It’s a curious aspect of psychological or cognitive symmetry and psychotherapeutic insight that compassion as expressed inwards or outwards is effectively and irreducibly, logically identical; our relationship with the world constitutively is our relationship with ourselves and our inner worlds (and words) are essentially the reordered experiences and components of the outer worlds and persons or places and events we perceive […]
Tag: self
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is perfection. We have all spent so very long and so much effort and wasted time seeking some Other and distant or somehow different completeness and possession of Self as refined, perfect and infallible that we almost entirely missed the point. That uncertainty and doubt which plagues us is really only and always just […]
Distance
We have all and for so very long defined ourselves by a conceptual difference and distance we now accept as necessary that we fail to see that the loneliness and isolation this exclusion brings has become the one thing that unites us all. It is as though we seek to experience and know the world […]
Everyone knew that beauty was a trap.
Everyone knew that beauty was a trap but no one ever talked about it. The perfect prison, you see, is that which one makes in and of themselves and in being or becoming so enamoured and as though hypnotically entranced by the idea as an abstraction that itself comes to acquire some magical or narcotic […]
Self-identity is a Cultural Genome
Those small fragments of recombinatory information through which we understand and define ourselves and each other are nothing more or less than a patterned instance of the local, national and global cultures we inhabit and that, equally, inhabit us. In this way we are no different than the diverse and essentially narcissistic artefacts, entities and […]
Personal non-existence ain’t so bad…
Context: Epiphenomenalism: one of the most disturbing ideas in philosophy Consider, also, the unpalatable likelihood that all of our attachments to self-identity and the various, vicarious and endlessly complicated confusion and chaos that difference and conceptual or ideological distance brings: it’s all the internal surface of an autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing system that optimally […]
All my hollow sorrows haunt me.
I am as though that myth that as soon as you stop believing in me, I cease to exist. The beliefs we hold are very much like this but it is (also) we who stop existing when they vanish. For this reason, but perhaps not only for this reason, we all find ourselves committing to […]
Healing Wisdom
Sometimes we see ourselves as separate and isolated from a world which asks (or as often, demands) of us that we be or become these separate nodal trees as labelled identities and alienated decision-machines of consumption and compliance to fuel the swirling, rolling, tumbling chaos and confusion that our cultures and Global civilisation represents and […]
My Love is a Marionette
My love is a marionette. Dancing on threads that she never controls or owns and like blindfolds in darkness, that I never know. Life’s theatre of pleasure is a labyrinth of pain and were it not that we all refine in game and grammar such intricate strategies of haunted self-deception as pure aspirations to continuing […]
Universal Selfie
True, perhaps, and yet all technology, all cognitive hyper-extension through art, language, culture – it is all really just one vast and monumentally intricate selfie, a world that replicates and represents itself through us, in us, as us. Curiously, and more than a little bit Zen, is that if everything is self, then nothing is.
Loneliness in Love
Have you ever noticed the ways in which love has a tendency to empty and hollow out our world every bit as much as it inflates it with meaning and purpose? I find myself dreaming, desiring, longing and imagining the effective fictive fantasy of Other, of closure and reflexive psychological completion, of unity and hope […]
The Selfish Problem of Duality
The core issue is an ontological symmetry that in some sense “breaks” or aggregates around, through and as human subjectivity. All of our organisational systems, definitions, structural and technological innovations and vulnerabilities reflect this self-same underlying and enigmatically self-contained dynamic. The proliferation of models, frameworks, maps and “best practices’ is misses a key point. A […]