What would your life be like now if your main driver during the majority of your time wasn’t earning money but actualizing yourself, through whatever sensibilities are naturally given you, and seeking truth? Life will be such centuries from now (if humanity doesn’t eradicate itself first). Can you imagine what these successors will think of our slavish pursuits and factiousness?
∞
In: Rumination
The hardest thing in the world is to see the obvious.
“Let us not forget that culture and language were the first virtual realities. A child is born into a world of unspeakable wonder. Each part of the world is seen to glow with animate mystery and the beckoning light of the unknown. But quickly our parents and our siblings provide us with words. At first these are nouns; that shimmering pattern of sound and iridescence is a ‘bird,’ that cool, silky, undulating surface is ‘water.’ As young children we respond to our cultural programming and quickly replace mysterious things and feelings with culturally validated and familiar words. We tile over reality with a mosaic of interconnected words. Later, as we grow in ability and understanding, the culture in which we find ourselves provides conventionalized relationships for us to model. Lover, father, investor, property owner. Each role has its own rules and its own conventions. These roles, too, tile over and replace the amorphous wonder of simply being alive. As we learn our lines and blocking that goes with them, we move out of the inchoate realm of the preverbal child and into the realm of the first virtual reality, the VR of culture. Many of us never realize that this domain is virtual, and instead we assume that we are discovering the true nature of the real world.”
— Terence McKenna, in The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Food and drink are great, but this ‘foodie-ism,’ this obsession with meticulously garnered and crafted food & drink in NYC (and elsewhere), which is taken to the point of absurdity, is symptomatic of a largely confused, addled, decadent culture, grasping onto anything that provides some semblance of meaning in the void of moribund judeo-christianity, philosophy, and aesthetics
∞
In: Rumination
Everyone becomes a philosopher eventually.
One can’t ‘know’ truth— because just as one is part of all, so ‘reason’ is just a part of ‘intuition.’ Therefore, one must be truth.
But— doesn’t this seem too simple? A metaphorical matter of numbers, quantity. Just become ‘one with all’— and you will be the Truth. Can it be so simple?
I just found a tiny bug, a baby cockroach, in my friend’s cabinet, and instinctively squashed it with a napkin.
So, too, can someone or something squash me in an instant.
We nestle away in lees of safety, adorn ourselves in houses of comfort, live a grand illusion, when we exist on the flimsiest of foundations, bound to fate and the seemingly blind, indiscriminate will of the universe.
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