I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.
And now: I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer alive.
In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History… There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation… Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.
And how absurd might that be?
Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people.
That can’t be good.
Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?
Let’s see who can list the most.
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
And don’t forget it.
Daisy: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where’s your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that’s best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.
In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
Virtually!
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
So, what did you fail to notice that you failed to notice? Here, say.
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
Yep, one of the “knots”.
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
The Sixties, let’s call it.
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
Let’s make sure that never happens here, okay?
There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
“The ruinous abdication by philosophy of its rightful domain is the consequence of the oblivion of philosophers to a great insight first beheld clearly by Socrates and re-affirmed by Kant as by no other philosopher. Science, concerned solely and exclusively with objective existents, cannot give answers to questions about meanings and values. Only ideas engendered by the mind and to be found nowhere but in the mind (Socrates), only the pure transcendental forms supplied by reason (Kant), can secure the ideals and values and put us in touch with the realities that constitute our moral and spiritual life. Twenty-four centuries after Socrates, two centuries after Kant, we badly need to re-learn the lesson." D. R. Khashaba
Of course, this is where “I” come in, isn’t it?
“Seduced by the spectacular theoretical and practical successes of the objective sciences into thinking that the methods and criteria of those sciences were the only means to truth, philosophers sought to apply those same methods and criteria to questions relating to the meaning of life and the values that give meaning to life. Philosophy, especially the Analytical species prevalent in the English-speaking world, was broken up into specialized disciplines and fragmented into particular problems, all swayed and impregnated by scientism, reductionism, and relativism. All questions of meaning and value were consigned to the rubbish heap of ‘metaphysical nonsense’.” D. R. Khashaba
Of course, this is where “I” come in, isn’t it?
“Religion is great at providing comfort as it attempts to describe the universe we live in, why we die, and why certain things happen. But like everything in life, we can only see and judge through our own eyes.” Rebecca Ryder
Comfort and consolation. Don’t leave home without them.
“Literature is always good. Stories are particularly powerful because they support the illusion that life has direction and purpose. Where God fails to show his hand, the writer shows his. When so much around us seems meaningless, stories give meaning. Stories don’t judge, yet they teach us, nurture us and while life goes on, they do us the favour of ending.” Rebecca Ryder
So, how am I doing here?
“Reading is still both fundamental and essential. And what, above all, a teacher can communicate to you is what to read and how to read. How to read! For the art of reading is in danger of being lost.” Ludwig Lewisohn
Not counting the Bible?
“And indeed, why should we think words ‘allow us to see,’ when they were invented precisely to speak of what is not before our eyes and what cannot be pointed at with a finger? The most words can do (since they produce emotional effects) is to lead us to imagine.” Umberto Eco
Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.
With obvious exceptions here, let’s say.
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.
Sure, go ahead, pick one:
Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects. And you can say “Well it’s only symbolic that women are nature”, it’s like no, it’s not just symbolic. The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can’t get more like nature than that, in fact it’s the very definition of nature.
New thread? Or, perhaps, a new forum?
In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.
See, I told you.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Actually, for some here, it’s the other way around.
I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, “isn’t it soft?” I looked at her ruined face and said, “yes, Grandma, it’s soft.”
Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.”
Fractured and fragmented, it is then.
Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.
I think it’s important to note this from time to time.
The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’
To click or not to click, that is the question.
For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
Good to know?
Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?
Define really?
Thousands of years before our liberal age, ancient Buddhism went further by denying not just all cosmic dramas, but even the inner drama of human creation. The universe has no meaning, and human feelings too are not part of a great cosmic tale. They are ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. That’s the truth. Get over it.
Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
You can say that again!
Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.
Tell us about it!
The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.
A fractured and fragmented “I” may well be as far as you can take that.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.
And, sure, from time to time, the normal woman.
A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from ‘reality’ than many of the people on whom the label ‘psychotic’ is fixed.
That’s complete bullshit. But then all the way to the bank.
Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing “the facts”. We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the “evidence”.
“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.” Rick Riordan
Right, whatever the fuck that means.
“I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity.” Marilyn Monroe
Next up: what can’t be manufactured here.
“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” Albert Einstein
You tell me this time.
“One eye sees, the other feels.” Paul Klee
Actually, it’s the other way around.
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” Ursula K. LeGuin
Kinda let’s say.
“The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.” Lester Bangs
The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future–though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.
Another classic example of something being true because it comforts and consoles the one who believes it, he figured.
I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement…
[i]Okay, so how do mere mortals go about liberating themselves from all of this:
Of course: the unverse works in ways no less mysterious?!
In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives.
And that’s just in regard to all of the One True Paths, isn’t it?
Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.
Bullshit? Nagel sort of almost nearly demonstrates that the Christian God is the real deal? All the other Gods evolved into Him let’s say?
I am drawn to a fourth alternative, natural teleology, or teleological bias, as an account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate. I believe that teleology is a naturalistic alternative that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law.
Theoretically, let’s say.
This is a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science. But I have been persuaded that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the idea of explanation of the intentions of a purposive being who produces the means to his ends by choice. In spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it certainly shouldn’t be ruled out a priori. Formally, the possibility of principles of change over time tending toward certain types of outcome is coherent, in a world in which the nonteleological laws are not fully deterministic.
I’m certainly not ruling it out of course. On the other hand…
Go ahead, fit yourself and your God and your moral philosophy into your own teleological account of the universe here.
“I am only alive because I have not yet died.” Anthony Doerr
Hey, same here!
“When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.” Ray Bradbury
Just not literally, he suspected.
“I’ve told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Oblivion notwothstanding.
‘Tell him,’ the colonel said, smiling, ‘that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.’ Gabriel García Márquez
Let’s pin down how profound that is.
“Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no… Death is…not. Death isn’t. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I’ve frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, no–what you’ve been is not on boats.” Tom Stoppard.
I wake up scared and I’m scared all day. I’m scared of being scared. Scared of “losing it”. Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home - that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.
Then it’s under [the turtles] all the way down.
There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.
I’ll never forgive myself that’s for sure.
It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck?
Not counting me, of course.
I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.
The end, beautiful friend, the end.
I’m in love with you and you don’t want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story.
As I sit down to write this piece, my heart races with excitement as I reflect on what has truly changed about me over the years. As I stood on the edge of the vast desert, the wind whipping through my hair, I realized something profound—not just in terms of physical appearance but also in how deeply intertwined our identities are now. The transformation from a confident woman who embraced her identity into a reclining figure reflects not only personal growth but also broader societal shifts towards embracing diversity and acceptance.
I may appear mundane but I don’t mind wrinkly clothes, so maybe that’s why I don’t get this? It’s literally right there, what is this running gag about the mystery of providing pleasurable sexual sensation? It’s not hard. I mean, it is if the situation calls for it, but this one doesn’t seem to.
You can only predict things after they have happened.
Well, so far, anyway.
I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that it was abnormal for people NOT to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it’s because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me.
Nope, not so far. How about you?
Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.
Absurd enough for you?
I’ve always been suspicious of collective truths.
And, if only theoretically, you too?
If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.
What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.
Or did that all end with the Sixties?
The [possibility of developing psychosis] is aways present if the individual begins to identify himself too exclusively with that part of him which feels unembodied.
Or, for others, the fractured and fragmented parts.
Jack falls in love with Jill’s image of Jack, taking it to be himself.
Yep, one of the “knots”.
We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which ‘our’ world will die with us although ‘the’ world will go on without us.
Bummer.
If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.
Starting now, say.
He had all along felt that he was, in his own words (which incidentally are also Heidegger’s), ‘on the fringe of being’, with only one foot in life and with no right even to that. He felt that he was not really alive and that anyway he was of no value and had hardly the right to the pretension of having life.
