Category / Agora
Music I’ve Loved : 7
Hormone Train, All Aboard
I’m thinking soon to do a WP hiatus, six to twelve months, to work on a book of short stories. Here is one I’ll likely include; it’s first version is four or five years old, but I will do some minor polishing. I’d been thinking about the shitshow that dating has become in the web era, especially for young people who never experienced a purely un-virtual adolescence. Then… I had a strange dream that night, similar to this sci-fi lite tale, situated in the middle of the 2030s.
Asking the Baker for Surgery
Suppose you were confused or just plain curious as to the reality of human free will. Where would be a reasonable starting point to look into this topic? And where would likely be a clusterfuck waste of your precious time?
Music I’ve Loved : 6
Meditation On Chalk
There is a subtle distancing effect which our numerous online devices and other technologies foist upon our minds regarding the world of everyday objects. Left unchecked, we develop a disregard and disinterest in things and their nature, reflected in the disposable stance many ‘movers and shakers’ adopt towards articles of utility. But imagine if the surrounding world of objects could be reunited with their rightful depths of significance, qualities, and history! Suppose you had to think ONLY about a piece of chalk, to take a mundane example, for 10 full minutes. How difficult would it be, and what could be recovered?
Beyond Mindfulness
Do This Before Waking
There is a country with exceedingly fuzzy borders we all traverse and meander about each night between definitely awake and definitely not awake. Dream state consciousness researchers call this fluctuating interim the hypnogogic condition. But there is also hypogogia: the transition phase between not yet awake and awake every morning. An equally evasive experience, but easier to empirically study on one’s own, I find. Whoever explores this persistently can more easily catch pictures of how altered consciousness looks, because the mental energy is increasing and refreshed in the mornings as opposed to night times. It is a matter of building technique…
Whither the Faithful?
Clairvoyance in Mark’s Gospel
I want to open a space in your imagination concerning the Gospel of Mark. A vessel of considerations for a different way to think about what concepts like ‘revelation’, ‘salvation’, and the entire idea of religious striving means. I hold that the usual and widespread way of looking at these sorts of things are extrememly unfortunate and guarantee confusion. We’ve been sold a bogus conceptual framework by the ‘experts’, the theologians, evangelical pastors and institutions espousing church dogmas. Often but not always this falseness has been inadvertant. The remedy for this must be individual and entirely reject anything smacking of received authority.
