What is the Purpose of ‘The Work’? A good question to ask is—What is the purpose of anything? When the superlative English artist Ben Nicholson was challenged to explain the purpose of his more abstract paintings he said, “When you see a tree in the middle of a field you don’t go asking what its […]
In relation to the Figure of Eight (see 30th November 2011) it might be wondered how we are to keep ourselves at the fertile point of stasis at the centre of the Figure? The place where maximum energy is accumulated… Where self-remembering is at its most intense… What is there in us that is almost […]
In the rush of everyday life we forget ourselves; we forget who we are; on waking in the morning we get into the habitual comfortable position that we adopt towards what we anticipate are going to be the events of the day and promptly fall asleep into them as we identify with all the outstanding […]
The dynamic concept of the Figure of Eight was introduced in my Blog ‘Somatic Markers’ dated 16th November. The bottom half of the Figure of Eight represents the ground of our being—core self—that which we can become more aware of in meditative exercises of one kind or another: the rush of blood in the ears, […]
It’s often recommended that in order to operate effectively at all levels in the world one needs to be firmly in the present moment. The recommendation often comes without practical guidance. A pleasant and painfree way to be firmly in the present is to write haiku. The habit of haiku-writing keeps one centred in the […]
The Figure of Eight When I first read The Feeling of Now by Antonio Damasio, working hard to understand what seemed absorbing but rather dense, I doodled a diagram in order to get things into some perspective. The basic Figure of Eight construction I started with remains, but it’s undergone several changes since I first […]
… we imagine that we are awake, that we are conscious: of course, you’ll say, we’d have to be awake and conscious to make sense of what we are reading right now. Not so: we are asleep. Or at least you were till you started reading this and then you woke up a little for […]
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