Quote from "The Journey into Yourself"

I did not know that I would be captivated by Eckhart Tolle simple words...
After "The Power of Now" I bought "The Journey into yourself" - the recording of long, 9 hours lecture Eckhart gave at one of his seminars.

I made short transcript of short passage that reflects his thoughts.
I did so because they were quite close to thougts of one of my friends - who was practicing monk and buddist. And they are close to deepest level of understanding in all mystical traditions I met...

I could make some errors, hope my readers and Eckhart will forgive me:

"The empty space is left behind by death, whenever a form dissolves in your life. It may be an actual death or it may be a loss of something that happened to be important to you. If you can face that hole that is left behind by the form that is no longer there, it is a temporary hole into the dimension of formless, now I could almost say, into God, the formless one life, the formless, timeless one consciousness, that underlines all manifestation. It momentarily shines through whenever there is a hole in the tapestry of physical existence.

There is a kind of tapestry of forms, and in this tapestry of forms, which is gigantic, regularly, and at all time (...) holes open up continuously and are replaced by something else, but if you can be aware of the holes, of the openings, something shines through them that has not to do with a form but with essence of all forms.

And it is enormously peaceful. There is enormous peace and aliveness there, and that is the grace that lies concealed in any kind of death, accidental death, seemingly premature death, in any kind of loss…
(...)
And then you cover up the hole with reactions immediately, so that you do not have to face emptiness…. So when emptiness comes in your life, that is a beautiful, potentially , a beautiful opening in which you can actually find yourself, You find yourself by not resisting that, and so you begin to welcome death when it comes because it is inseparable part of this world of form.

But when we look at death and judge it from a point of view of an identity, a sense of self that is identified with form – and from there death looks horrible!"

No more words for tonight...

Demistyfing The Dead Sea Scrolls

I'm sure you will not regret buying and listening to this course created and lead by Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman. In 14 Lectures, narrated by the professor himself, one can listen about the most important archaeological discovery of XX century. For those who do not know, in 1947 in a place west to Dead Sea, called Qumran, the first from a set of ancient manuscripts was found. The set was later called The Dead Sea Scrolls. Over next almost 20 years, hundreds of manuscripts, mostly - parts of scrolls were identified. For long time the discovery was a bit secretive, with lots of all sorts of conspiracy theories about them. None of them proved true. And this is what Lawrence Schiffman says - this discovery is one of the greatest, but there is nothing that could "prove" or "disprove" religious believes !!!

The course author makes some interesting hypothesis about Qumran and its community. For example, contrary to popular views telling of Essenes as the Qumran community inhabitants, he convinces the listeners that it was rather created by a group of pious, priestly Sadducees who supposedly distances themselves from the practices of the Temple in Jerusalem.

What is very important in this lecture is the objectivity of its teaching. The author clearly states, that, though the discovery is very important, it does not question or break any of existing religious traditions, including Judaism and Christianity. However, shedding light on the most interesting period in Judaism's history - i.e. the transformation from the Temple periods to later rabbinic or Talmudic period, it also sheds light on early Christian history.

The lecture ends with interesting summary of Dead Sea Scrolls presence in today's public culture, and this presence is said to bring a very positive effect on bringing closer the largest and oldest monotheistic religions of the world....

I listened to this lecture with great attention, also because several weeks ago I was blessed by the possibility to visit Qumran and to feel it's unique atmosphere. See my two pictures:

RDF lecture

I didn't write here about but I lecture at The Academy of Humanities and Economics in Lodz. This semester (just ends) was all about XML and related technologies. So far my lectures are not ready for publishing. Tomorrow morning I will be talking about RDF, Semantic Web and Ontolgies. Nice themes. When younger, I was crazy about philosophy, and partially still am I. :-)