To remember: those extraordinary days last week. Cold enough to mandate a fire in the office stove through the day. Bright sunshine, "very dry air" according to the weather forecast. Patchy frost on the windscreen on the second morning; air too dry (?) to form the same thick covering as the first morning. Blue skies and then a bright moon. Very active days and a perspective that made so much of January look dark. The way a day might look if seen from a cave, but seen from outside the cave. How the cave would look then.
Conversation yesterday about the curious certainties of public scientists, rejecting the spiritual with the same conviction as they would have used to reject the idea that the earth goes round the sun. Why did that come up (again)? Yes - talking about the place of the spiritual in a grounded, engaged, busy rational life. And then talking about the curious workings of human nature on belief systems. The names attached to the divisions made in enlightenment by Buddhism. And the transition from the teachings of a carpenter's son to bishops in vestments on Sunday mornings. Graven images, depictions of the Prophet.
Long drives each way, music, meditative mood. Memories; passing places not often seen outside memory. These places aren't there any more, they're somewhere else. There are birds talking outside the closed door of this rather chilly office. The fire next. I wonder if there is a counterpart to "as above, so below" to "as without, so within": dark/light; secular spiritual; the world as seen. At some level, or at every level, what my perception brings to me is a story of myself. Discuss. In silence. There is a role for structure, for ritual, for discipline, but it is lines painted on freedom. Leave them as ink.
Conversation yesterday about the curious certainties of public scientists, rejecting the spiritual with the same conviction as they would have used to reject the idea that the earth goes round the sun. Why did that come up (again)? Yes - talking about the place of the spiritual in a grounded, engaged, busy rational life. And then talking about the curious workings of human nature on belief systems. The names attached to the divisions made in enlightenment by Buddhism. And the transition from the teachings of a carpenter's son to bishops in vestments on Sunday mornings. Graven images, depictions of the Prophet.
Long drives each way, music, meditative mood. Memories; passing places not often seen outside memory. These places aren't there any more, they're somewhere else. There are birds talking outside the closed door of this rather chilly office. The fire next. I wonder if there is a counterpart to "as above, so below" to "as without, so within": dark/light; secular spiritual; the world as seen. At some level, or at every level, what my perception brings to me is a story of myself. Discuss. In silence. There is a role for structure, for ritual, for discipline, but it is lines painted on freedom. Leave them as ink.
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