• On Creativity

      In sixth grade, my daughter, Camille, made a papier-mâché  “Ellacambit”. For those of you who are wondering, an “Ellacambit” is an elephant/rabbit combo forged together with the help of a little bit of Cami ingenuity. I gotta admit, he was a pretty fabulous creature. He joyfully graced our kitchen table for quite a while. We eventually “lost” him to an encroaching mold infection.  We mourn him still.  The job of the artist is making tangible the inner workings of the imagination. The Greeks refer to this process of bringing something into existence as aition. Creation is not just about making something happen, it is a matter of letting something come forth and setting it free. Acts of creativity capitalize on the process of making the invisible visible. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi wrote about normal human…

  • On Love

      I have a beautiful garden in my backyard. The woman who helped me plan it made it clear that we needed to have a diversity of flowers in the bed. We laughed a lot during the planning – you see, I happen to really love lilies and other July blooming flowers. Debra reminded me that I wanted a garden that flowered throughout the year. And, she was right. In the spring, I have tulips and daffodils, in the summer I enjoy my lilies, in the fall I have mums and in the winter berries. Love is born out of allurement – a gravitational pull toward something. This allurement or attraction is related good smells, a soft touch, a pleasing image, a shared laugh. Love is born out of this…

  • Moving Beyond the Meme

    Popular culture is littered with tag lines intended to lead us to enlightenment. “Live in the moment.” “Don’t be attached.” “Meditate.” “Just Breathe.” “You are who you choose to be.” Operating outside a broader understanding of an articulated spirituality, these abstracted ideas become diluted and meaningless. Like signposts in a desert, they point in the right direction but they leave us without any road to travel. Our new series “Moving Beyond the Meme” will expand on the following abstracted ideas both by offering short blog posts and directing students to our developed book club offerings.  Up first:  On Thinking Thinking is important. It is also complex. In order for you to read this sentence several million neurons needed to fire together coherently. A working brain is an important asset. However, it is not all you are. Thinking is…

  • Community is Shared

      I am a sociologist by training. I love to think about culture, people, interactions, identity issues and patterns. Emile Durkheim, the famous French father of all things sociological, argued that one must treat ‘social facts as things’. These “facts” become the subject of study for sociologists. Further, Durkheim believed that collective phenomenon is not merely reducible to the individual actor. Society, he believed, is more than the sum of its many parts. It is a system formed by the association of individuals that come together to constitute a reality with its own distinctive characteristics. Let me think of an example: how about language? Language pre-exists our birth and it continues after our death. Perhaps some of us will have the honor of inventing some new recognizable slang (LOL, duh),…

  • Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch

    May 2015 Book of the Month Over the last four decades, David Lynch has created some of the best-known and widely discussed screen works of our time. This distinctive writer-director’s art bears not only the mark of box-office success but also critical acclaim and cultural posterity. Yet Lynch generally reveals little of himself, or the ideas behind his work. Now he provides a rare window into his methods as an artist and his personal working style. In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch writes candidly about the tremendous creative benefits he has gained from his thirty-two-year commitment to practicing transcendental meditation. In brief chapters, Lynch describes the experience of “diving within” and “catching” ideas like fish-and then preparing them for television or movie screens, and other mediums in which Lynch works, such…

  • Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov

    March 2015 Book of the Month Radical when it was first written in 1977, Stalking the Wild Pendulum offered the reader  a revolutionary image of the human mind and the universe. We at TTSM hope our July 2012 book pick reignites the passion for consciousness studies first inspired by Bentov more than thirty five years ago. In his creative first book, Itzhak Bentov paints a provocative image of the universe as comprised of sound vibrations, light rays, subtle energies, and packets of consciousness. He also discusses his  ideas that our brains are actually thought amplifiers, not thought’s source; that the universe is a hologram, as is the brain; that we can instantly reclaim any information ever known; that our bodies mirror the universe, down to the working of each cell; that…

  • The Empowerment Plan

    “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ― Rumi, The Essential Rumi If there is one thing that I am a stickler on, it is class attendance. A few years ago, a former student, signed up to take a second class with me. When she missed the first two weeks, I was surprised. A good student, Veronika, knew about my “skipping class” pet peeve. Toward the end of the second week of the semester, I received a rather breathless apology email from a very obviously busy young woman. Veronika, it seems, had been otherwise occupied. She had been invited to speak at the UN regarding her burgeoning non-profit “The Empowerment Plan”. The Empowerment Plan is a Detroit based organization dedicated to serving…

  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

    July 2014 Book of the Month “Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.” We won’t make any promises that Jonathan Livingston Seagull will change your life. The simple novella has undoubtedly been oversold for years as a new-age miracle worker. However, despite its outsized reputation, this 1970 international bestseller still offers some lovely insights and timeless inspiration to readers of all ages. Besides, it’s a perfect beach book! (You won’t even have time to get burned – only takes an hour to read from cover to cover.) There is a particular sweetness to Richard Bach’s writing. His book chronicles the adventures of a restless seagull intent…

  • Spirit Has Spoken Thru Me

    Spirit has spoken thru me, Though i am still catching up. These lights you call stars are shards of your broken wholeness. Why do you dream such painful dreams? Reality is not like this. For a moment at your request it can appear so, But only so you can see yourself shimmer in a cold clear midnight sky. And only for a moment. The cold misaligns you, Fools and folds your senses into aloneness. At least then a longing for communion and warmth awakens. And return is promised. Dualism is such a disturbing game to play. Is the view really worth the anguish that carries you there? Deb Smith