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HIGHLIGHTS #1282 - Sunday, December 8, 2002 - Edited by Gloria  

Earth As Art  

Description: The West Fjords are a series of peninsulas in northwestern Iceland. They represent less than one-eighth the country's land area, but their jagged perimeter accounts for more than half of Iceland's total coastline.  

JERRY KATZ   NDSN@yahoogroups.com

From distant eye, Earth becomes art

By Richard Stenger
CNN

Find this article at:
http://asia.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/12/06/satellite.art

See the art at:

http://edcw2ks15.cr.usgs.gov:8090/imagegallery/silverstream/pages/pgImageDisplay.html?CollectionID=33

http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthasart/

(CNN) --Impressionism. Pointillism. Cubism. All the great painting styles make an appearance at a new exhibit showcasing breathtakingly bizarre and colorful images, created by mother nature and a high-flying helper.

Dozens of portraits of our planet, currently on display at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., were selected from more than 400,000 pictures taken by the Landsat 7 satellite since 1999.

Mountains, deserts, islands and glaciers become haunting abstract subjects, seen in brilliant blues, greens and reds from a vantage point more than 400 miles away.

"Every now and then you have to stop and admire them for their beauty instead of their science," said Jon Christopherson, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who studies the Landsat 7 images.

A desert resembles marbled rock. A frozen lake is transformed into a dragon. A multitude of tiny circles, each an irrigated field, looks like something from French painter Georges Seurat.

Each of the 41 images was chosen for its artistic appeal rather than scientific significance, the Library of Congress said.

 

JOHN METZGER   NDSN@yahoogroups.com

This is by far the greatest gift that mystical experiences can bestow on us: to see -- 
really see -- all that is right with the world. Just as believers in a beneficent deity 
should be haunted by the problem of natural evil, so gnostics, atheists, pessimists, and 
nihilists should be haunted by the problem of friendship, love, beauty, truth, humor, 
compassion, fun. Never forget the problem of fun. 

http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i14/14b00701.htm

 

DAVID BOZZI

The Static Channel

  Late night television
hisses static
from a narcoleptic local station,
    like an insomniatic cat
as I drift in the hypnogogic state
    and my coffee stained pajamas...

This whoooshing stuff,
a radio image of
    Big Bang first banging,
whooshes everywhere
still ringing
    like the clang of a Big Bell...

Nations
build
receivers
televisions, radios
with waves
override
the whoosh of creation
gurgling.

Spray paint it
with graffiti
sit-coms
imagined news,
slants
and disfigurements.

Not suggesting to everyone
go out and listen to static,

Just go out and listen.

  ROBERT COOPER DailyDharma@yahoogroups.com

  Do not try to become anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
What you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
~Ajhan Chah

   
Rowan Williams in "Writing in the Dust: After September 11"

HAVE COMPASSION FOR THE SUFFERING WORLD

The trauma can offer a breathing space; and in that space there is the
possibility of recognizing that we have had an experience that is not just a
nightmarish insult to us but a door into the suffering of countless other
innocents, a suffering that is more or less routine for them in their less
regularly protected environments.

And in the face of extreme dread, we may become conscious, as people often
do, of two very fundamental choices. We can cling harder and harder to the
rock of our threatened identity -- a choice, finally, for self-delusion over
truth; or we can accept that we have no ultimate choice but to let go, and
in that letting go, give room to what's there around us -- to the sheer
impression of the moment, to the need of the person next to you, to the fear
that needs to be looked at, acknowledged and calmed (not denied). If that
happens, the heart has room for many strangers, near and far. There is a
global hospitality possible too in the presence of death.

Read the Review:
http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/bookreview/item_5086.html

 

The zebras are an endangered species in their native habitat of northern Kenya,
where fewer than 5,000 remain. 

VIORICA WEISSMAN    MillionPaths@yahoogroups.com

 Experience leaves only memories behind  and adds to the burden which is heavy enough.  You need no more experiences. The past ones  are sufficient. And if you feel you need more,  look into the hearts of people around you.  You will find a variety of experiences which  you would not be able to go through in a  thousand years. Learn from the sorrows of  others and save yourself your own. It is not  experience that you need, but the freedom  from all experience.   ___ Nisargadatta  

qntmpkt    MillionPaths@yahoogroups.com

Wolfgang Pauli on the Unity of Life

Wolfgang Pauli from his lecture on science and Western thought, quoted by Werner 
Heisenberg in the latter's article: "Embracing the Rational and the Mystical", page 175 
of "Quantum Questions" by Ken Wilber, Shambala. 
 

"I believe, however, that to anyone for whom a narrow rationalism has lost its 
persuaveness, and to whom the charm of a mystical attitude, experiencing the outer 
world in its oppressive multiplicity as illusory, is also not powerful enough, nothing 
else remains but to expose oneself in one way or another to these intensified 
oppositions and their conflicts. Precisely by doing so, the inquirer can also more or 
less consciously tread an inner path to salvation. Slowly there then emerge internal 
images, fantasies or Ideas to compensate the outer situation, and which show an 
approach to the poles of the antitheses to be possible. Warned by the miscarriage of all 
premature endeavors after unity in the history of human thought, I shall not venture to 
make predictions about the future. But, contrary to the strict division of the activity of 
the human spirit into separate departments--a division prevailing since the 19th 
century--I consider the ambition of overcoming opposites, including also a synthesis 
embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity, to be the 
mythos, spoken or unspoken, of our present day and age". 
   

JAN BARENDRECHT    DirectApproach@yahoogroups.com

-----------------------
Edward Teller (The Pursuit of Simplicity) :

What is called understanding
is often no more than a state
where one has become familiar
with what one does not understand
----------------------

Does that ring a bell?

  KARTA    DirectApproach@yahoogroups.com  

I am a mother. I am a son. I am a doctor.
I am a lawyer. I'm musical. I'm tall.
I'm American. I am French. I am Jewish.
I am Christian. I am black. I am gay.
I am celibate. I'm depressed. I'm
happpy. I am this. I am that.

We all know ourselves in relation to something. We only know a qualified "I".
When we say "I am" the mind demands
"What am I"? I am what? This book is
about the "I am" prior to all
qualification, what we are before the intrusion of the mind.

How can we know what cannot be qualified?

It calls for a kind of knowing, not
knowledge which comes from accumulation
of facts and experience. We may have absorbed every book published and
experienced every adventure and it
would not bring us one step nearer to
knowing "I am". So this new knowing
begins with giving up looking for it
in experiences and second hand
information. Giving up does not mean we become passive; on the contrary, in
letting go of our mechanical learned responses we are open to full potential,
our creativity, a dynamic new realm.
The natural state of the relaxed brain
is multidimensional attention. It
does not need viewpoints, data, opinions,
memory to be alert. When all these directions cease, an organic,
non-directed wakefulness remains.
This is the threshold of "I am"?

xi from Jein Klein: I am


MACE MEALER   HarshaSatsangh@yahoogroups.com        

Ahhhh How quickly they forget!
     Humans are the only beings
     that will bargain for a drink of transcendence
     from the depths of an ocean of grace.
     But do not despair, Marley
     you will be visited by an endless stream
     of those sent to test your mettle,
     the entire universe conspires
     to bring us to ourselves,
     once the challenge is issued. 
 

~~~~~~~~~

  
  
 

"Faith is an oasis in the heart
which will never be reached
by the caravan of thinking."

Gibran

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