discrimination did not occur. But it ran deep.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)