why I refuse to learn drawing properly
When some people want to learn to draw, they do it the “right” way. They take a drawing class, watch youtube videos, or buy a book – starting from the basics. I…
tags /consciousness /
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to develop compassion is to develop thinking in systems
I had a lot of self-hatred when I was younger. But over the past few years it gradually eased up as I embarked on a journey of self-understanding. This journey wasn’t voluntary,…
pandemic grief and sadness
One of the biggest cognitive dissonances I’ve had in this pandemic is seeing almost everyone I know – including the most intelligent and the most socially responsible – throw away all covid…
the interestingness of our thoughts
I started watching this kdrama titled “recipe for farewell” recently. The male protagonist would cook for his terminally-ill wife, then post the recipe and his thoughts on his blog. It made me feel that…
contemplating mortality & creative output
These days I’ve been re-examining my relationship to my life, and by extension: my relationships to this website, social media, etc. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but I self-censor a…
storing up spirit in a chain of notes
we must choose between anxiety and repression
Evidently we must choose between anxiety and repression. If we cannot face the truth of our condition, which is mortality (or groundlessness, according to my Buddhist interpretation), we must forget that truth, which is to repress it. The difference between neurosis and normality — that undramatic, unnoticed psychopathology of the average, according to Maslow — is how successful that repression is. The neurotic has a better memory than most of us, so anxiety keeps breaking through into consciousness and must be dealt with more harshly in order to preserve some purchase on one’s fate, some circumscribed sphere of action.
Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing?
Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?
giving human consciousness the slip
Because of his past
In 2006, my friend Pamela Krasney, an activist devoted to prison reform and other social justice causes, told me about a death row inmate who, she claimed, had been wrongly convicted of murder. He was unlike anyone she’d ever known—more conscious, wise, and empathetic “in spite of his past.” She corrected herself. “Because of his past.”