Poetry

"The Keeper of Sheep" by Fernando Pessoa
I thought a few of you might appreciate this:

http://vimeo.com/104769517

I tried watching it yesterday but It didn't stream for me. I'll have to try watching it on my laptop.

Here is another link to the clip::

http://vimeo.com/conditionedthings

How can you not think? Even making a conscious effort to 'not think' is, in fact thinking is it not?

Here is one to think about...if anyone wishes to think that is...

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

Breath growing short

Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls

On that small tree

And saturates your brick back garden walls,

So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

This glistening illuminates the air.

It never ends.

Whenever the rain comes it will be there,

Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter's choice, the maple tree is new.

Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

What I must do

Is live to see that. That will end the game

For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,

A final flood of colours will live on

As my mind dies,

Burned by my vision of a world that shone

So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

Breathtaking piece!!

"How can you not think? Even making a conscious effort to 'not think' is, in fact thinking is it not?"

What a clever observation. At last you could think. Though it is true that with the power of thinking we could condition our minds to not think, at least for a short while- this is called meditation.- Of course there are different stages of achieving this: the total silence of mind is the hardest one and needs long long practice.
We can even start by counting, anything that distracts us from thinking. Even the phrase of "Pay attention" means to dislodge yourself from your internal dialog.
In meditation they teach that by encouraging the practitioner to first pay attention to something, and then to the surrounding world, without rendering any judgment about any element or in general. I think this is what this poem is trying to say.
This poem as you see cannot get the attention of readers of this site even though is one of the best poem of the one of the most influential poets of contemporary Europe. Imagine if someone, posted this, it would not even get nominated for the weeklies.

I haven't been able to see the video. I can't listen to it unless I have headphones which at the moment, I don't.

But as far as Hellon's post. How I interpret it is as if someone is having a conversation to himself. It rather seems he has accepted he is going to die but hopes to make it till autumn. May be her daughter is pregnant? and the maple tree is some metaphor for a baby? He wants to see the baby? I am not sure. But I feel connected to that poem. I like the tone and the rhyming. Though perhaps, he just like the auburn color in the maple tree and he wants to see it?

I did think about the possibility of meditation here but dismissed it because...IMO you have to practise meditating for years before pulling it off and while you are practicing you are thinking about when the time will come that you are able to not think and wonder if you'll ever achieve this state so....theoretically your mind is thinking ahead...always thinking :)

Regarding the poem. It was written by Clive James who has been battling with leukaemia and emphysema since 2010. He knows the battle is drawing close to and end.

It is not achievable by thinking it is achievable by conditioning our minds. First a cleaver mind realizes how addictive is thinking, so instead of thinking about "not thinking" he distracts himself from thinking, by only for example, staring at a blank spot in his mind, for at least few seconds. In first as you mentioned it becomes impossible, then for a while mind reacts to the exercise by desperately over thinking, but after a while only few practitioners could learn to tame the wild horse and ride on silence.
As I said it is not impossible. Meditation is the degree of silencing the mind. The good thing that comes whit this exercise is that one gets a glimpse into the point zero as I described it before ( some in my poetry). One would see (as this poem tries to convey) there are not any distance between us and the subject of our thinking, except 'our abilities of thinking'.
This is exactly what that the philosopher (Ronald de Sousa), who is waking the Philosopher's walk ( in the university of Toronto's campus) trying to convey by reciting Pessoa's poem . The poem is about Metaphysic in which is another name for philosophy. He thinks that "there is ample metaphysics in not thinking at all". In real as you realized the paradox, he thinks there is ample reason to assume thinking is vain. Though as you mentioned he gets there by using the very faculties of thinking or better yet, by suspending and than by redirecting and reprocessing that faculty. It seems contradictory but yet it is right: like "to be and not to be" in the same time, which are contradictory but yet it is the only way to be, for it is how everything is: "The first breath in our life, is the first step towards the death." So paradox is always there, but our minds are not able to process the thought because we are not conditioned to dialectical reasoning, we only see, 'this and that' ratiocination.
Don Juan always reminded Carlos that a "man of knowledge" is the only person who could remain at ease in the presence of paradox. I love this. I love the way native Americans describe the universe.

This is a fascinating subject so, thank you for starting it. You mention 'staring at a blank spot' and I do know what you mean. I practice Tai Chi and yoga both of which use this focusing method to concentrate but...don't you think that...sub-consciously the mind is saying....focus...focus..do not loose your balance? As I say...a sub-conscious thought.

The brain is a fascinating thing, and the sub-conscious is something that interests me. I'm sure you've heard of sub-conscious advertising? I'm the only one in the family who can see these random pop-ups on TV without having to really look for them...weird haha!!!!

