my free vacation.

From: Mid-Atlantic Vipassana Registration

[mailto:registration@midatlantic.us.dhamma.org]

Sent: Tue 4/15/2008 10:20 AM

To: Sides, Brandon

Subject: 5/14/2008 Vipassana Course Confirmation

To: Brandon Sides

Course: 5/14/2008 - 5/25/2008

You are registered to attend the Vipassana meditation course starting on

5/14/2008 and ending on 5/25/2008. Please respond to this e-mail either

confirming your attendance if you definitely plan on being there, or by

canceling if you will not be able to attend.

We often experience waiting lists for courses. If the course is full, and

you do not confirm within one week, your place may be given to someone on

the waiting list.

If you would like to carpool to the course by either offering or receiving a

ride, please let us know this in your reply. Also, please feel free to

contact us if you have any questions or concerns about the course.

Thank you for your prompt response. Please be sure to include the entire

content of this message in your reply.

Mid-Atlantic Vipassana Association

be nice.

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become."

~ Buddha

call it self evident.

Mind is the Master-Power that molds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of thought, and, shaping what he wills
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:--
He thinks in secret, and it come to pass:
Environment is but his looking glass...

in the moment.

"Slow down everyone, your movin' too fast. Frames can't catch you when your movin' like that..."

~ Jack Johnson

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

for future publication.

After my research on a few essays due in my modern philosophy class, I stumbled upon Marx's view of alienation. In previous context I had interpreted Marx's alienation through the lens of religion, but now I have an interpretation through the lens of capitalism. Through the lens of capitalism, I hope to write a book/paper on Marx's alienation titled:

"The more you work the less you live: A Marxian metaphor on the balance between work and play."

- It will mainly be about the actuality of your vocation controlling the life you should be living. It is the overtaking of your existence. The produced (consumer products) becomes more important than the producer (worker) so to speak.

Other viewpoints I will interject into to the book/paper:

…..the objectification of labor if…the relation of the worker to the product of labor that is foreign/alien….

“It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object...”

morality...

I'm in the process of reconstructing (or intuitively constructing) the origin of morality. I feel it may converge with Nietzche's "Genealogy of Morality", but who knows.

The illustration begins with man as animal. The unevolved, primitive man that has not even come close to a conception of communication. These peoples are nestled in herds of families, and no where near to becoming clans...