Dion Pugil’s home in a Rock

The name Dion Pugil is taken from an amazing story:

The Father Confessor. By Herman Hesse.

By the way, if you haven't read any good books lately, pick up Siddhartha by Hesse. You won't regret it. In fact you will wonder why in the world no one told you to read it before. (Sorry, I had forgoten to tell you).

One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is how to mind your own business.

Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

A serious obstacle to recollection is the mania for directing those you have not been appointed to direct, reforming those you have not been asked to reform, correcting those over whom you have no jurisdiction.  How can you do these things and keep your mind at rest?  Renounce this futile concern with other men’s affairs!

Pay as little attention as you can to the faults of other people.  And none at all to their natural defects and eccentricities.

 -Thomas Merton. Seeds of contemplation

Just thought it was worth posting it again… and again… and again… and again. 

Man do I love good writers. Paul Graham, a painter and computer hacker (maybe Kevin’s heard of him) writes on subjects that range from painting, to programming, to being in elemetary school, to doing business. Here are two examples I’d like to recommend. Some might be a little long, so if you have a printer you might want to print them. Believe me, give this guy a chance, he’s awsome.

What you wish you’d known.

How to do what you love.

Now on a completely different subject, yesterday I came upon an article that I thought was great. It’s written by a Buddhist Nun. It’s on a practice called Tonglen. Great stuff. Really.
The practice of Tonglen.

Oh and by the way, if after reading Graham’s essays you think the guy’s one of the coolest dudes. Here’s the link to all his essays: Paul Graham.

The book “Open Mind, Open Heart” by Thomas Keating is here online.

I started reading “A Theory of Everything� today. There’s some good stuff even in the preface.

Ken Wilber, the author, talks a bit about what are some of the hottest intelectual subjects in the world today. Evolutionary Psichology is the first one he mentions. He then moves on to mention as an even hotter subject String Theory, and M-Theory (which are basically both the same thing). String theory is also called Unified theory of the universe. It’s an attempt to put all the laws of physics together under one great theory.

But then comes the great part, he mentions a greek word he loves, Kosmos. Not cosmos, but kosmos. Kosmos was the greek word for

the patterned Whole of all existance, including the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realms.

In modernity science tried to simply teach us that the whole thing was the cosmos, that is, the universe. The Theory of Everything tries to give us a richer intergral vision of it all. Mind; matter; soul; spirit. All of it.

The attempt to state a theory of everything is impossible. He says the task is undoable because “knowledge expands faster than ways to categorize it.� But in this paragraph he states why the attempt is worth it:

So why even attempt the imposible? Because, I believe, a little bit of wholeness is better than none at all. And an integral vision offers considerably more wholeness than the slice-and-dice alternatives. We can be more whole or less whole; more fragmented or less fragmented; more alienated or less alienated- and an integral vision invites us to be a little more whole, a little less fragmented, in our works, our lives, our destiny.

I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of anything that shuts the rest of anything out. That’s why I guess I felt so much anger for so long towards my old church life. They taught of a God and Jesus and Church that was meant to be the everything that existed.

Isn’t Jesus called the All in all? I don’t believe in that New Agish vision of the world of that states that you and I are God, with my dogs included, as well as the grass and the trees. But I do believe that if he is the All in all, he’s related to everything. Everything. How can he not be?

All this talking about theories of everything and unity made me remember this “holistic� poem by Rumi:

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,

Buddhist, sufi or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East

or the the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not

composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,

did not descent from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace

of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two

worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that

breath breathing human being.

-Jelaluddin Rumi

I read “The Chosen” by Chaim Potok for the first time about 5 years ago. The book tells the story of two young Jewish kids from different backgrounds and how they become best friends.

I recommend this book to christians because it teaches about accepting people who don’t have the same religious customs as you but that belong to the same religion.

It’s a powerful story. You’ll cry of sadness and of joy. You’ll love it.

The Chosen in Amazon