pure mental material

Intelligent support for digital text (in the face of negative academic and literati reaction) from Tim Parks in The New York Review of Book:

"The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself."

Full article here

formless consciousness

From a spiritual perspective, the universe is entirely permeated by its underlying basis, formless consciousness. That means everything that can be perceived as having form in the world, from the most basic subtle forces to hard compact matter, is essentially conscious. Formless consciousness and material substance constitute the totality, two sides of a single entity. It follows that formlessness is beyond time and space, and amounts to an infinite absolute that material form is defined against. 

direct perception of formlessness

Speculative spirituality:

There is a debate within spiritual schools of thought about whether form is actually a substance, or simply an illusion, amounting to false perception. They are not really opposed though, in my view. I think it is a case of how the direct perception of formlessness is experienced by the authors of the texts that originated those schools. Take the differences recorded in the Vedanta, the Eastern philosophical tradition I most closely adhere to, and which for me has the clearest definitions of the subject.

Two distinct schools would be Samkhya and Advaita. In the Samkhya school (consolidated between 5th and 2nd centuries BCE), the formless absolute and material form are said to be separate and distinct from one another. Material form arises from formless consciousness and clouds it, producing the effect of the experience of separation in the human organism that evolves within it, a state that remains until the essential nature of the world is directly perceived by detaching from the material covering that obscures it.

Yoga is the process by which this detaching occurs, and the school is closely associated with the clarification of yogic practices. In Advaita (the dominant school consolidated by Shankara around 788-820 CE), a similar analysis of clouding is proposed, but no substance is implied, simply ignorance. Removing ignorance is a achieved through questioning the nature of reality and meditating on its essential nature.

Another school, Kashmiri Shaivism (975-1025 CE), developed later, and proposes that formless consciousness, which it calls Shiva, and material form, which it conceives of as cosmic energy, and calls Shakti, amount to two sides of the same entity.

In this school, as in the Samkhya school, the universe of form is conceived of as emerging from the formless basis as a process giving rise to what they term the elements of space, air, fire, water and earth, which produce the senses of, respectively, hearing, touch, seeing, tasting and smelling. These are the reflections of consciousness in the elements.

The process is viewed as one of increasing contraction of the primal state of energy or substance, which otherwise reflects formless consciousness in its infinite fullness. So, each further contraction produces an increased covering of its reflection of the basis. When energy/substance is fully emerged to the earth state, the most dense, it produces a hard materiality that all but covers and cuts off identity with the basis.

It is never completely covered, however, because the material foundation remains the primal energy state (space) and all the states that continue to emerge from the formless basis (air, fire, water). There is no separation between states of energy. So fusion of all the states occurs and this mixing gives rise to the evolution of individualised forms (though they are entirely interconnected within the totality).

How forms emerge and are constituted as dynamic parts of the whole will be the subject of future specualtive posts. 

false gods (pt2)

Romantic antidote to modernity projected onto utopian future:

“[A]t every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body.”

From The Part Played By Labour In The Transition From Apes To Man, Fred Engels (1876)

false gods (pt1)

Romantic antidote to modernity projected onto exotic location:

“To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction. Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor’s hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance. As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.”

From The Diary of Anais Nin Vol 5 (1947/55)

analyze, interpret, and reconstruct

"Neuroscientists are also gaining an increasingly better understanding of how our brains analyze, interpret, and reconstruct place and space. We know the brain adds information to what it receives from the physical environment: in optical illusions, it supplies lines that the eyes don’t actually see, and it can form three-dimensional images where only two exist on paper (architects are particularly adept at this). The brain also brings memory to our environment. When you enter a particularly beautiful cathedral, your experience includes memories and emotions tied to the past experiences of spiritual places you’ve visited throughout your life. Your brain is drawing connections between place and memory, even if you don’t realize it."

In more Science-catching-up-with-spiritual-reality news, this article reveals a growing collusion between cutting edge architectural discourse and that of neurobiological research. Though the idea that the environment, the human brain and our subjective experience are interrelated could only come as a surprise to the most reductionist atheists and their dualistic alter egos, the literal religionists. (Both camps think human consciousness is somehow separated out from the general processes of the universe, the former thinking we have evolved to a point we can step outside of blind evolution and correct certain functions we think act counter to our best interests (the essential underpinning of Humanist thought), and the latter believe an overseeing God created us as independent souls, to wander over the earth as we please.)

Pic from original article

he creeps uninvited

"In short, there is a young woman in this film whom Bond correctly identifies (in his smug, smart-arse way) as a sex-worker who was kidnapped and enslaved as a child by human traffickers. She is now a brutalised and unwilling gangster’s moll. She gives no sign of being sexually interested in Bond, merely of being incredibly scared and unhappy. So he creeps uninvited into her hotel shower cubicle later that night, like Jimmy Savile, and silently screws her because he is bored." 

Found this interesting article via twitter. It's from Giles Coren and was posted on his wife's blog after the Times decided not to run it. It exposes the coldness in the heart of a certain kind of British film director who has taken the Hollywood dollar after a career in theatre or advertising. In this case the over-praised Sam Mendes, who made the film in question. His films are always vacuous exercises in theatrical style. I'd place the equally awful, and now deceased, Anthony Minghella in the same category (you can think of several others, I'm sure). 

incredibly complicated sweetness

To celebrate its return to the bestseller shelves in WH Smith (albeit re-packaged with an awful photo of a pair of actors) on the back of an unimaginative movie adaptation, here's a passage from Jack's book On The Road. Also, a section of the original text, typed onto a single scroll of paper is currently on display at the British Library. Details here.

"Now this is the first time we've been alone and in a position to talk for years," said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!" He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles-how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter. "Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!" he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes- that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. "Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things- Oh, the things-I've thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself-stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault." We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road. "Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way 1 am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us-that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to drive and drove carefully)-"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side." There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word "pure" a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days.

the old world falls apart

Don't be freaked by the term 'sacred' here. This short film doesn't draw meaning from a mythical god in the sky, but neither does it draw meaning from the dumb conservatism of secular mysticism and its chief contesting ideological manifestations: free markets and scientific socialism. It is a contribution to a discussion taking us beyond such outdated oppositions.

urban colour scheme

I posted this back in June. Now the artist Slinkachu has an exhibition at the Andipa Gallery in London SW3 from 27 Sept to 27 Oct. His book Global Model Village is out today. Again, I like the found objects aspect and the creation of miniature worlds under our feet, beneath our gaze. The artist leaves the tiny models in place after he had photographed them and claims often on returning months later some remain untouched.


pic from here

urban colour scheme

'I'd like to teach the world to sing' by Laura Keeble (2012), currently hanging in the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, just across the street from Lime St station. Exhibited as part of the John Moores Painting Prize, the UK's biggest painting competition, open to anonymous entries from UK based artists working with paint. A found coke can with enamel paint depicting marching cops, it appears very slight on the wall between two framed pieces by other painters, and has an affinity with the series of flattened tin cans posted here under the 'city' thread (see tag below).

self and other disappear

a gradient of grays

" “(C)onsciousness” is not a term that applies only to higher mammals, and exists well beyond the realm of humans... it is a continuum, a sliding scale, a gradient of grays between the white of an unfeeling amoeba and the black of we highly evolved Homo sapiens. It is not a quality that something simply “has” or “doesn’t have”. Rather, the animal world falls at points across the scale." 

From here

Regarding the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness which can be read in full here

millions of petabytes

"This system — let’s call it Grace — has access to the world’s major datasets, which contain millions of petabytes of social data in this hypothetical future. Grace would work surreptitiously and guardedly, applying social math to each of our private social contexts, convincing us to brush more often, to read to our kids, to help others in need. Grace would reward us at the physiological level, by convincing one person to touch another, unleashing oxytocin and building trust where none existed before. Teams would work more efficiently. Friends would make that extra effort, families would settle old differences. Politicians would reach out to their opponents to find common cause and to put aside partisan division. Warring factions in dusty far-away lands would lay down their AK-47s and make peace where there had been decades or millennia of war."

There's an extraordinarily nutty post here from Stowe Boyd, an influential thinker in the field of new technology and its impact on society and culture. He is quite serious, I think, in his belief that machines can save the world.

I can't believe he hasn't watched this:

now where was i?... continued

my mate amy marries her french hunk

night party at the pool in murcia

louis my grandson in normal mode

my mate katie visits from japan

now where was I?

