Reclusland » prayer

The Heights of Heaven and The Depths of Earth

Ian — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:45:17 +0000

->
CHANGING LINE: Hexagram Thirty-Six/Line Six

Six at the top means:
Not light but darkness.
First he climbed up to heaven,
Then plunged into the depths of the earth.

Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration.

From the Hua Hu Ching

Ian — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:21:58 +0000

The world is full
of half-enlightened masters.
Overly clever, too “sensitive” to
live in the real world, they
surround themselves with selfish
pleasures and bestow their grandiose
teachings upon the unwary.

Prematurely publicizing themselves, intent
upon reaching some spiritual climax, they
constantly sacrifice the truth
and deviate from the Tao.
What they really offer the world
is their own confusion.

The true master understands that
enlightenment is not the end,
but the means. Realizing that
virtue is her goal, she accepts
the long and often arduous cultivation
that is necessary to attain it.

She doesn’t scheme to become a leader,
but quietly shoulders whatever
responsibilities fall to her.
Unattached to her accomplishments,
taking credit for nothing at all,
she guides the whole world by guiding
the individuals who come to her.

She shares her divine energy with
her students, encouraging them,
creating trials to strengthen them,
scolding them to awaken them,
directing the streams of their lives
toward the infinite ocean of the Tao.

If you aspire to this sort of mastery,
then root yourself in the Tao. Relinquish
your negative habits and attitudes.
Strengthen your sincerity.
Live in the real world, and extend
your virtue to it without discrimination
in the daily round.

Be the truest father or mother,
the truest brother or sister,
the truest friend, and the truest disciple.

Humbly respect and serve your teacher,
and dedicate your entire being
unwaveringly to self-cultivation.
Then you will surely achieve self-mastery
and be able to help others in doing the same.

Baobabs and the Ocean

Ian — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:27:49 +0000

The Malian Boy & The Shiny Seed from Kitanoo on Vimeo.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Winter into Spring

Ian — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:01:59 +0000

A best-of of the past several months, presented in the order they were taken, in the hopes of creating a story (of sorts…)

Hail! To the Elements, the Ancestors, and the Harmony!

Ian — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:15:13 +0000

Fun and Games, Over and Over (may they be fully reborn)

Ian — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:23:13 +0000

The broad strategy is to visually represent a computer program in such a way that, when one looks at the visual representation, one’s visual system naturally responds by carrying out the computation and generating a perception that encodes the appropriate output to the computation. That is, there would be a special kind of image that amounts to “visual software,” software our “visual hardware” (or brain) computes, and computes in such a way that the output can be “read off” the elicited perception.

Ideally, we would be able to glance at a complex visual stimulus—the program with inputs—and our visual system would automatically and effortlessly generate a perception that would inform us of the ouput of the computation. Visual stimuli like this would not only amount to a novel and useful visual notation, but would actually trick our visual systems into doing our work for us.

Lord of the Dance

Ian — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:27:07 +0000

I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the Moon & the Stars & the Sun
I came down from Heaven & I danced on Earth
At Bethlehem I had my birth: