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awareness / thinking: page 2.......
| The
most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this
should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy,
is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority.
Emma
Goldman
(1869-1940) |
 |
~ ~ ~ ~
| The
world
has become a place where everything is so convenient and accessible
that
your mind sort of dries up.
I mean, how brilliant would it be just to have no phones, no fax machines, and all those things that just complicate your life? Naomi Watts... [Showtime sho.com interview about her role in The Outsider [2002] |
 |
~ ~ ~ ~
I don't think about anything too much. ...
If I think too much, it kind of freaks me out.Pamela Anderson... [Movieline, Nov 2002]
~ ~ ~ ~
| I
didn't take science in high school, but when I went back as an adult, I
went to Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman.
Both are gorgeous writers. And so smart. But both, with their huge hat sizes, came to the conclusion late in life that there is wonder in all of this. In other words, they didn't take science as an antiseptic road to a logical definition of life. They got on that road and said, 'This is a miracle. This is fantastic.' So if they were finding art at the end of their research, that gave me license to employ it in a similar way. Marianne Wiggins Her novel Evidence of Things Unseen [revolves] around a photographer and amateur scientist named Fos, his wife, Opal, and his best friend and partner, Flash. It takes place in Tennessee between the world wars, and re-creates a world in which science and technology are on the verge of changing everything, albeit in ways its characters cannot predict. ... At the heart of the book is the notion that perception influences experience, that what we call reality is mostly a matter of what we are prepared to observe. |
 .. .. "Above [that]," she continues, "one of the physicists had written, 'Isn't this The 1st Principle of Magic?' Fos thought it was." from book review article by David L. Ulin [LA Times, August 3 2003] .Evidence
of Things Unseen : A Novel |
~ ~ ~ ~
| We
are what we think we are. The habitual inclination of our thoughts
determines
our talents and abilities, and our personality. Thus, some think they
are
writers or artists, industrious or lazy, and so on.
What if you want to be other than what you presently think you are? You may argue that others have been born with the special talent you lack but desire to have. This is true. But they had to cultivate the habit of that ability some time -- if not in this life, then in a previous one. So whatever you want to be, start to develop that pattern now. You can instill any trend in your consciousness right now, provided you inject a strong thought in your mind; then your actions and whole being will obey that thought. |
 .. .. Where There Is Light - Insight and Inspiration for Meeting Life's Challenges by Paramahansa Yogananda image of Yogananda from Self-Realization Fellowship site |
~ ~ ~ ~
We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour
which keeps Believing nimble.Emily Dickinson - quoted in Jan Phillips' Museletter janphillips.com
| Spiritual
intelligence is a frame of mind and a way of life that can only be
cultivated
over time in a careful and disciplined way. It can develop in delight
and
bring more joy and self-fulfillment into a person's life, but it is not
a permanent state of bliss. It is a state of awareness, one that is an
ongoing effort of will rather than of feeling.
It is a state of not knowing that calls for tolerance and respect for what Buddhists call Beginner's Mind. ... A mature respect for one's status as a student allow us to approach our inner selves with curiosity, respect and trust, the attitudes that [sculptor] Megan has learned to adopt when she approaches the stones she plans to carve. from
book:*
Riding the Windhorse : Spiritual
Intelligence
and the Growth of the Self |
 |
~ ~ ~ ~
 .. .. When we are in the prison of the mind, we really believe whatever we want to believe, under its influence. Our wonderland, our life of misery and suffering, is the rabbit hole we dig with our narrow notions and relations of our mind. We make ourselves a slave to the mind and its limited potential with our own notions. When young elephants are captured in the forest, it is easy to tame their minds. The baby elephant is tied to a stake with a strong chain that it cannot break. |
Even
when it grows into a mighty adult, easily able to break the chain, the
elephant will not do so because its mind has become accustomed to not
being
able to break the chain.
It is unable to set itself free from bondage even though it has greater physical strength. The conditioning becomes so strong that even when the chain is removed, the elephant will not try and escape. Just like the elephants, if we become prisoners of our own mental conditioning and are not taught to know our true identity, we live in the worst kind of bondage. The bondage is not outside. It is inside. Regular chains can be broken with physical force, but the bondage of the mind can only be removed through better understanding. excerpt from book site
image: Keanu Reeves as Neo
|
~ ~ ~ ~
| On
July 31, 1870, the geologist Joseph LeConte got up "at peep of day" to
see the sun rise from Glacier Point on the south rim of Yosemite
Valley.
