My Reading List

 Undiscovered Country: A Spiritual Adventure by Kathryn C. Hulme (1966)

This book was recommended to me by a friend who lived in Kawai and personally knew the author. I'm very glad I've read this memoirs. However the methods are not there. He asked his students not to reveal methods and exercises given to them as they were personally customized to each student. There is not point to do someone's exercise.

"Nothing in life is ever wasted, every experience can be of use" (p33)
 
"We must keep in mind that as we were, everything was done to us from outside, that we took no part in our activity because we had no unique central "I", only a crowd of "personality" I's in continual argument between centers, fighting for their turns in the driver seat".

"When you do a thing - do it with the whole self. One thing at a time. Now I sit here and I eat. For me nothing exists in the world except this food, this table".

She... seen life straight, without shock or surprise for any of its shabby revelations".

"This is most important day for you. After you assimilate what I'm giving, you will be responsible for all your acts, even for our unconscious acts. Beginning then, you will take  a position of responsibility. A record is kept for each. All you do is written in red or black in the angel Gabriel's book. Not for everyone is its record kept, but only for those who have taken the position of responsibility. There is a law of sins; now you are subjects to this law."


You can never know the subjective state of another. You must not try to understand what causes it. 

"In order to truly understand an experience, one must first go completely into it and then come entirely out of it". (p180)

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey (June 2011)

How one wave can behave independently from, and be unaffected by, the waves around it.

According to the UN's International Marina Organization, from 1990 to mid-1997 a total of 99 bulk carriers were lost (in the ocean). In winter of 1997-98 27 vessels along with 654 people were lost during a 4-month period.

The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.





Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell (май 2011)

"Britain's Royal Society had dispatched COOK, La Perouse's predecessor and idol, on his first Pacific expedition in time to make it to Tahiti by June 3, 1769, so as TO OBSERVE THE TRANSIT OF VENUS ACROSS THE SUN. THAT'S WHY THEY SENT HIM THERE: to sail for 8 month just to catch a glipmse of another planet's orbit, an event that, incidentally, lasted for 6 hours. The expedition's  calculations were to be used to measure the universe, but since such calculations would not really be accurate untill the inventon of photography, Cook completed his task yet still sort of failed" (24).

"I began to think about leaving that country to go to some other parts of the globe. I did not care where I shall go to". Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, an orphan whose parents were killed by Kamehameha's warriors ina  stint of vigorous "uniting" (20).