If our Founding Fathers were to write the Second Amendment today, how would they phrase it? 20 Signs You’re Doing Better Than You Think You Are. How Buzz Aldrin's communion on the moon was hushed up | Matthew Cresswell. Neil Armstrong will be remembered at Washington National Cathedral today. It's a good moment to look at one eccentric Apollo story: the tale of Aldrin's hushed-up communion on the moon.
Before Armstrong and Aldrin stepped out of the lunar module on July 20, 1969, Aldrin unstowed a small plastic container of wine and some bread. He had brought them to the moon from Webster Presbyterian church near Houston, where he was an elder. Aldrin had received permission from the Presbyterian church's general assembly to administer it to himself. In his book Magnificent Desolation he shares the message he then radioed to Nasa: "I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.
" He then ate and drank the elements. He also read a section of the gospel of John. And as for O'Hair? David Lynch on Using Meditation as an Anchor of Creative Integrity. Rethinking the Placebo Effect: How Our Minds Actually Affect Our Bodies. By Maria Popova The startling physiological effects of loneliness, optimism, and meditation. In 2013, Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a mind-bending debate on the nature of “nothing” — an inquiry that has occupied thinkers since the dawn of recorded thought and permeates everything from Hamlet’s iconic question to the boldest frontiers of quantum physics.
That’s precisely what New Scientist editor-in-chief Jeremy Webb explores with a kaleidoscopic lens in Nothing: Surprising Insights Everywhere from Zero to Oblivion (public library | IndieBound) — a terrific collection of essays and articles exploring everything from vacuum to the birth and death of the universe to how the concept of zero gained wide acceptance in the 17th century after being shunned as a dangerous innovation for 400 years. As Webb elegantly puts it, “nothing becomes a lens through which we can explore the universe around us and even what it is to be human. It reveals past attitudes and present thinking.”
Donating = Loving. Jack Kerouac on How to Meditate. Sam Harris on the Paradox of Meditation and How to Stretch Our Capacity for Everyday Self-Transcendence. Montaigne believed that meditation is the finest exercise of one’s mind and David Lynch uses it as an anchor of his creative integrity. Over the centuries, the ancient Eastern practice has had a variety of exports and permutations in the West, but at no point has it been more vital to our sanity and psychoemotional survival than amidst our current epidemic of hurrying and cult of productivity. It is remarkable how much we, as a culture, invest in the fitness of the body and how little, by and large, in the fitness of the spirit and the psyche — which is essentially what meditation provides. In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (public library), neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris argued that cultivating the art of presence is our greatest gateway to true happiness.
Harris writes: We know that the self is a social construct and the dissolution of its illusion, Harris argues, is the most valuable gift of meditation: