November 2011
161 posts
5 tags
The Insane Passion for Truth
“Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of everything...
3 tags
The Body of Fear
“Underneath all the wanting and grasping, underneath the need to understand is what we have called ‘the body of fear.’ At the root of suffering is a small heart, frightened to be here, afraid to trust the river of change, to let go in this changing world.”
— Jack Kornfield, “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry”
2 tags
The Most Valuable Commodity
“The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. ‘Fear’ he used to say, ‘fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.’ That blew me away. ‘Turn on the TV,’ he’d say. ‘What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their...
4 tags
While The Music Was Being Played
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
— Alan Watts
4 tags
An Experience Of Being Alive
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about.”
...
4 tags
The Meaning of Life
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
— Alan Watts, “Culture of Counter-Culture”
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A Mystery To Be Experienced
“Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced.”
— Alan Watts
5 tags
How They Are Relevant Now
“Now, all these myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there - how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years ago, but how they...
5 tags
Outward Forms Alone — They Are Not Sufficient
Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
And it will be a hundred times better
for everyone.
Give up kindness, renounce morality,
And men will rediscover filial piety and love.
Give up ingenuity, renounce profit,
And bandits and thieves will
disappear.
These three are outward forms alone;
they are not sufficient in themselves.
It is more important
To see the simplicity,
To realize...
3 tags
True One Way or Another
“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”
— Joseph Campbell
3 tags
Stop Searching
“Stop searching and you will see.”
— Laozi
2 tags
Once The Storm Is Over
“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
— Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore”
4 tags
It Is From Silence That All Begins
“There is something uncompromisingly honest in the experience of silence. It is from silence that all speech, and therefore all myth, begins. Speech is the myth of that which cannot be spoken. Without speech, there can be no theory, without theory there can be no answers. When the world of myth and theory confuses us, silence is always there, affording us the opportunity not merely to...
4 tags
We Will Gather Images and Images Of Images
“We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on.”
— Reb Carasso
3 tags
What Hides the Truth
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.”
— Ecclesiastes according to Jean Baudrillard
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The White Space Between the Words
“What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words.”
— Max Frisch
6 tags
What He Cannot Reveal To You
“The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.”
— Kahlil Gibran
4 tags
The Need To Speak
“The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.”
— Jean Baudrillard
5 tags
A Local Expression Of Global Developments
“When we accept this final point — surely the most heterodox, from the point of view of most philosophers — we are for the first time in a position to study and to teach Indian, Chinese, European, and Arabic philosophy alongside one another in a serious and adequate way. When we accept, for example, that all of the great Axial Age civilizations, to use Karl Jaspers’s helpful label, are...
4 tags
They Believe In Everything
“When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”
— Umberto Eco
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From There Came the Order Of Life
“In the ancient cultural places of the world there was a temple, a church or a cathedral in its center. From there came the order of life. In every modern big city there is a bank building in its center. In my ‘Pied Piper’ I have tried to depict this as a kind of demon cult, where money is something to be prayed to like something sacred. It’s even being expressed there...
5 tags
Transformations Of Culture
“The transformations of culture do not take place in history, they take place in myth. A model, a hypothesis, or a myth is a way of rendering the invisible. Because the unconscious is outside time, it can perceive transformations beyond the limits of the ego. These unconscious perceptions are expressed in art or mythologies. We ourselves are living in an age of cultural transformation, but...
4 tags
The Events Of the Old and the New Testaments
“It’s impossible to understand roughly three-quarters of Western art if you don’t know the events of the Old and the New Testaments and the stories of the saints.”
— Umberto Eco, “The Lost Wisdom of the Three Wise Men”
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When We Lose Our Myths
“When we lose our myths, we lose our place in the universe.”
— Madeleine L’Engle
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Frankly Admit That We Do Not Know
“What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.”
— Richard Feynman
4 tags
The Imagination Of Nature
“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for all to be stuck — half of us upside down — by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.”
— Richard...
