Categories
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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ignoring Truth for Temporary Happiness

The most mystifying truth of all is that we live in a world that defines value and success in such limited terms, as being little more than successfully replicating the patterns and conventions of behaviour and thought that we encounter and through which we learn to play a game of simple (or – often enough […]

Categories
Philosophy

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 […]

Categories
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 […]

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, […]

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Philosophy

The Abyss

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, quite famously, that “if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you” and it was meant as a warning, a caution following a statement that those who fight with monsters can themselves become monsters and this is in many ways a representation, among other things, of the manifest […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

One Big Family of Planetary Dysfunction

Notice that the love of family is the love that humanity really needs; we are, for all our shared problems, just One vast and dysfunctional (planetary) family.

Categories
Philosophy

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 […]

Categories
life

Spring’s scattered Autumn irony…

There is in these delicate flowers such sweetness and unbounded longing for life. These cherry blossoms from my garden were full of life a few days ago and now they have faded, as though in accelerated decrepitude their moving frame of reference and colourful Spring joys are as short as they are glorious. Where pale […]

Categories
life

Love is a game best played by fools…

Love is a game best played by fools and in the end we are all played as so many fools by love.

Categories
Philosophy

Grief

All grief is love, veiled.

Categories
Philosophy

Love is Unprovable and that is its Power

Perhaps love trumps (vincit) all precisely because this power, wisdom and enduring value of compassionate or selfless care is of a class of entities that remain unpolluted by acquiescence to a proof or measure of their value and presence. That which can not be measured, though perhaps implicitly metaphysical, can also not be bounded and […]