Broken Silence

A few friends have emailed me in recent weeks asking if I'm going to write here anymore. It's good to hear from people who think I have something to say worth reading, and it helps revive something I think about from time to time: whether blogging here is really a good idea, both for me and for anyone else. The issue usually boils down to just how much I want to encourage my own wandering mind and attention. There's also the simple matter of putting ideas out in the public that might come off as those of someone creating an aura of authority about themselves. While I clearly lack any credentials or maturity that might justify authority, and I hope that's always evident to everyone out there, merely speaking out tends to create its own internal sense of authority and righteousness, something I don't need to be tempted into assuming for myself. 

That said, the simple fact is that even when I don't blog here, I tend to get involved in all kinds of internet commenting at various sites, often just on issues of ordinary politics. My mind just doesn't shut down entirely into states of silent contemplation all day long. So I end up writing on matters that are actually of relatively peripheral interest to me. So the best argument I can come up with for blogging here more often is that at least I am able to choose to blog on subjects that are of a greater interest to me, things of a spiritual nature, or at least related to the spiritual issues that are at the heart of my own life these days. 

I'm not sure that I can reasonably confine myself, as I at one time intended, to merely blog about self-enquiry. One thing that led me to fall silent here was that my practice of self-enquiry simply led me to have very little to say about it. And when I did have something to say about it, I usually ended up getting in a conversation about it over at David Godman's blog, which is devoted to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. If anyone is interested in following those conversations, I'd advise reading through the comments sections of any number of David's posts there. In fact, I'd recommend reading all of David's blog, since he has written a whole series of highly informative posts about Ramana and his devotees, and the quality of readers and comments there, with a few exceptions, is simply excellent. 

In any case, the fact that I'm writing this post seems to indicate that I am indeed resuming my blogging here. I've got a whole host of issues to blog about, from the esoteric to the political, and I'm thinking, simply because it's an issue that's been on my mind lately, of blogging about the whole controversy of global warming and climate change. I'd like to address not just he scientific and political issues, but the spiritual ones, such as they are. We shall see how well it goes. I'm not sure if anyone out there will even know that I'm resuming blogging, but if there are people who care, let them know.