[sciborg2]

"The values of contemporary capitalism are drawn out into a suffocating eternity: it was always like this, and it always will be; the Flintstones and the Jetsons were, after all, basically the same people. But meanwhile those strange shapes and patterns on the cave walls still glimmer, beckoning us in — if we knew how to understand them — to a world impossibly different to our own."
    -Sam Kriss

[sciborg2]

"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images.... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."

-Gilles Deleuze

"Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it's permitted, but no one is capable of it anymore. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom."

–Oswald Spengler

[sciborg2]

"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

"MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butcher's slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!

MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes upon your own carnage...."

-Italo Calvino interviews Montezuma

=-=-=

One cannot ignore the marginal, the "little", the liminal, the "zara hatke" [somewhat odd], the woman we see only when we squint a little -- in these cracks may rebellion, and the promise of a better tomorrow, be found.
  -Qalandar

[sciborg2]

"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

"MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butcher's slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!

MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes upon your own carnage...."

-Italo Calvino interviews Montezuma

=-=-=

One cannot ignore the marginal, the "little", the liminal, the "zara hatke" [somewhat odd], the woman we see only when we squint a little -- in these cracks may rebellion, and the promise of a better tomorrow, be found.
  -Qalandar

Above all, some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved -- they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices..... On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form.

Here -- not with the ax, not with the bow -- man fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds -- the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.
-Loren Eisley, 'The Inner Galaxy'

[sciborg2]

"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
  - Viktor Frankl

[TaoHorror]

"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
  - Viktor Frankl

This is a particularly good one, Sci

[sciborg2]

"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
  - Viktor Frankl

This is a particularly good one, Sci

Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.

'Why talk about the "laws of nature" when what we mean is the characteristic behaviour of phenomena within certain limits at a given stage of development in a given epoch—so far as these can be ascertained?'

– A. N. Whitehead

[Madness]

Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.

Bakker readers should be Frankl readers... it seems axiomatic .

[sciborg2]

Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.

Bakker readers should be Frankl readers... it seems axiomatic .

The Bakker Appendix N would be an interesting list...

"We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.

They are representatives of abstract forces, who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.

There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.

The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push."
 -William S Burroughs

[sciborg2]

Man's search for Meaning is def worth a read.

Bakker readers should be Frankl readers... it seems axiomatic .

The Bakker Appendix N would be an interesting list...

"We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.

They are representatives of abstract forces, who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.

There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.

The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push."
 -William S Burroughs

From today onward
May I be willing
To live with chaos and confusion
And that of all other sentient beings
May I be willing
To share our mutual confusion
And work incessantly and humbly
To help and elevate everyone without exception
-Tibetan Prayer

=-=-=

“Once, St. Teresa was amorously complaining to God in
prayer about her sufferings & trials. The Lord told her:

 “Teresa, so do I treat My friends!” conveying the purificatory character of suffering.

But Teresa answered boldly: “That’s why you have so few (friends)”

-Raimon Panikkar

[TaoHorror]

Sobriety is a farce. No matter how drunk you get, there will always be someone stupider than you sober. So why be sober?

- Goathead Keene

[sciborg2]

Sobriety is a farce. No matter how drunk you get, there will always be someone stupider than you sober. So why be sober?

- Goathead Keene

Didn't Tool write a song about this? ;-)

[sciborg2]

“What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences--say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded;it slips all too easily through our fingers and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly”
― Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?

[sciborg2]

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
— Rainer Maria Rilke

[sciborg2]

“Only the pure soul can truthfully live in this tension: to know about the possible ruin and still remain tirelessly active for all that is possible in the world.”
 -Karl Jaspers

=-=-=

"As properly unconditional, the subject is a free being. It is truly present as the self-conscious Existenz which in action finds itself in its objectivity but cannot be derived from objective being, no more than that being can be derived from it."
 — Karl Jaspers