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The joyous emancipation of the obsolete
Sculptor Alberto Giacometti at his studio, 1958. Some implements have been used for certain purposes for a very long time not because they were intrinsically suited for it, but because at the time they were the best at it. They were allocated a purpose that wasn’t necessarily inherent to them, but because they were the…
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Our infinite choice as finite beings
The idea of progress is founded on a process of forward movement. It is not too controversial to observe that, in the general discourse, progress is intimately tied to a particular direction measured by sets of well-known variables: education, economic prosperity, industrial power, material well-being, political transparency, health, and so on (an argument can be…
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Constellations and the human mind (as above, so below)
⚘ Branch thought from: Creating cultural resources against reality’s impermanence – Waterways for flooding states of mind ⚘Branches: Metaphors are keys into mind territories “That which is Below is like that which is Above and that which is Above is like that which is Below to do the miracles of the Only Thing.” Emerald Tablet, verse…
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Meaning feels like sunlight
The sun as the ground of all meaning. Everything that vitalises us, from literal warmth to the deepest experiences of love, purpose, and presence, is an extension of the same elemental force, and our task is to remain turned toward it.- Darkness and light
- Emerging into the light means arriving where vitality is constant, not desperate slivers through crevices in a maze
- Light reveals the world beyond the cage of the mind; darkness is what the helpless mind fills with horrors
- The sun as origin
- All life forces are born from the sun’s energy; every living being finds its share, directly or through the chain of consumption
- The sun is present across every dimension of existence because all of it was born from the same source
- The sunlike in experience
- We carry the capacity to find what is sunlike regardless of the literal sun.
- It goes deeper than meaning defined by values. It is felt from the deepest core of what we are and radiates outward
- The heliotropic imperative
- At our most elemental, we must be heliotropic or gradually fade.
- The sun is comfort without sedation, rest and mobilisation at once.
- Every experience of meaningfulness is a variation of the humblest living being finding its spot in the sunlight after a cold search in the dark
- Darkness and light
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Poets are subjects of the ineffable
Poetry exists to express what conventional language cannot convey, offering transformed perception rather than definitions.
- The poet's innate orientation
- Poets engage primarily with the ineffable that wells up through experience
- What can easily be said becomes a secondary performance or game to them
- The pre-verbal stage of experience holds unusual predominance in their inner lives
- Authentic poetic expression
- Poets craft combinations of words, structure, and rhythm faithful to pure experience
- The combination works through unique imagery and transformed perception, not complementary definitions
- Poetry reveals and points attention rather than telling what something is
- The poet's trade-off
- Advantage: the pre-verbal richness remains palpitatingly strong, sharpening their expressive instinct
- Disadvantage: the ineffable claims impractical mind space at the expense of expediency
- Result: less efficient engagement with language-centric social reality
- The compulsion to express
- The ineffable radiates within, compelling them to give it expression
- Poets sense the importance of the culturally unacknowledged
- Suppressing this inclination creates draining waste and constant resistance
- Poetry's purpose and limits
- Poets do not codify the world like other disciplines
- They decode nature to codify the human soul, which resists conclusive codification
- Poetry offers invitations to transformed states, not definitions
In the end, poetry provides handholds for the ever-untamed, ineffable parts of the soul, guiding perception towards what words alone cannot capture.
- The poet's innate orientation
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The corpus of human knowledge: the human drive to understand good things and reproduce them
Humanity's intellectual history represents a sustained effort to understand and reproduce the good things we encounter in the world.
- The threshold of sustained thinking
- Early humans often quit thinking when confronted with impassable hurdles
- Lacking accumulated knowledge, ancestors had fewer incentives to think systematically
- Science emerged as one episode in this broader adventure of the mind
- The drive to reproduce goodness
- When something good happens, we want to make it occur more often
- We seek to understand essence: causes, mechanisms, constituent parts
- This produces technologies for shelter, cultivation, medicine, joy, and communication
- Philosophy and art as reproduction
- Philosophy asks how to reproduce meaning, peace, happiness, wisdom, and virtue
- Art attempts to reproduce beauty and aesthetic experiences
- Music theory codifies what makes sounds move us spiritually
- Jung's pursuit of synchronicity
- He observed meaningful coincidences that defied causality throughout his life
- He explored esotericism, alchemy, Eastern philosophy, and quantum physics
- Though he never succeeded in reproducing synchronicity, his work left fascinating byproducts in its wake.
- The imbalance of tools and temples
- Modern rationality favours reproducing our capacity to reproduce over choosing what to reproduce
- We need temples to materialise devotion and sacrifice. We do not just need better tools
- Everything has opportunity cost; more freedom means greater sacrifice with each choice
- Calvino's invisible cities
- Each city embodies a population devoted to perpetuating certain goods above others
- We must seek what is not hell, then make it endure and give it space
In the end, transcendent desires beyond utility create infinite ramifications. We must listen to our desires to discover what good things deserve reproduction.
- The threshold of sustained thinking