It’s well worth taking some time to… ponder the idea that we consist not just of one single ‘I’ but of a large number of ‘I’s that constantly compete for attention. For example, the reader may well now be in Reading-these-words-I but also feeling the urge to get into Wondering-what-the-first sentence-means-for-them-I while being dominated by […]
I woke this morning (15th April 2022) to the sound of all the chaffinches in the world exchanging pleasantries across the dyke, over the fields and through the forest, and it occurred to me that a model I’ve used to inform my own life would work very well as a way of thinking about Jefferies, […]
In the same dark corner where I found Living by Zen I discovered another book by DTSuzuki – Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism. Alan Watts did the introduction and wrote about the cultivation of intellectual silence when desirable ‘to be aware of whatever happens to be, without thinking about it, without forming words & symbols in […]
In Grateful Memory of David McAndrew The title page of the very old essay that started me off with this Glob, done with a hand-propelled typewriter, ribbon clearly on its way out, which I have scanned and laboriously corrected with the aid of the Optical Character Recognition facility that snuffles away in the maw […]
Words matter; the linguistic make-up of discourse is all-important… One of the reasons for… lack of understanding… is to be found in the language which people speak. This language is full of wrong concepts, wrong classifications, wrong associations. And the chief thing is that… the vagueness and inaccuracy of ordinary thinking happens because every word […]
I was in the course of writing this Glob when I heard of the death of my mate Ed Percival (of Shirlaws); it would have appealed to him: we were such different kettles of fish – there must have been some special something-or-other that ensured our great success as a team of two running NLP […]
So often one hears, “I can’t draw…” “I can’t write…” “I can’t figure this out…” Many adherents of the Gurdjieff canon have a general belief that human beings are simply unable to DO anything because there’s a belief that we are asleep, not in control of our lives. Certainly any attempt to DO is futile […]
Book-learning often has a bad press. Mere book-learning, they spit out between pursed lips… But it’s worth asking exactly what one does get from books… The short answer might be that it depends what you do with the words you ingest. The longer answer is, perhaps, that it all depends on what is happening to […]
(For Sarah—for mentioning Montaigne during an Enneagram workshop) For some strange reason, ‘Christmas’ offers many people an opportunity for a peculiar kind of celebration which seems to entail spending vast amounts of money. Over ‘Christmas’ 2011 I decided I’d celebrate in a peculiar manner by re-reading the selected essays of Michel de Montaigne. I first […]
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