Thursday, 29 September 2011
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Are UK chocolate companies involved in slavery?
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Although slavery is no longer legal there are still millions of people living in slavery today. One place and industry where slaves still exist is the cocoa industry. This documentary takes a deeper look at that industry with disturbing and challenging eyes.
Saturday, 10 September 2011
'Slate-grey' and 'powder-blue': a photographic encounter with two Budapest women.
Background:
'Buda-pest' is a series of photographs shot in Budapest September 2011The written 'counter-point' texts seek to not demand particular readings or interpretations.
Bespectacled 'powder-blue woman' resembles the Greek singer Nana Mouskouri when young.
Slate-grey woman sits in shades of grey on the slate-grey marble.
Curled-up, 'slate-grey woman' sees only her pain, tight as a knot in apple-tree wood.
Bespectacled woman's pursed lips suggests she may be feeling the force field of inwardness and hopelessness that I had to negotiate in walking past slate-grey woman, then turning back.
The polished slate-grey marble benches are worthy of Greek or Roman 'senators'.
The three containers, red, powder blue and white contain their secrets of the day.
The mustard-yellow of the light-reflecting window is everywhere in Budapest.
White, green and red are the colours of the flag of Hungary.
The pavement shadows the vomit from a previous sitting.
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Friday, 2 September 2011
Recovering the 'ology' - the spiritual basis of (ecological) caring. (52 Meditations)
This week's Breath-mantra:
Breathing in: I sense this flower's uniqueness
Breathing out: through it floods in the Whole that makes of us one
OR
Breath-in: each thing a gateway
Breath-out: let go and let be the Whole
OR
Breath-in: this
Breath-out: Whole
OR - make up your own breath-mantra
CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY
Today I was again reminded of the need to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the parts and the Whole.
I was reminded of a wonderful, eccentric educationalist from Houston that I met.
She pointed out that the ancient Greeks understood what we lost sometime post-enlightenment - a sense of the Whole.
This is a linguistic matter - and therefore or thereby a consciousness matter.
She pointed to words such as geology, zoology, biology. We now are only conscious of the zoo, geo & bio prefixes and
have lost our sense of, and connection with, the 'ology'!
Recovery of the ology is also recovery of enchantment, awe and wonder.
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Abraham Joshua Heschel is the great master on matters of awe and wonder and the ineffable. Read first his Who is Man
WARNING: sit down and breathe consciously before you read further - the following could seriously expand the boundaries of your being!
WikiQuote provides us with the following quotes from Rebbe Heschel - the ones I've chosen are from Who is Man
Who Is Man? (1965)
- Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.
- Ch. 4
- It would be a contradiction in terms to assume that the attainment of transcendent meaning consists in comprehending a notion. Transcendence can never be an object of possession or of comprehension. Yet man can relate himself and be engaged to it. He must know how to court meaning in order to be engaged in it. Love of ultimate meaning is not self-centered but rather a concern to transcend the self.
- Ch. 4
- Ultimate meaning is not grasped once and for all in the form of timeless idea, acquired once and for all, securely preserved in conviction. It is not simply given. It comes upon us as an intimation that comes and goes. What is left behind is a memory, and a commitment to that memory. Our words do not describe it, our tools do not wield it. But sometimes it seems as if our very being were its description, its secret tool.
- Ch. 4
- The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair. Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts.
This may be the vocation of man: to say "Amen" to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.- Ch. 4
- The sense of meaning is not born in ease and sloth. It comes after bitter trials, disappointments in the glitters, foundering, strandings. It is the marrow from the bone. There is no manna in our wilderness.
Thought is not bred apart from experience or from inner surroundings. Thinking is living, and no thought is bred in an isolated cell in the brain. No thought is an island.- Ch. 5
- Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.
- Ch. 5
- Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one's role in relation to all other beings. For living is not being in itself, but living of the world, affecting, exploiting, consuming, comprehending, deriving, depriving.
- Ch. 5
- There are two primary ways in which mans relates himself to the world that surround him: manipulation and appreciation. In the first way he sees in what surrounds mim things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use. In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired.
- Ch. 5
- Fellowship depends on appreciation while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead, and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: What I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence.
- Ch. 5
- Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.
- Ch. 5
- As a result of letting the drive for power dominate existence, man is bound to lose his sense for nature's otherness. Nature becomes a utensil, an object to be used.The world ceases to be that which is and becomes that which is available.
It is a submissive world that modern man is in the habit of sensing, and he seems content with the riches of thinghood. Space is the limit of his ambitions, and there is little he desires besides it. Correspondingly, man's consciousness recedes more and more in the process of reducing his status to that of a consumer and manipulator. He has enclosed himself in the availability of things, with the shutters down and no sight of what is beyond availability.- Ch. 5
- Exclusive manipulation results in the dissolution of awareness of all transcendence. Promise becomes a pretext, God becomes a symbol, truth a fiction, loyalty tentative, the holy a mere convention. Man's very existence devours all transcendence. Instead of facing the grandeur of the cosmos, he explains it away; instead of beholding, he takes a picture; instead of hearing a voice, he tapes it. He does not see what he is able to face. There is a suspension of man's sense of the holy. His mind is becoming a wall instead of being a door open to what is larger than the scope of his comprehension. He locks himself out of the world by reducing all reality to mere things and all relationship to mere manipulation. Transcendence is not an article of faith. It is what we come upon immediately when standing face to face with reality.
- Ch. 5
- The perceptibility of things is not the end of their being. Their surface is available to our tools, their depth is immune to our inquisitiveness.
Things are both available and immune. We penetrate their physical givenness, we cannot intuit their secret. We measure what they exhibit, we know how they function, but we also know that we do not know what they are, what they stand for, what they imply.- Ch. 5
- Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.
- Ch. 5
- The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.
- Ch. 5
- Authentic existence involves exaltation, sensitivity to the holy, awareness of indebtedness.
Existence without transcendence is a way of living where things become idols and idols become monsters.
Denial of transcendence contradicts the essential truth of being human. Its roots can be traced either to stolidity of self-contentment or to superciliousness of contempt, to moods rather than to comprehensive awareness of the totality and mystery of being.
Denial of transcendence which claims to unveil the truth of being is an inner contradiction, since the truth of being is not within being or within our consciousness of being but rather a truth that transcends our being.- Ch. 5
- Essential to education for being human is to cultivate a sense for the inexpedient, to disclose the fallacy of absolute expediency. God's voice may sound feeble to our conscience. Yet there is a divine cunning in history which seems to prove that the wages of absolute expediency is disaster.
Happiness is not a synonym for self-satisfaction, complacency, or smugness. Self-satisfaction breeds futility and despair. Self-satisfaction is the opiate of fools.- Ch. 5
- New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. … Man's true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him.
- Ch. 5
- In our reflection we must go back to where we stand in awe before sheer being, faced with the marvel of the moment. The world is not just here. It shocks us into amazement.
Of being itself all we can positively say is: being is ineffable. The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. My power of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is not emptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance. What I face I cannot utter or phrase in language. But the richness of my facing the abundance of being endows me with marvelous reward: a sense of the ineffable.- Ch. 5
- Being as we know it, the world as we come upon it, stands before us as otherness, remoteness. For all our efforts to exploit or comprehend it, it remains evasive, mysteriously immune. Being is unbelievable.
- Ch. 5
- Our concern with environment cannot be reduced to what can be used, to what can be grasped. Environment includes not only the inkstand and the blotting paper, but also the impenetrable stillness in the air, the stars, the clouds, the quiet passing of time, the wonder of my own being. I am an end as well as a means, and so is the world: an end as well as a means. My view of the world and my understanding of the self determine each other. The complete manipulation of the world results in the complete instrumentalization of the self.
Thursday, 1 September 2011
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