The French Lieutenant's Woman - by John Fowles

Written as an exercise of Victorian literature, the book depicts the psychological evolution of an impossible love. The characters psyche is Victorian, and all their inner evolution follows the epoch's constraints.

Island, by Aldous Huxley

Written towards the end of his life, the book draws Huxley's view about the perfect utopic society. With only minor influences from Brave New World, Huxley succeeds in creating a society where Budhism, psichology and medicine, drugs and sexuality, and many more, all add their benefit to the individual experience, to the personal achievement.

Quotes worth thinking about:

- But Good Being is in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences. So be aware - aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering.

- faith is something very different from belief. Belied is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's .. - people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history - sadism versus duty, sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia.. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being.

- .. about the sexuality of children. What we're born with , what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn't concentrated on the genitals; it's a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That's the paradise we inherit.

- does one learn how to forget?

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet be here, on the spot, with the living.

- one has no right to inflict one's sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn't sad. One just has to accept one's grief and one's absurd attempts to be a stoic.

- Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment.

- Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

- You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions.

- Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible.

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

- "I" affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; "am" denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. "I am". Two tiny word, but what an enormity of untruth.

- .. a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.

- The point is to get people to understand we're not at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we're disturbed by what's going on inside our heads, we can do something about it.

- one thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.

Book Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature - website, laureates

Pulizer - website, awards

Man Booker Prize (UK, 1969, fiction) - website, awards

Orange Prize (UK, 1996, English female authors) - website

Commonwealth Writers' Prize (UK, 1987) - website

National Book Awards (USA) - website

American Booksellers Association (USA) - website

Goncourt (France) - website

Prix Medicis  (France) - website

Prix  Renaudot  (France) - website

Prix  Femina (France) - website

Premio Nacional de Literatura (Espagna)

Romulo Gallegos (Venezuela, 1967)

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

The book tells the story of the cultural and emotional regression (degradation) of a group of young English school-boys that are by accident all alone on a deserted island. Some philosophical reasonings come to attention: hedonism versus responsibility, self versus group, death morality versus group adherence, innocence versus savagery.
The author leaves children to play and evolve under our eyes, their simple and rudimentary decisions become, at a smaller scale, the decisions of the modern civilization.

"Egoistul" cu Radu Beligan, TNB

Gen: Drama, Teatrul National Bucuresti
Nota: 5+/5

Actori: 5+/5
Scenariul: 5+/5
Regia: 5/5

Am vazut intr-un final "Egoistul", imi doream de tare mult sa ajung, am vanat bilete cu intrerupere timp de 4-5 ani. Punerea in piesa a fost superba, Radu Beligan a tinut practic tot spectacolul. Tema: egoismul din noi, egoismul in familie, intre prieteni, intre toti cei dragi; iar la finalul zilei suntem singuri, asa cum ne-am nascut, goliti de energie de cei din jur, in jocul agitat al vietii.

Beligan a avut rolul autorului, observatorului rece, participand la piesa vietii doar distant, ironic si fara implicare emotonala; parca amuzat fiind de jocul ce se desfasoara in fata sa, insa deloc uimit, si nici macar incercand sa ii faca pe ceilalti sa priceapa jocul sau, intelegerea sa.

E ca si cum s-a distantat de viata, o intelege prea bine ca sa cada in plasele intinse de ea, priveste ironic si rational la dezlantuirea plina de energie a fiintelor din jurul sau, energie depusa cu siretenie si interes.

Totusi, ironic, e ca si cum isi traieste pe scena propria viata, ajunsa la sfarsit. Probabil de aceea a si starnit in mine tristete, probabil ca mi-as fi dorit chiar eu, in egoismul meu, sa traiesc aceasta piesa mai mult timp, acele momente sa le inghet in timp, sau sa pot reveni la ele. Insa nu ma voi mai putea intoarce la ele, probabil si actorul va muri, si clipele au fost cele de azi, pline de farmec si inteles, si poate mai pline de substanta tocmai prin coincidenta vietii actorului cu personajul.

Pana la urma spectatorii nu au fost egoisti, desi probabil toti ne doream sa aplaudam mai mult, sa ne aducem aprecierea pentru piesa foarte reusita, aplauzele nu au durat mult, aceasta pentru ca Beligan a iesit din scena obosit, prea obosit de viata. Dar cu siguranta aceasta este viata, si ea isi urmeaza cursul simplu, cu viata si moarte, pentru noi toti, fara un talc anume, doar simplu.

Link: http://www.tnb.ro/?page=spectacol&idspec=143

Mindfulness In Plain English - by Ven. Henepola Gunaratana

A good friend recommended this book, you can download it using the link.

This is the most clear book on meditation I've read until now. It clearly states what meditation is, and is not, it does not go into philosophy that much (unless needed for the understanding of the techniques), it gives lots of details and alternatives to the techniques used, it states what can go wrong and how to fix it, and what are the stages along the way.

