“From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me.”
C. G. Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Notes:
I’ve read hundreds of books. And I remember what? Snippets. Particles. Fragments. Crumbs. Smidgens. Specks. Morsels. Bits. Traces. A messy mosaic of something. Adding up to a little more than nothing. A cacophony of deafening alarm bells ringing out to me. Wake up! Slow down! Listen! All banging around. But coincidences. And synchrodestiny. Are crumbs that resurface with frequency. The culprit? A Deepak Chopra book picked up while browsing at a Barnes & Nobles bookstore on a bitterly cold day over ten years ago. [Read more…]
6:17am: I’m up and out the door. It’s a beautiful morning for running. Wisps of cool air cutting through the early September humidity. Streaks of clouds cover the sunrise. A splash of color on a few trees getting a head start on autumn. It’s September 3rd. And a great day to be alive. (Hello September. Where did the year go? Love, LOVE, the fall season. The pulsating picture above feels like my heart does now. Ba Boom. Ba Boom. Ba Boom. Ba Boom. Keep tickin’ baby. Keep tickin’.)
6:23am: Pace is good. Both jets feel good. No one is out and about. Pesky squirrels are sleeping. Even the birds are quiet. (Yep, it’s just me and my head. And that can get crowded. Managed to contain the food intake yesterday. Miracle. Determined to get this weight down before the hibernation period. As Brenna would say, Thanksgiving is the time of the year “when I feel like I’ve eaten a gallon of mashed potatoes and a gravy-injected turkey and washed it down with six or seven espressos.”)
WSJ Magazine: What Did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, and Sarah Bernhardt Have in Common? The surprising—and continuing—influence of Swami Vivekananda, the pied piper of the global yoga movement.
Fascinating article worth reading in its entirety on this man’s influence on Henry & William James, Leo Tolstoy, Salinger, Carl Jung and many others. A few of my favorite excerpts:
“By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career…While he no longer visited with his editors, he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda…”
“Though the iconic author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ published his last story in 1965, he did not stop writing. From the early 1950’s onward, he maintained a lively correspondence with several Vedanta monks and fellow devotees. After all, the central guiding light of Salinger’s spiritual quest was the teachings of Vivekananda, the Calcutta born Monk who popularized Vedanta and yoga in the West at the end of the 19th century.
“These days yoga is offered up in classes and studios that have become as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Vivekananda would have been puzzled, if not somewhat alarmed. ‘As soon as I think of myself as a little body,’ he warned, ‘I want to preserve it, protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies. Then you and I become separate.’ For Vivekananda, yoga meant just one thing: “the realization of God.”
Live & Learn 