I've flipped

I love printed books, their tactile heft, their beauty, but over the years I've developed a preference for ebook reading. Instant word-touch dictionary access, text highlighting, easy word or name search, no need to turn on a lamp at night and wake your sleeping spouse--it just offers so many advantages. And now the biggest remaining deficiency has largely been overcome: page flipping.

Father Chrismyth

"Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snowman. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up."

~G. K. Chesterton,  "Man and Mythologies" 

Gone But Not Forgotten

(September 21, 1934 – November 7, 2016)

"There’s a line in “The Future”: “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.” I understood that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years. Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches, it was lost. So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgot. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bath water. People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful."   ~Leonard Cohen

LOTUS Interview

East Meets West: Heroes and Mystics

The Roots of Meditation

"The roots of meditation are the ancient warrior professions,” Roth explains. “That was hand-to-hand combat, and to perform, you couldn’t act out of anger or fear or impulsivity. You had to be clear-thinking at all times. When he talks about how meditation improves his performance, Ray talks about inner equanimity and being a ninja. It’s made to order for people in the finance industry.”  ~The Om of Wall Street

The warrior "roots" of meditation are actually in the Aryan culture that brought the Vedic religion into India. See THE ASSASSIN LOTUS.

(thanks to John Magee)