Some beautiful footage -- shot at China's Wudang Monastery -- of martial artists demonstrating their forms, was my favorite part of Opening Dao: a short documentary film introducing some of the the basic principles of Daoism/Taoism and the martial arts.

Enjoy!

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"Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."

~ G. H. Hardy (1877-1947)

Can't help but wonder if Hardy -- in this passage from his 1940 essay "A Mathematical Apology" -- was making explicit reference to Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which had been published some nine years earlier?

Gödel's analysis began by establishing that "in any non-trivial axiomatic system, there are true theorems which cannot be proven." This set the stage for the actual Incompleteness Theorem, which rocked the boat of formalist mathematics, big-time, by demonstrating that the establishment of a set of axioms encompassing all of mathematics could never succeed. In other words, Gödel used logic and mathematics to show that logic and mathematics had some serious limitations.

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Stars burn clear
all night til dawn.

Do that yourself, and a spring
will rise in the dark with water
your deepest thirst is for.

~ Rumi

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Via my recent adventure with the terrier, I've been reading and very much enjoying David Loy's Nonduality: A Study In Comparative Philosophy. There's much that I've appreciated about this book, which was originally published in 1988 by Yale University Press, and which draws forth the thread of commonality between three spiritual paths: Taoism, Buddhism and Vedanta.

Perhaps most significant for me personally was that it helped me to resolve -- at least partially -- a kind of cognitive dissonance I've been experiencing, in relation to Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta: how these two traditions on the face of it seem in so many ways diametrically opposed, yet have such a similar feel to them. And, since I love noticing what the various nondual traditions have in common, I was quite receptive to Mr. Loy's project.

I've written a review, which ended up quite a bit longer than I had anticipated, so I've divided it into three parts:

Part One: Five Flavors Of Nonduality
Part Two: Nondual Action & Nondual Thinking
Part Three: Philosophical Difference, Identical Nondual Experience

Enjoy!