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.