[H]

We are now in a position to draw out the implications of Dasein's special way of being, which is existence. Cultures and cultural institutions have existence as their way of being, and so does each of us. To exist is to take a stand on what is essential about one's being and to be defined by that stand. Thus Dasein is what, in its social activity, it interprets itself to be. Human beings do not already have some specific nature. It makes no sense to ask whether we are essentially rational animals, creatures of God, organisms with built-in needs, sexual beings, or complex computers. Human beings can interpret themselves in any of these ways and many more, and they can, in varying degrees, become any of these things, but to be human is not to be essentially any of them. Human being is essentially simply self-interpreting.

Hubert Dreyfus - Being-in-the-world: A Commentary of Heidegger's Being And Time

[sciborg2]

"my son is no bigger than a grub...where does he live? at the moment, between the leaves of a book. this is where he runs the least risk of being lost. inversely, he risks being squashed, if someone puts something on the book. otherwise he rests between the leaves without much difficulty.

what is the future for such a grub?

not much hope. he'll vegetate. if he stays this size.

but then slowly he takes on substance. this is doubtless the result of my efforts: sometimes i take him out, i place him in a bed, or outside, for after all he has a right to the world, and he seems to lean toward life. the danger that someone unaware will crush him remains. little by little he even gains in intelligence. he begins to think, to be happy, to become a real living being.

obviously, he is very far behind, since he has existed in this form for months. but now he has really decided to catch up. now i spy him running, having gone downstairs, and climbing...

i feel happiness, love for my grub leaving his twilight state. seeing life "crystallize" is such a blessing...."
-Helene Cixous, 'The School of Dreams'

[Francis Buck]

"We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are."

– Anaïs Nin

[sciborg2]

'The mystical is an irreducible, primordial phenomenon, a basic, primordial givenness that cannot be traced back to or derived from some other phenomena, such as colours, sounds, values, and so on.'

– Gerda Walther

[H]

The path from illusion to its critical denunciation is the very core of philoso­phy, which means that successful ("true") philosophy is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.

Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing

[sciborg2]

"But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but "few" initiates....
 -R.Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

'For how can one describe, as other than oneself, that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself?

This is no doubt why in the Mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated.'
 -Plotinus

[sciborg2]

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
 -William Blake

[sciborg2]

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj

[Francis Buck]

"But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but "few" initiates....
 -R.Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

'For how can one describe, as other than oneself, that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself?

This is no doubt why in the Mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated.'
 -Plotinus

Awesome quotes as usual! Love that first one.

----------------------------------------

"How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home?"

- Zhuangzi

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intellligence by means of our language".

- Wittgenstein

"Whatever happens at all, happens as it should."

- Marcus Aurelius

[sciborg2]

"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.

Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil."
-JRR Tolkien

[sciborg2]

"We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.

Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil."
-JRR Tolkien

People do terrible things to each other when it all falls apart Slade.
But it's always the same things.
That's what makes our job easier.
 -Grant Morrison, The Filth

[sciborg2]

“Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are.”
― Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Volume 1: Say You Want a Revolution

=-=-=

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
 -Gerard Manley Hopkin

[sciborg2]

‘Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.’
 -Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Francis Buck]

Here, however, lies the task of any philosophical thought: to go to the limit of hypotheses and processes, even if they are catastrophic. The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes.
—Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion

From the beginning you beings are deluded
Because you do not recognize
The awareness of the ground

[H]

We are entering a new era of paranoid warfare in which the greatest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. It is only with this thoroughgoing "dematerialization" -when Marx's famous thesis from The Communist Manifesto, that in capitalism "all that is solid melts into air;' acquires a much more literal meaning than the one he had in mind, when our material social reality is not only dominated by the spectral or speculative movement of Capital but is itself progressively "spectralized" (the "Protean Self" replacing the old self identical Subject, the elusive fluidity of its experiences superseding the stability of owned objects), in short, when the usual relationship between solid material objects and fluid ideas is inverted (objects are progressively dissolved in fluid experiences, while the only stable things are virtual symbolic obligations)-its only at this point that what Derrida called the spectral aspect of capitalism is fully actualized.

Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing