Anderson: “The best way to keep an audience from seeing the weakness in any plot is to step up the sense of menace; the maxim of hack screenwriters is that when things get slow you put a bear on the beach.” There is a narrow bandwidth of intelligence where an individual is able to thinkContinue reading “The Responsibility of Thinking Well”
Author Archives: tractsofrevolution
Life Without Hooks
De Mello: “Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of ‘I’; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everythingContinue reading “Life Without Hooks”
Light and Shadow
Robinson: “Faced with the shadow, the unacceptable, [the response of the West] has been to reject and exclude it. The dark has been detached from the image of God or the Christ and projected on to a Devil or Antichrist viewed as the embodiment of evil per se – though at the beginning of theContinue reading “Light and Shadow”
At the Threshold
Anderson: “As we become aware of the social construction of reality – consciously, publicly aware – the boundary erodes between the kind of fiction we call art or literature and the kind of fiction we call reality. History becomes another kind of storytelling, personal and social life becomes another kind of drama.” Reality is aContinue reading “At the Threshold”
Dropping Illusions
De Mello: “You must drop it all. Not physical renunciation, you understand; that’s easy. When your illusions drop, you’re in touch with reality at last, and believe me, you will never again be lonely, never again. Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality. Contact with reality, dropping one’sContinue reading “Dropping Illusions”
The Two Eyes
Robinson: “By drawing the insights of another center into as it were the gravitational field of one’s own, so that they come to form part of that ‘universe’ revolving round its single center, one is deliberately seeking escape from the tension of living with both poles at once. But truth may come from refusing thisContinue reading “The Two Eyes”
Holding On and Letting Go
Anderson: “People of power and position are not the only ones who resist threats to a belief system; so do ordinary people who have internalized that belief system and take it to be absolute reality. The collapse of a belief system can be like the end of the world. Even those who are most oppressedContinue reading “Holding On and Letting Go”
The View from Down Under
De Mello: “The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand. We’re always fixing things, aren’t we? It never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed. They really don’t. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they’d change.” “Problems” motivate ourContinue reading “The View from Down Under”
Easter Reality
Religious high holy days are anchored deep in myth and symbol. These are times when true believers – as well as the larger number of unaffiliated and “occasional pilgrims” – step into the sacred stories and reflect once again on the miracles of old. Too many of them probably do this out of family obligationContinue reading “Easter Reality”
Inner Dialogue
Robinson: “Each of us, if we are in any way integrated, has a center from which our lives are lived, and our ‘world’ is what is enclosed within the circumference of that circle. Yet often we are more conscious of the edges than the centers, corresponding to the bounds of an animal’s territory which itContinue reading “Inner Dialogue”
Tracts of Revolution 