love

WHISPERS OF LOVE

Lover whispers to my ear,
"Better to be a prey than a hunter.
Make yourself My fool.
Stop trying to be the sun and become a speck!
Dwell at My door and be homeless.
Don't pretend to be a candle, be a moth,
so you may taste the savor of Life
and know the power hidden in serving."

Mathnawi V. 411-414 (translated by Kabir Helminski)
The Rumi Collection, Edited by Kabir Helminski

pangolin

In pangolins, the section of the brain that relates to problem solving is highly developed. Although their problem solving ability is primarily used to find food in obscure locations, when kept in captivity pangolins are remarkable escape artists

Ben Abuyah and learning

Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah used to say:

“Those who are open to life’s lessons and who nurture no prejudices are like a blank sheet of paper on which God writes his words with divine ink

“Those who are always looking on the world with cynicism and prejudice are like a sheet of paper already written upon and on which there is no room for new words.

“Don’t bother about what you already know, or what you don’t know. Don’t think about the past or the future, just let the divine hands write down each day the surprises of the present”.

human friendship

Without a net, I catch a falcon
and release it to the sky, hunting

You. This wine I drink today was
never held in a clay jar. I love

this world, even as I hear the great
wind of leaving it rising, for there

is a grainy taste I prefer to every
idea of heaven: human friendship.

- Rumi

I had forgotten I had a blog.

I should remember lots of things from when I was at school - it was long ago and I don't. I don't remember any comments made on my own essays. Largely I don't remember what I wrote in them but I do remember that I once 'borrowed' an essay and at the top was written in red:

A. Excellentos Fray Bentos

Perhaps it had been a catch phrase some years earlier but it was sufficiently strange by that time to get lodged somewhere in my head and I have from time to time wondered why it should get stuck there when so much else has blown away.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7012819.stm

Here is a bit about out of body experiences:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6960612.stm

Dr Susan Blackmore, psychologist and visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, said: "This has at last brought OBEs into the lab and tested one of the main theories of how they occur.
"Scientists have long suspected that the clue to these extraordinary, and sometimes life-changing, experiences lies in disrupting our normal illusion of being a self behind our eyes, and replacing it with a new viewpoint from above or behind."