4 tags
Their Life Is a Closeness To Myth
“Theordor-Wilhelm Danzel, in his explanation of Mexican mythologies, supports my assertion and affirms that primitives do not clearly separate subjectivity and objectivity. They do not see two faces to the world, but rather see ten thousand and do not organize them in categories. Their life is broad like a dream. They are lords of a country that at times is pleasing, because the mere...
3 tags
A Ritual Is the Enactment of a Myth
“A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the...
7 tags
A Lowering of the Intensity and Richness
“If we contrast the vivid, poignant, shaking, peak-experience type religious or transcendental experience, which I have been describing, with the thoughtless, habitual, reflex-like, absent-minded, automatic responses which are dubbed ‘religious’ by many people, then we are faced with a universal, ‘existential’ problem. Familiarization and repetition produces a...
4 tags
Humiliated Repetition
“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”
— Roland Barthes, “The Pleasure of the Text”
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They Cannot Originate Anything
“The Archons are not only mind parasites — delusional nodes in the human mind, considered as quasi-autonomous psychic entities, if you will — they are cosmic imposters, parasites who pose as gods. But they lack the primary divine factor of ennoia, ‘intentionality,’ ‘creative will.’ They cannot originate anything, the can only imitate, and they must effectuate their...
3 tags
Given To Us By Our Society
“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
— Alan Watts
4 tags
What We Mainly Present To Our Children
“An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth — scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books — might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.”
...
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Where Citations Come From
— xkcd, “Citogenesis”
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Uncertainty’s Antidote
“Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like ‘uncertainty’s antidote.’ This turns out also to be the formal definition — the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty. (…)
The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things —...
6 tags
To Live Now As We Think Human Beings Should Live
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are...
3 tags
Always Treat Them As Men
“Because words express thoughts, Mark Saithes; and thoughts determine actions. If you call a man a bug, it means that you propose to treat him as a bug. Whereas if you call him a man, it means that you propose to treat him as a man. My profession is to study men. Which means I must always call men by their name; always think of them as men; yes and always treat them as men. Because if you...
7 tags
Metaphors Are More Than Mere Language
The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. What’s left is the idea that reason is not based on abstract laws because cognition is grounded in bodily experience […].
As Lakoff points out, metaphors are more than mere language and literary devices, they are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain. As a result,...
3 tags
Tautology Club
— xkcd, “Honor Societies”
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We Ourselves Are a Part of This Language
“We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected...
4 tags
The Artificer Fashioning Objects
“The platonist metaphor assimilates mathematical enquiry to the investigations of the astronomer: mathematical structures, like galaxies, exist, independently of us, in a realm of reality which we do not inhabit but which those of us who have the skill are capable of observing and reporting on. The constructivist metaphor assimilates mathematical activity to that of the artificer...
3 tags
In Their Own Way, All Things Are True
“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face...
3 tags
Everything Tells the Story Of the Universe
“The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to...
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Signs and Symbols Rule the World
“Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws.”
— Confucius
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Mental Landscapes That Have Meaning
“It’s just that I still have this vivid image of him ‘pulling rats out’ of blocks of wood with total concentration, and that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something — or tries to. People need things like that to go on living — mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can’t explain them in words. Part of why we live is to...
4 tags
Speak a New Language
“Speak a new language
so that the world
will be a new world.”
— Rumi
5 tags
Words Are Merely Stepping Stones
“What does reading do, You can learn almost everything from reading, But I read too, So you must know something, Now I’m not so sure, You’ll have to read differently then, How, The same method doesn’t work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they...
5 tags
Generate Different Readings
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
— Umberto Eco
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Uniformity Is Undesirable
“In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. (…) Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished.”
— Yoshida Kenkō, “Essays in Idleness” as cited in “Japanese Aesthetics and Culture”
2 tags
A Poet Is an Unhappy Being
“A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music… and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: ‘Sing for us soon again;’ that is as much as to say. ‘May new sufferings torment your soul.’”
— Søren Kierkegaard