I wonder if you've Read The Power of One where the main character is trained by a Zulu warrior to sub-consciously call him to mind by picturing three fountains and some stones...yes, quite fascinating....

It is true for the beginners but after a while mind gets the glimpse, though only the glimpse into that silence. Silence is our nature, thinking actually is our second nature. Animals do not think therefore their attentions are way keener than ours. Pay attention to dogs and cats, they hear and see way better than man. The facility of thinking even though a blessing, it is our doom, our prison. it is overused and abused by us like everything else. Like eating, we do not need most of the thing that we eat and what we really need most of the time we don't, therefore we are diseased, obese and cancered and... Sexuality which is the facility of love and reproduction, we use and abuse it for so many other reasons. So as so many other things. Ergo thinking al I mentioned which is our blessing by itself is our prison: a man, 24 hours a day, seven days a week... is a prisoner , an absolute miserable prisoner of his/ her internal dialog, in which if you dissect, is nothing but the ego talking in the language of self-pity, self importance, envy, and all the seven spectrums of sins. We rarely think about things that we need to, and when we do, we are distracted by the shadows of ourselves, our egos, so we cannot see anything but our version of things. The new psychology ascertains as don Juan said: Our memory is not the account of what happened in our past , it is an account of our version of what happened in our past!! Marcel Proust in his master piece: " In Search of Lost Time " mentions this dilemma so beautifully : " what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us..."

Actually, animals do think. Although on different levels and, not the same as humans.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,30198,00.html

I don't really think that thinking is our doom but...perhaps I'm doomed for thinking this way?

*Edit...sorry, of course I meant humans..not adults. I've changed it now :)

Animals act and react upon conditional reflective impulses and their facilities of decrement is very limited. Nothing without forehead could process analytic thought exactly as nothing without leg could walk, it only could crawl, it is as simple as that. Bees or ants make all those sophisticated colonies without processing a simple thought.
I did not say is our doom only, you forget the first half, the blessing. Like eating and sexuality, everything good could turn bad.

Everlasting, the first few second in the clip is very quite after it gets pretty loud.

Animals act and react upon conditional reflective impulses and their facilities of decrement is very limited

^^^^

If you read the link I provided then you will see that this is not always the case. The ape was escaping using his own devises and not by mimicking something he had been taught by a human.

nothing without leg could walk, it only could crawl, it is as simple as that.

^^^^

Try telling Oscar Pistorius that one :)

Edit
you are funny

I said their facility of decrement is limited

Yeah...I know what you said haha!!!

I hope you're not superstitious BTW?

Did I kill this thread by asking if you were superstitious? I hope not :) Tomorrow is a travel day for me so I won't be on and....just in case you really are curious about what I meant...your voting count is 666 apparently that's the devil's number if you're into that sort of thing....just one of my whacky observations lol!!!

If you mean if I got offended, no I did not. But you change the direction of the conversation to somewhere else and I did not feel like opening another can of worms.
I have scientific and new age approach to superstition. And yes I believe in the power of number as Plato did. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said there are some lucky numbers that people in order to own all their good luck, pretend that they are unlucky, like the number 13.

Yes...my train of thought did get derailed I guess but...when you think about it..isn't that what this thread is about ? I mean about thinking or not thinking and how we can or cannot control our thoughts even although we think we can?

About distracting a thought or conversation...I was distracted by the numbers on your profile...I am not a devil worshipper and yet, for some reason...in my subconscious mind, I remember reading that 666 is related to the devil or the antichrist so...thinking about it again...I think my previous post may not have been as derailed as I thought at first...are you still following me?

:):)

I want to give you a vote just to push you to 667..why is that LOL???

O come on he is a cute ( handsome) devil why killing him??

Cool...I'll leave you on 666 :)

You see how the brain works here...we have totally diverted from the original topic and yet...we are still learning something...well I never knew the devil was handsome...I don't think he exists to be honest but...obviously you do LMAO????

If you're searching for pattern in any chaos you would find one.

Are you saying that you never heard the phrase handsome devil??
As the devil part, I always been SHORT CHANGED in this site and miss treated by his worshipers everywhere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwD441CGgGM

Oh yes...handsome devil?...I do remember that phrase...just haven't had cause to use it in a few decades :)

The sound on your audio is very faint...think it's your niece because I seem to remember it from before but...can't hear this one???

It is funny nobody could hear me nowadays.

Well...I don't want to make anything of it but...are you still happy with that 666 number LOL!!!

Haha if you want to get rid of it be my guest!!

Na,,if you're cool with it then.....