Benji
@benji
Benji
Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
• It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step.
• An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely…
• I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words.
• Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles.
• I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability…
• We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a rich and abiding confluence.
For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle... See more
Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events—such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions—happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is
... See moreMihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
As Girard once said: “There are fundamentally only two ways of looking at religion: as superfluous, added on—or as the origin of everything.” If there can be no in-between, I suspect that like Girard, Thiel sees religion as the origin of everything.
David Perell • Peter Thiel’s Religion
Challenging imposed narratives of doom by using anomalous phenomena and awe to reopen our sense of possibility
TRANSCRIPT
That's the same thing these magical moments, these inklings of awe, reconnections to each other, or the divine, or the everything. That's what they do.
They're like the deja vu that helps Neo recognize a glitch in the Matrix, or when Katniss shoots an arrow at the sky in Hunger Games to reveal it's just a dome.
Despite all evidence to the contrary,
... See moreCHROMAKOPIA
open.spotify.com"For you, the Grail."
newsletter.theleading-edge.org
• When we’re using technology, other practitioners or psychedelics we urgently need to consider the impact on our free will.
• Who is doing the work? When Jung was asked about psychedelics he warned us to “beware unearned wisdom.”
• Then afterwards, who is interpreting the results for you?
• How embodied and integrated is the wisdom received?
• The distractive potential of tech is well understood.
• But as we move into an era of increasingly advanced consciousness tech, the risk is that we accidentally outsource the development of our souls.
Nonduality has become a popular teaching in the contemporary spiritual field. Although there are varying, conflicting perspectives and practices now offered as nonduality, these teachings also have important elements in common. They all view human beings as intrinsically endowed with the means to understand or even to realize the primary nature of
... See morePh.D Judith Blackstone • The Fullness of the Ground: A Guide to Embodied Awakening
Psychedelic Judaism is going to win
jellomenorah.com
• In my favorite talk of the entire symposium, Sam Shonkoff described two modes of connecting with history. The first mode claims that drugs played a role in advancing Judaism—for example, that hassidic Judaism was boosted by poor Jews eating ergot-filled rye bread (ergot being chemically related to LSD). These claims are tenuous at best and have little to provide modern Jewish psychedelic users beyond some modicum of validation.
• Instead, Shonkoff argued, the more common move is to make a hermeneutical claim: my ancestors may not have tripped on shrooms, but I can understand them because I tripped on shrooms. The biggest public advocate of this idea was Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, whose LSD trip with Timothy Leary could reasonably be said to have inaugurated psychedelic Judaism. For Zalman, psychedelics offered moderns a way to get in touch with the past, even if that past didn’t involve psychedelics, and even if we’ll inevitably project ourselves onto the past that we’re retrieving. Like so many previous generations, psychedelic Judaism willfully and enthusiastically injects itself into our shared history. What could be more authentically Jewish than that?
• But, as some of the other speakers noted, there’s actually a third mode: the Jewish history of altered states of consciousness. This mode encompasses mystical texts in which the senses become mixed (discussed by Eliot Wolfson and Nathaniel Berman). It might also include Biblical and Talmudic sources that point to drumming-induced trance states, as well as female-run vineyard rituals (argued by Jill Hammer). Most usefully, it could even include the real-but-obscure history of Jewish shamans (ba’alei shem), whose use of esoteric rituals, intricate ceremonies, and herbal medicines was importantly raised up by Yosef Rosen (much of this tradition died off when medical schools began accepting Jewish students).
• This flourishing, moreover, has a clear path to maturation. It’s so straightforward, in fact, that I can spell it out in broad strokes right here, in no particular order:
• Create a suite of definitive studies on the history of Jewish psychedelic use, consciousness alteration, and practical guides (some of these are already in the works!)
• Fund research teams on Judaism and psychedelics
• Establish mechanisms for cultural exchange between American and Israeli psychedelic users
• Encourage experimentation with psychedelic-boosted Jewish rituals, both communal and individual
• Design and expand trainings for facilitators and trip sitters
• Collect oral histories of Jewish psychedelic use from the 1950s until today
• Further develop informal online networks, as well as regional networks
• Draft a statement of principles for psychedelic Judaism
• Publish guidelines for safe use
• Develop Jewish thought about addiction
• Create pedagogical tools for communities with little exposure to psychedelics, so that they can appreciate them intellectually and/or try them if interested (coercion is never okay)
• Devise strategies for engagement with major rabbinic institutions
• Establish a national organization to link all the people in the psychedelic Judaism space and perhaps do public advocacy