仙島 Headless Thinking

Doing nothing absolutely - 什麼都不做就是做到最好

“If you are beyond all grasping at an object and at a subject, that is the monarch of all views. If there is no distraction, it is the monarch of all meditations. If there is no effort, it is the monarch among all conducts. When there is no hope and no fear, that is the final result, and the fruition has been attained or revealed.”  - Tilopa After a 30 minute meditation session, we decided to sit down and share our thoughts on what meditation is. Philosophy and history have the luxury of offering a lot of paths for topics to branch out into, whereas meditation itself seems so static an activity that it doesn't seem like you'd be able to talk a lot about. To talk about it would defeat the purpose, one would guess. But after a whole year of consistently meditating each day, we are more than confident to share with you some of the insights and the benefits we gained from doing this most inactive of inactivities. With it, we feel like we are tapping into something that is maybe more real than anything else conceivable. For more information, please visit our website: https://headlessthinking.wordpress.com/ Also check out our Substack for our articles and other exclusive material: https://headlessthinking.substack.com/ Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII

Dragon slaying and worship - 屠龍拜龍

"How can we forget those ancient myths from the beginnings of all peoples, the myths of the dragons who turn into princesses at the last minute? Maybe every dragon in our life is a princess, just waiting to see us perform a beautiful, courageous act for once. Maybe every terror is, at absolute bottom, only something helpless, wanting our help." - Rainer Maria Rilke This quote is a lot to deal with, overturning our image of the monster as the angel. The dragon as a terrifying creature is most definitely a western image that does not echo with other parts of the world. Rilke here already breaks through a century old bias and takes into consideration a more benevolent nature of this beast. In this episode we will not just be in agreement with Rilke here, but look at what the connection between dragons and princesses exactly is. We'll take a look at the origin of the word 'dragon', how the west and the east were originally in agreement on the dragon as not being a face of the devil and how that changed. The true symbolism of the dragon is bigger, much bigger, than most people assume and not to be reduced to either 'powerful' or even 'wise'. For more information, please visit our website: https://headlessthinking.wordpress.com/ Also check out our Substack for our articles and other exclusive material: https://headlessthinking.substack.com/ Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII

Learning how to receive 卡巴拉

It's been a while and so the 仙島 Headless Thinking team decided to sit together and discuss a topic we've been studying the past few months: Kabbalah. While this tradition isn't a big secret anymore, it still has a mysterious aura to it. In this episode, we try and dispel some of the basic misunderstandings that exist about this discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. Because while many people have an opinion on it, very few know what it is actually and fundamentally about. This episode is the beginning of a larger project of 仙島 Headless Thinking that will be exploring Kabbalah in ways you won't be able to Google your way into knowing. So follow the updates on social media and learn things that aren't available anywhere else. For more information, please visit our website: https://headlessthinking.wordpress.com/ Also check out our Substack for our articles and other exclusive material: https://headlessthinking.substack.com/ Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII

Mediadrome, the new flesh of the internet 互聯網的新肉體

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Most likely everyone has heard George Berkeley's famous thought experiment, which has led to at least three centuries of metaphysical ponderings on the nature of perception and observation. But we want to ask a different question for this episode and swing it to perhaps equally metaphysical levels, although the question might look like a joke at first: "If you haven't posted anything on social media, has it really happened?" A significant part of you will resist and point out that no matter how big a role social media plays in our lives, we will always give precedence to the events offline than whatever reproduction we'll post or see online. But is that really the case? Has almost ubiquitous Wi-Fi not altered everything to a point where we have become too intertwined to tell the difference? And what does that say about media as a whole? Join me and Ben on a thorough discussion on the film "Videodrome", which pointed to a time it wasn't even aware of yet, and on the new media invasion. For more information, please visit our website: https://headlessthinking.wordpress.com/ Also check out our Substack for our articles and other exclusive material: https://headlessthinking.substack.com/ Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII

The gates of death & the doors of perception 眾妙之門

We aren't living in the most prudish of time periods, but we certainly haven't been trail blazing as much as we think we have. A lot of ideas that were explored more than half a century ago are still realms left unmapped. In "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, we get, next to a dive into what Huxley would call a visit with the antipodes of our reality, also a manifesto that argues for a serious undertaking into the chemical wedding that takes place in our heads when we exhaust the body and leave room for the mind at large. But more than half a century later the field is still very much understudied and I think it would disappoint Huxley a bit, who assumed we would have, most likely, made a lot more progress by now. In "Heaven and Hell", Huxley further explores what happens when we tamper with the psychic censor of the brain's chemistry. Messing with the brain puts us at risk, but the rewards are still there and of enormous value to our understanding of reality and subsequent feeling of belonging. In this episode, we will tamper with the ideas of both books and the connection there is between doors of perception being opened and the dangerous risks we take that learn us something about the gates of death. For more information, please visit our website: https://headlessthinking.wordpress.com/  Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII