Categories
Philosophy

Love

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. […]

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Philosophy

Quicksilver Spectres of Endless Introspection

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unity

The world and everything in it constitutes a single, unified and mischievously indefinable information and energy-processing system. This is in essence a computational system but is distinguished from computers by the fact that it does not possess quite the same properties of mechanical or algorithmic and rules-based limitation that a computer demonstrates (as both weakness […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

There is (perhaps) no greater dream than to for once and for all just extract and abstract ourselves from the source of all our worries, the need to work or to perform any other task which we can as intelligent people quite easily and rapidly identify as being fairly meaningless in the bigger picture of […]

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Philosophy

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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Philosophy

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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Philosophy

The words which set us free…

The language with which we speak and embellish our world with meanings is also the primary method and tool by which we obscure this world and each other from successful comprehension or communication and understanding or compassion and peace. This is irreducible. The more we structure systems of belief as knowledge, the more we obscure […]

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Philosophy

Blue Sky and Birdsong, Freedom and Peace

I went on one of my habitually isolated late-pandemic afternoon walks today, just soaking up an ambient not-quite-optimistic Spring mood of renewal with which to soothe my sense of wistfully-idiomatic rebirth amid the decay of winter’s persistent, yet currently overgrown, detritus. Defocussing attention on any one experience or sensation, we open the doors of perception […]

Categories
Psychology

Fascination, Transference and Romantic Dissatisfaction

My recent fixation on flowers is quite plausibly an instance of psychological transference, where feelings or emotions that might find themselves unattainably inhibited in one direction find new avenues, channels and vectors of (self) expression. We often enough observe the rapid and adaptive transmutation of emotional needs and impulses from one goal to another and, […]

Categories
Psychology

Incomplete Sketches of Mental Life

Our mental images are the incomplete sketches upon which we build a whole world and in their useful ambiguity and uncertainty we cultivate our freedom to grow.

Categories
Philosophy

You are not the individual you think you are…

I am endlessly astounded by the way so many essentially unique and fundamentally different individuals lash themselves to hollow systems of belief, ideology and narcissistic self-gratification for nothing more than a deep and unrelenting tribal urge to copy other people, to self-validate and affirm identity through the distributed and prefabricated grammatical and behavioural prescriptions of […]

Categories
life

Irony of Selfless Compassion

The bitter-sweet cost and irreducible irony of sincere compassion is that in any act of selfless love we will almost always ourselves lose that which we seek to set free.