Ah yes...banging on about the failure of modern discourse to include the obvious facts of consciousness as they have been known for all cultures throughout history, and continue to be known by the community of seriously intelligent contemplatives, but denied by the narrow prejudices of materialistic atheism, a provincial western-centric strain of thought that stems from the current dominance of capitalistic science and technology in our culture. But before we proceed with that, here's some pictures from my summer:

jo fro and 65daysofstatic at tramlines

walking home through sheffield at dusk

godson's first footie match: brazil v belarus at old trafford during olympics

only olympics event i got to go to

the daz in london posing with a foreign language newspaper 

stone's 50 years exhibition at somerset house

assorted daughters and grandkids (one missing) watching the olympics

urban colour scheme

From Gav

overborne by fate

"I think that realistic literature from the first has been a victim literature. Pit any ordinary individual—and realistic literature concerns itself with ordinary individuals—against the external world, and the external world will conquer him, of course. Everything that people believed in the nineteenth century about determinism, about man's place in nature, about the power of productive forces in society, made it inevitable that the hero of the realistic novel should not be a hero but a sufferer who is eventually overcome. So I was doing nothing very original by writing another realistic novel about a common man and calling it The Victim. I suppose I was discovering independently the essence of much of modern realism. In my innocence, I put my finger on it. Serious realism also contrasts the common man with aristocratic greatness. He is overborne by fate, just as the great are in Shakespeare or Sophocles. But this contrast, inherent in literary tradition, always damages him. In the end the force of tradition carries realism into parody, satire, mock epic—Leopold Bloom."


Saul Bellow from here
Pic from here

terrifying a novice

Pamela Stevenson talking great sense in the Guardian on 50 Shades of Grey:

"Frankly, in BDSM terms, Grey is a lightweight. He eschews many fairly standard interests, although he is an expert at the "mind-fuck". Even novices, however, would know that his use of cable ties is a very bad idea (to avoid nerve-damage and scarring, soft, thick rope is de rigueur).

Grey's lack of competency in his chosen erotic arena is most apparent, though, in the way he fails to assess his potential new submissive's naivety. Experienced BDSM practitioners are acutely aware of the gulf between cognoscenti and others, and would not dream of terrifying a novice by bringing up such advanced techniques as fire, electricity and gynaecological play."

Full article here
Interesting blog critiquing the book here
Pic is of a friend

constantly emanating whole

Higgs-Boson in theory

Deep meditators, along with anyone who has experienced a spontaneous awakening to spiritual understanding, know thought is rooted in a boundless infinity of consciousness. The mind only really functions as a bundle of superimposed subtle energy interactions that effectively fizzle out (the true meaning of the term Nirvana) when that greater reality emerges. Then, all oppositions are effectively annihilated, and every longed-for goal of common, conflicted life is realised in its totality. Love is unconditional and free, requiring no object to attach to and bargain with, peace is all-absorbing, knowledge is total, with nothing further to discover, and harmony complete. It is known in traditional practice as the unmanifest spirit, the root and cause of the manifest energised world, which itself is seen as its apparel, inseparable from and entirely bound up with it. This manifest aspect is, in its primal essence, a subtle emanation that has the inherent quality of contraction. Contraction makes the world of form. 

The movement is understood as inward over the basis. Beginning as a barely discernable vibration then increasing in intensity until reaching a state of maximum density, a process that is ongoing and always-arising - the primal subtle emanation continuing even as the maximum point of density is reached. This creates a core tension that leads to the fusion that modern secular science seems to detect something of in its evidence of an original Big Bang moment. Dense energy disperses, radiates back outwards as particles, not into a theoretical void, but into the already-existing and always-arising energy field, with its constant contraction. This inward contraction and outward dispersal creates the balanced tension that gives rise to forms, to atoms, molecules and so on. All of it occurring within the immaterial consciousness. 

Higgs-Boson revealed 

Only the internal instruments of the senses are capable of studying this, and a long history of exploration and testing results is available in the various yogic and meditative traditions (if the effort is made to read beyond the cultural colouring to get to the essence). What all of them agree is that once the ground of being is reached by direct experience, it is possible to understand how the individualised mind and body is formed as a uniquely configured part of a vast interrelated whole. It is made up of the most minute particles of energy coalescing around the essential core tension and forming into every seen and unseen object in existence. This is how the world works. Each part of the whole is governed in its activity, in its behaviour, by its place in the constantly emanating whole - the environment of the cosmos - from infinite space right down to the individualised body. 

