tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86992814347562823612024-02-20T16:35:48.997-06:00Craig's Spring Branch BlogExperiences in my neighborhoodCraighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-37794633886400498142011-09-10T13:01:00.003-05:002011-09-10T14:06:11.228-05:00AnniversaryThe 19th of September is the third anniversary of the day when I began making daily entries in my metaphysics log book. I am almost all the way through my third notebook. I use the spiral bound college rule 150 sheets 9.5 inch X 6 inch style. On the pages of these notebooks I record:every meditationevery prayerevery ceremonyevery reading in the topics of metaphysicsevery tarot card spreada small Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-38668117523670843402011-08-30T17:15:00.003-05:002011-09-01T09:23:39.325-05:00Descartes was never a dog ownerCraig's Spring Branch Blog has been in hiatus for a couple months while I was occupied with other stuff.
I stumbled onto an amazing web page yesterday: anotherpanacea. It is the weblog of Joshua Miller, a philosophy teacher at George Washington University. I have only read a couple of the entries so far, but the one that amazed me was plucked out of the ether for me doing a google search:
How Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-19889259277538067492011-04-18T10:06:00.002-05:002011-04-18T10:37:50.181-05:00How do you react?On my last metaphysics post I discussed almost all of my ritual activity for the Spring Equinox. I omitted one item which is complex enough that it may take up a post of its own. On the 21st of March I did a special tarot reading, for that and for the 77 following days. It was the first time I ever did a tarot reading using the whole deck.Tarot is a useful tool, but I do not usually take it very Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-55385124422605210332011-04-13T08:41:00.002-05:002011-04-13T09:38:03.268-05:00Hypnagogic and hypnopompicDreams have been covered here, and I really don't have much more to say about them. They can be fascinating, but I am not of the school that makes them a royal road to the unconscious. I am not sure the idea of an unconscious mind is very useful. In the current set of metaphors, I prefer the notion of reptilian brain functions to the unconscious mind. Most dream discussions are beastly dull.One Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-5225811509073439012011-04-08T16:08:00.005-05:002011-04-10T07:41:11.902-05:00What does not kill me makes me stronger I"What does not kill me makes me stronger."Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, #8, tr. R. Hollingdale.I have a love and hate relationship with Nietzsche, and the hatred portion is neatly summarized by the above aphorism. Today is a milestone day on the calendar year. It happened to be the day when the heat in my apartment got high enough (88 degrees Fahrenheit at 4:00 Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-40513243156085925212011-04-03T16:38:00.005-05:002011-04-10T07:40:45.496-05:00The movie was not as good as the bookIn my preparations for Easter I watched (almost all) three movie versions of the story:King of Kings,The Last Temptation of Christ,and Passion of the Christ.The comparison and contrast was fascinating, and after I looked up a few things which I found noteworthy.The oldest of the three, King of Kings, is from 1961 and parts of it did not age well. The thing which sticks out the most is the Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-37340794660191788702011-03-29T08:33:00.004-05:002011-04-10T07:40:17.802-05:00Heard from passing renegades Geronimo is deadOn Monday March 21 I performed a ritual to celebrate the Spring Equinox and to invoke aspects of Mars into my living room. I used a recipe very similar to what I did for the three previous holidays, solstices and equinox. (Example here.)The personality I chose to personify the energy of Mars was Jack LaLanne, the California fitness guru who recently passed on. This was a little different thanCraighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-1435485166624853452011-03-24T13:51:00.003-05:002011-03-24T14:17:21.604-05:00How To Treat Stage FrightPrior to experiencing my "miracle" cure for my stage fright, I suffered a severe case of it for many years. Stage fright is a common phobia, and some surveys place public speaking up with snakes and spiders as amongst the most common fears anybody suffers. In the course of my struggles I looked in many places for the answer. I diligently studied what appears to remain the authoritative book Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-49152444823887004342011-03-19T18:49:00.002-05:002011-03-19T20:04:47.384-05:00Morris and Kuhn and WittgentseinFrom 6 March to 10 March, Errol Morris (documentary film director of Thin Blue Line, Fog of War, and others) published a five part sequence on the New York Times opinionator blog about Thomas Kuhn and many related topics. (Link.) It sucked up my attention for a good couple of hours and got me to thinking about many problems which may not be solvable.The biggest issue is an ideal which is often Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-76336467898946261192011-03-14T10:13:00.001-05:002011-03-24T14:19:54.787-05:00Angle of safetyIn February 2009 on the 100th anniversary of Wallace Stegner's birthday, Timothy Egan wrote a thoughtful tribute to Stegner on the New York Times Op-Ed page. He did not get any facts wrong, but he did not put his emphasis where I would have, although I have only read five of Stegner's books and only three of these were novels.Stegner's greatest accomplishment was his versatility: first an award Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-17303155976480619262011-03-09T09:40:00.002-06:002011-03-09T11:04:47.514-06:00Kundalini risingThe physiological process involved in the rising of the Kundalini (natural nervous or even supernatural psychic energy) in devoted and persevering yogis has never been explained any place where I could understand it; it is a mystery. If you have the patience to examine any of the citations on that wikipedia page, perhaps it will make more sense to you. To me the single best resource is The Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-9459490581458753472011-03-04T19:17:00.006-06:002011-03-05T14:21:45.807-06:00The Kitchen TableThe kitchen table is an exercise which I learned from a woman who is the most skilled hypnotist I have ever seen close up. It is simple and takes very little time, but it does require a dedicated group of people. It is from the Gestalt Psychotherapy field, and very similar in dynamics to the Two Chair Exercise, which I previously went over. The working premise for its effect is that stress and Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-49965317762038400352011-02-27T07:34:00.003-06:002011-03-04T19:45:43.704-06:00Six degrees of crispy bacon On the wikipedia page for Social Network Theory they have Stanley Milgram and his six degrees separation (apparently he did not use that term) story. He did use the term small world. There are a couple entries for Milgram in my Social Network Analysis textbook, but nothing like the amount of emphasis they use there. The current larger size of the world may be swamping the small world thing into Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-16487334457129589042011-02-22T19:10:00.003-06:002011-02-27T07:54:33.160-06:00Memory RelentlessI have a memory of an interview on National Public Radio from a few years back with Maurice Sendak. In the interview he expressed a depressing view of his own life and his memories of it. The gist of this (my own memory is fuzzy enough that this is not verbatim) was that he found his memories to be relentless; that he would associate from one thing to another and it was inevitable that he would Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-61587901552791376452011-02-17T08:51:00.004-06:002011-02-17T14:35:11.637-06:00The Walden Pond Isolation ManeuverLast August 28 I had the opportunity to attend a conference at the University of Saint Thomas, "Religion, Mental Health, and the Search for Meaning: Bridging the Gaps" (previously described here and here). There was one sentence in the conference which has stuck with me for over five months. The speaker was a Catholic priest and he was describing a typical metaphysics problem for one of his Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-50633542438148904142011-02-12T07:54:00.002-06:002011-02-12T15:55:10.492-06:00Mismeasures of psychometryMy title is modified from Stephen Jay Gould's. My post is going to be a lot shorter than his book. He wrote it to debunk the intelligence test industry, and then he revised it a few years later and re-published into the midst of the Bell Curve controversy. My topic is only remotely related: I am going to write about personality tests, not intelligence tests.It appears to me that the gold standardCraighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-60192298231706767692011-02-07T08:22:00.001-06:002011-02-07T08:24:56.562-06:00Jerry Kramer on Vince Lombardi on AristotleAttending to the annual Super Bowl spectacle can be a tough workout for the attention span. The highlight this week was listening to the sports talk radio show and they were interviewing Jerry Kramer and the dude quotes Vince Lombardi quoting Aristotle!"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."Which is great stuff, except Aristotle never said that. It is a Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-34968163860935288152011-02-02T06:22:00.004-06:002011-03-26T13:58:28.352-05:00Vengeance on a Dumb BruteIn the current wikipedia article on Melville they have that business about the mental constitution of the man. I have seen a lot of odd things about Melville and particularly about his novel, Moby Dick. I am not obsessed with Ahab, but I am interested. Sometimes I can believe I am the only reader who understands what exactly is going on in this novel. (That is not a bad criterion for a an Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-50132717190755030792011-01-28T21:04:00.004-06:002011-01-29T13:48:52.554-06:00Theory and practice of meditation IVThis is an appendix to what was intended as a triplet of posts on the Theory and Practice of Meditation: I, II, III. The first was my own theory of what meditation is, how to do it in general, and why it might work; the second was a recipe of my primary meditation technique; the third was a recipe of my alternate regular meditation technique. I have tried many others, and I will describe in this Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-25821084223415356452011-01-23T19:34:00.005-06:002011-01-27T12:05:20.607-06:00The Gloria tapesIn 1965 a patient ("Gloria") participated in a teaching film with three world-renowned psychotherapists: Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls. She was a young divorced mother and volunteered her problems with parenting and dating to the scrutiny of these three fellows and their three psychotherapy techniques: Client-centered Therapy, Rational Emotive Therapy, and Gestalt Therapy. The film Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-42934422675153638202011-01-18T08:35:00.003-06:002011-01-18T14:51:03.576-06:00Meditations on first philosophyMeditations on first philosophy is the title of the first book ever written in contemporary western Philosophy, according to the university course I took. It was written by Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century, who began with the premise that he wanted to find true factual indubitable knowledge and that the way to find this was to begin by doubting everything, and retaining only what could Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-8514127580892640862011-01-13T13:42:00.004-06:002011-01-14T07:19:58.915-06:00Life as literatureThis is the title of a book by Alexander Nehamas. He is a philosophy professor and his book is a study of some of the writings of Nietzsche, with a theme that literary criticism is a handy set of tools to examine all of human life. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not too big. The simile is a little off though, and it works much better in the other direction. A novel can put you insideCraighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-88045222355065508442011-01-08T14:35:00.004-06:002011-01-08T15:38:08.133-06:00Invoking Abraham LincolnOn the 20th of December I performed an invocation of Saturn in celebration of the Winter Solstice. It was similar in form to the rituals I recently performed for the Autumn Equinox and for the Summer Solstice. On the 20th we had a full moon, and with a potential spectacular added twist: a total lunar eclipse.I found out about the eclipse a week ahead of time; I was planning on doing a solstice Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-89364027890849909242011-01-03T07:02:00.005-06:002011-10-03T09:23:22.635-05:00Dream worksMy experience with using dreams for psychotherapy is lengthy and inefficient with a couple of bright spots. The idea is that we have a subconscious mind in the first place (a hypothetical and unproven premise); and that secondly the material presented to us in our dreaming state of consciousness, which we happen to retain upon waking, provides us with a glimpse into the dynamics of processes Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8699281434756282361.post-8435150805328718682010-12-29T06:47:00.000-06:002010-12-29T06:48:21.506-06:00Magic and lightThis is an anecdote about an experience I once had which impressed me, but which I have never known exactly what to make of. I always think about it at this time of year, near the solstice, when sunlight is at minimum, and shadow length is at maximum. It is related to a topic in academic philosophy, phenomenology, and I am sure that if I understood my Husserl and my Heidegger a bit better Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16235421444022575080noreply@blogger.com0