Koestler

There's a new biography (only biography) out on the man.

Will you read it?

Carl Rogers' Seven Point Description of 'The Good Life'

1.A growing openness to experience – they move away from defensiveness and have no need for subception (a perceptual defense that involves unconsciously applying strategies to prevent a troubling stimulus from entering consciousness).

2.An increasingly existential lifestyle – living each moment fully – not distorting the moment to fit personality or self concept but allowing personality and self concept to emanate from the experience. This results in excitement, daring, adaptability, tolerance, spontaneity, and a lack of rigidity and suggests a foundation of trust. "To open one's spirit to what is going on now, and discover in that present process whatever structure it appears to have" (Rogers 1961)[9]

3.Increasing organismic trust – they trust their own judgment and their ability to choose behaviour that is appropriate for each moment. They do not rely on existing codes and social norms but trust that as they are open to experiences they will be able to trust their own sense of right and wrong.

4.Freedom of choice – not being shackled by the restrictions that influence an incongruent individual, they are able to make a wider range of choices more fluently. They believe that they play a role in determining their own behaviour and so feel responsible for their own behaviour.

5.Creativity – it follows that they will feel more free to be creative. They will also be more creative in the way they adapt to their own circumstances without feeling a need to conform.

6.Reliability and constructiveness – they can be trusted to act constructively. An individual who is open to all their needs will be able to maintain a balance between them. Even aggressive needs will be matched and balanced by intrinsic goodness in congruent individuals.

7.A rich full life – he describes the life of the fully functioning individual as rich, full and exciting and suggests that they experience joy and pain, love and heartbreak, fear and courage more intensely. Rogers' description of the good life:

“ This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. (Rogers 1961)[9]

By the way, what

was that photo of

you texted the other day.

Couldn't make it out...

Been

This is why we do.

Mist over everything

better, a soft absurd

odd are numbered

and nights. Dreams even

which means writing days

writing mornings again

which means writing days

and nights. Dreams even

odd are numbered

better, a soft absurd

mist over everything.

This is why we do.

I am changing your nickname to . . .

"Barbecue."

As you love your own body, so regard everyone as equal to your own body... Call it a bird, an insect, an animal or a man, call it by any name you please, one serves one's own Self in every one of them.

“Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum,” Dr. Karl Gierow of the Swedish Academy said, on the occasion of Beckett’s enNobelling in 1969—sans Sam, who hid out in Tunisia until the flap was over—“and the result will be either a paradox or an Irishman. If it is an Irishman, you will get the paradox into the bargain.”

"How did it leave us--the old, safe, slow way people used to know of learning how one another feels, and the privilege that went with it of shying away if it seemed best? People in love like me, I suppose, give away the short cuts to everybody's secrets."

A little bit a duchamp

http://runningfromcamera.blogspot.com/

Abra Josh Heschel

"The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. In a religious experience, for example, it is not a thing that imposes itself on man but a spiritual presence. What is retained in the soul is the moment of insight rather than the place where the act came to pass. A moment of insight is a fortune, transporting us beyond the confines of measured time. Spritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time."

_The Sabbath_

Lars Gustafson:

A rabbi once told me that when God spoke to Moses in that bush, it wasn't in a thundering voice; it was in a very weak voice. You have to listen carefully for that voice. You have to be very sharp.