The knowledge that awareness, or pure consciousness, is the unitive underpinning of the mind and body (subtle and gross aspects of an individualised coalescion of particles) allows us to negotiate life with an equanimity not available to the currents of mind caught up in the general collective energies of society. It allows, for instance, a delight in the general excitement of a scientific discovery like the supposed Higgs-Boson particle, but also a recognition that what has been detected is unlikely to be placed in any context that can accurately discern its true nature. 

Images from here and here

time would glide

"I was 19 years old. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together … And on the days we were together, time would glide. Most of the day I'd see him, and his smile. I'd hear his conversation and his silence..until it was time to sleep. Sleep I would often share with him. By the time I realized I was in love, it was malignant. It was hopeless. There was no escaping, no negotiating with the feeling. No choice. It was my first love. It changed my life."

Frank Ocean of Odd Future
Full text here
Pic from here

false separation

"The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. "


From here

unspeakable visions

The text: here

adaptive function of religion

"(T)he fact that salient religious cues prompt neighborly (sic) decisions and curb social transgressions because they focus the believers’ attention on God’s hawkeyed view of their behaviors is tremendously important for understanding the adaptive function of religion." full article here

I think this interesting argument from research nevertheless gets things the wrong way around. A taxi driver who is diligently honest by nature is likely to exhibit a belief system that takes into account the presence of a transcendent truthfulness - what he might refer to as God - because the ideas go hand in hand. It's not that he's frightened of being judged by a vengeful cosmic father figure necessarily (though maybe that's true for some). A case of an atheist positing a very simplistic cause and effect worldview I think.

urban colour scheme

from here

we are participants

"In the long run, we’re in an age of experience: not audience. We don’t ‘watch’ TV or ‘consume’ media anymore: we are participants and TV users, not ‘watchers’. The old guard don’t get it, but we are turning a corner and leaving old TV behind."


From here

into a rhythm

Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth interviews Chloe Sevigny:

GORDON: I want to ask you a broad question: When I am playing music, there comes this feeling of just losing your body in space. Almost like you’re upside down and you don’t even know it. Do you get that feeling when you’re acting?

SEVIGNY: I do. You can’t really remember what happened afterwards. The problem comes when you don’t get to have that. You feel like you’ve failed. So I’ve learned that you can’t have these expectations that you’re going to find that state—but I do have it pretty often. You get into a rhythm. I’ve worked with directors who have very little money so we only have two or three takes. In that situation, I know I just need to go for it. Hopefully the performances don’t go over the top. When I have a bigger part, like Nicki on Big Love or Lana inBoys Don’t Cry, a juicier role, it’s easier to get there. When you’re doing little tidbits, you don’t have as much room. But small roles can be comfortable, too. Like my part in Zodiac[2007]. I was terrified of all the actors who were big stars. And I had this tiny role.

from here

pic from here

urban colour scheme

from here via here

concrete social realities

"[T]he ‘inner-turn’ drives us away from concerns with the material; so much so that being preoccupied with worldly matters is somehow portrayed as tawdry or shallow. It’s no accident that we see the wealthy and celebrities drawn to this very capitalist form of religion: most of the world realizes that material concerns do matter. I don’t believe that we find ourselves and meaning via an inner journey. I’m not even sure I know what it means. While of course there is course for introspection and self-examination, this, I argue, has to be in a context of concrete social realities."


From here  An interview with the writer of Dispirited, an attack on "Spiritual but not Religious" thought.


Sometimes intelligent atheists (as opposed to the mindless group-thinkers of the half-educated leftish metropolitan mass) make telling points about spirituality that need making. This book directs its critique at the 'New Age' Mind-Body-Spirit mulch that passes for serious inner enquiry, though it also looks towards Theravada Buddhism, with its absence of overt diety-worship, for a common ground in belief between traditional systems of thought and modern post-religious ideas. It's a trend in modern discourse towards establishing a firmer ground for truth than the post-modern relativism that so many so-called intellectuals have gotten lost in: with their ridiculous contradictions, often projecting exotic notions onto traditional societies (especially when they are suicide bombing us) while simultaneously thinking their systems of thought are rooted in ignorance. But traditional thought is complex and has always contained a range of perspectives that shows up narrow 'modern', atheistic thought for its limited provincialism. 


