conskeptical

do you see what I see?
Aug 28
Permalink
Being a Landmark Forum Graduate
Earlier this year I enrolled on an ‘educational weekend’ called the Landmark Forum. It was a game changing experience.
Out Of Self Experience
Have you ever experienced yourself from the perspective of another person? If no, here’s a quick recipe for how to do it: get yourself in a room full of over 150 people over a 3 day period comprising maybe 30 hours, and spend much of those hours listening to many of them share in excruciating detail intimate details of their lives. Possibly, do it yourself. After a number of hours, the chances are you’ll start to dissociate, and see things strongly from the perspective of the people sharing. It’s like empathizing with a movie character, but far far more so. When you can genuinely see out of other people’s eyes like that, you can take a look at yourself and see things about yourself you’d never previously imagined. That’s pretty powerful. You get a new ability for seeing other people too. That’s pretty powerful as well.
Being Your Word
It’s likely that as a child you learned that ‘keeping your promises’ is a good thing to do. Well, here’s the strongest reason I know, and it’s got NOTHING particularly to do with ethics.
Words are inherently feeble things. Faint vibrations of air don’t, in and of themselves, really change anything. So why do we spend so many of our waking hours hopefully wagging our jaws?
There’s an implicit assumption here: that words precede consequences in the real world. ‘Keeping your promises’ is just the very tiniest tip of the iceberg of what that means. If you keep your promises, then that means that your words have a good track record of preceding consequences that are under your control. It means that your hopeful jaw wagging isn’t entirely in vain.
Now take this to the next level. Imagine BEING your word. You don’t just keep your promises. Everything you say is in accordance with hard reality as perceived by you and your nearest and dearest, and perhaps your less near and dear. Other people, and even more crucially, you, understand that when you open your mouth, something pertaining to reality is going to come out. That’s a good basis from which to be heard.
Another dimension of this is that you can start to THINK in accordance with reality. You can understand just how real or imagined your thinking is. You can start to keep the promises you made to yourself that NOBODY ELSE KNOWS ABOUT. When you imagine fancifully, you know that’s what you’re doing and enjoy it for what it is, and never confuse it for planning things for reality.
That’s powerful.
Knowing Things With Your Whole Being
We all know things with our intellects. The intellect is the great knower after all. But how much experience do we have knowing things with our whole BEING?
What does it feel like to know something with your whole being? The hallmark is that you don’t need to convince yourself. I don’t have to persuade myself to go for a run or a cycle ride, because when it’s time, I KNOW that’s what I want to do. I don’t have to persuade myself that the floor will hold me up, because I KNOW that it will. I KNOW that I ‘should’ be doing my maths assignment, but I’m not doing it, because my being-knowing knows that ‘should’ isn’t good enough. When doing my maths assignment is a high enough priority that it gets to take over my reality, then I’ll KNOW that it’s time to do it, and do it. In the meantime, why have the worry of procrastation? (You might be able to tell that being-knowing when it comes to deadlines is still something I’m working towards :D)
Better still, when you get used to this kind of knowing, you don’t need to depend so much on, or worry about, the other kind of knowing. Intellectual knowing is merely a precursor to being-knowing, and you can learn to give it the appropriate weight.
Perhaps the best thing I learnt during the forum was absurdism. I’ve enjoyed absurdism all my life, but when I understood it with my whole being, that was really ABSURD. Just amazing. You can feel it in your bones. Being-knowing feels so synchronized.
The other cool thing is that being-knowing is totally in-the-moment and provisional. What you know now (that the floor will hold you up, or that somebody feels a certain way), might be synchronized in this moment, but if you tune into being-knowing, as soon as it desynchronizes, you learn not to lend weight to that knowledge. Intellectual knowing, on the other hand, isn’t tuned into reality in that way: intellectual knowing is based on rules and exceptions, and often needs revising, outside of the moment. That’s not to say it’s not useful, it’s just harder to use than being-knowing. Learning to develop intellectual knowledge into being-knowing is an amazing road to go down.
The Breathtaking Breadth Of The Blind Spot
We should all know that we don’t know most things. But to have people point out things you don’t know, that were staring you in the face, that had you known them you would probably have done something else, one after the other, for 30 hours, that’s an exercise in humility, amazement, dizziness and possibility. And typically a whole host of other things :)
Being Coachable
Most of us are stubborn to some degree or other. Typically it’s a survival strategy against having other people use us for their own purposes, and affords us a degree of autonomy.
However, stubbornness isn’t adaptive in all circumstances, and especially so when you ask someone to help you. Asking someone to help you, and accepting their help, should be done on the basis that you trust them to deliver that help. If they try to help you in response to your request, and you reject the help, you are effectively reneging on the initial request for help (which isn’t being your word).
With practice, you can learn to ask the right people for the right help, and place yourself in their hands. When you place yourself in somebody else’s hands, you open yourself up to the possibility of things happening that you couldn’t have caused by yourself. There are a lot more people out there than there are of you, so learning to place yourself appropriately in other people’s hands is a really FREEING skill. This is one of the key foundations of collaboration. (Essentially, trust.)
An Effective Mind Virus
So, clearly, I didn’t learn ALL this in one weekend from one mightily crazy seeming organisation. But they surely provide an environment that is most unusually conducive to such revelations.
And these are fairly game-changing revelations. How to deal with and trust an organisation that sells this wholesale, at a profit, in an evangelical way? (And you understand, if you’ve read this far, an organisation that knows how to get even its most skeptical clients to be ‘evangelical’ too!)
How do I know this particular mind virus isn’t dangerous? Well… the simple answer is I don’t. But I do know that of the seething mass of mind viruses that (we’re) I’m exposed to every day, this one sure seems to be more beneficial than most.
And perhaps paradoxically, not truly knowing if it’s going to end up a mess is part of my motivation for my continuing involvement with them. Really powerful tools have the potential to cause great harm and great good: why should mind tools be any different?
Nothing ventured nothing gained!

