parallaxx
April 2010
March 2010
“Now, must we not be alone? At present we are not alone - we are merely a bundle of influences. We are the result of all kinds of influences - social, religious, economic. hereditary, climatic. Through all those influences, we try to find something beyond; and if we cannot find it, we invent it, and cling to our inventions. But when we understand the whole process of influence at all the different levels of our consciousness, then, by becoming free of it, there is an aloneness which is uninfluenced; that is, the mind and heart are no longer shaped by outward events or inward experiences. It is only when there is this aloneness that there is a possibility of finding the real. But a mind that is merely isolating itself through fear, can have only anguish; and such a mind can never go beyond itself. With most of us, the difficulty is that we are unaware of our escapes. We are so conditioned, so accustomed to our escapes, that we take them as realities. But if we will look more deeply into our selves, we will see how extraordinarily lonely, how extraordinarily empty we are under the superficial covering of our escapes. Being aware of that emptiness, we are constantly covering it up with various activities, whether artistic, social, religious or political. But emptiness can never finally be covered: it must be understood. To understand it, we must be aware of these escapes; and when we understand the escapes, then we shall be able to face our emptiness. Then we shall see that the emptiness is not different from ourselves, that the observer is the observed. In that experience, in that integration of the thinker and the thought, this loneliness, this anguish, disappears.”
—J. Krishnamurti (Paris, 1950) (via predatorywaspobserver, crashinglybeautiful, theantidote, anotherword) (via myserendipities)
Listen
Jerk It Out
Caesars
From the album 39 Minutes of Bliss (In an Otherwise Meaningless World) (Hi-res art)
TODAY’S SONG
Jerk it out - Caesars
When the Devils Loose
A.A Bondy
AA Bondy - When the Devils Loose
“Perhaps I have really been one-sided; perhaps I have exaggerated when I sensed the threatening danger of nihilism, of homunculism, as I called it, behind many a theory and unconscious philosophical system of modern psychotherapy; perhaps I am really hypersensitive to the slightest suggestion of nihilism. But if that is the case, please understand that I am so hypersensitive only because I have had to overcome nihilism within myself. And that is perhaps why I am so capable of smelling it out, wherever it may hide. And if I may be allowed to tell tales out of the school of my own existential self-analysis, perhaps I can see the mote in the other’s eyes so well because I have had to tear the beam out of my own.”
—Viktor Frankl,
Collective Neurosis of the Present Day. (via db183)
Collective Neurosis of the Present Day. (via db183)
Why We Need to Dream (New York Times) →
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
“Why do we dream? As a chronic insomniac, I like to pretend that our dreams are meaningless narratives, a series of bad B-movies invented by the mind. I find solace in the theory that all those inexplicable plot twists are just random noise from the brain stem, an arbitrary montage of images and characters and anxieties. This suggests that I’m not missing anything when I lie awake at night — there are no insights to be wrung from our R.E.M. reveries.
Unfortunately for me, there’s increasing evidence that our dreams are not neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance. The narratives that seem so incomprehensible are actually careful distillations of experience, a regurgitation of all the new ideas and insights we encounter during the day…”
