It’s a curious aspect of psychological or cognitive symmetry and psychotherapeutic insight that compassion as expressed inwards or outwards is effectively and irreducibly, logically identical; our relationship with the world constitutively is our relationship with ourselves and our inner worlds (and words) are essentially the reordered experiences and components of the outer worlds and persons or places and events we perceive […]
Forgiveness as a function of compassion defies normative or common-as-colloquial assumptions of transactional interpersonal value and utility to become more valuable both when it is rare and when it is plentiful. Compassion externalised is indistinguishable and effectively identical to its introspective inversion and that is the key and enduring insight here. It’s a difficult concept […]
Having breakfast today and, grateful for a brief respite from wearing surgical masks in the current pandemic context, someone truly eye-catching walked in to order coffee. Young, petite, pretty with clear skin and sparkling eyes that were as yet undulled by the disillusionment of time and age. She was quite naturally beautiful and everyone there […]
A rare moment of clarity: I realise that I’m not going to be here forever, that my own transient, anxious and caffeine-fuelled path through life is, has been and will forever be completely meaningless if I do not in some small way make this world a better place and room for improvement quite clearly exists […]
Don’t let the unexpected arrival of a lifelong friendship blind you to its simplicity: no expectations, only compassion. If they expect anything from you which is in any way, shape or form beyond those things that will nurture your safety, well-being and happiness – then they are not your friends. Friendship is a kind of […]
Soulmates are two sides of one life. It is in the difference and distance between us that we might identify both our selves and each other as though two ends of some silvered, higher-dimensional thread but it is in the binding identity of entangled energy, information and experience that we discover the unity of which […]
There is nothing so simultaneously intangible and yet visceral, concrete and consequential as unbounded, unselfish compassion. Every step and gesture or word oriented towards hate and war is a failure and yet finds itself masked with a purpose, self-determination and simplistic caricature of meaning that draws us all along quite unwittingly towards our own destruction. […]
What would you do if you discovered that the only reason you even existed was to bring compassion, love and happiness or even the possibility of hope and light or learning and wisdom into the life of a truly beautiful, fascinating, sensitive and brilliant human being that you were almost certain to never meet? We […]
Context: Experts Sign Open Letter Slamming Europe’s Proposal to Recognise Robots as Legal Persons Robots might be a bit of a stretch for asserting personhood although it does remain somewhat indistinct as to where and when awareness, experience or sentience arise in recognisably “living” things. We may (following, at a distance, something I once read […]
Relatively recent and unexpected career changes have found me up to my armpits in the swiftly-flowing waters and complex technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I am utterly fascinated by the many and diverse ways in which we seek to replicate our own cognition and even while we must at some level know that […]
You can neither give nor take freedom from someone else in any profound, enduring or ultimate and Universal sense – they always and already possess it and no matter how much you rationalise or embellish it with words and reasons or project ethical, ideological and behavioural grammars upon it or as it, the underlying fact […]
Love fascinates me. We might as easily substitute any other concept of similar ambiguity as indicated by the word “peace” or “unity” and “happiness” because, beyond any contingent or arbitrary agreement upon the structural or material facts and experiences these referential entities represent, they all exist in something of a Twilight Zone of unprovable truth. […]
