Mike MacLeod
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  • Mountain View, CA
  • United States
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Thanks for the personal experience. I'll go over your postings on EA and get a feel for your journey, I hope. I was put off somewhat by the altitude there, but as you point out, as often as not the students offer it up to the teacher without prompt…
November 13
Thanks for the report. Can you tell us something about how it has affected you personally, a case study, if you will? Is this something that can become "habit", in the sense of prompted subconsiously to be performed consciously, if you take my mea…
November 13
It's perfect as it is, I daresay. As is EA, though it is not for me. What is for me? Not much, possibly, but I can recommend Mr. Gobley on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MrGobley.
November 5
I say Al Fatihah for a number of people.
November 5
This is something I wonder about, but mostly in context with those who speak against it. I remember that in the 1.1 version of HR James made a comment to the effect that feelings of disappointment or darker ones of frustration or anger were at the r…
July 27
"What is happiness to you, David?" Vanilla Sky recently took second place on a list of most polarizing movies, but from the perspective of my Sufi experiences it was one powerful meditation on reality, self, love, ego, desire, and of course happine…
July 23
Rajan, Luckily, I don't experience it like this. It's more like having a loved and trusted friend at your elbow all the time, silently there with you, but immediately available for consultation. My own superego is strident and demanding and talks…
July 18
Hi Rajan, I realize this is probably not quite what you were enquiring about, but I wanted to talk about it from arm's length, as it were, for a start. They talk about annihilations in the Shaykh, then the Founder of the order, then in the Prophet…
July 18
I wasn't specifically looking for a teacher; I was leading a miserable life and looking for help anywhere. I had been a precocious child in a loveless family and leaned while very young to depend completely on my intellect, so by the time I was 12 o…
July 18
Hi Michael, Well...I said too much, but yes, I didn't feel like this book made much of a contribution, for reasons Dr. Kingsley was not aware of then (but which he may have encountered by now), and for reasons of which I think any scholar should be…
July 8
I have to say that I was not impressed by Kingsley's In the Dark Places of Wisdom. I only managed to get through about 80% of it, and that was hard work. I quit when it became clear to me that he was not going to provide any instruction in incubatio…
July 6
We strive in the name of what we love. You could make a case that there cannot be strife with indifference, so the two motivations annihilate, leading to another occurrence of when "opposites combine and mingle", said to happen on the Path. As the…
July 6
If "strife" means "conflict" in this context, it is one thing, but if it is the noun form of "strive" it means something else all together. What do we strive for? Might be a spoonful of water Saved from the desert sand Might be a spoon of your prec…
July 6
By the by, I very much endorse the idea of fasting from various foods to see how and if it affects problems. I have friends who are raw food fanatics, and I once sneered (politely) at what I saw as their affectations. Then I developed painful arthri…
June 27
Or a rooster crowing.
June 26
Hi Michael, Thanks for the positive feedback. No, I never looked at myself in that way, despite spending most of my life looking into myself like a parakeet twittering at itself in a mirror.
June 26

Mike MacLeod's Blog

Mike MacLeod

A wire brush


My father used to make wood sculptures by taking a large chunk of wood with a heavy grain and burning its surface with an acetylene torch. He then took a wire brush and scraped away the charcoal, leaving the grain of the wood, the bones of the wood, exposed with great beauty.… Continue

Posted on June 16, 2009 at 11:31am — 3 Comments

Mike MacLeod

The River of Consciousness

A man is standing in the middle-point of a small river, waist-deep, looking downstream. He can see, from this vantage point, the water flowing past him, and the banks of the river on each side.

Downstream, he sees several smaller creeks emptying into it on each side. The waters meet the water in "his" river and color it where they enter, but they mix into the greater river.

After a while the man wonders where the creeks come from, and with monumental effort turns around and sees creeks flowing… Continue

Posted on June 11, 2009 at 1:59am — 1 Comment

Mike MacLeod

Belief

For a good long time I have struggled with the concepts of belief, disbelief, skepticism, knowledge, understanding, and others that orbit around what we call epistemology.

My main interest is in belief. I have passionate feelings about it, dating back to the rabid atheist days of my youth, and I have somehow managed to preserve my dislike for the concept through many intellectual twists and turns.

A comprehensive essay on its interrelationships with human psychology is beyond the scope of a bl… Continue

Posted on June 11, 2009 at 1:56am — 18 Comments

Mike MacLeod

The Traveler (reposted)

I thought it might be appropriate to revisit this lovely poem. I forget who brought it here first, but thank you again.

The Traveler

A hundred years I slept beneath a thorn,
Until the tree was root and branches of my thought,
Until white petals blossomed in my crown.

A thousand years I floated in a lake
Until my brimful eye could hold
The scattered moonlight and the burning cloud.

Mine is the gaze that knows
Eyebright, asphodel, the briar rose.
I have seen the rainbow open, the sun cl… Continue

Posted on June 11, 2009 at 12:53am — 1 Comment

Mike MacLeod

Overheard in the Dergah

The dervish looked at his Shaykh uncertainly.

"O, my Shaykh, you know best. Can you tell us what is wrong with mankind in a single sentence?"

The Shaykh looked out the window into the November evening as the line of cars and their headlights disappeared into the smoggy evening murk.

"Yes, I can. Men are starving and they tear pictures of food out of magazines and eat them."

Posted on June 10, 2009 at 2:31pm — 1 Comment

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