Even while we all actively generate endless tides of digital self-representation (as images, data points, digital footprints, biometric and geolocation records, corporate and institutional identifiers or classifications) of self-identity we find ourselves simultaneously slipping away from reality, certainty and any notion of existential closure. This irreducible uncertainty and quicksilver spectre of endlessly self-inflected introspection as […]
Tag: emptiness
What is sleep? We may as well ask ourselves “what is language?” Sleep is in general a measure of the absence of language, of incessant mental chatter and an accelerated internal narrative that our minds are quite naturally oriented towards. If we might assert that language is a technology as much as it is the […]
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Reality
Finding myself endlessly questioning the reality of all that with which I am presented, two things become clear. First, that which is true can often appear as a lie but in most cases a lie will assert infallible truth and this is in itself a key differentiator and indicator of that which can or should […]
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Unto the void…
I am not I so much as I am that inverse absence and logical complement of all that I am not, of all those probabilistic paths and arcs through space and time that I never took or that exist in the hyper-inflating complexity of all those other (and unknown – as entropy) many-worlds. All that […]
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Civilisation
We call it “civilisation” as though it were truly and in any measurably definable sense a civil or even gentle presence when all we really mean by this word is that amorphous mass and unknowing ocean of shambling humanity or maddening crowd we find ourselves at any particular time and place quite inadvertently inhabiting. It […]
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Global Systems
There are quite a number of critically important things in this world which remain spectacularly and enduringly conspicuous by their absence. Central among these we might place everyday idioms of wishful thinking such as peace, love, freedom and environmental sustainability. What unifies all of these things is that the ways that manifest in this world […]
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Recursion
There is a very special sense in which the ordered complexity our world resembles matryoshka nesting dolls. It is not purely of the overt ubiquity of fractal patterns of self-similarity in spatial or material structure and temporal sequence, although these symmetries are striking and quite deeply beautiful in their own mischievously inter-dimensional ways. The recursion […]
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Emptiness
Everything begins as nothing and eventually returns there again. There is no real loss or sorrow, just the transience and self-inflected emptiness that pervades everything in life and to which we all must eventually return. A hollow, haunting experience of these facts can be overwhelming but it is worth remembering that if you are sensitive, […]
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Unprovable me…
I wonder sometimes: am I the sum of my past, the simple aggregate bundle of sensations and experiences or memories and otherwise material or extended causes and effects I leave behind me (in time) like vapour trails? This Self I carry around as some interior burden or mirror of external expectations or normative cultural conventions […]
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We are all born broken…
How else is it that we might spend our lives seeking a comfort, consolation and closure that always seems to dwell just out of reach, just beyond our grasp and ever-beckoning as a tantalisingly seductive certainty of reflexive self-definition or unambiguous security and psychological or existential safe harbour in the open arms and tender touch […]
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The Emptiness
There is an implicit and irreducible incompleteness in things. Those who feel experiences most acutely, with greater sensitivity and the profound depth of interior, psychological reflection are much less likely to simply sweep away a lingering sense of unease, less able to simply accept with complete belief or unproblematic gullibility the profoundly hollow or superficial […]
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The Necessity of Self-Deception
We are always and already primed, cultivated and prepared by those cultural information systems we inhabit to possess some primitive – but essential – form of self-deception. There is a necessary blind-spot in self-identity that very much forms the core around which that aspirational bundle of ambiguities, uncertainties and insecurities we identify as Self is […]
