Giggles = More + New + Math + . + Com

I received a great link on one of my feeds this Tuesday: http://www.morenewmath.com/all/

I love the hilarious social commentary, but to capture it all in basic formulae is an extraordinarily cheeky touch.

;-D

At work, dreaming of a bodhi tree...

.

Shinzen Young on the Teasing Apart of the Senses in Mindfulness Meditation

"…when we have this unblocked experience of the six senses and they produce their wave, this actually is not the complete experience of the Source. There's one final step in the reduction. And that takes place when the waves cancel out. And there is a moment of true peace. Not peace in the sense that the mind has stopped thinking. But peace in the sense that all of the expansive and contractive forces that can create this or any universe have come together. And in their coming together they have drawn the richness of this and all conceivable universes, drawn them back into a state that is a cancellation of positive and negative. So it is a kind of nothing, but contains all the positive and negative. So it is at the same time, an everything."

Thanks to C4 for this.

The evidentiary burden of poetry...

"A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof." 

- Rene Char

(thanks again @williamharryman for this)

Samson

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth
I have to go, I have to go
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
He ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed
And history books forgot about us and the bible didn't mention us
And the bible didn't mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the stars came fallin' on our heads
But they're just old light, they're just old light
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
Told me I was beautiful and came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light
And he told me that I'd done alright
And kissed me 'til the mornin' light, the mornin' light
And he kissed me 'til the mornin' light

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
Ate a slice of wonderbread and went right back to bed
Oh, we couldn't bring the columns down
Yeah we couldn't destroy a single one
And history books forgot about us
And the bible didn't mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first

Happy Endings - Garden State

What are you thinking about?   
 - You're not coming back, are you? - Come on, Sam.  
 - Of course I am. - No, you're not.  
 You don't realize this is good. This doesn't happen often.  
 In your life, you know? I mean, this...  
 We can work this stuff out.  
 I want to help you, you know?  
 We need each other. I haven't even lied in, like, two days.  
 Is that true?  
 - No.   
 Look, this isn't...  
 This isn't a conversation about this being over.  
 It's... It's...  
 I'm not puttin' a period at the end of this, you know?  
 I'm puttin', like, an ellipsis on it.  
 Because I'm-I'm worried that if I don't go figure myself out...  
 if I don't go, like, land on my own two feet...  
 then I'm gonna fuck this whole thing up, and this is too important.  
 I gotta go. l...  
 Gotta go.  
 I fired my psychiatrist. I gotta go find a new one.  
 Look, I'm gonna call you when I get there.  
 I'm gonna call you.  
 Look at me.  
 Look at me.  
 You changed my life.  
 You changed my life, and I've known you four days.  
 This is the beginning of something really big.  
 But right now, I gotta go.  
 Come here.  
 Final boarding call for all...   
 Take your seats as quickly as possible.   
 - What are you doing? - Remember that idea I had about working stuff out on my own...  
 - and then finding you once I figured stuff out? - The ellipsis?  
 Yeah. The ellipsis. It's dumb. It's dumb. It's an awful idea.  
 And I'm not gonna do it, okay? 'Cause like you said, this is it.  
 This is life...  
 and I'm in love with you, Samantha.  
 I think that's the only thing I've ever been really sure of in my entire life.  
 I'm really messed up now, and I got a lot of stuff I gotta work out.  
 But I don't want to waste any more of my life without you in it, okay?  
 - Yeah. - And I think I can do this! I mean, I want to.  
 - We have to, right? - Yeah!  
 - Right? - Yes!  
 So what do we do?  
 What do we do?

Between Loss and Nothingness

They’ll ask me how I am, and I’ll assure them I’m doing well. I’ll deliver an implausible performance, and they’ll pretend not to notice.

Silently we’ll all share my absence. Without allusion to this or any other inconvenient disturbance, we’ll somehow all feast in this smouldering farrago of unanswered questions and unquestioned answers.

Somehow. What remains clear to the mind is lost to the heart. Why not then remain truly silent? What compels this insufferable murmur?

We will feast on these burnt offerings, but my hunger for her touch will remain. Entirely illicit, its every cut bleeds across me and into the ravenous torment of memory.

Memories of us. Of a singular hope. Now fading into sense. Into char, scorch. Into this, that. Into what, and who, and, of course, how.

But never, anymore, now. Just now. I would give the nothing I have left to know that adoration. A childlike prayer for innocent perfection. The gift of skin and breath, beyond the assurance of time’s defilements, or at least together in the warmth of unspoiled ignorance.

But the coals have gone out. The reborn eyes of the known see more than the tortured lens of my mortal desires, and their every cut bleeds across me and into the rapacious void of what is unavoidable truth.

No solace will be found here. I know that much. I’ll sit, desolate, aimless, alone amongst friends. And she will sit similar, dreaming of that corner of the universe which only arises between us. And we’ll believe time to be our only balm. And starved we will remain. Adrift. Beyond the reach of hand, but not of hope.

