5 posts tagged “quotes”

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Jessica Wapner , Scientific American

From Friends of Silence

see also....

“The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that lead from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Frrom “Signs of God” by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

**
We are made of time
We are its feet and its voice.
The feet of time walk in our shoes.
Sooner or later, we all know,
the winds of time will close the tracks.
Passage of nothing, steps of no one.
The voice of time tells of the boyage.

--Eduardo Galeano

**

Eternity is one time, its only dimension: always.

...ACIM

**
Memory is the repository of the past, which is where most of our living takes place. we have divided life into past, present, and future, and this division, like all of our divisions, removes us from the fullness of living, from the mysterious unknown and unknowable movement of life that isw the source of all beauty. The past exists only in memory, and thefuture is merely a projection of past memories. Now, this moment, is all there is.

-- From The Secret of the Yamas by John McAfee

***
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
in a relative way,
And returned the previous night.

---Anonymous

**

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of life, the clearer we should see through it.

-- Jean Paul

** We were breaking an unspoken social rule. we were talking about God and religion at a time when the stakes were high, when turmoil and confusion were the order of the day. We were harried, busy mothers, but at our meetings we found ourselves released from Time, suspended from the reality of the outside world ... Our relationship was turning into something sacred, something we began to call our Faith Club.

-- From The Faith Club : A Muslin, A Christian, A Jew
by R. Idliby, S. Oliver, and P. Warner

***
In the timelessness we discover god. If we have ever become aware of the moment when we understood something, we must have realized the extratemporal nature of the event. Extemporaneous means outside of time. Indeed, the git of making extemporaneous comments hinges on our receptivity to inspired wisdom, reaching our consciousness from the realm of the timeless.

-- From Beyond the Dream by Thomas Hora

**
When time is a friend, you relish how it works. You know that your purpose is within you and that eventually time will unfold a dream, an integrating vision for your life purpose ..... My future is behind me. I can’t see it, while I can see my past which runs out in front of me.

-- Sharon Franquemont

**
He was still and gazed deeply into the infinite pool that bears stars into being. Above him was a tiny smudge of light that was the closest galaxy. It was spinning, spinning, but so far away that one could look for a whole lifetime and not see it alter. The galaxies out there whirled into each other like discs, blinding into space without colliding -- passing through each other at thousands of miles per second, yet they did not appear to move.

Suddenly he understood: Time is an illusion of the mind. Only love remains.

--From Eclipse of the Sun by Michael O’Brien

Why is it so important that you are with God 
and God alone on the mountain top? It's 
important because it's the place in which you
can listen to the voice of the One who calls  
you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the 
One who calls you "my beloved daughter,"
"my beloved son," "my beloved child." To pray is to let that voice
speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice
resound in your whole being.

    --Henri Nouwen

**
Lucifer falls,  Alice falls,  so does Icarus.  Humpty Dumpty falls.
The giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk" falls.  Jack and Jill fall.  The Titans 
tumble earthwad for nine days straight.  Elpenor slips headlong from Circe's.
roof.  Adam and Eve supposedly fall,  though in fact the theological idea of a
lapse into sin is Christian in origin,  the necessary precondition for rapture.  We must
fall so that Christ can raise us.  Read Genesis, however,  and you'll see that the authors
of the Hebrew scriptures,  their imaginations defined perhaps by the long horizons of
the Fertile Crescent,  conceive of expulsion in lateral terms.  The central metaphor
is not descent but exile.  Still,  the experience of falling is so fundamental that is lends
itself to moral and existential embellishment.
Witnessed or not,  an accidental fall entails a loss of dignity.  Our upright posture most
distinguishes Homo erectus from that class of creatures that the  Bible identifies as
"creeping,"  and no animal is creepier than that enigmatic serpent whose curse it is to
crawl upon the ground,  just as no animal topples more easily than we do.  Quadrupeds
wobble and trip when newborn,  but rarely thereafter.  Just think what a horrific sight it
is to see a racehorse go down.  Implicit in the biblical stories is a kind of hierarchy of being
that seems to mirror the human body cosmologically.  I suspect that Zeus and Baal and
Yahweh Himself may be associated with mountaintops and clouds in part because our eyes
are among our own most altitudinous organs.  To be human is to defy gravity.  To be a
snake is to embrace it.  The snake is thus our anatomical opposite,  though when we fall
-- or sleep,  or have sex,  or die -- we assume a serpentine posture,  a fact implicit
in the symbolism of  Genesis.
Only with the Hellenic distinction between the body and the spirit could we imagine the
dead ascending like helium balloons into the sky.  The flight of Icarus is not merely an
allegory about human ambition.  It is an allegory about our ambition to slip our mortal
bonds.  Only the soul may ascend;  the body must plummet.  To be earthbound is to be
deathbound.  In the theater of  battle to fall means to die.  The same logic governs the
collapse of architecture and empires,  those collective attempts to defy gravity and time.
But there is also a pleasure in falling,  in giving in, in assenting to gravity's pull.  Although
we can fall into disgrace,  we can also fall into a trance, or sleep,  or love.  What  these
experiences have in common is the surrendering of the will -- to music, or to unconsciousness,
or to another.  These are all varieties of bewilderment.  In the absence of pain, falling ill
can accord some of the same pleasures as falling in love.  There is a voluptuousness to
illness,  the eros of the infantile.  Even seemingly disastrous falls can be accompanied by
the joy of relief or the exhilaration of chaos.
***
"Contact!  Contact!"  Thoreau shouted at the heavens from atop Mount Ktaadn.  "Where
are we?  Who are we?"  And the heavens did not reply."

From "Falling; Confessions of a lapsed forest Christian" by Donovan Hohn
Harpers Magazine,  April 2008