“By learning, among many other things, to concentrate our attention, to control our thoughts, our desires, and emotions during the reading; to vanquish our laziness, always to finish what we start, not to get upset if the individual for whom we are reading refuses to grasp Consciousness, to do what we are doing the best […]
Rossellini’s Ten Commandments Roberto Rossellini’s Ten Commandments on film-making he gave to his students at the Centro Sperimentale, 1. The camera is a pen, a plain ordinary Bic, easy to use. It’s enough to know what you want to say – if you have something to say. 2. The camera is a paper tiger. Don’t […]
Not only is Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 film The Flowers of St. Francis just outrageously beautiful, not only does it have tons of charm and that yummy scratchiness in the 16mm audio track, but it’s also surprisingly funny. Find just a little bit of the awesomeness that is Rossellini below.
Our modern science acknowledges a Supreme Power, an Invisible Principle, but denies a Supreme Being, or Personal God. Logically the difference between the two might be questioned; for in this case, the Power and the Being are identical.
The beauty of this poem is beyond words.
Do you need a guide to experience the heat of the sun?
Shamans and mystics are important because they are interpreters of microclimates within our communities. Shamans cultivate their own personal relationships with the divine, with the fundamental principles of life. Their ability to find meaning within the mysteries of the universe, rather than through sanctioned books and renowned figures, necessarily destabilizes authoritarian power structures.
“The real skill of the practitioner [of magic] lies not in skilled concealment but in the skilled revelation of skilled concealment. Magic is efficacious not despite the trick but on account of its exposure.” — Michael Taussig, from the essay Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic River Rites exposes three realms of existence, […]
When we practice looking closely (and then looking closely again, and then again) at a text, or a painting, or person, we can begin to see beyond the categories we normally ascribe to that object. We start to see its suchness, its uniqueness in all the world. We begin think about its history and context. By looking closely, whole new worlds, both interior and exterior, begin to open up, and we can start to make connections between all things, which is the essence of the psychical project.
“‘Modern Spiritualism’ had, after all, started in the United States when the Fox sisters discovered in March 1848 that the spirit of a murdered man communicated with them through raps and taps (Wallace [1874] 1896:152-53). The movement spread quickly and reached England in the early 1850s in the shape of two female American mediums and […]
“The performer sees herself as a medium the spirit passes through.” – Joan Jonas, 1982