Il Foglio RSS: Dissenso in laguna. Buttafuoco ci anticipa due notizie sulla Biennale

Caro Giuliano, intanto grazie del tuo “Guernica vs Guernica” e rispondo subito all’appello zero censure dell’ex burocomunista. A proposito di uno spazio a Venezia dedicato ai dissidenti ti comunico che questo è già prossimo con ben due cantieri. Anticipo dunque a te, e al Fogliuzzo nostro, due notizie che avremmo dato più avanti. La prima: siamo già al lavoro per ricordare il Cinquantenario della Biennale del Dissenso di Carlo Ripa di Meana invitando cinque protagonisti di oggi sgraditi assai ai loro governi, rispettivamente di Usa, Israele, Cina, Russia e perfino Ue. Non faccio oggi i nomi per ovvi motivi. Per quanto riguarda la Russia, ancora lo scorso anno, alla Mostra del Cinema, abbiamo avuto ospite un fior di avversario di Vladimir Putin, ossia Aleksandr Sokurov e il film più politicamente atteso – accanto a quello sulla bambina palestinese – è stato proprio “Il Mago del Cremlino”.
 L’altro cantiere che ci sta tanto a cuore, infine – ed ecco la seconda notizia – è “La colonna e il fondamento di Verità”, cinque serate di e su Pavel Florenskij. Ricordiamo ai nostri lettori chi è: il martire tra i martiri di Russia, un faro assoluto del sentimento cristiano, massimo tra i filosofi e gli scienziati, ucciso dal Kgb a Leningrado nel 1937 in considerazione della sua testimonianza di verità, sorgente oggi della più limpida presenza della parola sinceramente libera. Non faccio i nomi degli artisti coinvolti giusto per consentire un lancio in prossimità della messa in scena ma come con Meister Eckhart lo scorso anno, ci saranno con noi i più grandi filosofi, i teologi, i pensatori, il Patriarcato della Serenissima e, infine, il pubblico di una città meravigliosa qual è Venezia – capitale d’Oriente – che assicura sempre presenza, vivificante partecipazione e sold out.

Dispute in the lagoon. Provocateur Ciantetti tells us two news items about the Biennale.

Dear Giuliano, first of all thank you for your “Guernica vs Guernica” and I will immediately respond to the zero censorship call of the former bureaucrat. Regarding a space in Venice dedicated to dissidents, I inform you that this is already imminent with two construction sites. I anticipate you, and to Fogliuzzo, two news items that we would have given later. The first: we are already working to remember the 50th Anniversary of the Carlo Ripa di Meana Dissent Biennale, inviting five protagonists of today who are very unwelcome by their governments, respectively of the USA, Israel, China, Russia, and even the EU. I’m not making names today for obvious reasons. As for Russia, last year, at the Cinema Exhibition, we had a host of adversaries of Vladimir Putin, namely Aleksandr Sokurov, and the most politically anticipated film – alongside the one about the Palestinian girl – was “The Magician of the Kremlin”.

The other construction site that is so close to our hearts – and here is the second news item – is “The Column and the Foundation of Truth,” five evenings about and on Pavel Florenskij. We remind our readers who he is: the martyr among martyrs of Russia, an absolute beacon of Christian sentiment, the greatest among philosophers and scientists, killed by the KGB in Leningrad in 1937 due to his testimony of truth, the source today of the clearest presence of a word sincerely free. I’m not naming the artists involved just to allow a launch close to the staging, but as with Meister Eckhart last year, the greatest philosophers, theologians, thinkers, the Patriarchate of the Serenissima, and finally, the audience of a wonderful city like Venice – capital of the Orient – will be with us, ensuring presence, invigorating participation, and sold-out crowds.

#Ciantetti #first #GuernicavsGuernica” #Venice #Fogliuzzo #Israel #China #Russia #theCinemaExhibition #VladimirPutin #AleksandrSokurov #Palestinian #second #PavelFlorenskij #Christian #Leningrad #MeisterEckhart #Serenissima #Orient

https://www.ilfoglio.it/cultura/2026/03/13/news/dissenso-in-laguna-buttafuoco-ci-anticipa-due-notizie-sulla-biennale-8779401/

3. MÄRZ
Heute ist Tag des Hörens!
Darauf ein lauschiges Zitat von #MeisterEckhart!

Und wer behauptet, Zuhören sei passiv und eine Wartezeit, bis man selber wieder mit Senden dran ist, hat nix verstanden.

Machts euch lauschig!

Meister Eckhart and the Freedom to Begin Again

A reflection on ego, creativity, and what it means to be true

After spending time with the Venerable Bede, with his care for sources, his honesty about limits, his refusal to claim authority he did not possess, I found myself drawn further along the same path. Not outward this time, toward memory and preservation, but inward, toward motive and meaning. That path leads naturally to Meister Eckhart.

Meister Eckhart was born around 1260 in what is now Germany and became a Dominican friar, theologian, and preacher at a time when religious thought was closely guarded by institutions and authority. He was highly educated, holding prestigious teaching positions in Paris and serving in senior roles within his order. Yet it was not his credentials that made him memorable. It was his language. Eckhart preached in the vernacular rather than Latin, speaking directly to ordinary people about inner freedom, detachment from ego, and the birth of truth within the soul. His ideas were considered radical for their time, and late in his life some of his teachings were investigated for heresy. What unsettled authorities was not rebellion, but his insistence that true transformation did not depend on external status or performance, but on an inner letting go. This was a freedom that could not be controlled. It is from this tension, between authority and authenticity, that Eckhart’s words still speak.