Thought scramble / distractions (= monkey mind) =>
thought understanding (patience and usage of positive feelings as antidotes) =>
meditation (= mindfulness & concentration) =>
enlightenment

Some quotes I especially liked:

• The purpose of Vipassana meditation is nothing less than the radical and permanent transformation of your entire sensory and cognitive experience. It is meant to revolutionize the whole of your life experience. Those periods of seated practice are times set aside for instilling new mental habits. You learn new ways to receive and understand sensation. You develop new methods of dealing with conscious thought, and new modes of attending to the incessant rush of your own emotions. These new mental behaviors must be made to carry over into the rest of your life.
• You search for that thing you call 'me', but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them. You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective and defensive over these pitiful things and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself -- physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings and emotions -- it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for 'me'. You find nothing. In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes which have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

• When you hate somebody you think, "Let him be ugly. Let him lie in pain. Let him have no prosperity. Let him not be right. Let him not be famous. Let him have no friends. Let him, after death, reappear in an unhappy state of depravation in a bad destination in perdition." However, what actually happens is that your own body generates such harmful chemistry that you experience pain, increased heart beat, tension, change of facial expression, loss of appetite for food, deprivation of sleep and appear very unpleasant to others. You go through the same things you wish for your enemy. Also you cannot see the truth as it is. Your mind is like boiling water. Or you are like a patient suffering from jaundice to whom any delicious food tastes bland. Similarly, you cannot appreciate somebody's appearance, achievement, success, etc. As long as this condition exists, you cannot meditate well.
• Those who have studied Buddhism superficially are quick to conclude that it is a pessimistic set of teachings, always harping on unpleasant things like suffering, always urging us to confront the uncomfortable realities of pain, death and illness. Buddhist thinkers do not regard themselves as pessimists--quite the opposite, actually. Pain exists in the universe; some measure of it is unavoidable. Learning to deal with it is not pessimism, but a very pragmatic form of optimism. How would you deal with the death of your spouse? How would you feel if you lost your mother tomorrow? Or your sister or your closest friend? Suppose you lost your job, your savings, and the use of your hands, on the same day; could you face the prospect of spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair? How are you going to cope with the pain of terminal cancer if you contract it, and how will you deal with your own death, when that approaches? You may escape most of these misfortunes, but you won't escape all of them. Most of us lose friends and relatives at some time during our lives; all of us get sick now and then; at the very least you are going to die someday. You can suffer through things like that or you can face them openly--the choice is yours.
• Pain is inevitable, suffering is not. Pain and suffering are two different animals.
• If the breath seems an exceedingly dull thing to observe over and over, you may rest assured of one thing: You have ceased to observe the process with true mindfulness. Mindfulness is never boring. Look again. Don't assume that you know what breath is. Don't take it for granted that you have already seen everything there is to see. If you do, you are conceptualizing the process. You are not observing its living reality. When you are clearly mindful of breath or indeed anything else, it is never boring. Mindfulness looks at everything with the eyes of a child, with the sense of wonder. Mindfulness sees every second as if it were the first and the only second in the universe. So look again.
• Restlessness is often a cover-up for some deeper experience taking place in the unconscious. We humans are great at repressing things. Rather than confronting some unpleasant thought we experience, we try to bury it. We won't have to deal with the issue.
• Thoughts of greed cover everything connected with desire, from outright avarice for material gain, all the way down to a subtle need to be respected as a moral person. Thoughts of hatred run the gamut from petty peevishness to murderous rage. Delusion covers everything from daydreaming through actual hallucinations. Generosity cancels greed. Benevolence and compassion cancel hatred. You can find a specific antidote for any troubling thought if you just think about it a while.
• The purpose of meditation is not to concentrate on the breath, without interruption, forever. That by itself would be a useless goal. The purpose of meditation is not to achieve a perfectly still and serene mind. Although a lovely state, it doesn't lead to liberation by itself. The purpose of meditation is to achieve uninterrupted mindfulness. Mindfulness, and only mindfulness, produces Enlightenment.
• mindfulness and concentration. A bit of caution on this term: The word 'hindrances' carries a negative connotation, and indeed these are states of mind we want to eradicate. That does not mean, however, that they are to be repressed, avoided or condemned.
  Let's use greed as an example. We wish to avoid prolonging any state of greed that arises, because a continuation of that state leads to bondage and sorrow. That does not mean we try to toss the thought out of the mind when it appears. We simply refuse to encourage it to stay. We let it come, and we let it go. When greed is first observed with bare attention, no value judgements are made. We simply stand back and watch it arise. The whole dynamic of greed from start to finish is simply observed in this way. We don't help it, or hinder it, or interfere with it in the slightest. It stays as long as it stays. And we learn as much about it as we can while it is there. We watch what greed does. We watch how it troubles us, and how it burdens others. We notice how it keeps us perpetually unsatisfied, forever in a state of unfulfilled longing. From this first-hand experience, we ascertain at a gut level that greed is an unskillful way to run your life. There is nothing theoretical about this realization.
