Monthly Archives: March 2020
Quote for the Week
I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.
–courtesy of here.
A Grateful Dead Cover
It’s not Friday yet, but this is a fantastic cover of my favorite Grateful Dead song, and somehow it strikes me as appropriate in the current quarantine conditions. Enjoy!
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
I’ve noted that the Alice books were the absolute favorites of my childhood, bar none. Later on, I wrote about how Kipling’s Jungle Books were number two. I got to thinking about Robin Hood for some unrelated reason recently, and I immediately recalled the number three book of my childhood canon: Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire. I don’t recall exactly, but I must have encountered it a little after I first read the Alice books and around about the same time–or perhaps slightly earlier–that I read The Jungle Book. What I do remember is that my favorite uncle got me several books in the Children’s Illustrated Classics series by J M Dent & Sons Ltd around about 1974 or 1975. One was The Heroes, by Charles Kingsley, one an edition of the Arabian Nights, and the third Pyle’s Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.
This series, fiendishly difficult to find today, were hardcover books about eight by twelve inches. They had the original text of the works in question along with line drawing illustrations. Two especially nice features of the books were that definitions of words that might be hard for children were given in the margins of the pages, so that you could figure them out as you read without needing to ask a parent or consult a dictionary; and second, that there were appendices that discussed the historical background of the books and the authors. You couldn’t really have a better series for budding readers, and I regret that the series seems to be long out of print.
Quote for the Week
Ἀλλήλοις θ᾽ ὁμιλεῖν, ὡς τοὺς μὲν φίλους ἐχθροὺς μὴ ποιῆσαι, τοὺς δ᾽ ἐχθροὺς φίλους ἐργάσασθαι. ἴδιόν τε μηδὲν ἡγεῖσθαι.
We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.
–As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, “Pythagoras”, Sect. 23, as translated in Dictionary of Quotations (1906) by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 320; courtesy of Wikiquote.
Interpenetration is an important teaching, but it still suggests that things outside of one another penetrate into each other. Interbeing is a step forward. We are already inside, so we don’t have to enter. In contemporary nuclear physics, people talk about implicit order and explicit order. In the explicit order, things exist outside of each other — the table outside of the flower, the sunshine outside of the cypress tree. In the implicit order, we see that they are inside each other — the sunshine inside the cypress tree. Interbeing is the implicit order. To practice mindfulness and to look deeply into the nature of things is to discover the true nature of interbeing. There we find peace and develop the strength to be in touch with everything. With this understanding, we can easily sustain the work of loving and caring for the Earth and for each other for a long time.
–Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart; courtesy of Wikiquote.
Quote for the Week
知之者不如好之者，好之者不如樂之者。
They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.
–Confucius, The Analects, Chapter VI; courtesy of Wikiquote.
The Chequer-board of Nights and Days 