Being a Landmark Forum Graduate

Earlier this year I enrolled on an ‘educational weekend’ called the Landmark Forum. It was a game changing experience.

Out Of Self Experience

Have you ever experienced yourself from the perspective of another person? If no, here’s a quick recipe for how to do it: get yourself in a room full of over 150 people over a 3 day period comprising maybe 30 hours, and spend much of those hours listening to many of them share in excruciating detail intimate details of their lives. Possibly, do it yourself. After a number of hours, the chances are you’ll start to dissociate, and see things strongly from the perspective of the people sharing. It’s like empathizing with a movie character, but far far more so. When you can genuinely see out of other people’s eyes like that, you can take a look at yourself and see things about yourself you’d never previously imagined. That’s pretty powerful. You get a new ability for seeing other people too. That’s pretty powerful as well.

Being Your Word

It’s likely that as a child you learned that ‘keeping your promises’ is a good thing to do. Well, here’s the strongest reason I know, and it’s got NOTHING particularly to do with ethics.

Words are inherently feeble things. Faint vibrations of air don’t, in and of themselves, really change anything. So why do we spend so many of our waking hours hopefully wagging our jaws?

There’s an implicit assumption here: that words precede consequences in the real world. ‘Keeping your promises’ is just the very tiniest tip of the iceberg of what that means. If you keep your promises, then that means that your words have a good track record of preceding consequences that are under your control. It means that your hopeful jaw wagging isn’t entirely in vain.

Now take this to the next level. Imagine BEING your word. You don’t just keep your promises. Everything you say is in accordance with hard reality as perceived by you and your nearest and dearest, and perhaps your less near and dear. Other people, and even more crucially, you, understand that when you open your mouth, something pertaining to reality is going to come out. That’s a good basis from which to be heard.

Another dimension of this is that you can start to THINK in accordance with reality. You can understand just how real or imagined your thinking is. You can start to keep the promises you made to yourself that NOBODY ELSE KNOWS ABOUT. When you imagine fancifully, you know that’s what you’re doing and enjoy it for what it is, and never confuse it for planning things for reality.

That’s powerful.