Where's my iPhone?

"Every muscle aching..."

Metaphysical Mistake. The Question: Should we believe in belief?

Metaphysical Mistake
Confusion by Christians between belief and reason has created bad science and inept religion

Karen Armstrong
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 12 July 2009 20.00 BST
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

The extraordinary and eccentric emphasis on "belief" in Christianity today is an accident of history that has distorted our understanding of religious truth. We call religious people "believers", as though acceptance of a set of doctrines was their principal activity, and before undertaking the religious life many feel obliged to satisfy themselves about the metaphysical claims of the church, which cannot be proven rationally since they lie beyond the reach of empirical sense data.

Most other traditions prize practice above creedal orthodoxy: Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do, and that you cannot understand the truths of faith unless you are committed to a transformative way of life that takes you beyond the prism of selfishness. All good religious teaching – including such Christian doctrines as the Trinity or the Incarnation – is basically a summons to action. Yet instead of being taught to act creatively upon them, many modern Christians feel it is more important to "believe" them. Why?

In most pre-modern cultures, there were two recognised ways of attaining truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were crucial and each had its particular sphere of competence. Logos ("reason; science") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to control our environment and function in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external realities. But logos could not assuage human grief or give people intimations that their lives had meaning. For that they turned to mythos, an early form of psychology, which dealt with the more elusive aspects of human experience.

Stories of heroes descending to the underworld were not regarded as primarily factual but taught people how to negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche. In the same way, the purpose of a creation myth was therapeutic; before the modern period no sensible person ever thought it gave an accurate account of the origins of life. A cosmology was recited at times of crisis or sickness, when people needed a symbolic influx of the creative energy that had brought something out of nothing. Thus the Genesis myth, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion, was balm to the bruised spirits of the Israelites who had been defeated and deported by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar during the sixth century BCE. Nobody was required to "believe" it; like most peoples, the Israelites had a number of other mutually-exclusive creation stories and as late as the 16th century, Jews thought nothing of making up a new creation myth that bore no relation to Genesis but spoke more directly to their tragic circumstances at that time.

Above all, myth was a programme of action. When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life and the way our humanity worked, even if its insights, like those of art, could not be proven rationally. If you did not act upon it, it would remain as incomprehensible and abstract – like the rules of a board game, which seem impossibly convoluted, dull and meaningless until you start to play.

Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

But during the modern period, scientific logos became so successful that myth was discredited, the logos of scientific rationalism became the only valid path to truth, and Newton and Descartes claimed it was possible to prove God's existence, something earlier Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians had vigorously denied. Christians bought into the scientific theology, and some embarked on the doomed venture of turning their faith's mythos into logos.

It was during the late 17th century, as the western conception of truth became more notional, that the word "belief" changed its meaning. Previously, bileve meant "love, loyalty, commitment". It was related to the Latin libido and used in the King James Bible to translate the Greek pistis ("trust; faithfulness; involvement"). In demanding pistis, therefore, Jesus was asking for commitment not credulity: people must give everything to the poor, follow him to the end, and commit totally to the coming Kingdom.

By the late 17th century, however, philosophers and scientists had started to use "belief" to mean an intellectual assent to a somewhat dubious proposition. We often assume "modern" means "superior", and while this is true of science and technology, our religious thinking is often undeveloped. In the past, people understood it was unwise to confuse mythos with logos, but today we read the mythoi of scripture with an unparalleled literalism, and in "creation science" we have bad science and inept religion. The question is: how can we extricate ourselves from the religious cul-de-sac we entered about 300 years ago?

A Doll's House

Letting Go

I'm a Bad Bad Boy...

Bad boy names
July 14, 2009 - 10:01AM
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/bad-boy-names-20090714-dja0.html

Boys growing up with popular names such as Michael, Joshua and Christopher have a good chance of leading law-abiding lives.

But young men named Kareem, Walter or Ivan could run afoul of the law.

That's according to a recent US study that claims the more unpopular, uncommon or feminine a boy's first name, the greater the chance he will end up behind bars.

While Shippensburg University professor David Kalist's report in Social Science Quarterly shows that "unpopular names are likely not the cause of crime," he explains that factors often associated with those names can "increase the tendency toward juvenile delinquency."

Boys with unpopular, girlish or uncommon names often are ridiculed by peers, come from families of low socioeconomic status and face discrimination in the workforce based on a preconceived bias about their names, according to the study, which analysed more than 15,000 names.

Jay Corzine, chairman of the University of Central Florida's sociology department, said, "Some kids could have a name that leads to teasing and being picked on and, in return, that child could become aggressive with others."

Top 10 bad-boy names

Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell, Walter.

KKKFC

A Work, In Progress

The waves refract
lightforms against
the foam ceiling and
airconditioner vents
defiantly entertaining
an otherwise vacant hour
yet feebily binding me
to the memories of a
distant life lived before
my hours became
my only commodity.

