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The web has an almost infinite capacity for storage and memory yet its prevailing use is an acceleration of ephemerality. The reasons for this are complex to say the least (of which financial short term gain is probably the most prevalent). But this doesn’t mean the tendency can’t be resisted. Perhaps books as well as their online siblings could be seen as batteries, banks which can exceed our capacity for recollection and be utilized for power. Power against those that would have us lick their corporate salt blocks in perpetuity.
The words gathered here are not necessarily aimed at public consumption — if one connects with something here that is of course wonderful. But this is ultimately a personal reservoir, a store where I can return to remind myself, when low and forgetful, to revive my awe of all that is blooming and has come to pass.
He knew, as sailors come to, not to stare hard but to let the faintest suggestion of form and light in at the periphery of his gaze.
The fortieth wave ploughed through an abstract topography bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of its origins, with ridges and furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had been rendered unique — but enough structure had been created to act as the framework for everything to come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of itself to be scattered across the freshly calibrated landscape.
From the introduction to The Writing Of Stones by Roger Caillois PDF
(...)
Stones, like us, stand at the intersection of countless lines crossing one another and receding to infinity, at the center of a field of forces too unpredictable to be measured; and we awkwardly call the result chance, hazard, or fate.
(...)
This almost menacing perfection — for it rests on the absence of life, the visible stillness of death — appears in stones so variously that one might list all the endeavors and styles of human art and not find one without its parallel in mineral nature. There is nothing surprising about this: the crude attempts of that lost creature, man, could not cover more than a tiny part of the aesthetics of the universe.
I looked up, as if somehow I could grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite! The trouble was that I’d only been thinking in terms of Man’s own limited dimension. I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. The vast majesty of creation had to mean something — but then I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. Suddenly, I knew theinfinitesimal and the infinite were just two ends of the same thing. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.
Link to article
via Stewart Brand
Filaments are massive thread-like formations, comprising huge amounts of matter — including galaxies, gas and, modelling implies, dark matter. They can be 500 million light years long but just 20 million light years wide. At their largest scale, the filaments divide the universe into a vast gravitationally linked lattice interspersed with enormous dark matter voids.
A thousand years of nonlinear history
Despite the many differences between them, living creatures and their inorganic counterparts share a crucial dependence on intense flows of energy and materials. In many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge. As the biogeographer Ian G. Simmons puts it, “The flows of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.” Our organic bodies are, in this sense, nothing but temporary coagulations in these flows: we capture in our bodies a certain portion of the flow at birth, then release it again when we die and microorganisms transform us into a new batch of raw materials.
In such worlds the organic basis of intelligence was often a swarm of avian creatures no bigger than sparrows. A host of individual bodies were possessed together by a single individual mind of human rank. The body of this mind was multiple, but the mind itself was almost as firmly knit as the mind of a man. [...] Probing as best we could beyond the formal similarity of spirit which gave us access to the bird-clouds, we discovered painfully how to see with a million eyes at once, how to feel the texture of the atmosphere with a million wings. We learned to interpret the composite percepts of mud-flats and marshes and great agricultural regions, irrigated twice daily by the tide.
It is sometimes of great Use for a Man to pretend he is deceiv’d; for when we let a subtile Fellow see that we are sensible of his Tricks, it gives him occasion to be more refin’d.
From A dialog between Robert Hunter and Terence McKenna
(...)
Only that which can change can continue.
Book 4
(...)
His schoolfellows did not like Gabriel; all laughed and jeered at him, because he was less cruel and more gentle of nature than the rest, and even as a rare and beautiful bird escaped from a cage is hacked to death by the common sparrows, so was Gabriel among his fellows.
- my mind follows the night wind
- over dunes and pinnacles
- I can hear it whisper
- each time more softly
- that there is no need
- to come back,
- that I myself am the wind
- so long whispering that our identities
- are both cast in doubt.
- In the vast abyss before time, self
- is not, and soul commingles
- with mist, and rock, and light. In time,
- soul brings the misty self to be.
- Then slow time hardens self to stone
- while ever lightening the soul,
- till soul can loose its hold of self
- and both are free and can return
- to vastness and dissolve in light,
- the long light after time.
- Some people have begun to come into my dreams
- from a long way away,
- traveling over the mountain passes
- that nobody living knows.
- Old people who smell like fog
- and the soft bark of redwoods.
- They talk together softly.
- They know more than I know.
- I think they come from home.
- Only when we are sick of our sickness
- Shall we cease to be sick.
- The Sage is not sick, being sick of sickness;
- This is the secret of health.
Like it or not, change is coming. And the greater the resistance, the greater the pain.