Knowing Things With Your Whole Being

We all know things with our intellects. The intellect is the great knower after all. But how much experience do we have knowing things with our whole BEING?

What does it feel like to know something with your whole being? The hallmark is that you don’t need to convince yourself. I don’t have to persuade myself to go for a run or a cycle ride, because when it’s time, I KNOW that’s what I want to do. I don’t have to persuade myself that the floor will hold me up, because I KNOW that it will. I KNOW that I ‘should’ be doing my maths assignment, but I’m not doing it, because my being-knowing knows that ‘should’ isn’t good enough. When doing my maths assignment is a high enough priority that it gets to take over my reality, then I’ll KNOW that it’s time to do it, and do it. In the meantime, why have the worry of procrastation? (You might be able to tell that being-knowing when it comes to deadlines is still something I’m working towards :D)

Better still, when you get used to this kind of knowing, you don’t need to depend so much on, or worry about, the other kind of knowing. Intellectual knowing is merely a precursor to being-knowing, and you can learn to give it the appropriate weight.

Perhaps the best thing I learnt during the forum was absurdism. I’ve enjoyed absurdism all my life, but when I understood it with my whole being, that was really ABSURD. Just amazing. You can feel it in your bones. Being-knowing feels so synchronized.

The other cool thing is that being-knowing is totally in-the-moment and provisional. What you know now (that the floor will hold you up, or that somebody feels a certain way), might be synchronized in this moment, but if you tune into being-knowing, as soon as it desynchronizes, you learn not to lend weight to that knowledge. Intellectual knowing, on the other hand, isn’t tuned into reality in that way: intellectual knowing is based on rules and exceptions, and often needs revising, outside of the moment. That’s not to say it’s not useful, it’s just harder to use than being-knowing. Learning to develop intellectual knowledge into being-knowing is an amazing road to go down.

The Breathtaking Breadth Of The Blind Spot

We should all know that we don’t know most things. But to have people point out things you don’t know, that were staring you in the face, that had you known them you would probably have done something else, one after the other, for 30 hours, that’s an exercise in humility, amazement, dizziness and possibility. And typically a whole host of other things :)

Being Coachable

Most of us are stubborn to some degree or other. Typically it’s a survival strategy against having other people use us for their own purposes, and affords us a degree of autonomy.

However, stubbornness isn’t adaptive in all circumstances, and especially so when you ask someone to help you. Asking someone to help you, and accepting their help, should be done on the basis that you trust them to deliver that help. If they try to help you in response to your request, and you reject the help, you are effectively reneging on the initial request for help (which isn’t being your word).

With practice, you can learn to ask the right people for the right help, and place yourself in their hands. When you place yourself in somebody else’s hands, you open yourself up to the possibility of things happening that you couldn’t have caused by yourself. There are a lot more people out there than there are of you, so learning to place yourself appropriately in other people’s hands is a really FREEING skill. This is one of the key foundations of collaboration. (Essentially, trust.)

An Effective Mind Virus

So, clearly, I didn’t learn ALL this in one weekend from one mightily crazy seeming organisation. But they surely provide an environment that is most unusually conducive to such revelations.

And these are fairly game-changing revelations. How to deal with and trust an organisation that sells this wholesale, at a profit, in an evangelical way? (And you understand, if you’ve read this far, an organisation that knows how to get even its most skeptical clients to be ‘evangelical’ too!)

How do I know this particular mind virus isn’t dangerous? Well… the simple answer is I don’t. But I do know that of the seething mass of mind viruses that (we’re) I’m exposed to every day, this one sure seems to be more beneficial than most.

And perhaps paradoxically, not truly knowing if it’s going to end up a mess is part of my motivation for my continuing involvement with them. Really powerful tools have the potential to cause great harm and great good: why should mind tools be any different?

Nothing ventured nothing gained!

