Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

A Little Of This And A Little Of That …  When Solomon began to build the temple made of awakened intelligence, various materials begged to be part of it. Stones broke away and lifted off the mountain, singing, “Take us along!” Light shone from the mortar. The doorjambs and walls had lively conversation. The door knocker striking made music. Solomon’s mosque beyond matter is One that each of us must build. There’s no way to say how it Will look, constructed as it is of What we intend, and passionate action. Rumi (Barks)

Thought Coming Through The Walls Maybe our digital technology is still too new. Writing first appears on clay tablets around 3000 BC; it’s another 3,300 years before mankind invents the codex; from the codex to moveable type, 1,150 years; from moveable type to the Internet, 532 years. Forty years haven’t passed since the general introduction of the personal computer; the World Wide Web has only been in place for 20. We’re still playing with toys. The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Absent the force of the human imagination and its powers of expression, our machines cannot accelerate the hope of political and social change, which stems from language that induces a change of heart. Lewis Lapham Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear Huffpost

People Saying Interesting Things Tour Carol Snow Near a shrine in Japan he'd swept the path  and then placed camellia blossoms there. Or -- we had no way of knowing -- he'd swept the path  between fallen camellias. My words itch at your ears til you understand them. Walt Whitman

Here's To The Outsiders 2 of 2 And now at the edge of the year, we gather in the Edge community. I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative. Bill Hicks Jesus Himself, John the Baptist: Raggedy outsiders. John Updike ...we needed three centuries of self-imposed alienation, of tearing things to pieces to see how they worked to be be able to come back to a coherent world, this time with the powers and knowledge we always felt were our birthright--powers and knowledge we had mimed with magic. But now that we have come back, we must cast away the habits of exile--the self-contempt, the illusion of alienation, the hatred of the past, the sterile existentialism, the fear of the future, the wilful imposition of meaninglessness on a universe bursting with meaning. Frederick Turner

Here's To The Outsiders (1 of 2) We have come, along the wandering path of these podcasts, in the darkest time of winter, at a time when the news has also been dark, to the hundredth episode. Somewhere around 10,000 items so far. First day after the Mayan calendar cycle, just under Christmas, the time of family trauma and much loneliness. Let us take a leisurely stroll for a couple of episodes through the land of the Outsiders. Come with me and join the Outsiders! It didn't work in the composition of this work to drop names with every item. But listen for Margaret Visser, Robert Anton Wilson, David Cayley, Jack Kerouac, John Livingston, Bucky Fuller, Leonard Cohen, Alan Watts, Douglas Rushkoff, Caroline Casey, Derrick de Kerckhove,  John Taylor Gatto, Michael Ignatieff, Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Jonathan Winters, Richard Kearney, Ivan Illich, James Hillman, Nils Christie. If I've missed any that concern you, please contact me and I'll see if I have a na...

The Current Scene Through Different Windows The strength of language doesn't consist in its capacity to pin things down or sort things out. "Word work," Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, "is sublime because it is generative," its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. "We die," she said. "That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer's day, offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of immortality: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this and this gives life to thee."  Lewis Lapham  Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear  Huffpost

In A Thousand Nutshells All artists are pickpockets. friend of Robert W. Fuller The right way to wholeness is a longissima via , not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus. C. G. Jung (1968 [1944] par. 6)