If his humanity
was apparent
I’d love to know
if he was ogling
the expanse from
his harbour view
or the shallower
waters in his reflection.

NineTenths

23/25! The plan continues...

I'm Explaining a Few Things - Pablo Neruda

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharpmeasure of life,
stacked-up fish,the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

- Pablo Neruda, I'm explaining a few things (1936)

Careless

Vindan and His Voodoo Chile

Constitutional Recognition of LGBT Rights in India

I was touched this morning as reports fed through that the High Court in Delhi has held that homosexual intercourse between consenting adults is not a criminal act.  The Court found that a 148-year-old colonial law which describes LGBT relationships as an "unnatural offence" was discriminatory and a "violation of fundamental rights".

I was moved to read much of the Chief Justice's judgement, to garner a better sense of the legal basis of this 'fundamental right'.  Turns out that the petitioner, the Naz Foundation (an NGO working in the field of HIV/AIDS Intervention and prevention) got up on a spectacularly progressive constitutional argument that Section 377 of the relevant Indian penal code "based upon traditional Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards, which conceive of sex in purely functional terms, i.e., for the purpose of procreation only" renders "Any non-procreative sexual activity thus viewed as being "against the order of nature"" and as such "the legislation criminalising consensual oral and anal sex is outdated and has no place in modern society".

The Chief Justice delivered a politically philosophical judgement in favour of the Naz Foundation. He quoted some eloquent Indian precedent establishing the importance of a review function in the separation of democratic powers:

"The role of the judiciary is to protect the fundamental  rights.  A modern democracy while based on the principle of majority rule implicitly recognizes the need to protect the fundamental rights of those who may dissent or deviate from the majoritarian view.  It is the job of the judiciary to balance the principles ensuring that the government on the basis of number does not override fundamental rights.  After the enunciation of the basic structure doctrine, full judicial review is an integral part of the constitutional scheme.  To quote the words of Krishna Iyer, J. "... The compulsion of constitutional humanism and the assumption of full faith in life and liberty cannot be so futile or fragmentary that any transient legislative majority in tantrums against any minority by three quick readings of a Bill with the requisite quorum, can prescribe any unreasonable modality and thereby sterilise the grandiloquent mandate.""

It was from this plateau that the constitutional argument proceeded, and as is always the case with these leading decisions, a gorgeous archaeology of the political ideals of a nation's founders is offered to substantiate the judgement.  In his closing judgement, the Chief Justice appealed to foundational statements made by Jawaharlal Nehru about the need to avoid a positivist interpretation of the Indian Constitution:

"The notion of equality in the Indian Constitution flows from the 'Objective Resolution' moved by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on December 13, 1946.  Nehru, in his speech, moving this Resolution wished that the House should consider the Resolution not in a spirit of narrow legal wording, but rather look at the spirit behind that Resolution. He said, "Words are magic things often enough, but even the magic of words sometimes cannot convey the magic of the human spirit and of a Nation's passion…….. (The Resolution) seeks very feebly to tell the world of what we have thought or dreamt of so long, and what we now hope to achieve in the near future." [Constituent  Assembly Debates:  Lok Sabha Secretariat, New Delhi: 1999, Vol. I, pages 57-65]."

He then went on to deliver a powerful endorsement of LGBT human rights by by grounding them as part of the fundamental inclusiveness of socio-cultural participation enshrined in the Indian constitution:

"If there is one constitutional tenet that can be said to be underlying theme of the Indian Constitution, it is that of 'inclusiveness'. This Court believes that Indian Constitution reflects this value deeply ingrained in Indian society,  nurtured over several generations. The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognising a role in society for everyone.  Those perceived by the majority as "deviants' or 'different' are not on that score excluded or ostracised. 

Where society can display inclusiveness and understanding, such persons can be assured of a life of dignity and non-discrimination. This was the 'spirit behind the Resolution' of which Nehru spoke so passionately. In our view, Indian Constitutional law does not permit the statutory criminal law to be held captive by the popular misconceptions of who the LGBTs are.  It cannot be forgotten that discrimination is anti-thesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster the dignity of every individual". 

I don't think this will be the last we'll hear of this judgement as it moves around judicial review, but it nonetheless sends a clear message that LGBT rights are best conceived as constitutionally founded in a nation which will need to take a lead in social justice as it continues to become more globally prominent and economically prosperous.

"Egos out of ids, and sages out if egos"...

"Where it was, there shall I become"

- Sigmund Freud

Sent from my iPhone

Red Bubble Account

I've just created an account on arts network RedBubble.

Come play with me at http://www.redbubble.com/people/lukefullagar

I See

The Knee of Listening

"The seeker is violent. At first he approaches the man of understanding humbly, self-effacing, with great need. But his questions find no ultimate solution. He becomes frustrated and angry, and he leaves. He criticizes the man of understanding. He asserts the forms of his own seeking. He says the man of understanding is a seeker like himself."

- Franklin Jones, who later became guru Adi Da Samaraj