Aug 27
Permalink
 
the death of journey
If you’ve seen the BBC’s Planet Earth series you’ll have heard of Lechuguilla Cave. Planet Earth contains stunning footage of this cave. The cavers had to camp underground to get the footage. The footage is stunning to watch from my armchair, but can you imagine how stunning it would be to see after going through 2 years of getting permission to go there, and then travelling and camping inside a cave for days?Now imagine that a tour operator dynamites a fast access tunnel, installs highway access, car parks, a visitor centre, elevators and ships in tourists to see it at $20 a pop.
Is the cave still as beautiful as it was before?
Similar: there’s a song in the film Tekkon Kinkreet called White’s Dream. I think it’s simply fantastic. The film is beautiful, so much so I got the sound track. Then I fell in love with the song White’s Dream. Then I realized that the song peaks at around 4:50 and it’s just AMAZING right there.
So I tried listening to that fantastic section on it’s own. And it wasn’t as amazing. It turns out the amazingness is only AMAZING when I listen right from the beginning of the song, and pay attention. The amazingness isn’t purely a function of that snippet of audio, it’s a function of that snippet of audio as the summit of a journey that the rest of the song takes me through, and that the film took me through when I watched it.
Many of us ‘know’, in our intellectual minds, that the ‘journey’ is as worthy, if not more so, than the ‘getting there’, but to feel this in your bones is a new level of understanding. (And it also raises the question: without a journey, is it really possible to get anywhere anyway!?)
Would you install elevators into the wonderous caverns of Lechuguilla?
And what relation do aircraft bear to those elevators?
Journey isn’t dead, but our society contains so many tools for us to kill it if we so choose. Is that what we choose? Do we choose consciously or unconsciously?

the death of journey

If you’ve seen the BBC’s Planet Earth series you’ll have heard of Lechuguilla Cave. Planet Earth contains stunning footage of this cave. The cavers had to camp underground to get the footage. The footage is stunning to watch from my armchair, but can you imagine how stunning it would be to see after going through 2 years of getting permission to go there, and then travelling and camping inside a cave for days?
Now imagine that a tour operator dynamites a fast access tunnel, installs highway access, car parks, a visitor centre, elevators and ships in tourists to see it at $20 a pop.

Is the cave still as beautiful as it was before?

Similar: there’s a song in the film Tekkon Kinkreet called White’s Dream. I think it’s simply fantastic. The film is beautiful, so much so I got the sound track. Then I fell in love with the song White’s Dream. Then I realized that the song peaks at around 4:50 and it’s just AMAZING right there.

So I tried listening to that fantastic section on it’s own. And it wasn’t as amazing. It turns out the amazingness is only AMAZING when I listen right from the beginning of the song, and pay attention. The amazingness isn’t purely a function of that snippet of audio, it’s a function of that snippet of audio as the summit of a journey that the rest of the song takes me through, and that the film took me through when I watched it.

Many of us ‘know’, in our intellectual minds, that the ‘journey’ is as worthy, if not more so, than the ‘getting there’, but to feel this in your bones is a new level of understanding. (And it also raises the question: without a journey, is it really possible to get anywhere anyway!?)

Would you install elevators into the wonderous caverns of Lechuguilla?

And what relation do aircraft bear to those elevators?

Journey isn’t dead, but our society contains so many tools for us to kill it if we so choose. Is that what we choose? Do we choose consciously or unconsciously?

Aug 24
Permalink

Cable Car View (San Francisco)

A pleasant way to spend a bit of spare time in the rather steep-sided city of San Francisco! (I found myself there due to work, which raises some questions about ethical carbon footprints/general ecological sense… just because it was work doesn’t clear my responsibility, so what do I do? Hmmmmm.)

Aug 08
Permalink
Out Of This Earth: East India Adivasis And The Aluminium CartelFelix Padel and Samarendra Das
This is a rather interesting book tracing out in great detail the world aluminium industry. There is a particular focus on how the aluminium industry affects tribal peoples, which is particularly relevant given that a great many of said tribal peoples live on land which the aluminium industry is digging up, and trying to dig up, in order to make aluminium.
I think most of us in the ‘West’ understand the global political importance of oil, but hardly appreciate the impacts of the other extractive industries: metals, and in this case aluminium, being key among them.
I haven’t read far into this book yet, but it is written from a very interesting perspective: that of a ‘reverse anthropology’: trying to understand the actions of the West (focus on mining) in an anthropological academic style, but written from the perspective of indigenous people, as far as the authors could manage. (As opposed to a traditional anthropological perspective which is normally taken through the eyes of western culture, looking at another culture.)
I’m looking forward to having read this… it is pretty huge though!

