David Kortava in Harper’s Magazine: At the time [she signed up for a meditation retreat in rural Delaware], Meganâs life was in fluxâshe had just gone through a breakup and decided to move to Utah, where she planned to work on an organic farm. Ten days of meditation sounded restorative, a way of turning the…
Tag: meditation
Writing is meditation. Its value is just doing it.
The current dawning of the Coronacene reframes and underscores an always-salient truth: Real success in writing is just doing it. Just inhabiting the act itself. Just seeing new words appear on the page. “The search for meaning distilled in an act . . . an act of meditation, an act of prayer . . ….
Meditation, the daimon muse, and the I Ching
Several thousand people have now downloaded my free e-book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius (formerly available at Demon Muse, which I have now shut down because of repeated hacks and security breaches). There’s obviously a widespread interest in the idea, experience, and practice of what feels like inner…
Alan Watts: “The Real You”
“It’s absolutely necessary that we let go of ourselves, and it can’t be done, not by anything that we call ‘doing it’ — acting, willing, or even just accepting things. . . . When you look out of your eyes at nature happening ‘out there,’ you’re looking at you. That’s the real you, the you…
Alan Moore: “Writing is a very focused form of meditation”
From an excellent new profile of Alan Moore in The Observer, focusing mainly on his rejection of Hollywood but spinning out into various and sundry areas of deep fascinatingness (as befitting his fascinatingly deep and varied person), a statement regarding the deep intertwinement of magic, consciousness, creativity, and writing: This business of being a practising…
Music, Meditation, and the Skull as a Sound Chamber
The ancient Tibetan metaphysical texts state that all sound is music, all music is mantra, and mantra is the essence of all sound. Through the use of ritual and mantric power, the Tibetans use sound to effect a specific change in the individual and the environment. Mantra is a pattern of sound or sound vibration…
Philosophy as Martial Art in the Shadow of Apocalypse
De Umbris Idearum: the shadows of ideas. Giordano Bruno used this as the title of one of his treatises on the art of memory. As thematic inspiration for this weekly column, the notion of shadows is taken for its most expansive potential. Everything we encounter in the environment is in some way a shadow of…
Silently Witnessing World War III
This morning, not long after sitting for 20 minutes or so of meditation, while I was drinking my coffee and checking my news feeds, I came across a headline announcing “US gives Iran ‘last chance’ warning over shutting down nuclear facility.” Right after that I saw a separate one announcing that “Russia Is Massing Troops…
Fear and trembling in the medical-industrial complex
I’m tempted to exclaim, “Take that, medical-industrial complex! ” On the heels of a recent Atlantic article about the growing mainstream acceptance of “New Age” or alternative medical treatments comes one from The Wall Street Journal about the verifiable benefits of meditation, cognitive therapy, and other psychological interventions for chronic pain. The establishment, naturally, is…
Religious Horror: the burgeoning cultural moment
What an interesting cultural moment it is for somebody like me, who holds an obsessive interest in religion, horror, and the interface between them. For example, it’s widely recognized that zombies have become the monsters of the moment in contemporary horror entertainment. Zombie-themed movies have been flooding movie theatres for the past five or six…