Baudelaire was an artmonk (kinda)
At One O’Clock in the Morning A prayer of sorts by Charles Baudelaire: Alone, at last! Not a sound to be heard but the rumbling of some belated and decrepit cabs. For a few hours we shall have silence, if not repose. At last the tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I myself ...
Chapter 2 of Augustine’s Rule
[Part of the Daily Lectio series, named after the Benedictine tradition of lectio divina, "divine reading." For instructions and background on the series, click here. Subscribe to Daily Lectio. Send comments or suggested readings to nathan@artmonastery.org] Starting on October 2nd, I’ll be doing a Jesuit retreat on the Rule of Augustine (which I’ve written about here: “Up to our necks in Augustine”). ...
Up to our necks in Augustine
On Saturday the Art Monastery, a community of artists from a wide range of spiritual traditions working to apply the tools of monasticism to art-making instead of religion, will embark on a 7-day silent retreat in the Jesuit tradition, in which the primary form of activity (and inactivity) will be to read the Rule of ...
A Users Guide to Lectio Divina, or How to Feast on Words
I’ve been sending out daily readings on monasticism to a handful of artmonks at the Art Monastery. Why not post them here too? Hence, I’ll be posting readings from a variety of traditions and sources, along with commentary from a secular monastic, art monastic or “monastech” perspective, as a new series of blog posts called Daily ...
Profile: Mirabai Bush and the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
From Zen Peacemakers: Mirabai Bush is Senior Fellow and the founding Director of the Center on Contemplative Mind in Society, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to encourage contemplative awareness in American life in order to create a more just, compassionate, and reflective society. She has designed and led contemplative trainings for corporations from Monsanto ...
Accelerating Future » Al Fin: Neither Ray Kurzweil nor PZ Myers Understand the Brain
I suspect (and pray?) that the people that will have an edge designing artificial consciousness are the ones that have deeply explored their own. Accelerating Future » Al Fin: Neither Ray Kurzweil nor PZ Myers Understand the Brain. In other words, Ray Kurzweil expects humans to build a brain-functional machine in the next 2 decades ...
Getting the questions right
Examples of the secular world learning from the world’s ancient contemplative and spiritual traditions abound. Neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, cognitive scientists and cosmologists are learning from inner technologies of meditation and contemplative practice. But what of the outer, visible, measurable technologies of those traditions? How are we learning from those technologies that fit into what is ...