Out Of This Earth: East India Adivasis And The Aluminium Cartel
Felix Padel and Samarendra Das

This is a rather interesting book tracing out in great detail the world aluminium industry. There is a particular focus on how the aluminium industry affects tribal peoples, which is particularly relevant given that a great many of said tribal peoples live on land which the aluminium industry is digging up, and trying to dig up, in order to make aluminium.

I think most of us in the ‘West’ understand the global political importance of oil, but hardly appreciate the impacts of the other extractive industries: metals, and in this case aluminium, being key among them.

I haven’t read far into this book yet, but it is written from a very interesting perspective: that of a ‘reverse anthropology’: trying to understand the actions of the West (focus on mining) in an anthropological academic style, but written from the perspective of indigenous people, as far as the authors could manage. (As opposed to a traditional anthropological perspective which is normally taken through the eyes of western culture, looking at another culture.)

I’m looking forward to having read this… it is pretty huge though!

Aug 05
Permalink

Really awesome Kempo exercise

Tjelvar took us through this nage starter exercise on Monday. It is a really great trust and confidence exercise, and it felt really great to try it. With a bit more practice somersaults will be possible!

Catch the rest of the videos on the dojo website here: http://cambridge-shorinji.tumblr.com/.

Aug 01
Permalink

on pigeonholing people

(the impatient reader may like to skip straight to the middle section of this post, entitled The Revelation)

Pigeonholing 101

If there’s one thing people really hate, it’s being pigeonholed.

pigeonhole: 4. to assign a definite place or to definite places in some orderly system: to pigeonhole new ideas.

Think of an occasion when someone didn’t react well to you. If there’s someone who doesn’t react well to you on a regular basis, although a regrettable (but ever so common) state of affairs, that’s an even better example to bring to mind for the purposes of this.

I suspect that if you have a little ponder, a significant component of that person’s bad reaction to you is that they feel pigeonholed in their interaction with you. There’s something about the interaction which closes down the possibilities for enjoyment, interest, progress etc., and the only thing left is a bad reaction.

In fact, if you have a little ponder more, any bad interaction can be solved by actively not pigeonholing the person you’re having a bad interaction with. By not pigeonholing someone, the space of possible actions grows, imagination is encouraged and something constructive can happen.

The Revelation

In fact, on a recent phone call I realised something that fairly well staggered me, in its obviousness as well as its spaciousness:

  • Me pigeonholing others is not the only source of relationship messing-up pigeonholingness!

My moment of revelation on the phone call was when I realised this:

  1. When I pigeonhole another, the other feels dislike towards me.
  2. When another pigeonholes me, I feel dislike towards the other.
  3. When another pigeonholes themselves in my presence, the other feels dislike towards our relationship and therefore frequently me.
  4. When I pigeonhole myself in another’s presence, I feel dislike towards our relationship, and therefore frequently the other.

So, when feeling stuck in any sort of relationship (friendly, working, loving, any human interaction whatsoever), look out for pigeonholing, but not just the traditional ‘me pigeonholing them’, any of these 4 variations is liable to be at play fouling things up. Telling the difference between them is useful information with which to respond to each variety of pigeonholing with more skill and appropriateness, and erasing it from your life wherever its making a mess.

