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Philosophy

The Shack by the Sea

He lived in a shotgun shack by the sea, patched with tin and leaning under the wind. The tide was his only clock, the gulls his only critics. He fished enough to eat, carried crates at the dock when it was needed, and spent his nights hunched over scraps of paper, writing lines that never […]

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Philosophy

Horror Vacui, Guru Version

Spirituality more broadly seems to have been seduced by a personality cult that opportunistically misrepresents and all too easily misunderstands messenger and signal as isomorphic with message, quite agnostic of the significance of any particular narrative. This is an elementary projective narcissism, identifying individual with an essentially inarticulable metaphysics of Other and world that is […]

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Philosophy

ATP

Ageing is our embodied experience of entropy. In itself, it is neither good nor bad – it just is. The countless ways that things decay or almost wilfully disassemble – they tend on average to be costly and unpleasant experiences but there is a flip side to the story. This darker anomaly and compound mystery […]

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life

Near-Death Experience

No light, no heavenly choir and certainly no sense of omnipresent Divine love but a few months ago I came pretty close to dying. Not close enough to death to experience anything on or from the “other side” but it was quite frightening. If nothing else, nearly dying has reinforced to me how precious this […]

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Philosophy

Nothing lasts forever…

…indeed, and only nothing lasts forever. That the most interesting and authentically valuable things in life – peace, freedom, love, (true) beauty and wisdom – might actually only ever be possible in ways that make them indistinguishable from nothing is a fact for which my many thousand of potential words and philosophical affectations can provide […]

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Philosophy

On Infinity and Nothingness

Some days, I just fade away. All dreams, desires, playful remedies as patterns of linguistic reminiscence or passionate aspiration – they just dissolve into the emptiness from whence they came. Dust and mindless, meaningless turbulence remains – spiralling into a slow oblivion in resonant sympathy with an unfurling tapestry of Universal decay and relentless forgetting […]

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Philosophy

Beauty, set free from all expectation…

My experience of beauty was never one in which I felt any compulsion to own or control. I found a pure and simple fascination in the natural fact and reality that a person authentically and sincerely loved is always and already set free. It is in only in or by recognising our own inner emotional […]

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Philosophy

Love Letter to an Unknown Other

An obsession with material beauty is in many ways the natural consequence of an embodied psychological experience implicitly oriented by evolutionary momentum towards the possibility of self-reproduction. In this sense we should not be surprised that the most prevalent symbolic and overt (or corollary hidden, unconscious) forces in this all too human world are intrinsically […]

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life

Letters to Eternity

I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]

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Philosophy

The Infinite Highway

I found myself driving home today after (materially) returning to work for the first time in a number of weeks, the pandemic still being what it is and weighing heavily upon all of our lives and lifestyles in the catastrophic way it has (and – at time of writing – continues to). Making my way […]

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Philosophy

The Fall

What we most often fail to acknowledge is that this focal node and yawning abyss of pluripotent significance and semiotic elasticity that we experience as “Self” is in fact the doubly-inflected presence of an absence, the exponentiated self-replication of an entirely abstract self-representational void. Other than that we could hardly grow or evolve and become […]

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Alien Anthropology

FOMO

Fear of missing out is much deeper and more challenging than the superficiality with which it is commonly portrayed. At some level we are all aware that we have very little effect on this world, that despite our starring role in the narrative theatre of our own life – we have almost no influence or […]