Separation Anxiety

We’re expected to, “Get over it!” In a time with few acknowledged initiation rituals this traumatic breaking of unity is almost universally accepted as a rite-of-passage. Why does separation – let’s consider it in any and every form it can take. Why does it create anxiety? What does this say more generally about the violence,

A Space for Community

Art, even more so than craft, cannot be contained by technique. If you think, “I know what I’m doing!” You’re either mistaken or you are killing whatever art you might have been capable of creating. Hampered your capacity to enter an involvement in an act of creation. An artist’s materials can be a useful medium

Rational

We believe we are rational. We use logic to confirm it. We ignore the circularity of our arguments. How do we drop defensiveness? We live in a tumult of fear and anxiety. There is a gap between our beliefs and what we know we are hiding from behind those defenses. We are at least in

Where is the break with our past most apparent?

“Forever.” When I read this simple word no matter where, it gives me pause. There was a time when forever had a tangible solid ring. Today? No more. There are countless assumptions that were once seemingly reasonable, that ring hollow today. It is a symptom of the end of an era. In this situation the

One more cross-post: Write without disappointment

A continuation, building on yesterday’s post, further meditations on writing. I’ve written about the role of disappointment in my own life and the way understanding this was the key to breaking free of anxiety. In a recent conversation on writing I was brought to the point of considering how an attitude with or without disappointment

Doing No Thing, a Path Past Ego Death

We are caught up in urgency. We do good things. We are good people. What we strive after needs to be done! Yet we are exhausted. We are frustrated. We are pressed by the futility of our actions and have no idea how to change anything in a worthwhile way. Double-binds rear their ugly heads.

Fear, Authority, and Craving After Security

I just came across this quote from Krishnamurti’ Life Ahead. “…you create authority because you are seeking a safe way of conduct, a secure manner of living. The very pursuit of security creates authority, and that is why you become a mere slave, a cog in a machine, living without any capacity to think, to

Anxiety & Security, Two Sides of Ego

Recently – and I’m afraid I can’t place the source right now – I came across the insight that anxiety is a refuge of Ego. In my own case it was the last free bastion for untrammeled egotism after I’d been able to leave my chronic depression behind. As with any mechanism of Ego, anxiety

Anxiety, Trying, and Other Alarms We Might Learn to Heed

What if we saw anxiety not as a condition, but as a useful alarm? First, we would invest less energy in striving to quash it. We would heed its warnings, but then, equally importantly, we would turn it off. Why is this such a hard thing to imagine? When an alarm goes off, it is