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John Dunne:

“One of the ways he conceptualized meta-awareness is that it's, for example, the moment that you notice that...

You've been reading a scientific article or something, and you get three paragraphs, four paragraphs, and then you realize, "I have no idea what those paragraphs meant." Right? (…)

So, even in a focused attention practice, you're focusing on your breath or some object.

And then, at some point, you notice, as inevitably you do, "Oh, I'm planning my lunch."

And that moment is a moment of explicit meta-awareness where at a particular moment, I make a judgment like, "Oh, I am doing X." And it's often in a linguistic form, actually. (…)

There’s this idea of what we call "implicit meta-awareness" that we think is not intermittent. It's sustained.

There is one position which says this is actually an ongoing feature of every moment of consciousness.

So the monitoring's always going on, this background, sustained, implicit awareness that's presenting to you things like your body position

but also the state of your awareness, your affect, and that's how we get the signal, so to speak, to then make a judgment, "Oh, I'm distracted."

That's the theory here. This is presenting information about the quality of our awareness, and sometimes that becomes salient. (…)

For example, let's say I'm having a conversation that's getting really heated, debate about something.

And people are getting more and more irritated, and I'm getting more and more like argghhh, grrrr...

Then, finally, I realize, "Oh, I've won the debate, but I've lost a friend."

Why? Because this channel that was presenting my affect to me, the signal wasn't strong enough.

So part of what meditation practices can do is, in a sense, improve the strength of that signal, of that meta-awareness signal.”

Source: Mind & Life: John Dunne - At the Crossroads of Buddhism and Science

#mind and life #john dunne #podcast #mbti #mbtiideas

Screen cap from Play it As It Lays. Saw it last night, still thinking about it today.

#play it as it lays #joan didion #john dunne

john and joan

#mine #joan didion #john dunne

You’ve kind of been led to believe that there is a form to this,” she says, “but it turned out not to have any form. It didn’t resolve in any way.” Rather than move through it, “I think what happens is you incorporate it. You don’t get over it; it becomes part of who you are. What I mean is that you are a different person after that. I don’t know why this surprises me, since you’re a different person every day you live, but it does.

Joan Didion on grief

#joan didion #john dunne #quotes #grief

Irish American Heritage Museum Auditions for "The Cattle Raid of Cooley"

Irish American Heritage Museum Auditions for “The Cattle Raid of Cooley”

The Irish American Heritage Museum announces auditions for roles in its September production of John Dunne’s The Cattle Raid of Cooley. The plays are funded by a grant from The Republic of Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Emigrant Support Programme. The director is seeking two, young (20 – 30), athletic, male actors of any ethnicity. If cast, actors will engage in stage combat.…

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#Irish American Heritage Museum #John Dunne #Siena College #The Cattle Raid of Cooley #The Republic of Ireland

Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing. John Donne

#elephants #sunset #john dunne

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2)

Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated ritual of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. p190-1

We could have been swimming in the cave with the swell of clear water and the entire point could have slumped, slipped into the sea around us. The entire point slipping into the sea around us was the kind of conclusion I anticipated. I did not anticipate cardiac arrest at the dinner table. p 192

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as “dwelling on it.” We understand the aversion most of us have to “dwelling on it.” Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural; a failure to manage the situation. p192

The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow. p193

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response. p194

So many roads once; now so many cul-de-sacs. - C. S. Lewis p195

It is the blight that man was born for. - Gerard Manley Hopkins p197

Time is the school in which we learn,/Time is the fire in which we burn - Delmont Schwartz p198

I fretted for example over a Bayer commercial for a low-dose aspirin that was said to “significantly reduce” the risk of a heart attack. I knew perfectly well how aspirin reduces the risk of heart attack: it keeps blood from clotting. I also knew that John was taking Coumadin, a far more powerful anticoagulant. Yet I was seized nonetheless by the possible folly of having overlooked low-dose aspirin. p205-6

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. p206

The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. p225

My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even “mudgy,” softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him. p225

I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead. p225

I know why we try to keep the dead alive; we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. p225

#joan didion #john dunne #the year of magical thinking #grief #loss

#JOAN DIDION #john dunne #<3 #I am in love and I have been