Bewitched by the I Ching

I am not a Bible reader but of late, I have found inspiration in the I Ching which, its followers believe, is “a living, breathing oracle, a patient and all-seeing teacher who can be relied upon for flawless advice at every turning point in our lives.” Reading the I Ching has gifted me with a gentler spirit, accepting with serene humility the trials and brickbats thrown my way. Through the I Ching, I would like to disengage myself from the wiles of the world – to replace hatred with kindness, jealousy with selflessness, and the thirst for material things with rugged simplicity that can only come from a special kind of happiness within.

Using the I Ching entails shaking three coins, with the heads and tails having equivalent points. These are added up and formed into six lines stacked on top of each other. The resulting hexagram has a corresponding text to guide followers through the day.

And so far, my I Ching yesterday went like this:

See yourself as a young tree now. The ground round you is fertile; sun and water and wind are plentiful. By maintaining your focus on moving upward toward light, clarity, and purity, you can reach great heights. If you become entangled in inferior things, you will not enjoy the full benefit of this gracious hour. Stay balanced, innocent, and correct, and good fortune is assured.

In a time such as this, it is wise to adopt a stance of outer disengagement and inner perseverance. Do not focus on or interact with the negative influences around you; this only strengthens their grip on you. Step aside, yield, let go, allow people and events to pass without attachment. Direct your attention inside, to your inner light, your devotion to what is right, your conversation with the Higher Power.

Progress may be slow, but there will indeed be progress.

My friends who are interested in the I Ching may like this book.

Overbooked!

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more books and I am doing it now.

There are many reasons why people resort to reading. It can be an indication of one’s financial health (better to read than to shop) or it can be a distress signal of how low your social life has become (whaaaa! where are all the parties? am having a migraine here)

I like the fact that reading keeps me celibate and sane at the same time.In literature, you can have all the Mr. Darcys and Robert Kincaids in the world whereas if you choose real life you probably will have to deal with a man who’s grumpy, cranky and doesn’t give a hoot about ya.

Am so stuffed with books I need air to breathe.

Did I tell you I was once a book columnist? It was soo demanding that I had to take a leave and concentrate on my full-time job.

Anyway, last Friday, I was doing my media rounds when Jun I, the Bulletin’s editor-in-chief greeted me in his office with: Have you read The Da Vinci Code? Do you need some more to shake your faith?

I wanted to say to him, shake my booty maybe but oh no! not again. That…Da Vinci….Code!”

In the end, I am being hailed out of his office with three books: The Messianic Legacy, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus and The Holy Kingdom: The Quest For The Real King Arthur.
Don’t call me a nerd. I am now more than that.

On the other hand, the Manila International Book Fair was a feast. I went with Issa yesterday and bumped into Timmy and Ivy. Today, I get to see Brad and Amor who were looking for stuff for their baby.

I would have tagged Paolo along but he didn’t want to go. He’s into computer games and when I read him books, my precious kiddo says “baduy!”

I went crazy in the book fair and I had to refrain myself from swallowing every book on sight.Yes! I want to hear what the cad Michael Bergin has to say about Carolyn Bessette. Oh no! There’s a new Helen Fielding Novel?… I want to have this book 1000 Places to See Before You Die but at the rate it’s sold at more than 1000 bucks, I’d rather go to Hong Kong than buy it. Salivate, salivate, salivate…

It’s amazing how they design really lovely covers for books these days…but the titles are not getting any better: Date or Soulmate? How to Know in Two Dates or Less. I Used To Miss Him But My Aim is Improving. A Husband who loved his Wife. Under The Duvet. Going Topless.

And I got a kick over this one: My Favorite Mistake. (Clue: It’s about a man)

Let it be known that am not buying any stuff on How To Make A Guy Fall In Love With You or Sex Tricks to Drive Your Man Crazy or even parenting manuals. I realized that it’s better learn them in real life; theories don’t always apply when they do happen. Besides, my three gigantic bookshelves at home are testament to the fact that you can only have enough of a good thing. Am borrowing my friends’ books instead.

After five hours of rummaging at the book fair, my shopping cart is this:

Princess magazines for my two princesses
Half-half (Kala-kalahati) Pinoy storybook for my video games fanatic
The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray
People Magazine with Orlando Bloom on the cover
Still more magazines
Cutesy notebook from Fully-booked
The Coconut Cookery of Bicol ( a bargain from Bookmark Inc; their coffeetable books were going, going at bodega prices)
The Nymph of MTV by Angelo Suarez (he’s a brilliant nineteener from UST and won the National Book Award for Poetry. Read him.)

As Marcus Tullius Cicero would say: A room without books is like a body without a soul

Sex in the name of Love

It was a different Paulo Coelho I read in Eleven Minutes.While The Alchemist is a simple fable about following your dream, readers should not expect the same treatment from the novel which deals with the adventures of Maria, a Brazilian village girl who achieves her life’s goals the hard way, through prostitution.

The book is sensual and provocative and is easily one of my favorites this year.The translation from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa is “full of poetry and beautiful images”…the words being a long, slow lap dance waiting to be devoured at every turn. Eleven Minutes is about harsh realities, human relationships, sex as a form of pleasure and how love can emerge from all of that. Eleven..thugged at my heartstrings because it reminded me of my own journeys of the heart. At some point, we are bound to adopt Maria’s philosophy that we must love without expecting nothing in return if only to shield us from the inevitable heartbreak. Life is a flux and real love means freedom.

Some of my favorite lines from the novel:

Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of the people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.

