Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Imagine being born with a boundless capacity for love, and an insatiable curiosity for the beyond, and yet only given around 80 years to explore that. That to me is why one life is never enough and never will be enough to make conscious one's soul. Many life adventures are necessary to keep opening us up empty and embracing.

(Jan 13, 2026 03:31 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]It is no coincidence that only a few years after we learn to read do we begin experiencing the world as narrated by this running voice in our head we call "thinking." It's like we are reading it instead of really seeing it. Before that, in the halcyon days of our childhood, life happened to us viscerally and imagistically like art, without the editorializing commentary of this cultural cerebral rambler. When everything was really deeply happening to us, whether it made any sense or not. By the time we reach adolescence we are all walking around in insulating thought bubbles.

A six-year-old is soon dead, even if their body lives on to a hundred.

“Good is not the opposite of evil, joy is the opposite of evil.”
― Michael Ventura, The Zoo Where You're Fed to God

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"There was a time when words arrived slowly.
And because of that, they mattered more.
A handwritten letter meant someone stopped their day.
They sat down.
They thought about you.
They chose their words carefully.
They crossed things out.
They started over.
They folded the paper neatly.
You could feel the weight of it in your hands.
The ink.
The handwriting.
The pauses between sentences.
You didn’t skim it.
You read it again and again.
You saved it in a drawer.
Or a box.
Or between the pages of a book.
Some letters stayed with you longer than people did.
And some still live in your heart today.

Because time spent writing meant love."

"The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slave of permanence..."
-- Hermann Hesse

We only speak and write out of an exuberance of energy and passion. When there is just too much inside us to be silent about. The words and sentences explode and pop before us like fireworks, always taking even ourselves by surprise. Our words are always spilling over, carrying us into new and unknown spaces. And sometimes a new truth even appears articulated in just such a poetic way that it elevates our souls to a higher point of view.

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We need a certain amount of superficiality and frivolity in our lives. Of playing and participating in the fruitless and nonsensical. It gives us leave to be free from all the solemnity and seriousness that thinking imposes on us. The relieving reminder that not all life is profound or consequential. Sometimes the sheer energy of just being in the moment and of being completely carefree is just what we need to restore our perspective. I suspect that this is the reason why we dream.

There was once a day that against all odds I stopped not existing. It happened out of the blue and without precedent, an entity totally self-contained inside the originality and individuality of its own being. In a universe like this, why may my existence not in fact be repeated one day, after to all appearances I have dissolved into nothing? What possible nothingness can I dissolve into that does not in fact exist totally relative to my conscious being?

The difference between listening FOR and listening TO. Listening for is focused on the words themselves and seeks from their being spoken a thought or subject that it has in mind. Listening to otoh is focused on the person that is speaking, the source of what is being said and its meaning in the context of their nature and situation. Listening for sifts thru the spoken words to find only what it wants to hear and respond to. Listening to bares itself to the entire brunt of the speaking itself, not just in what it says but in how it is being said, what is not being said, and that it is being said at all.

Seems the opposite is true. Listening in the context of who you assume the person is could be lost in your subjective understanding of who you think they are. While listening to the actual meaning of the words is taking what they say at face value, in good faith.

Listening to does not require familiarity with the speaker at all. We can listen to someone we just met and have few assumptions about their personality or their life situation. We can understand their speaking as expressions of a human being with such and such probable qualities and inclinations. The abiding context of who they are and their own life thus spares us from the misapprehension of their words as typical of a certain category or type that we happen to project on them.