Advanced Pigeonholing

Some extra classifications/hints towards dealing with each of the four types above:

  1. When I pigeonhole another, the other feels dislike towards me.
    me: aggressor
    other: victim
    my strategy: quit pigeonholing. Don’t prevent the other from surprising me and invite them to behave outside my expectations. 
  2. When another pigeonholes me, I feel dislike towards the other.
    me: victim
    other: aggressor
    my strategy: refuse to be pigeonholed. Surprise the other, behave outside their expectations, but don’t retaliate, just ignore the pressure to behave predictably, and behave freely and as myself.
  3. When another pigeonholes themselves in my presence, the other feels dislike towards our relationship and therefore frequently me.
    me: accomplice
    other: trapped by themselves
    my strategy: don’t collaborate with the other’s pigeonholing of themselves. Create options for them to opt out of pigeonholing themselves, invite them to try those different options.
  4. When I pigeonhole myself in another’s presence, I feel dislike towards our relationship, and therefore frequently the other.
    me: trapped by myself
    other: accomplice
    my strategy: recognise that I’m the one pigeonholing myself, don’t place any blame on the other, or myself. Refuse to allow the other to be my accomplice. Stop pigeonholing myself, accept any invitations from the other that lead away from me pigeonholing myself. 

My feeling is that less pigeonholing = more and more exciting possibilities.

Jul 27
Permalink

On Ethical Whitewash

Adding detail to my skepticism regarding the ‘ethical’ economy:

  • the success of a business reflects the success of its customers
  • if an ethical business has only unethical customers, then the ethical business’s success is tied to (and limited by) the success of unethical customers
  • an ethical business should NOT have its success tied to and limited by that of unethical business (it should avoid being ethical whitewash…)
  • THEREFORE: ethical business should tie its success to ethical endeavour to be ethical itself (otherwise it is just whitewash for unethical business).
  • THEREFORE: ethical business that takes custom from unethical business should take genuine effort to transform the unethical customer into an ethical one, to avoid being ethical whitewash.

This is related to perpetual motion: just as I can’t power a motor from a dynamo attached to same motor, so I can’t save Africa from the proceeds of pillaging it (why the majority of NGO work is essentially pointless…), so I can’t create an ethical business climate from the proceeds of an unethical business climate.

Literally, ethical economic value must be created freshly, and must displace unethical economic value. I really doubt that there’s any viable way of transforming unethical economic value into ethical econmic value (although the displacement can take place at multiple granularities, far below that of an entire business).

Put another way, there’s no way to really profit from selling your soul (or anything else) to the devil.

It’s obvious really.

Jul 26
Permalink
This Monday morning I was filled with the Monday morning dread expected of me as a corporate worker in the Western world.
But  I was determined to do my calligraphy homework. So, making myself late  for work, I sat down with my brush and ink, and became blissfully filled  with love, felt as if I was reaching out across the universe, and 45  minutes later I felt a wonderful serenity come over me that was unlike  any Monday morning in my memory at that time.
Just wonderful.

This Monday morning I was filled with the Monday morning dread expected of me as a corporate worker in the Western world.

But I was determined to do my calligraphy homework. So, making myself late for work, I sat down with my brush and ink, and became blissfully filled with love, felt as if I was reaching out across the universe, and 45 minutes later I felt a wonderful serenity come over me that was unlike any Monday morning in my memory at that time.

Just wonderful.

Jul 22
Permalink
Using logic to solve a coffee-table block puzzle, having failed at the trial-and-error approach…
Thanks to Sebastian for the picture, and posing the problem in the first place :)

Using logic to solve a coffee-table block puzzle, having failed at the trial-and-error approach…

Thanks to Sebastian for the picture, and posing the problem in the first place :)

