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Markoid
Markoid
1621 posts

Edited Feb 07, 2017, 11:23
Re: Well-being - River Sources
Feb 07, 2017, 11:14
moss wrote:
Markoid wrote:
We do tai-chi at work. Does that count? Meditation next - and it'ssoooooooo cool, if you do it properly.

Basically concentrating on one's breathing.


I don't meditate my mind is too curious to sit still for a period of time, but meditation arrives at answers, although in actual fact you should be aiming for a different level, LS would tell you more.
But reading Resurgence (now that gives a hell of a lot way as to how I am;) this morning, Satish said there should be five elements, the original 4, earth, water, fire and air, the fifth of course is imagination, in our thoughts we live elsewhere. Now he was walking a pilgrim's walk from the source of the Thames to where it reaches the sea. His walk is what many of the people do on TMA their pilgrimages are to the stones....


Medititation is basically challenging, believing and ultimately accepting all energy as positive and accepting all of the earth sources via imagination. I think it's an amazing thing to do.

Basically focusing on breathing. It takes you away from everything. Mental cleansing. Like sleep is physical cleansing.
Dog in fog
Dog in fog
317 posts

Edited Feb 08, 2017, 13:12
Re: Well-being - River Sources
Feb 08, 2017, 13:11
moss wrote:
Dog in fog wrote:


Just as an aside, your words made me think of a book I've been more pondering on than reading for the past year. I'm reading it in dribs and drabs: conceptually, it's very interesting. The comments in this link are worth reading...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48582.The_Spell_of_the_Sensuous.

[quote="Dog in fog"]






Read that book a few years back, his story about being trapped in a small cave as the rains fell and the spiders wove their web around him still buzzes in my mind.
What of course no one says is that phenemonology is not confined to archaeology. When my son was at uni doing computer studies he came home and asked me to buy him some books. There was four by Christopher Alexander - The Nature of Order. I could not understand how an architect could be useful to computers, but of course read the books when they came in. They taught me how to look deeper into the things around, the actual 'wholeness' of the everyday things in the world. This is where David Abram is coming from, it is captured in the perfect swan's wing on the cover......>

DiF's reply
Yes, and the bit where he feels he's floating in the universe due to the reflection of stars, plus fireflies, in the paddy field below him!

Thanks for the tip - I shall have a look.



Littlestone
Littlestone
5386 posts

Edited Feb 16, 2017, 21:29
Re: Well-being
Feb 08, 2017, 15:15
spencer wrote:
I totally agree with your hypothesis. But cannot prove it.


Not always necessary to prove everything spencer.

We’ll probably never prove that the Buddha actually achieved enlightenment and entered Nirvana, nor if Jesus ascended to take his seat at the right hand of God. Nor whether Krishna really did counsel Arjuna on the Field of Dharma... but you take my point :-) The point is that those concepts, those ever evolving interpretations of ‘reality’ as we perceive it, have not stopped millions of people from believing in them nor, perhaps more importantly, from creating some of mankind’s greatest art, architecture, music and poetry in their name.

That aside, a few days after starting this thread, I realised how much Richard Jefferies had (subconsciously) influenced my opening post. Jefferies, Rabindranath Tagore, Walt Whitman and thousands of other poets, humanists, gurus, mystics and visionaries have been the guiding light for so many – past and present, East and West. Perhaps it’s Jefferies however, more than any other, who touches the souls of those here who would ‘drink at the spring’. Here’s what Jefferies writes in his book, The Old House at Coate, about (spring) water -

"I went to drink at the spring: the clear, cool, and sweet water tempted me in the summer. Stooping in the rocky cell, I lifted the water in the hollow of my hand, carefully else the sand might be disturbed. The sunlight gleamed on it as it slipped through my fingers; thus I had the sun, too, in my palm. Alone, under the roots of the trees and the step stone; alone, with the sunlight and the pure water, there was a sense of something more than these; the water was more to me than water; and the sun than sun - as if I had something in common with them and could feel with them. The gleaming ray on the liquid in my palm held me in its possession for the moment: the touch of the water gave me something from itself; it dropped from my fingers and was gone; the gleam disappeared, but I had had them. Beside the physical water and the physical light, my soul had received from them their beauty."
tjj
tjj
3606 posts

Edited Feb 09, 2017, 10:57
Re: Well-being
Feb 09, 2017, 00:39
I feel it beholden on me to respond to your post about Richard Jefferies - given the Old House at Coate is very close to where I live and I'm happy to promote its current use as a museum dedicated to nature side RJ's work. He clearly was his happiest roaming the Wiltshire countryside as a boy and young man but suspect would be hard pressed to find that spring again these days (probably buried under the M4). Although he died young, his life in London understandably was not so idyllic - apparently he often stood in front of the Royal Exchange and watched the flow of Victorian commercial life pass by - he wrote ...

"all these men and women that pass through are driven on by the push of accumulated circumstances; they cannot stay, they must go …. Where will be these millions of to-day in a hundred years? But, further than that, let us ask, Where then will be the sum and outcome of their labour? … There will not be any sum or outcome or result of this ceaseless labour and movement; it vanishes in the moment that it is done, and in a hundred years nothing will be there, for nothing is there now."

He was wrong was he not. We live with the legacy of the industrious Victorians and also the materialism of late 20th century. Would he have hated the dual carriageway outside his home and the speed of everything - perhaps not, if he lived today would he have owned a car? An imponderable!

Although you were not addressing me directly I have to take issue with your first paragraph (this is a discussion forum) - of course no one would ever be able to prove "Jesus is sitting on the right hand of God" etc. Its nonsense, or at best metaphorical. And while speaking of inspired art, you forgot to mention all the atrocities that were done in name of religion over the centuries - and are still being done in the name of religion.

The bit about the spring was nice though.
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