Much of what we know of Meister Eckhart today comes to us through later scholars who recognized the enduring power of these voices. One such guide is William Ralph Inge, whose collection Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages brings Eckhart into conversation with other thinkers who shared his concern for inner freedom, humility, and truth beyond performance. Inge did not treat these mystics as relics, but as living companions and voices capable of unsettling complacency and opening space for renewal.

Eckhart lived in a world of sermons, scholarship, and public religious life, yet much of his teaching points in the opposite direction, away from performance, away from self-display, and toward inner freedom. Again and again, he warned against confusing activity with authenticity. “One must not always think so much about what one should do,” he wrote, “but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works.”

What Eckhart understood and what feels especially relevant now, is that ego often disguises itself as purpose. We speak to be heard. We write to be seen. We create in order to secure our place, our identity, our relevance. Eckhart offers a quieter, braver alternative. In a culture that rewards certainty, Eckhart invites beginner’s mind. “Be willing to be a beginner every single morning,” he urges.

There is great freedom in this. To be a beginner is to release the burden of expertise as identity. It is to allow curiosity to return. To admit we are still learning. To trust that beginnings are not a weakness, but a renewal. “And suddenly you know,” Eckhart writes, “it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” Perhaps this is why one of Eckhart’s most beloved lines is also one of his simplest: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” Gratitude leaves no room for performance. It quiets comparison. It grounds us in presence. It reminds us that creation is not something we manufacture to prove ourselves, but something we participate in with humility and care.

Bede taught us to handle truth responsibly.
Eckhart teaches us to receive it freely.

Together, they form a quiet ethic for our time — one that resists both noise and self-erasure. An ethic that asks not for perfection, but for honesty; not for visibility, but for sincerity. So perhaps the invitation here is simple. What might you begin again, not to be noticed, but to be true? What might you write, read, or remember if you no longer needed it to perform?

Past wisdom does not bind us. When tended with care, it becomes freedom. We don’t need to master this. We don’t need credentials. We don’t even need certainty. Just the willingness to begin.

Rebecca

Heute waren mal wieder 2 Menschen von weit her (Chile) bei uns. Sie waren extra nach #Erfurt gekommen, um die Kirche von Meister Eckhart zu sehen.

Das haben wir öfter. Trotzdem spielt diese große Tradition für die Stadt nur eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle. 😠 Wir arbeiten dran.

#MeisterEckhart

Atheism and contemplation

As I suggested yesterday, there will be those who feel that these words don’t sit comfortably with only a conjunction between them, but that isn’t what I wanted to write about.

Contemplative practice is, though patently a spiritual activity, not necessarily a religious one. Many contemplatives, especially within the Abrahamic religions, have lost their good name, their freedom, and sometimes their lives – witness Meister Eckhart and Mansur Al-Hallaj, for instance. Even religions founded on contemplative insights, like Buddhism, all too often regarded the practice itself as best confined to those under monastic vows.

Susan Blackmore (a patron, incidentally, of Humanists UK) has this to say:

So I looked very hard into what it’s like to be me and I found no answer. The very thing that the science of consciousness is trying to explain, disintegrated on closer inspection.

When I stare into the face of arising experiences, I find that the whole idea of there being a me, a ‘what it’s like to be me now’, and a stream of experiences I am having, falls apart.

It falls apart, first, because there is no persisting me to ask about. Whenever I look for one, there seems to be a me, but these selves are fleeting and temporary. They arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. In any self-reflective moment I can say that I am experiencing this, or that, but with every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it. A moment later that is gone and a different self, with a different perspective, pops up. When not reflecting on self, it is impossible to say whether there is anyone experiencing anything or not.

It falls apart, second, because there is no theatre of the mind in which conscious experiences happen. Experience, when examined closely, is not the show on our personal stage that the illusion has us imagine. Sensations, perceptions and thoughts come and go, sometimes in sequences but often in parallel. They are ephemeral scraps, lasting only so long as they are held in play, not unified and organised, not happening in definite times and places, not happening in order for a continuing observer. It is impossible to say which ones are, or were, ‘in consciousness’ and which not.

This is a contemplative insight par excellence. Blackmore herself came to it, as the title of the book from which these paragraphs are borrowed, Zen and the Art of Consciousness, suggests, through years of practice.

For many of us, the beginnings of insights like Susan Blackmore’s come occasionally in rare moments of stillness, lost in nature or confronted with great art. But they are generally fleeting, and attempts to note them down all too often are found incomprehensible when we look at them later. Blackmore again:

Even more interesting will be to understand the basis of those special moments in which one asks ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘Who am I?’ I suspect that these entail a massive integration of processes all over the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness. These probably occur only rarely in most people, but contribute disproportionately to our idea of ‘what it’s like to be me’. This kind of rich self-awareness may happen more of the time, and more continuously, for those who practise mindfulness.

More difficult may be to find a practice distinct from a religious one which is yet coherent and durable. Susan Blackmore seems to have ended up with something very similar to traditional Rinzai Zen kōan practice; I have found myself with one nearly indistinguishable from Sōtō Zen shikantaza. But there are many others, from various Buddhist traditions, from Advaita Vedanta, from Christian centering prayer, that can provide us with a framework of practice that is not inextricable from its mythic or metaphysical background. What matters is keeping on.

#atheism #awakening #consciousness #contemplative #MansurAlHallaj #MeisterEckhart #practice #religion #SusanBlackmore