Jul 14
Permalink
…mathematical interest in simplification through pattern discovery…
— from Michael Ohene’s interesting blog Cooking For Engineers. Perhaps this captures the beauty of mathematics in the most succinct way I’ve seen yet. ‘Simplification through pattern discovery.’ Amazing :)
Jul 11
Permalink
The Four Winds
The fruits of my second Japanese calligraphy lesson.
This is a really rewarding activity. The shapes have such an elegant simplicity, and starting to develop the mindset to reproduce that effectively is quite something!
For me:
Never used a brush before. Being sensitive to the texture of the paper, through the brush, and sensitive to the shape of the brush as it moves across the paper is a real exercise in sensing the subtle, and achieving a light touch. Getting familiar with how the ink relates to the brush, and flows onto the paper is non-intuitive and interesting too.
Never learned any Japanese characters before. Trying to reproduce these with brush and ink gives me new eyes on the subtlety of the angles and proportions, and maybe even on the meanings! Trying to reproduce unfamiliar shapes using unfamiliar tools and media is such a lot to think about that thinking is pointless! A really nice exercise in learning through doing over thinking.
A wonderful example of ‘one chance’. In life we have just one chance in any moment: calligraphy really underlines that: once the brush is on the paper, that’s it, no stopping and no turning back!
So why learn Japanese calligraphy and where can it lead? Well, it would seem to fit nicely alongside Shorinji Kempo and Go. There is a meditative calm to it that seems to fit halfway between Kempo and Go: with Go, although there is no turning back, there is plenty of stopping (the flow, although strongly present, is discontinuous, not continuous as with calligraphy); with Kempo, being all-body active is a different kind of meditative calm when compared with the seated calm of calligraphy or Go.
Nice.

The Four Winds

The fruits of my second Japanese calligraphy lesson.

This is a really rewarding activity. The shapes have such an elegant simplicity, and starting to develop the mindset to reproduce that effectively is quite something!

For me:

  • Never used a brush before. Being sensitive to the texture of the paper, through the brush, and sensitive to the shape of the brush as it moves across the paper is a real exercise in sensing the subtle, and achieving a light touch. Getting familiar with how the ink relates to the brush, and flows onto the paper is non-intuitive and interesting too.
  • Never learned any Japanese characters before. Trying to reproduce these with brush and ink gives me new eyes on the subtlety of the angles and proportions, and maybe even on the meanings! Trying to reproduce unfamiliar shapes using unfamiliar tools and media is such a lot to think about that thinking is pointless! A really nice exercise in learning through doing over thinking.
  • A wonderful example of ‘one chance’. In life we have just one chance in any moment: calligraphy really underlines that: once the brush is on the paper, that’s it, no stopping and no turning back!

So why learn Japanese calligraphy and where can it lead? Well, it would seem to fit nicely alongside Shorinji Kempo and Go. There is a meditative calm to it that seems to fit halfway between Kempo and Go: with Go, although there is no turning back, there is plenty of stopping (the flow, although strongly present, is discontinuous, not continuous as with calligraphy); with Kempo, being all-body active is a different kind of meditative calm when compared with the seated calm of calligraphy or Go.

Nice.

Jul 04
Permalink

Israel videos: coral, desert, air

Posted to my YouTube account months after the event… SO organised :)

Jun 28
Permalink
Kolya
A heartwarming tale of a 55-year old skirt-chaser who is woken up to the possibility of committed relationships and responsibility when a 5 year old child unexpectedly appears on his doorstep.
Set in Prague in 1988 (released in 1996), as the Soviet Bloc is beginning to crumble, this film has the feel of an old fashioned fairy tale about it: the attention to human detail is all there, in the screenplay, the camerawork, the setting, everything. There is a straightforward, often hilarious, warts-and-all honesty/idiosyncrasy to the whole thing that is very refreshing as well, compared to the production-line ‘characters’ peddled in mainstream cinema.
Well worth the watch.

Kolya

A heartwarming tale of a 55-year old skirt-chaser who is woken up to the possibility of committed relationships and responsibility when a 5 year old child unexpectedly appears on his doorstep.

Set in Prague in 1988 (released in 1996), as the Soviet Bloc is beginning to crumble, this film has the feel of an old fashioned fairy tale about it: the attention to human detail is all there, in the screenplay, the camerawork, the setting, everything. There is a straightforward, often hilarious, warts-and-all honesty/idiosyncrasy to the whole thing that is very refreshing as well, compared to the production-line ‘characters’ peddled in mainstream cinema.

Well worth the watch.

Jun 27
Permalink
He who binds to himself to Joy,
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the Joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
William Blake - A nice one from the Rigpa Glimpse of the Day recently…
Jun 23
Permalink
Instructors can impart a fraction of the teaching. It is through your own devoted practice that the mysteries of the Art of Peace are brought to life.
Morihei Ueshiba - The Art Of Peace