Book 14: The Future Of Learning (Mark Treadwell) Check out my Baggy Trousers post for this one.
Book 15: Meditation (Franz Kafka)
Book 16: I'm With The Band (Pamela Des Barres)
Book 17: What The Buddha Taught (Walpola Rahula)
I picked Meditation up from The Piggery recently. It's a nifty little volume combining Kafka's seemingly random musings/meditations with some great photos from the late nineteenth century.
Here is his meditation on Resolutions:
To lift yourself out of a miserable mood, even if you have to do it by strength of will, should be easy. I force myself out of my chair, stride around the table, exercise my head and neck, make my eyes sparkle, tighten the muscles around them. Defy my own feelings, welcome A. enthusiastically supposing he comes to see me, amiably tolerate B. in my room, swallow all that is said at C.'s, whatever pain and trouble it may cost me, in long draughts.
Yet even if I manage that, one single slip, and a slip cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, easy and painful alike, and I will have to shrink back into my own circle again.
So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, and, if you feel that you are being carried away, not to let yourself be lured into taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with your own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyard and let nothing survive save that.
A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger along your eyebrows.Love and peace - Wozza
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