... and after "about one and a half hour's rapturous gaze," he went
back
to the camp for breakfast.
Then, he reports, the whole party "returned to Glacier Point, and spent the whole of the beautiful Sunday morning in the presence of grand mountains, yawning chasms, and magnificent falls."// How long does it take to see something? I've wondered about that for a long time, watching people stroll through art museums, or stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon for a few minutes or so, then turn around to whatever's next. If there's one thing our culture's given us, it's the opportunity to have something else that's next, or just multitaskable right now. // I too have been spending time in Yosemite, working on a project with the photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe for a couple of years now, and one of the singular pleasures has been sitting around while they make photographs. Because of the technical nature of the work, we spend from a couple of hours to a couple of days at each location, and while they're working I'm mostly doing what LeConte was doing, the hardest thing to do in this culture, that thing often only done when sitting in a stalled car or waiting for the doctor to see you: nothing. |
 .. .. Rebecca Solnit from
her article Slow
Seeing - How a "rephotography" project
As
Eve
Said to the Serpent : On Landscape,
Gender,
and Art River
of
Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and
the |
...~ ~ ~ ~
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. Saul Bellowquoted in W-ISDOM list 6/13/04
~ ~ ~ ~
Michael (Jeff Goldblum) : I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Sam Weber (Tom Berenger} : Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex.
Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?
The Big Chill [1983] [dvd]
~ ~ ~ ~
The need to relinquish our certainty lies at the heart both of modern science and ancient spirituality. From the science of Complexity, Ilya Prigogine tells us that, "The future is uncertain. . .but such uncertainty lies at the very heart of human creativity." It is uncertainty that creates the space for invention. We must let go, clear the space, leap into the void of not-knowing, if we want to discover anything new.
Margaret Wheatley - quoted in W-ISDOM list 4/03/04
....book: Leadership and the New Science - by Margaret Wheatley
image from book The End of Certainty by Ilya Prigogine
~ ~ ~ ~...
We're in this weird MTV generation with reality TV, where kids don't think for themselves. Amber Tamblyn ... [Parade, Jan 11 2004]
~ ~ ~ ~......
The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself - and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results. Agatha Christie..... [www.naww.org Woman's Quote of the Day, 3/8/03]
 .. .. Discoveries dawned on the minds of the ardent and engaged, the jubilant and enraged, not merely the employed. |
The
worship of convention has never yet led to astonishment and a joyous
leap
in human potential.
Only enthusiasm plants wild gardens in the mind and harvests inspired fruits and flowers. Only enthusiasm, born of light, conceives of brighter worlds to walk in. Tama J. Kieves photo from her site: Awakening Artistry
|
...~ ~ ~ ~
|
Rumi image from Poetry of Rumi 2004 calendar |
 |
...
The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when you find out that something is not what you thought. Nothing is what we thought. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion. Love. Courage. These are code words for things we don't know in our minds, but any of us could experience.
These words point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.... The only place ever to work is right now." .......Pema Chodron
~ ~ ~ ~
 |
All
things reveal us to ourselves. If we look deeply enough into an oak
tree
or mountain stream, into a photograph or other work of art, we will
find
ourselves there.
And if we linger, listening intently, it will speak to us in a language divine, a language of light, symbol, metaphor. In the process of observing, of being wholly attentive, we are liberated momentarily from our sense of separateness, rapt in a oneness with the subject of our gaze - a connection as real as that of lovers who have felt their spiritual beings merge in another dimension as their earthly bodies join together. We all crave this oneness, this holy and mystical union, and are willing to travel to the ends of the earth to find it. Yet it is ours to experience in every moment, wherever we are. Jan Phillips - from her article: "God Is At Eye Level" by // more quotes by Phillips on photography: page 2 |
~ ~ ~ ~
Many of us perpetuate negative self-talk about talents that we don't accept.
Self-criticism can seriously injure potential talent that wants to be expressed.
This negative self-talk comes in a variety of forms.Sometimes we hear it in our own voice. It says things like: "I don't really have it.
I'm not good enough. It won't work. I'll fail. I'll make mistakes and look foolish.
I can't make a living with my talent." ...Fortunately, talent waits patiently behind our fear and self-doubt...
By confronting those critical voices in our heads, it is possible to disempower them.
Lucia Capacchione, PhD - from her book: Putting Your Talent to Work
~ ~ ~ ~
memetics:Uniquely among animals, humans are capable of imitation and so can copy from one another ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs and stories.
