Beautiful dreaming . . .
It's Odin's day . . . and the heat is returning to Okieland …
“Gods and human beings are the co-creators of dreams in the darkness of our mutual sleep.”
The author of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust was born 153 years ago today in 1871 Auteuil, Paris, France.
Traditionally, it’s been thought that not only are sleep and waking opposites, but that they impose a kind of rift, a sharp distinction in time between conscious states, but recent empirical work supports the idea that consciousness takes many forms along a spectrum between sleep and waking.
We travel through our lives as “naive realists” assuming that our experiential reality is – well, real – stable. Our model of reality is, in philosophical terms, “transparent,” so convincing as to be invisible. In this sense, dreams aren’t so different from waking experience: They’re both illusions we take, falsely, to be the real world. – Claire L. Evans, in Noëma online, July 1, 2024.
“Being” is much better definition for what Western science and philosophy sometimes call “non-dual,” which Cynthia Bourgeault says is a “definition from negation.” Rather, for Ms. Bourgeault, “being” is the condition of knowledge impregnated by love. A “liberating re-orientation for our own age.” At the 24th Annual Festival of Faiths: Faith, Science and The Sacred Cosmos, 2015.
For more from Ms. Bourgeault, check out “The Beauty of Chaos” from an “audience with Cynthia Bourgeault” at the Aspen Chapel in February of this year.
Smoke and mirrors
It's Tew's day . . . a warming while lovely summer day in Okieland . . .
Duality manipulation at the mediated core of our culture.
In our ubiquitous mediated environment: I'm sick and tired of the “what if” approach media has taken with Joe Biden's presidency and ongoing candidacy. “What if” is the ultimate anxiety producing question: the answers to “What if” are infinite and immeasurable. Any one of us could drop dead at any moment and certainly “if” the sky were to fall. “If” Joe Biden were to succumb to disablement or death, between today and after his re-election, he immediately would be replaced by the best-of-all-worlds vice-President in Kamala Harris. You don't hear the pundits questioning that fact...beyond, the predictable dualities of her gender and/or her racial heritage – as if she had a choice. The only “what if” that makes any difference whatsoever is the “what if Trump seizes the Presidency again?”
The media addiction to duality reflects our own. They treat everything as if whatever the subject is has only two sides and they are discussed as if they were equal – “fair and balanced” don't you know. Biden and Trump, democrats and MAGA are NOT equivalents in any way – except for their addiction to the duality of apparent “choices”: him/her, yes/no, right/wrong, up/down, good/bad, white/black, rich/poor. Another fave media tool, related to the “iffy,” is the “let's you and him (her) fight so we can watch, where equivalency runs the risk of being put to the lie.
Heather Cox Richardson calls our attention to the MAGA manipulation of the 14th Amendment in Letters from an American.
So, what are we missing? Most everything, it seems. – Tara Brach
Mindfulness isn’t about getting rid of anything or trying to feel better. It's about thinking your way to feeling. Feelings just want to be heard. –
Mindful meditation is an intimate relationship with oneself in which we find we are our own best friend. With our “BFF Bestie” we cannot lie and are open hearted to non-judgmental acceptance of “the good, the bad, the ugly.” Even the hardest Truths are gifts. And, it's all non-dual.
Vote for a blue sky . . .
It's a Moon day . . . with a new one now waxing with thunderstorms headed for TulseyTown this afternoon.
. . . pushing anyone away creates a wall that barricades a small, separate self from others, from the world, from inner freedom. – Tara Brach
Some people are expressing concern that voting won’t matter this November, people saying on social media and in conversations in person that Trump will steal the election or that the courts will. If you’re starting to think this way, Joyce Vance wants you to stop right now.
The Western capitalist mythos of “self-fulfillment” is the root of the artificial and often violent erasure of our interconnectedness and a fundamental logical flaw. – Wendell Berry.
Project 2025 and its document is fast becoming about as popular as Ebola. Toward the end of last week, Joyce Vance posted, as promised, an essay regarding Project 2025. Trump, whose policy outlines are like Xerox copies from the Project 2025 playbook, is just now getting to realize how toxic his association with it has become. – Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse, 5 July 2025.
Polls don't vote. People do. I'm a people. You're a people. Vote, people.