February 2013
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Πάντα ῥεῖ
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All is in the course of change; and you yourself are constantly changing and, in a sense, passing away; and so too is the entire universe.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IX.19
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January 2013
219 posts
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Dust and shadow
But one common night awaits us all, and the road to death can be trodden only once.
Horace, Odes, Book I.28 ~ ~ ~ This was a common sentiment in the pagan Greco-Roman world. It is all too easy for westerners today to read this phrase of Horace’s—consciously or not, intentionally or not—through a Christian lens. Seneca too deals with the topic extensively. You don’t have...
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Anonymous asked: Can you explain what you meant by this: "Perhaps philosophy is nothing but a form of damage control"?
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Consider the Fabii, a single family which took over the whole war on behalf of the state. Consider the Spartans in position in the narrow pass at Thermopylae: they have no hope of victory, no hope of returning; that place will be their tomb… It’s not just the three hundred whose fear of death must be removed, but all mankind. [Epistle 82.20, 23]
The philosopher is in the position of military...
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I must have been born for more than one life: I cannot help but be interested in too many different things to explore in one lifetime!
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Perhaps philosophy is nothing but a form of damage control.
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Happy birthday to my Tumblr!
examined-life:
‘[T]he unexamined life is not worth living…’
~ Socrates, from Plato’s Apology
This was my very first post a year ago today…
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sisyphean-revolt:
The way that the body cannot help but to be moved by music, just as notes must follow one another in a melody. The body, too, is music. Instruments are extremities of the musical body. Music is the sensory organ of soul, as eyes are the sensory organ of sight.
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ludimagister:
No one has given man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. No one is to blame for him. There is no being that could be held responsible for the fact that anything exists at all, that anyone is thus and thus, that anyone was born in certain circumstances, in a certain environment. It is a tremendous restorative that such a being is...
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pseudobollocks:
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.
— John Dewey, Experience and Education
pseudobollocks:
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.
— John Dewey
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frugalstoic:
There’s nothing that you should say “that shouldn’t happen”. Rather, it’s one more thing to learn to pay attention to. And if you learn to pay attention well, there is freedom to be found in attention. In paying attention, there is a way of doing it where you are not caught, trapped, oppressed, influenced, or driven by what’s going on, inside or outside yourself. And that gives you a...
ludimagister:
Self-awareness is simply using mirror neurons for “looking at myself as if someone else is looking at me.” The mirror neuron mechanism that originally evolved to help you adopt another’s point of view was turned inward to look at your own self. This, in essence, is the basis of things like “introspection.” It may not be coincidental that we use phrases like “self-conscious” when you...
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Anonymous asked: Can you help with this question? Its from parmenides, why must it be that whatever truly exist must be both eternal and also unchanging?
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Repetition is a form of change.
Brian Eno (from Oblique Strategies)
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Skillful means, emptiness, and compassion
[Originally intended as a response to an interesting point that touched on Buddhism] Speaking strictly from the point of view of Mahayana Buddhism, nonduality itself is only upaya, skillful means. The point is not to rest satisfied in nonduality. The Ten Bulls pictures, for example, don’t end with a state of ‘enlightenment’—the monk subsequently returns to ‘the...
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Song of the Body
It begins With an itch at the door A vague star pulsating at the center of your back A small seed You can stretch your right hand with little effort Can sweep it beneath a fingernail And you do An elbow interrupts The left one twitching for attention And the irritable urge to perform Just one more household chore And don’t forget the steel cables Strapped around your spine Temples flare in full...
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An excellent review of Kurosawa's film Ikiru. →
‘…But it would be incorrect to say that Ikiru is a film about death. In fact, “ikiru” is the Japanese verb meaning “to live” - and the film is, more than anything else, a reminder that we are given life in order to live it. It is at this point that Watanabe begins wondering how one should really live.’
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Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life.
Ota Dokan (1432-1486)
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A graveyard: autumn fireflies two or three.
Gensho (Died on the fifth day of the first month, 1742 at the age of fifty-eight)
From Japanese Death Poems by Yoel Hoffmann
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The last poem left by Basho is generally considered his death poem, but Basho himself did not intend to write such a poem. When he was on his deathbed, his pupils hinted that he ought to leave one, but he replied that any of his poems could be his death poem.
Yoel Hoffmann, Japanese Death Poems
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I thought to live two centuries, or three— yet here comes death to me, a child just eighty-five years old.
Hanabusa Ikkei (1748-1843)
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Repetition doesn’t really exist. As far as your mind is concerned, nothing happens the same twice, even if in every technical sense, the thing is identical. Your perception is constantly shifting. It doesn’t stay in one place.
Brian Eno
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'Unamerican'
The problem with religion is not with its doctrines, no matter how bizarre, no matter how absurd, no matter how much it may fly in the face of our actual knowledge of the world. The content of religious belief is irrelevant. It is the attitude of reverence which is problematic—regardless of the object of worship. Reverence is a way of saying: Thou shalt not question. This reverential...
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MLK's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' (1963) →
Have you read the entire letter? Everyone should.
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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’
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Three Incantations for a Poem
1 I sleep in the heart’s inarticulate rivers waiting (for the flood for the flood to rise for the flood to rise up for the flood to rise up in me for the flood to rise up in me spilling over over the page) in rivers that do not belong to me 2 may these ashes become words once more may I press them to my forehead nose lips may the unutterable no longer fill my mouth may I not choke on silence 3...
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Citizen of the cosmos
Is it not naïve to take overweening pride in the accidents that comprise our sense of identity? We possess many inheritances which are an accumulation of circumstances before birth: biological, economic, cultural, national, religious, racial, sexual, etc. I could have been born anyone—and that serves as a reminder not to take such things too seriously. To be sure, such accidents are...
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Taking Inventory
No, it’s not enough to have faith That each pixel says one plus one plus look! There’s a billion more ahead, Sand and stars whirlpooling around my hands. So here I am breathing mathematics, Striding along a fractured shore Like an Egyptian god announcing Each grain’s name, as if I alone decided That this one here on my finger is Number Eight-Hundred Twenty-Two Raised to the Ninety-Third Power,...
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