• desire => want more => use more energy to get it => never ending circle
• Aversion: Suppose that you have been distracted by some negative experience. It could be something you fear or some nagging worry. It might be guilt or depression or pain. Whatever the actual substance of the thought or sensation, you find yourself rejecting or repressing -- trying to avoid it, resist it or deny it. The handling here is essentially the same. Watch the arising of the thought or sensation. Notice the state of rejection that comes with it. Gauge the extent or degree of that rejection. See how long it lasts and when it fades away.
• Every mental state has a birth, a growth and a decay. You should strive to see these stages clearly. This is no easy thing to do, however. As we have already noted, every thought and sensation begins first in the unconscious region of the mind and only later rises to consciousness. We generally become aware of such things only after they have arisen in the conscious realm and stayed there for some time. Indeed we usually become aware of distractions only when they have released their hold on us and are already on their way out. It is at this point that we are struck with the sudden realization that we have been somewhere, day-dreaming, fantasizing, or whatever. Quite obviously this is far too late in the chain of events. We may call this phenomenon catching the lion by its tail, and it is an unskillful thing to do. Like confronting a dangerous beast, we must approach mental states head-on.
• Meditation is a bit like mental acid. It eats away slowly at whatever you put it on. We humans are very odd beings. We like the taste of certain poisons and we stubbornly continue to eat them even while they are killing us. Thoughts to which we are attached are poison. You will find yourself quite eager to dig some thoughts out by the roots while you jealously guard and cherish certain others. That is the human condition.
• Mindfulness is mirror-thought. It reflects only what is presently happening and in exactly the way it is happening. There are no biases.
  Mindfulness is non-judgmental observation. It is that ability of the mind to observe without criticism. With this ability, one sees things without condemnation or judgment. One is surprised by nothing. One simply takes a balanced interest in things exactly as they are in their natural states. One does not decide and does not judge. One just observes.
• Mindfulness is goal-less awareness. In Mindfulness, one does not strain for results. One does not try to accomplish anything. When one is mindful, one experiences reality in the present moment in whatever form it takes. There is nothing to be achieved. There is only observation.
• Mindfulness, one is an unbiased observer whose sole job is to keep track of the constantly passing show of the universe within. Please note that last point. In Mindfulness, one watches the universe within. The meditator who is developing Mindfulness is not concerned with the external universe. It is there, but in meditation, one's field of study is one's own experience, one's thoughts, one's feelings, and one's perceptions. In meditation, one is one's own laboratory. The universe within has an enormous fund of information containing the reflection of the external world and much more. An examination of this material leads to total freedom.
• There are three fundamental activities of Mindfulness. We can use these activities as functional definitions of the term: (1) Mindfulness reminds us of what we are supposed to be doing; (2) it sees things as they really are; and (3) it sees the deep nature of all phenomena.
• Mindfulness alone has the power to reveal the deepest level of reality available to human observation: (a) all conditioned things are inherently transitory; (b) every worldly thing is, in the end, unsatisfying; and (c) there are really no entities that are unchanging or permanent, only processes.
• Mindfulness reminds the meditator to apply his attention to the proper object at the proper time and to exert precisely the amount of energy needed to do the job.
• Concentration should be regarded as a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. A sharp knife can be used to create a beautiful carving or to harm someone. It is all up to the one who uses the knife. Concentration is similar. Properly used, it can assist you
  towards liberation. But it can also be used in the service of the ego. It can operate in the framework of achievement and competition. You can use concentration to dominate others. You can use it to be selfish. The real problem is that concentration alone will not give you a perspective on yourself. It won't throw light on the basic problems of selfishness and the nature of suffering. It can be used to dig down into deep psychological states. But even then, the forces of egotism won't be understood.
• In a state of mindfulness, you see yourself exactly as you are. You see your own selfish behavior. You see your own suffering. And you see how you create that suffering. You see how you hurt others. You pierce right through the layer of lies that you normally tell yourself and you see what is really there. Mindfulness leads to wisdom.
• We spend most of our time running on automatic pilot, lost in the fog of day-dreams and preoccupations.
• One of the most frequently ignored aspects of our existence is our body

There should be a clear difference between tasks/actions on one hand and feelings and actions tight with those feelings on the other hand. One should be able to be Mindfull on the first and do the task, while should be analytical-Mindfull with the second. Otherwise the meditator would not be able to solve any activity.
VERIFY THIS AGAINST
"The meditator learns to pay bare attention to the birth, growth, and decay of all the phenomena of the mind. He turns from none of it, and he lets none of it escape. Thoughts and emotions, activities and desires, the whole show. He watches it all and he watches it continuously. It matters not whether it is lovely or horrid, beautiful or shameful."

Foucault's_Pendulum - Umberto Eco

Reminded me of two books "Alice in wonderland" and "Da Vinci Code", the plot is about the creation of a mystical book by three authors. While in the creation process, the book affects the author's lives profoundly.
I did not enjoy the tons of mystical, Templars and RosiCrucians literature cut-pasted in the book,
never the less I did enjoy the creative process, and the final plot, but that is aprox less than 10% of the whole book.