Heaven is not somewhere beyond the world; if it can be said to exist at all, it must be found within the inexhaustibly complex structure already here.
Tag: buddhism
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The Human Condition
Psychoanalysis begins with a joke that only works because it fails: the patient arrives burdened with paranoia, anxiety, and unhappiness, and the doctor replies that this is simply the human condition. (Cure denied.) The moment this is understood, the structure collapses. The consulting room becomes a mirror, not a remedy, and what it reflects is […]
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Epistemological Emptiness
Buddhist psychology can be uniquely insightful. The animist turn in Shinto casts nature (and all who sail in her) as something of and with an agency, an experience. If everything has experience, then in some sense nothing does but this is a rhetorical trick because negation, uncertainty, nothing, absence and potentiality are endemic to bio-logic. […]
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Of Hope (and Sorrow)
Defining “improve” or “better” in the context of our lives is always an interesting proposition. Following a generally Buddhist ontology and cathartic acceptance of suffering as irreducible, I wonder if the role of suffering and imperfection is so profoundly and intricately entangled with happiness and (an) aspirational ascent towards perfection that – if our lives […]
I find that Buddhist psychology in some of its regional dialects (historically, through Tibet into China and Japan) approximates to a profound observation on the ultimate insubstantiality of this contingent, transient concept of Self that inhabits and invariably haunts us all. In regards to AGI, I think a significant barrier is that the subjective experience […]
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Fighting for Peace?
I am really quite endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these political, cultural and spiritual traditions (both near and far in time and space, it must be said) become so readily or easily detached from their original motives and inspirations to become quite the opposite of their intended or asserted goals and often become […]
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Reality Inversion: The Emptiness in Art
“Reality” is a subtle concept. An artist creates an artefact, a fact, a reality through the skillful convergence of other facts. Those other references and earlier, representational facts were similarly composed of other, earlier facts. This is how our minds (and cultures) endlessly rebuild this world. In this way – we often mistake the discrete, […]
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I’m looking through you…
I’m looking through you. Where did you go?
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Emptiness of Self
Most of that which is “you” may not actually be you at all. What is original about you is the choices you make concerning the reconfiguration of preexisting things, concepts, objects, words, idioms and methods of self-expression.
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Idioms of Absence
An epigenetic self-replication of the spiritual void, manifest as cultural entities in the contemporary Chinese art of Mi Qiaoming.
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Can anyone own the moon ?
If personal subjectivity is a reflection of an internalised concept of ownership and property, what happens if it turns out that neither individual identity nor notions of ownership are, beyond a very limited and historically or culturally contingent sense, actually real ?
Daedelus Kite 