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 […]
Tag: emptiness
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 […]
Seduced by Illusion
I wonder what it is about an image that fools the mind so swiftly, so sweetly and so completely. The suspension of disbelief in the essential illusion with which we are presented is so natural and so subtle as to be all but invisible to us. It is perhaps precisely in this invisibility that they […]
Shared Daydreams and Emptiness
We rarely attain to moments of clarity (or maturity) sufficient to acknowledge the extent to which all of our identities are really and at base quite thoroughly and irredeemably fictional. All definitions of identity are made (and justified) by and in reference to other definitions and those themselves rest similarly upon yet more definitions in […]
Compassion, Suffering, Emptiness
We suffer for others and in so many ways but we always do so alone. There is nothing quite so distressing as to live in fear. It is a relentless slow burn of doubt that eats away at us inside and in its haunting persistence and metallic tang generates burdens, not necessarily of fact, but […]
Seeking Peace: Nothing really matters…
It may be something of a truism that to understand war, one must first understand peace. It is of a similar kind of statement to assert the inverse – that to understand peace, one must first understand war. What then of attempting to understand the unified totality of conflict and harmony? When inspecting the unified […]
Tautological Recursion
Bertrand Russell once remarked that all of mathematics consists of tautologies. In this sense, we are considering as logically foundational a vast, complex panoply of equivalences, equations, symmetries and relationships asserting unproblematic definitions, references, ontologies. It may be true that from within any system of reference, any conceptual schema whatsoever only acquires and maintains aspirational […]
Meaning does not reside in symbols…
The general assertion of significance and meaning as belonging to symbols (of Self, of nation, of Other, of flag or tribal, ideological and cultural association) is a direct and inverse consequence of a foundationally incomplete psychological identity; itself being little more than the symbolic or communications system and technological hyper-extension of a general principle of […]
Thin Masks of Self-Deception
A different perspective: we are not the actors here – the performers, the customers, the managers or the investors and participants in a system of business and profit extraction or desire and thinly-masked self-gratification. We are the transmission medium for patterns of socioeconomy, communication and identity – the shimmering, rippling, effervescent and sparkling complexity which […]
Hollow Theology
Some moments are so simple and unproblematically perfect that it is entirely understandable how Ancient peoples may have perceived a world so deeply infused and alive with mystery, magic and meaning. For all our progress and the hyper-extended cognition of complex technology, we have not really come all that far since then and while to […]
…and by that measure, love is the absence of hateful artefacts or experiences, peace is the absence of belligerent acts and associated technologies of violence. Where, though, is self? Can self be negatively defined in quite the same way and, if not, then what is it that is being happy, loving or peaceful but the […]
Meaning is just a game we play with words; a mere symbolic manipulation of the intrinsic curvature and self-inflected logical spaces of language, information and complexity that we inhabit and that – equally, if not more so – inhabit us. If we were for even a moment able to cast aside the base psychological narcissism […]