Categories
culture

Starry, Starry Night: an Artist’s Burden

The artist’s burden as unbounded, unrecognised arc and trajectory is really a microcosm of the resistance to change and insight (as individuality, creativity, compassion) that we all face in life. An irony of this is that, not only is an artist’s message so rarely understood or acknowledged during their own lifetimes, but this obscurity is […]

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Philosophy

The Library

We are each and all libraries of experience and knowledge or wisdom to each other and it is in our endless fixation upon just a handful of these living texts that we come to dismiss all those other possibilities for learning and growth that surround us. In reducing our story to a simple as abbreviated […]

Categories
Philosophy

Social Media and the Need to Feel Loved

You want to be loved for how you look but you need to be loved for who you are. The truth is, only one of these things matters and only you can work this out for yourself and this is not about simply hearing or reading these words, it is about listening, understanding and carefully […]

Categories
Philosophy

Compassion

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 […]

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Philosophy

Forgiveness

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 […]

Categories
life

Beautiful Faces and Bad Decisions

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 […]

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Philosophy

Peace

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 […]

Categories
life

Friendship is a Kind of Love

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 […]

Categories
life

Soulmates

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 […]

Categories
life

What the World Needs Now

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. […]

Categories
life

On Paradoxical Love

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Can Robots possess Legal Rights?

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 […]