tonight's sunset outside #Asheville, NC

my summarization of the contemplative philosopher Plotinus' instructions for how we're to realize the worth and wonder of existence: be beautifully 🙂 🪷

🙂 🙏 ❤️ from something I wrote the other day...

1/3 Plotinus suggests that for us to conceive of the One as "one" is already too much. Since "the degree of unity by which That transcends your thought is more than you imagined" (Enneads 6.9.6.15). This can sound abstract but…

tonight's sunset on my road, outside #Asheville, NC

Buddhists, esp. in Mahayana, appreciate that all our thoughts and perceptions come from somewhere — they're created, they're not the starting point — and thus, in Buddhist parlance, they're "empty," since they depend on other things in order to occur. This is a hymn to appreciating that truth 🙏 ❤️:

I hope it's not too much to, um, hope, but it would be a good if the vileness coming out around the Epstein materials works to raise the country's awareness of how awful our cultural patterns are. 1/-

from today's walk, near my home outside #Asheville, NC

in tonight's #meditation ... practice phrases like ... "just don’t pick and choose" "if you try to approach it you go away from it" and "have no gaining idea" ... led to an appreciation that ... the way things are otherwise known as the fact that there is anything is the meditation

I happen to be editing some writing I've done about the Cynics at the moment, and the spirit of your post reminds me of their playful-serious critiques of societal norms and expectations....

This reminds me that the way we perceive the world is a construction. And when we practice and allow equanimity — we see that that construction is a poem. 🙏 ❤️

one more of the aurora tonight, outside #Asheville, NC

another picture of the aurora tonight, from my yard

I think I'm* seeing the aurora here, outside #Asheville. (*more precisely — my phone camera is picking it up)

snowy night, outside #Asheville tonight

outside Asheville, it was 69F and sunny here this time yesterday ... it's currently 24F ... and snowing ❄️

I've mentioned in other posts, I've experienced meditating in dreamless sleep — no doubt about it. And I've been at it long enough, often just taking the posture is enough — things get more intimate and sober and somehow kind on their own. Another way I've put it: "This horse knows the way home."🙂🙏

really nice day today (though temps are expected in the 20F's tonight, and all day tomorrow) ... so went for a walk, and said hi to my neighbors (in the second pic they have clover in their mouth, which I picked for them)

I sense it can get subtle — our minds can't help but try to make models of what's happening. And spiritual "effort" and "intention" can have the paradoxical character of "trying to be natural." So it's like how being honest can take effort, but it's an effort towards not doing, not making things up.

In tonight's #meditation... the sense of "I" as an experience (in other words, "I" as less a starting point or a framer or an instigator or an evaluator, and more as a generated event)

tonight's sunset, outside #Asheville

on my walk just now, outside #Asheville

good foggy morning, from outside #Asheville

... and, in association with khthoniaa's post just now ...

I am, at this moment revising some writing I'm doing on Plotinus, who I find to to saying something very similar...

Judge Ellis' statements in issuing a preliminary injunction today against federal agents in Chicago using force against journalists, protestors, and religious figures ... is moving. Thread: bsky.app/profile/jons...

... meditation is about allowing what is more original than meditation

tonight's moon, Western Carolina

over-simple and needing nuance, but a helpful framing for me from tonight's #meditation: it's not about what I know, it's about what is happening.

tonight's sunset from my home ... outside #Asheville, NC (18 sec)

saw a flock of geese in the sky outside my window, but they'd moved on before I could step outside to photograph them — got a little rabbit in the yard instead :)

There's a Zen koan (Blue Cliff Record, #27)... A monk asked Zen teacher Yunmen, “When the tree withers and the leaves fall off, then what?” Yunmen said, “The body is exposed in the autumn wind.” .... The "autumn wind," also referred to as the "golden wind," brings ripening. 🙂 🙏

neighborhood rooster says good morning (10 sec.) #Asheville NC

I'm named after my grandfather who, in turn, was named after a Union soldier who his father had met when they were at Gettysburg. His father was a Confederate. The two soldiers met at night while on guard duty, and, rather than shoot one another, they traded books.

a poem that is awake an appreciative participant expression of the way things are in and as creation (realized largely in allowing an embrace from being alive) . tonight's #meditation

Doing some writing on Plotinus. It's often fun to see modern associations for the Greek terms he used. In this passage, e.g., "aei," endless or always, is related to our word "eternal" and also to "aye," our old word for "yes," which previously had had connotations of "yes, always," or "yes, ever."

pretty fall day here, outside my house, near #Asheville, NC (not sure what the little green goblin moving across the screen midway is — some Halloween visitor, I presume)

Word of gratitude to US gov't employees— Called in to Social Security to change the account where I receive direct deposit payments. The person I spoke with took care of it. Efficiently. Pleasantly. With so much sad antipathy from the Trump admin these days, I'm thankful for the kind interaction.

Scary 👻 🎃

Reminds me of how much doing loving-kindness meditation — directing wishes of well-being to others — helps me.

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it's not their most technically polished version — but it always moves me 🙏 ❤️ Oh, but if you could, do you think you would Trade in all the pain and suffering? Oh, but then you'd miss the beauty of The light upon this earth and the sweetness of the leaving www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW_X...

reminds me of moments on Zen retreats when there comes to be little difference between "meditation" and "things being the way they are"

Tonight's #meditation involved the koan-like question or orientation, "What's it like before I do anything?"

I'm doing some writing on Socrates, who had a "little daimon" (daimonion), and for background I went back and looked at how Homer and Hesiod used the term. I'm not expert in this area, but here's a summary of what I saw....

thread that lists food support resources and organizations in #Asheville, NC (thanks, Kim)

1\3 Sometimes in #meditation I find it helpful to not know what I'm doing. I can get in a place where there's too much thinking — and "thankfully" I can tell it's too much because I get a characteristic little head pain. But occasionally *any effort* then to still that thinking brings more pain.

"340 former officers of the CIA, the NSA, the state department and other national security agencies" have written a report on growing indications of what's termed "competitive authoritarianism" in the U.S. To say they're concerned is a gross understatement. 1|2 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...