Modern atheism's rise is a product of the rise of scientific enquiry, itself a faith-based system of thought holding a set of mystical beliefs: that the universe appeared out of nothing, that human consciousness is an accident of evolutionary processes that has somehow created a mind risen above the very processes that created it, and become capable of reversing or resisting negative selfish aspects of those processes (perpetuating a Christian notion of original sin overturned by an enlightened interior turn). Science's rise to cultural dominance in advanced technological societies is entirely due to its role in serving technological advance, and with it the production of consumer goods, the essential driver of capitalist enterprise and the dominance of markets and their economic logic. Leftist atheists owe their current dominance of public discourse to capitalism and serve its most iniquitous machinations through their denial of the true root of human benevolence. 


As Theravada Buddhism, and the Vedanta, its philosophical progenitor holds, human consciousness is not a uniquely established phenomenon that separates the human body out from the rest of the universe, but the ubiquitous and all-encompassing universal consciousness manifesting in an organism that has evolved as part of an interdependent and interactive totality. It is the fact of its immersion in the world that means the human body, rooted as it is in the environment, both social and 'natural', cannot escape its responsibilities to others and to the world - however that arises. The 'inner turn' in the true sense is not a turn away from the world, the conditions we all live in and the relations between us. But is a turn towards a greater reality - and therefore greater source of love and knowledge - than modern atheist thought can perceive. The capacity to care is greater when intelligent analysis and activity is rooted in a direct perception of the reality that we are, at root, a conscious singularity with only apparent separateness. 

materialist realism

“Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.” from Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative?

Used as a term to describe the saturation of public discourse with the idea that capitalism is the natural economic system and not one among other possible forms of production, capitalist realism is compared to the Socialist Realism of Soviet Union under Stalin, where all art and culture was coerced into a systemic promotion of a certain kind of materialist reality.

But we need more. We need an analysis of how materialist realism is dominant in public discourse. Promoted widely by all the main establishment cultural institutions (note especially the BBC's popular science programmes) this realism can be juxtaposed to spiritual realism, a view of the world based on understanding the essential nature of human consciousness and its relation to society and culture. 

pic from here

to see everything

"I used to watch Jari Litmanen [the Finnish 'shadow striker' of the great Ajax team of the 1990s] a lot," he says. "I enjoyed how he moved and got into space. And he was patient. If you looked at him, he always never looked like he was rushed doing anything. He always used to take his time. Then, when the opportunity came, he found the space to get the ball in the net. The more you do it, the more it works. You need to know where everyone is on the pitch. You need to see everything."

from here

urban colour scheme

From here

beyond this situation

"We have to create a scientific culture that recognizes the value of contemplative experience, and we have to create a culture of wisdom or spirituality that recognizes the value of science. We have to hold the two together. If we can’t or don’t, we will slide into one or other extreme—the resurgence of anti-scientific religious fundamentalism based on outmoded belief systems that are not valid and sustainable, or sustainable only in violent, terrible ways, or a scientific reductionism that doesn’t recognize the value of contemplative traditions, including the way that religious traditions have been the home where contemplative traditions have developed and flourished.

To be fair, many elements in religious history have been antagonistic to mysticism and contemplative experience, so it’s not as if reductionistic scientific trends are the only problem for contemplative traditions.

We have to move beyond this situation if we’re going to be a wholesome and healthy culture. The way I see forward is to working within both science and contemplative traditions to create a science that recognizes the importance and value of these traditions, while also transforming these traditions with scientific knowledge. I see this as potentially leading to a new post-religious or secular spirituality. I mean “secular” in the sense of a place where many different traditions can meet and hold something in common for the common good."


from here
pic here

purely physical

"When your job is to have sex with strange men it has to have some effect on your other sexual relationships. For me, however… I’ve been telling myself for the last several months it was purely physical (he fulfills about 90% of the qualities I find attractive); however, that little hand-holding interlude this morning made me realize I’m in love with him."


from here

the big man

dangerous hallucination

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity or organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit – to the conquest of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

From Psychedelics and Religious Experience by Alan Watt (1968)
from here
pic from here

product of physical events

"It is important to recognize that the case I'm building against free will does not depend upon philosophical materialism (the assumption that reality is, at bottom, purely physical). There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events. The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature - and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions. But even if the human mind were made of soul-stuff, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operations of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does."

Sam Harris making a good case for the absence of free will and individual agency, from a secular atheist perspective here.

urban colour scheme

Contributed by Gav

cautious not to come

“You got to get the hard-on, and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on, and cautious not to come.” 




Drew Bundini Brown, 
(Muhammed Ali's assistant trainer)