Stretching the Mind
"#15 Yoga: Though its roots are in India, the global tree of Yoga has most of its branches in rich white neighborhoods. Yoga has been so thoroughly embraced by white people because it requires large amounts of money and time, two things that white people have a lot of.
"Yoga is essentially stretching with guidance. Advanced Yoga is just regular Yoga done in a very hot room.
"You might think that since Yoga is such a minimalist activity, it can be done almost anywhere. But you would be wrong. Yoga must take place on hardwood floors at a studio. Exposed beams are generally believed to enhance Yoga experiences by 40 percent.
"Being non-competitive, you might think that Yoga can just be done in any type of clothes that allow for a full range of motion; again you would be wrong. Yoga is much more than just an activity, it is a chance to showcase $80 pants that are tailor-made for the rigors of Yoga.
"And last, but not least, Yoga feels exotic and foreign. It has become sort of like a religion that prizes flexibility and expensive clothes. Also, deep down, white people feel that their participation makes up for years of colonial rule in India."
~ From the book Stuff White People Like
Can you seek answers to your deepest questions without paying $80 for attire?
Inner Wakefulness
This place is a dream
only a sleeper considers it real
then death comes like dawn
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought
was your grief
A man goes to sleep in the town
where he has always lived
and he dreams
he's living in another town
in the dream he doesn't remember
the town he's sleeping in his bed in
he believes the reality
of the dream town
the world is that kind of sleep
Humankind is being led
along an evolving course,
through this migration
of intelligences
and though we seem
to be sleeping
there is an inner wakefulness,
that directs the dream
and that will eventually
startle us back
to the truth of
who we are
~ By, Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)
What do you consider real?
The Beginning of All Real Knowledge
"The knowledge of even the wisest of all men, if communicated to us, will be to us nothing more than an opinion, as long as it is not experienced within our own selves. As long as we cannot penetrate within the soul of Man, we can know little more about him but his corporeal form; but how could we penetrate within the soul of another as long as we do not know our own? Therefore the beginning of all real knowledge is the knowledge of Self; the knowledge of the Soul and not the vagaries of the brain."
~ Franz Hartmann, Magic White & Black
What do you really know?
There's Someone In My Head, But It's Not Me
"And then there's your brain. Three pounds of the most complex material we've discovered in the universe. This is the mission control center that drives the whole operation, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armored bunker of the skull.
"Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia--hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city. And each one contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.
"The cells are connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
"The three-pound organ in your skull--with its pink consistency of Jell-o--is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet."
~ Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, by David Eagleman
I Wished To Live Deliberately
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
~ Henry David Thoreau, from Walden
Inner Messenger
"Your inner mind is constantly trying to get your outer self aware of what's going on within yourself until you've answered to that need. It keeps throwing balls over the fence."
~ Jim Burns, from At Home With the Inner Self
Is your Inner Self trying to get your attention on something and it's not getting through?
