A small circle - Category: Conscious Evolution    
 To Live is to War with Trolls...9 comments
picture2 Aug 2006 @ 04:07

To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.
—Henrik Ibsen

The interest of a writer and the interests of his readers are never the same and if, on occasion, they happen to coincide, this is a lucky accident.
—W. H. Auden
 More >

 Where is Abel thy brother?8 comments
picture3 Jul 2006 @ 01:48
Picture 1 (left) is from a DVD cover of Godfrey Reggio’s 1988 movie, Powaqattsi. Powaqattsi is a Hopi Indian conjunctive from the word Powaqa, which refers to a negative sorcerer who lives at the expense of others, and Qatsi - i.e., life.

Picture 2 (right) is Wayne Forte’s acrylic on paper Cain and Abel IV '89 - 80” x 50”.



After Cain had murdered his brother Abel, God asked him, "Where is Abel thy brother?" Cain answered, "I know not; am I my brother's keeper?" Cain's words have come to symbolize people's unwillingness to accept responsibility for the welfare of their fellows - their "brothers" in the extended sense of the term. The tradition of Judaism and Christianity (the "Good Samaritan," "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and "Love your enemies") is that people do have this responsibility.

Commentators of old, those who searched through the Bible for allegorical content, saw in the two figures of Caïn and Abel only one person, only one entity in conflict with itself. It is the first schizophrenia of humanity. It refuses a part of itself.  More >

 A Report on the Banality of Evil4 comments
picture5 Dec 2004 @ 02:04
“Saturn devouring one of his children” (1821-23), Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain)

Hannah Arendt, in her ground breaking book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, discovered what she least expected and least wanted to face. During multiple interviews with Eichmann, the German Jewish author discovered that he was not a monster. He was not even an anti-Semitic maniac or twisted, distorted demon of a man. Eichmann, she said was a man who simply wanted to get ahead, to succeed in life, to please his superiors, to be respected by his peers, to do his job well, to be patriotic, devoted, and responsible.

Since the ovens of the concentration camps and the mushrooms clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mankind seems nowadays to have managed to industrialized evil to the point where total madness and collective evil can now be perpetrated with no intention at all.

Are we increasingly becoming participants in a system which progressively has been turning ordinary citizens into “willing but intentionless death dealers”?

So asks Joan Chittister in a timely article published in the December 2004 issue of Spirituality & Health:

"Today, the breadth and depth of human complicity in mass murder knows no end. We have assemblyline systems that crank out sheet steel for bombs in one state and warheads for bombs in another, fins for missiles in a third state, and delivery systems of trains and ships and packing crates in the next. The profits of this system, reaped on Wall Street, leave us all innocent, all intentionless, and all guilty at the same time."  More >

 Imagination vs. pride & nationalism2 comments
picture23 Aug 2004 @ 01:20
Painting | Meeting, 1997-2001, Mary Frank

"Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are forgotten and the images of television replace history..."

"Do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?"
 More >

 We And They2 comments
picture17 May 2004 @ 13:20
Photo: TFF: Jan Oberg, Basra Faces

We And They
by Rudyard Kipling

Father and Mother, and Me
Sister and Auntie say
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.
And They live over the sea,
While We live over the way,
But—would you believe it?—They look upon We
As only a sort of They!

(...)
 More >

 And we, who are we anyway?3 comments
picture31 Mar 2004 @ 11:47
And we, who are we anyway?
Plotinus


It happened again: Synchronicity! I was thinking about my good friend R. Little, today, and all the Stuarts Little of the world, and was reflecting about my good friend Flemming Funch's post, The Singularity and the Fifth Dimension (good stuff there), and, what do you know, this book by David Darling (“Zen Physics”) literally landed on my lap and fell open to the following passage:  More >

 Wayfarers1 comment
picture2 Dec 2003 @ 13:19
Photo: EPA

Peace is far too serious to be left exclusively to governments.
— Richard Dreyfuss

 More >

 Wayward4 comments
picture30 Nov 2003 @ 16:40
Photo: Koyaanisqatsi

We live in a world of knowledge and technology aplenty, but one that is clearly lacking in wisdom and spirituality. We are taught to want money, to retire as early as possible, to get ahead whatever the cost to others, to worship at the altar of the self, and to be in control of everything and everyone at all times

But those values are a recipe for extinction, a blueprint for human destruction. They are precisely the values that have destroyed the rainforest, melted the polar ice cap, and deprived peasant farmers of their lands. These values have left babies of color dead in their mothers' bony arms, old women to sleep in public parks, and one out of five preschool children in the United States in poverty. In the richest nation in the world, 20 million are hungry and 40 million have no health insurance.

— Joan Chittister
 More >

 Evolve0 comments
19 Sep 2003 @ 22:38
We live at an unprecedented time

 More >