Light

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“Like a hole in the paper is both in the paper and yet not of the paper, so is the supreme state in the very centre of consciousness, and yet beyond consciousness. It is an opening in the mind through which the mind is flooded with light. The opening is not even the light, it is just an opening.”

“When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace — immersed in the deep silence of reality.”

“There is only light and light is all. Everything else is but a picture made of light. Life and death, self and not-self — abandon all these ideas. They are of no use to you. See the light and disregard the picture.”

“In the immensity of consciousness a light appears, a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like a pen writing on paper. And the ink that leaves a trace is memory. You are that tiny point and by our movement the world is ever re-created. Stop moving, and there will be no world.”
— I Am That (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
— Ten Zen Questions (Susan Blackmore)

“You are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.”
–The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)

“How many more people have to die?”

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What a closed rural hospital tells us about US healthcare


When I was growing up in Kennett, Missouri, in the ’50s and ’60s, the Dunklin County Memorial Hospital was… an institution. That’s where I had my tonsils removed and that’s where everybody went if you needed to be in the hospital. If you needed some kind of special treatment or care you probably went to one of the hospitals in Memphis, 100 miles away. The hospital closed last year, pushing the little town that much closer to… I’m not sure what.

“We’re having probably three to five more deaths a month without having the hospital here,” he said. “I had a 35-year-old patient who started having chest pain. He needed to get to an emergency room but died on the way to the hospital. There are multiple deaths due to not having emergency services, mostly from heart attacks and accidents. There’s nowhere to stabilise them. If they’re having a heart attack, they’re dying before they get to the hospital. Plus the infant mortality rate has increased since the hospital closed.”

It’s happening all over rural America. This article tells the story. As does RP.

UPDATE (5/15/20): Company announces plans to re-open hospital in Missouri’s poorest region. “Nine of the state’s ten poorest counties are in southeast Missouri, and the Bootheel is the state’s poorest region.”

The smartphone is our era’s cigarette

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Ross Barkan writing in The Guardian:

“(The 2010s were) dominated, from start to finish, by a single piece of technology that has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interaction. The smartphone is to the 2010s what cigarettes were to much of the twentieth century, a ubiquitous and ruinous marker of the zeitgeist.”

“In the late 2000s, we allowed a few corporations to persuade us that this advanced, alien technology – assembled via de facto slave labor in Asia – was essential to human existence. We readily bought in, condensing our lives behind the sleek glass. The scroll hooked us like a drug, triggering the exact right loci in our brains; suddenly, we could never be bored again, doped by endless Facebook and Instagram feeds, retreating from unnecessary conversation or thought into an infinity of trivia. The internet never left us.”