What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine we have found it, we don’t like it.
Yogas, prayers, therapies, and spiritual exercises are at root only elaborate postponements of the recognition that there is nothing to be grasped and no way to grasp it.
Life really is not the avoidance of death. Death is the avoidance of death: the constant terror of death, the constant putting it off, the constant vigilance that one will not die—that is death! What we call life is, fundamentally, willingness to die.
To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared.
The absolutely vital thing is to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves.
Just in being alive I am unavoidably responsible for untold misery and pain. Apologies are hollow. Attempts at improvement create new entanglements. Passivity is simple evasion.
The first two of these instructions comprise the whole of the technique of Yoga. The last two are of a sublimity which it would be improper to expound in this present elementary stage.
For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.
Reject the obscenities of contrived uniformity, order and purpose. Turn and face the tidal wave of Chaos from which philosophers have been fleeing in terror for millennia. Leap in and come out surfing its crest, sporting amidst the limitless weirdness and mystery in all things.
So many people seem to spend their lives trying to appear normal, predictable and consistent to themselves and those that surround them. They just end up bored with themselves, bereft of any depth of inner resources, suffocated by the inhibitions that defend their own monolithic identities.
Yet whenever I see a frog’s eye low in the water warily ogling the shoreward landscape, I always think inconsequentially of those twiddling mechanical eyes that mankind manipulates nightly from a thousand observatories. Someday, with a telescopic lens an acre in extent, we are going to see something not to out liking, some looming shape outside there across the great pond of space.
Whenever I catch a frog’s eye I am aware of this, but I do not find it depressing. I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him. And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely magnificent power of humanity. It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
- When they say Don’t I know you?
- say no.
- When they invite you to the party
- remember what parties are like
- before answering.
- Someone telling you in a loud voice
- they once wrote a poem.
- Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
- Then reply.
- If they say We should get together
- say why?
- It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
- You’re trying to remember something
- too important to forget.
- Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
- Tell them you have a new project.
- It will never be finished.
- When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
- nod briefly and become a cabbage.
- When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
- appears at the door,
- don’t start singing him all your new songs.
- You will never catch up.
- Walk around feeling like a leaf.
- Know you could tumble any second.
- Then decide what to do with your time.
Even though the broad outline of events at a particular instant has been decided, some of the fine details remain fluid until a later time. Then, when this “fixing” of the details happens, it looks like they have retrospective consequences.
(...)
Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities.
- no guru, no method, no teacher
- just you and I and nature
- in the garden
- in the garden
- wet with rain
Wisdom says: be strong! Then canst thou bear more joy. Be not animal; refine thy rapture! If thou drink, drink by the eight and ninety rules of art: if thou love, exceed by delicacy; and if thou do aught joyous, let there be subtlety therein!
The clever man, so-called, the man of talent, shuts out his genius by setting up his conscious will as a positive entity. The true man of genius deliberately subordinates himself, reduces himself to a negative, and allows his genius to play through him as It will. We all know how stupid we are when we try to do things. Seek to make any other muscle work as consistently as your heart does without your silly interference — you cannot keep it up for forty-eight hours. Yield yourself utterly to the Will of Heaven, and you become the omnipotent instrument of that Will. Nothing that any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle.
But exceed! Exceed!
She played the game with no thought of the victory; and this is half the secret of playing most games of importance.
- The spots of the leopard are the sunlight in the glade; pursue thou the deer stealthily at thy pleasure.
- The dappling of the deer is the sunlight in the glade; concealed from the leopard do thou feed at thy pleasure.
- Resemble all that surroundeth thee; yet be Thyself — and take thy pleasure among the living.
And in his broad brow she read the knowledge of the Unity of Things, and in his eyes the joy unspeakable which that knowledge gives.
I’m understanding you with a part of me that I didn’t know was there.
All life is conflict. Every breath that you draw represents a victory in the struggle of the whole Universe.
In a steamboat the engine must first overcome its own inertia before it can attack the resistance of the water.
The only way to clear muddy water is to leave it alone.
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.
We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.
When a man starts to learn, it happens very slowly-bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield -And what can he do to overcome fear? The answer is very simple. He must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His intent becomes stronger. Learning is no longer a terrifying task.
- The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
- The desert sighs in the bed,
- And the crack in the tea-cup opens
- A lane to the land of the dead.
- Think in the morning.
- Act in the noon.
- Eat in the evening.
- Sleep in the night.
Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
To generalize is to be an idiot.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
- Disobedience over compliance
- Pull over push
- Compasses over maps
- Emergence over authority
- Learning over education
- Resilience over strength
- Systems over objects
- Risk over safety
- Practice over theory
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.