These are all memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 at the end of his book The Selfish Gene. Like genes, memes are replicators, competing to get into as many brains as possible, and this memetic competition has fashioned our minds and culture, just as natural selection has designed our bodies...
Blackmore makes a compelling case that this inner self, the 'inner me', is an illusion, a creation of the memes for the sake of their own replication.
from publisher review of The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore
~ ~
site: What is a Meme? [New Horizons for Learning]
books: Susan J. Blackmore. The Meme Machine | Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene
~ ~ ~ ~If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject you can create the consoling illusion it has been mastered.Stanley Kubrick
~ ~ ~ ~
Psychological courage entails a cleansing of the doors of perception, allowing us
to see things as they really are rather than through the distorted lens of the past.The more we are cleansed of expectations, the more we see what is and the more
we can respond to it creatively." ///To hope is to create a sacred space, a space of possibility, in which the goodness
of the Universe can express itself. The stance we adopt in that sacred space is one
of readiness, openness and non-attachment to a particular outcome." Joan Borysenko
~ ~ ~ ~
"It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing,
however ancient, can be trusted without proof."Henry David Thoreau - from Walden
~ ~ ~ ~
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. Agnes De Mille~ ~ ~ ~
The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test
in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.
Ken Wilber
~ ~ ~ ~
When awareness identifies with mental content this content becomes the context
from which all other mental content and experience are viewed. .. For example,
if a thought 'I'm scared' arises and .. seen to be what it is, i.e., just another thought,
then it exerts little influence.However, if it is identified with, then the reality at that moment is that the individual is scared
and is likely to generate and identify with a whole series of fearful thoughts and emotions...Thus, identification sets in motion a self- fulfilling, self-prophetic process in which experience
and psychological processes validate the reality.. identified with."
related article: Ego and Creativity
~ ~ ~ ~
There are illumined thought forms that emanate from a divine source, guiding us,
every moment, away from darkness and into light. The fact that we so often ignore
these illuminations does not mean that they are not there.They are our thoughts of wisdom and conscience and love. They are our sense
of goodness, the lure of becoming by which we are taken, though often kicking
and screaming, in the direction of our healing.
*related page:**intuition
~ ~ ~ ~
Sarah Ban Breathnach: "Reclaiming joy as your birthright requires a profound inner shift in your reality. Most of us unconsciously create dramas in our minds, automatically expecting the worst from every situation, only to have our negative expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies."
~ ~ ~ ~
Ask any woman about the inner voices that keep her from her creative work and chances are she'll have a litany a mile long. They're voices we inherit along the way, from our parents, our teachers, the culture, the church - voices that say "I'm not smart enough, I'm not good enough, I don't have a story worth telling, I'm not creative, I shouldn't stand out -- they're all (k)nots that keep us bound up and silent. writer/photographer Jan Phillips author of Marry Your Muse and God Is at Eye Level
<< more quotes by Phillips: photography: page 2
Ordinary education and social training seem to impoverish the capacity for free initiative and artistic imagination. We talk independence, but we enact conformity. The hunger in many people for what is called self-expression is related to this unrealized intuitive resource.
Brains are washed (when they are not clogged), wills are standardized, that is to say immobilized. Someone within cries for help. There must be more to life than all these learned acts, all this highly conditioned consumption. A person wants to do something of his own, to feel his own being alive and unique. He wants out of bondage. He wants in to the promised land.
Aside from that occasional smoke, Jennifer Connelly seems much too disciplined to have any vices. But this she vigorously denies. "I love this quote.. 'The skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.' ... "I have tons of bad habits.. A lot of them are just bad ways of looking at things and thinking."
Jennifer Connelly
[from The Intriguing Ms. Connelly by Michael Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, September, 2002]
according to bartleby.com, the full quote is:
"Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame."
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway, p. 62 (1925).
Claxton describes the 'hare brain' as logical, fast, machine-like thinking. The 'tortoise mind,' on the other hand, is slower, less focused, less articulate, much more playful, almost dreamy. Leaving no room for the tortoise mind..stifles creativity and innovation and inevitably leads to bad decisions.
John Cleese***[NY Times, 2.6.99] about book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton
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related pages:***awareness / thinking: page 1***awareness / thinking : page 3 ......
..awareness / thinking resources : articles sites books......
self-assessment:*beliefs checklist****-**
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