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What loving the path means
- Understanding the pursuit of knowledge or practice as a personal, living path that grows and flourishes like a tree shaped by our curiosity, effort, and experience.
- Engaging deeply with a field or craft involves raw effort, trial, and error
- We encounter dead ends and moments of spontaneous insight
- These experiences build familiarity and create the foundations of our understanding
- The “tree of knowledge” emerges from this process
- Roots: our initial curiosity and early approaches
- Trunk: core principles and recurrent insights that guide development
- Branches: ideas and details that expand our understanding
- Leaves, flowers, fruits: discoveries, creations, and contributions we can offer to others
- Growth is continual
- The tree develops uniquely with each detour, difficulty, and moment of revelation
- The path is slow and arduous, but the struggle and personal shaping make it meaningful
- Loving the path itself is essential
- The process transforms the seeker, embedding knowledge into identity
- Ripening fruits of the tree become gifts for others
- We love the tree because it is the tree that we have grown together with
- In the end, the beauty of learning and creation lies not in reaching the end, but in cultivating a unique, living path that reflects our effort, curiosity, and devotion.
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Creating cultural resources against reality’s impermanence
- I propose understanding words, concepts, and symbols as our way of stabilising fragments of an ever-shifting reality so that we can think, imagine, and communicate at all.
- Reality is never static
- Everything moves, transforms, combines, dissolves
- Impermanence and time reinforce one another
- Human perception is limited
- We retain only an infinitesimal part of our experience
- To manage this, we create concepts, words, symbols, imagery
- These freeze selected aspects of reality for later reflection and recombination
- Symbols require shared conventions
- Communication works when others reconstruct a similar “frozen model” in their minds
- Cultures offer vast symbolic repertoires, but only a small fraction becomes acceptable in daily life
- Cultural filtering restricts expression
- Many words and ideas are dismissed as pretentious, eccentric, archaic, or overly “artistic”
- Most symbolic resources remain dormant despite being intelligible within the culture
- What we preserve shapes how we think
- A selective sieve captures certain elements by default
- The rest lingers, waiting in books, artworks, niche circles
- Dormant resources may return
- Conventions shift through chance or deliberate effort
- When they do, they broaden what a culture can express and perceive
- In the end, culture evolves when forgotten symbolic resources re-enter circulation and expand the scope of what we can collectively imagine.
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Homo phantasians – the human who dreams, makes things, and dreams some more
Art as a fundamental expression of human imagination that reveals our inner life and shapes the world around us.
- The Cave of Hands exemplifies the power of human creativity
- Ancient hunter-gatherers created hand stencils that survive today
- Art captures and expresses their subjective humanity, showing that creativity is essential to being human
- Humans are homo phantasians: dreamers striving to give form to not-yet-existing fantasies
- Art risks losing its impact when reduced to mere decoration or utility
- Its power comes from the invisible, subjective resonance it has for creators and observers
- Removing or ignoring art diminishes its potential to inspire or transform
- Art emerges from a holistic source within the human spirit
- It transcends conventional categories, blending experience into new forms
- The magic of art persists through action
- By reflecting its inspiration in our choices, creations, and interventions, we transform reality
- Abstract qualities in art circulate through minds and shape perception, values, and behaviour
- Artistic energy is renewed when its influence is enacted, reproduced, and embedded in life
- Art asks us to continue dreaming and creating
- Gestures like the Cave of Hands endure when their spirit inspires further acts of imagination
- Each translation of artistic energy into the world strengthens its significance and contributes to a richer, more meaningful existence
- In the end, art retains its transformative power only as we live in ways that echo its inspiration, expanding imagination and beauty throughout the world.
- The Cave of Hands exemplifies the power of human creativity
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Being a hopeful chaser instead of a problem-solving optimiser
- I propose understanding the pursuit of forms—objects, experiences, or creations that move us—as a way to disrupt the monotonous cycle of the “perpetual present” and reconnect with hope.
- Life often feels like a repetitive cycle
- Continuous solving repeating problems and fulfilling needs creates a sense of sameness
- Minor variations or consumption only temporarily break the monotony
- Change is vague and dissatisfying; we feel powerless and confined to securing momentary comfort
- Spiritual and meaningful pursuits are often suppressed
- Neurotransmitter-driven peace replaces the pursuit of deeper purpose
- Without deliberate action, the present becomes a cyclic eternity
- Humans are naturally drawn to forms that transcend utility or rationality
- These forms inspire awe, wonder, or transcendence
- They appear in art, nature, acts of heroism, or human connection
- Each person experiences them uniquely, as what moves them expresses their individual hopes and yearnings
- It's hard to put into words why they move us, but we strive to give them space in the world.
- Engaging with and creating forms restores hope
- By pursuing them and giving them more space, we disrupt the eternal present
- We cultivate and share them, and through them we inspire others, giving life meaning beyond mere survival
- In the end, chasing and living through these forms fills the spiritual void and allows hope to shape our lives and the world around us.
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Hide-and-seek and the glory of friendship
Games are alternating spaces where ordinary life’s constraints dissolve and unexpected heroism becomes possible.
- Games can make heroes out of anyone, granting moments of deserved triumph regardless of how unevenly life has treated them.
- These heroic moments counteract the ordinary world’s opaque and often unfair rules.
- Two central dynamics shape this transformation:
- The magic circle: a bounded space where special, clear rules allow extraordinary events.
- The ordinary world game: the ever-present system of complex, restrictive expectations that shape identity and opportunity.
- One can conceive of human connection as alternating between two modes:
- Mode 1: playful participation
- Mode 2: revealing and celebrating the heart behind the social mask
- Entering play despite life’s imperfections creates a sanctuary where people can act from their genuine selves.