Yes, I’m breaking out my handmade shoes, and they are patched together from many things.

 ∞ ∞ ∞

Nothing to it but to do it.

So many thoughts pouring through my consciousness, the way the streams are flowing across the land.

Watched Waking Life, a film by Richard Linklater, last night and again today. It is

wonderful that our library provides us with free mind-altering substances. This movie is intense; I sat leaning forward, the better to follow what all these interesting people were saying about communication, evolution, corporate totalitarianism, free will, and the nature of consciousness. Today I watched the version with textual notes and, after a ride on the World Wide Web, came up with a reading list.

Robert C. Solomon: Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice; Existentialism; and Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life. What interested me about what Professor Solomon says in the film is that existentialism is not nihilistic. It is not a philosophy of despair but rather urges freedom from the tyranny of paradigmatic structures. Individuals do make a difference, simply by making conscious choices instead of giving over their decision-making and meaning-making power to an ideology.

Rupert Sheldrake: Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness; A New Science of Life; The Presence and the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature; and The Sense of Being Stared at, and Other Aspects of the Expanded Mind. Sheldrake is not in the film, but his ideas are. In particular the notion of human beings participating in our own evolution. Again, through conscious choices.

These titles call to me from my dreams, promising to open them so I’ll walk through to another world in which all possibilities exist.