And if nothing belongs to me, then there’s no point wasting my time looking after things that aren’t mine; it’s best to live as if today were the first of last day of my life.

In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.
It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone.
That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

What is real always finds a way of revealing itself

The most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.

Each day I choose the truth by which I try to live. But I would like to be able always to choose desire as my companion. Not out of obligation, not to lessen my loneliness, but because it is good. Yes, very good.

Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly.

Yes, I love you very much, as I have never loved another man, and that is precisely why I am leaving, because, if I stayed, the dream would become reality, the desire to possess, to want your life to be mine…in short, all the things that transform love into slavery. It’s best left like this – a dream.

As a last note: maybe I’ll have to email Mr. Coelho to say his ending sucks. It was just like in the movies. Jaded prostitute runs off into the sunset with her Prince and we all know it’s not like that in real life.Well at least in our very ordinary lives.

Do It Again, David!

I liiiiike David Sedaris. Unfortunately, he’s not profound enough to make me looooove him…yet. And that’s exactly the matter: he doesn’t mean to be profound, only FUNNY. Plus the fact that he’s deliciously gay. I envy the fact that he’s got a steady boyfriend who happens to have a house in Normandy. Reading Sedaris is all about growing up in North Carolina, living in New York, sniffing coke,learning French in France and so on. Now, that may seem ordinary but it’s his gift of words, describing things and keen social observation which gets me. He can make an icky thing like flushing a big turd monumental and funny. I’ve just finished Me Talk Pretty One Day and it definitely gets my vote as the book I’d like to be stranded on a desert island with.

Much Ado About The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code is the reason why am not eating pasta in seven years.

Personal biases aside,I think the book is sooo overrated, a product of Doubleday’s media hoopla, so to speak. Surely, the well-read among us have browsed through better stuff in our lifetime. While going through it, I had to actually peek through the succeeding pages to see when the insanity would end. My high school chum Lei, who maintains her own reading club at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center hit the nail on the head when she said: “It’s like a watered-down Eco. Written for Hollywood, no doubt.It spawned a whole section of supplementary readings in the bookstores here but I wasn’t taken.Am glad it’s dying down.”

Reading The Da Vinci Code elicited the same feelings as when I first read Grisham, you just know that the author was itching to finish the last two chapters because a multi-million dollar movie contract was waiting in the wings. A common criticism of ‘Da Vinci Code’ is the ending: after a stimulating discussion of the Church hierarchy’s role in covering up important facets of Christian history, the author backtracks in his claim by portraying the Opus Dei as having been manipulated by a Grail obsessed historian, Leigh Teabing.

The book itself is not an original, having been patterned after the premises of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail which was first published in the 80’s.I would think that the non-fiction book The Templar Revelation (1997)merits a better read,it is anchored on ample research and documentation about the occult and ancient religion, sans the ludicrous plot of tied-up bodies being stuffed in car trunks and spirited out of a plane that we so conveniently find in Da Vinci Code.

I did have fun learning about the Fibonacci sequence and the ancient ritual of Hieros Gamos (sexual union as a form of spirituality). I would think the book is a hit because everyone loves a conspiracy theory, especially when it strikes at the very foundation of our human faith. The idea that Mary Magdalene was in fact one of Jesus’s disciples and founded the Church is interestingly feminist. And nothing would tickle an intellectuals’ fancy better than the thought that Jesus was not a deity but all-out human, married to Mary Magdalene and siring a child by her in the person of Sarah.

The problem with Da Vinci Code is that Dan Brown presents a set of Facts before the Prologue and unknowing readers think all data presented in the book is factual. However, it is doubtful whether the Merovingian family (descendants of Mary Magdalene) actually founded Paris. Or the exact role that Emperor Constantine played in cosmetizing Christ’s divinity in the Gospels. Records show that early Christians believed in Christ as the Son of God even before the Council of Nicea.The Opus Dei also does not have a bishop or an order of monks. And if Silas was an albino, why did he seem to have extraordinary vision? As we know, albinos have poor eyesight or are nearly blind…

In the meantime, the carnival continues: check out these new titles on murders and secret societies, they might prove to be more interesting than Da Vinci Code: The Rule of Four, The Assassini and The Dante Club.

Am i reading Dan Brown Again? Well, I did not read Grisham again after the first one.

Am I watching The Da Vinci Code The Movie? Maybe. But I’ll not necessarily be the first to fall in line. Let the Italian Confederation and their groupies do that.

An email from Paulo Coelho

Oh my! Who would show up on my inbox today but the great Paulo Coelho. I wrote him yesterday coz Karen said he really replies to readers’ mail but I never expected it will be so soon.

Mr. Coelho’s full message, with my email to him, goes:

Dear Annalyn,
Thank you for your kind email. It’s very important to know what the
reader feels towards my work. I’ve got great respect for your opinion and I’m
grateful for that.
May love always be your guide in every moment of your life

Paulo Coelho

Nome = Annalyn
email = olivemist@yahoo.com
Pais = Philippines
subject = Hello and greetings from the Philippines
Mensagem = Good day Mr. Coelho. I would just like to say that I
liked reading The Alchemist and it has inspired me to search for my own
Personal Legend.Your book, though simply written, has made an impact on my
life. I am about to read Veronika… and Eleven Minutes anytime now. I will
find time for them even though I have a busy schedule. I really hope you can come visit our country too to touch base with your numerous fans here:) Good luck
and keep the fire burning.

The bestselling author sure knows his email etiquette. I don’t care if his executive assistant wrote it for him. His prompt response was much appreciated.I am reading Coelho now.

« Previous Page