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Monday, 4 June 2007
Clear your clutter with Feng Shui
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The Fine Arts of Relaxation, Concentration & Meditation
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Saturday, 2 June 2007
Automatic Wealth III - The Attractor Factor
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Monday, 28 May 2007
Don Miguel Ruiz
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1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.
3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.
I find them beautiful and I try to apply them to my life.
2 books set in Venice
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The second book is Venice Revealed by Paolo Barbaro. Again, I've read this in Italian but by the comments on amazon it looks like it has been translated very well into English. The work is divided in chapters that are sort of narrative essays about the beauty and troubles of Venice, how pollution affects the local flora and fauna, how the lagoon reflects all the colours and all the poisons. You can smell, feel and touch Venice through this book, meet its real inhabitants and discover its gems and wounds.
Saturday, 19 May 2007
Alain Elkann
Born in 1950 in New York from a French father and an Italian mother, Alain Elkann married and divorced Margherita Agnelli (daughter of). He's a well known journalist in Italy, I am told, I don't know, I've lived in England for too long. I discovered him because he was next to Umberto Eco on the library shelf. Elkann was a pupil of Moravia's and wrote his biography - the English translation is entitled Life of Moravia. I read in Italian Piazza Carignano, about a young author who lives between London, New York and Turin. Together with his new girlfriend, a French dancer, he discovers letters and diaries of a deceased Uncle who was a Jewish fascist. The theme of Jewish culture and religion is very dear to Elkann and he treats it from unusual and interesting angles. There's another novel of his translated into English, Misguided Lives. I haven't read it yet.
Thursday, 17 May 2007
Castaneda - The art of dreaming etc
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The art of dreaming, A separate reality, and Journey to Ixtlan. This is the order in which I read them. I decided to read Castaneda after discovering the books by Don Miguel Ruiz, that I will review at some stage in the future. Of course I had heard of Carlos Castaneda many times before but it always conjured a displeasing image of the lysergic Sixties. It was, instead, a real revelation for me, and so well related to everything else I've been intrigued with in recent times, like the astral plain, different realities, meditation, etc. I don't know who Don Juan was nor, for that matter, who Castaneda himself was, and it looks like it's going to stay that way. Here's my opinion. Castaneda has a most beautiful, lucid mind, he leads you with a sure hand into the most intriguing, scary, emotional dimensions. Like a real sorcerer he can manipulate your feelings, elate you and terrify you. Was his work non fiction or fiction? Was Don Juan real? Could you follow his teachings - but those were the teachings for Carlos, for you they may be very different. It doesn't matter. To learn, I believe, is what we are here for. How we learn is irrelevant. What surprises me, though, is that an author who sold millions in the 70s managed to escape the attention of any serious biographer. Is it me? I haven't found anything about his life that doesn't itself contain fiction, in the form of biographies written by his reincarnations, and the like. There was some criticism of his work by a number of anthropologists and some weird rumours surrounding his life post late 1970s. Apparently some of his followers were found dead, perhaps suicide, in the desert and, also apparently, he was preaching suicide. Why, what happened? Can anybody enlighten me?
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