Thursday 16 March 2017

more art of living ...

A stern rebuke arrives from the editor ... advising against diversions into technobabble and rather to return to the A Place to Be theme .... followed by an interesting diversion into .... technobabble:

"which is just Millenials attempting to do something useful and making a Bollox of it. Computing has become horribly complex - not what we were promised or indeed had many years ago when stuff did what it said on the tin and worked. V asked me the other day why we should be bothered about cyber terrorism which would only affect people with remote connection kettles. It shouldn't but those suckers who have their lives run by their phones or tablets should panic big style as the Russians /Chinese /Americans will be trying to get them to run up big utility bills buying the stuff that they can hack and put them in hock for ever.

Ho Ho Ho and all just to be cool,and trendy!"

And, "The art of living is dying young, but as late as possible. There. It's been said. So that one has been put to bed." 

Pithy and with a rhyme, which often helps the prose to flow, though there is much more to explore about this topic. And how pleasing to have other contributors to the blog ... 

Before that, a brief post from 2014 is revisited as the story of the hermit in the woods of Maine gets more detail ... interesting corroboration for the no-self theme of recent posts ...

Recent finds, following the trip to Durham's Oxfam Bookshop, offer rich seams to excavate ... Marcus Arelius' Meditations, often quoted for inspiration, though not so much meditations as guidelines for living a good life .... and deeper and harder to get at, Bede Griffiths' A New Vision of Reality ... rewarding and addressing many of the questions running through these pages ...

One of the Arts of Living is to follow intuition and stay grounded ... Marcus' ethics offering a framework, Griffiths and other mystics pointing to deeper truths ... but a deeper truth doesn't make the less deep one untrue and it is possible to lose the ground by going too deep too soon ... new insights need embodying before moving on ... David Bowie offers some wise advice about working just beyond the comfort zone ...

On FB this morning information about a course at Findhorn Foundation College "Diploma in Practical Spirituality and Wellness" tutored by William Bloom and accredited by Ofqual ... raising a raft of questions about authenticity in teaching the immeasurable within the reductionist paradigm of measuring ... a practical question for A Place to Be and its Retreat Centre ... and embracing paradoxical thinking to accept that some assurance of competence is helpful in any subject, whilst recognising that many highly qualified teachers have turned out to be frauds, incompetent or downright dangerous. Perhaps published customer feedback may help, as in Trip Advisor etc, though open to manipulation ... one to explore, like all the best paradoxes ... and in the psycho-therapeutic and spiritual domains the personal relationship the key ...


No comments:

Post a Comment