It is oft-repeated that Buddhism is not a religion, but rather a pragmatic psychology – it is quite here that the controversy within Scientology found its ground-swell, ensuring that the archaeological finds be immune to apathetic amnesia. Professor Chowdhury and three graduate students were completing work at a monastic complex in northern India when a hermetically sealed cave was...
Editorial notes: These reflections are about the quest to find underlying enduring meaning in the transitory experiences and events that make up our lives and constitute our world. It suggests that there is no such underlying enduring meaning, at least none accessible to us. But there can be crucial turning points in which we are surprised by experiences that transcend what we thought were the...
Brainstorming notes: Assuming the following re sexuality: Men desire to dominate women physically, but then to be needed by them physically and emotionally, and woman desire the emotional connection after Men/woman shock each other, re being dishonest to each other about how they feel about each other’s sexual mores; hence to be cross-binary-gender, need to incorporate this, e.g. part1 with...
In my heart, the real challenge awakened into quarrel’s inner courtrooms by Korach is the essence of post-theodic[I] egalitarianism[II], i.e. if all are facets of the same diamond, and all the centre of the stage, then why arrange ourselves by systems that force us to interact with each other and the world in specified protocols? This is both (1) unfair, why should only royalty enjoy fame’s...
Editorial notes: Shai opens this essay on how life and beauty (symbolised in the term “lilacs”) can be produced out of what looks at first like mere dead materiality (“dead soil”) with what looks like a claim to have had a mystical experience of God. He terms that experience as “How I solved the theocratic paradox in trans-noumenal space” – “trans-noumenal space” refers to the infinite...
Editorial notes: This commentary on the Shema makes reference to the ten sephirot, the underlying spiritual modalities structuring the divine image or “Tree of Life” on which the universe is designed according to the Kabbalah. These sephirotic powers are merely implicit and potential in the highest realm of infinity that is the source of all lower worlds, but are given more and more material form...
This is a poem about looking for purpose and direction, and how their considerations. Preface The gaze of our yearnings may differ Hence I had not tailored this message to my own.[1] Prelude In dreams born of dreams[2] All the meanings are cryptic And signify things unknowable. To rule them is to dream them, (the prophets read their own minds[3]). Method Goodness appears in the territorial...
Editorial notes: This essay moves from a brief reference to the Mishnah Shabbat to Kabbalistic categories mentioned in passing referring to Shabbat and everyday affairs, on to Midrashic analogies and the desirability of being true to oneself and ends with applying Kabbalistic terms to the crucial importance of the material world. This is related to the Fifth Commandment of honouring one’s parents...
Editorial notes: The short story below was found in Shai’s Google Drive notes and is clearly incomplete. The Brain Storming section at the end of the narrative alludes to the continuation of the story An apocryphal Braisa, non-canonical and existing only in Arabic: “Rabbi Yona was lost at sea. Can a man’s name be changed in absentia to avert an ill-luck? […]” Thus I have heard, when...
A map to a pathway: Dear You[1], We can tell each other how our life has been, which in essence (and writ small) is a tiny postcard, or map of where/what we’ve done and how we got there. The Earth is a single globe, and everything is One (everyone understands this in their own way, but we mostly agree that All is Greater than the self which separates itself from it). This means that every map in...
