AMERICA IS A PLACE WHERE Jewish merchants sell Zen love beads to agnostics for Christmas.”
— John Burton Brimer
Category: ?
Free of labels, which is also a good attitude.
Chanukah With Ramana
THE TECHNIQUE IS SIMPLE: just lay on your back, breathing evenly, and take a complete and negative bodily inventory: “I am not my legs; I am not my feet; I am not my arms;” “I am not my mind;” et al.
Now: What’s left after everything else is taken away?
This admittedly (and deceptively) simple exercise comes from Ramana Maharshi, an inadvertent Hindu holyman whose “Self-realization” technique resulted in one of the great spiritual experiences of my life.
In the early 2000s, on the sixth night of Chanukah (our Festival of Lights), my copilot and I were honored to play host to a famous “New Age” rabbi (“R”). I also invited along a filmmaker (“F”) of my acquaintance, who had long wanted me to meet R; he arrived with a Hindu friend of his (“H”), and you may imagine our delight and surprise when R told us that F was his own beloved teacher!
R and we were anticipating a small crowd in our apartment, but the only guests were the sparse handful I just described. So the session turned into a metaphysical round-robin between R, F and H of various Eastern and Western spiritual figures. When one of them mentioned Ramana’s name, the trio became very animated and described the holyman’s negation-of-thought technique which, upon my own diligent practice later that night, produced a most startling and profound awakening.
My word-busy mind dropped away to reveal a deep connection to the wordless Source of all consciousness – a perception of the unspoken silence between one thought and another – an all-encompassing peace of mind – a vision of the vast and intimate Self beyond the ego, beyond even the apparent separation of one thing from another.
Even now, years later, I still can’t adequately describe what happened. (Which is, kind of, the point.) Time’s passage has almost dulled the experience’s immediacy, but not its effect, which inspired in me a fierce non-dualism (or if you prefer, an undying all-is-One-ism) – and which makes me happy, and grounded, every time I recall it.
Thanks, Ramana. Apparently, that’s just what I needed.
The #popscope Phenomenon
AFTER I BOUGHT MY OWN telescope (an Orion StarMax 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain with equatorial mount), I would take it out in the early evenings on the sidewalk in front of our building with a sign leaning against the tripod that read, “FREE MOON TRIPS!” If anyone happened by (as they often did,) I would ask them, “Would you like to see the Moon?” Almost everyone did, and I took great pleasure in their gasps of awe as they saw up-close lunar craters for perhaps the first time.
Something of the same spirit infuses the nascent #popscope movement. Continue reading “The #popscope Phenomenon”
“Everybody Have a Nagila!”
IT’S THE WORLD’S SINGLE MOST recognizable Jewish song — covered by such luminaries as Harry Belafonte and Dick Dale — yet its genesis may surprise you. Another fine contribution from myjewishlearning dot com…
Now, More Than Ever
Leadership is not about the next election, it’s about the next generation.”
— Anon.
The Treachery of Elections
Click image to enlarge; if you need an explanation of the punchline, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images.
And now, suitably inspired, GO YE FORTH AND VOTE. (This charade has gone on long enough.)
You Too Can Be a Citizen Scientist!
IT’S CALLED ZOONIVERSE — AND IT’S revolutionizing science as we know it.
Modern scientists (like the rest of us) live in an age of Big Data: zillions and zillions of units of information, too many for one person to effectively process. Enter Zooniverse, which for the past several years has been dragooning legions of interested volunteers to sift through hundreds of data-dumps in order to match patterns that a computer can’t — classifying galaxies, say, or rain-forest flowers, or a British census, or Beluga whales, or African wildlife, or other projects in such fields as climate science, history, biology, medicine, the arts, language and many more. Continue reading “You Too Can Be a Citizen Scientist!”
Well, He Did
DRIVING THROUGH SONOMA RECENTLY, I spied what may be the funniest, most secretly famous vanity plate ever devised. It was a California plate bearing the simple, six-character legend:
HAN 1ST
(If you need this explained, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first.)
By the way — you have just read The Metaphorager’s 700th post. It was a long trip from http://www.sonic.net/scoop to blogger.com to “here;” in that vein, I offer my very first blog post. Enjoy!
Obligatory Notice
— click to enlarge —
Why I Love: Geology
IT’S THE SMELL OF THE rocks. It’s knowing what everything on the surface is sitting on. It’s the finding of hand-samples. (It’s also the finding of fossils.) It’s the divisions of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. It’s the appreciation of Deep Time. It’s the walking-about in nature. It’s that every rocky layer is a page in a vast book. It’s the feel of obsidian and chert and soapstone. It’s knowing the Mohs scale. It’s using the Mohs scale. It’s that the raw ingredients are made out of stardust. It’s literally seeing the connection-to-everything-else. Continue reading “Why I Love: Geology”
Live Long and Proffer
THE FIRST SOLO BAY AREA excursion I made after my mom and I moved to Walnut Creek in August 1977 was a trip to the aptly named Federation Trading Post, a Berkeley specialty store selling all sorts of Star Trek merchandise.
It was my second brush with official fandom of any sort. When I still lived back East, I had attended the 1975 Boston Star Trek convention, where my 13-year-old mind was blown by a hotel full of people who all suffered from the same obsession I did. Oh, I had it bad. Continue reading “Live Long and Proffer”
365 Names of God: The Beloved
THE BELOVED is most commonly a Sufi term, but not exclusively so. The idea of God as Lover may be outre to some, but the connotation of passion and all-involvement is a powerful one for many mystics (including the author of the Biblical Song of Songs). Some say the challenge of living with the mysterious mind of a spouse is perfect training for living with the mysterious Mind of God. Continue reading “365 Names of God: The Beloved”