Thomas Moore (2) (1940–)

Sometimes in their chanting monks will land upon a note and sing it in a fluid fashion, one syllable of text for 50 notes of chant, malisma, they call it. Living a melismatic life in imitation of plain chant we may stop on an experience, a place, hey person, or a memory and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or contemplate malismatically, but others prefer to draw, build, paint, or dance whatever their eye has fallen upon. Living one point after another is one form of experience, and that can be emphatically productive. But stopping for malisma gives this soul its reason for being.… (more)

>“I’m often surprised in my therapeutic work when an otherwise mature and discerning adult who is faced with some tough choice collapses everything into the statement “I can’t be selfish.” When I explore this weighty moral imperative with the person further, I usually find that it is tied to a religious upbringing. ”

I feel like there is something to gain from everything you read, but IMO, this is a book that has a very specific niche: those who do not understand myth, psychology, or how systems organize organically regardless of individual neuroticism, and want to understand deeply why all their experiences are not validated in depth by others. If you tie back ignorance about own actions regardless of what that person justifies that action as, all the way to upbringing, you are ignoring all the interactions in between that made that hard to validate any self (adult or child) against, and those exude a similar lack of connectedness to child while having nothing to do with anything religious or upbringing related.… (more)