Creative writing and artful observations

The great imaginal elsewheres skirting our being-in-the-world--of a future we never arrive at, of an afterlife we never know about, and of a scientific universe we can never find ourselves at home in---precisely envisioned kingdoms of disembodied absence imparting navigability and orientation to our lives like the 4 directions of the compass. Places only real as idealizations and "promised lands" of consummation--as abstract worlds we can always mentally escape into to give our transient lives some hint of purpose beyond themselves. The certitude of belief always a poor substitute for the noetic presencing of introspective thinking.

As with any self-touted theory of everything, be it scientific or metaphysical or spiritual, it always comes down to when you have to pull that paralogical ripcord where something can allegedly be two opposite things at the same time. As if all the labor to be coherently rational and precisely systematic arrives at nothing more than a mystical axiom.

Physics does it with the wave-particle duality of light and Schrodinger's superpositions. Monism does it with mind and matter. Even Christian theology with its "God in three persons" paradox.

Why not START with the punchline first? That all opposites ultimately fuse into each other. Why not dumbfound them from the outset? The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.

I'm leaving my front door unlocked tonight. Baby steps..

The real time of our lives, not this clocked and overscheduled counting of empty intervals but the rich underlying flowing together of everything into epiphanous knowingness, is in essence non-linear. That is, there is always more possibility--a compounding interest-taking-- than there was before. We sit precariously perched on the molten edge of a self-transcending reality.

We should always listen to what our body is telling us. The night before I took the bus to Orlando to join the Navy I threw up I was so nervous. My body was trying to tell me: "This isn't for you Jimmy." And in the end it was right. I was honorably discharged for depression 9 years later. But I was just so ready to quit living with my parents and to go back out into the world. The body knows right away what the mind only figures out later on.

It turns out that the most self-evident and immediate and real things in our experience are also the things we can least put into words. Everybody knows what pain feels like, what red looks like, and what joy feels like. And yet describing these to others is practically impossible. There's a fine line separating the sensory from the mystical. Between the visceral and the ineffable.

(Sep 29, 2026 07:10 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: It turns out that the most self-evident and immediate and real things in our experience are also the things we can least put into words. Everybody knows what pain feels like, what red looks like, and what joy feels like. And yet describing these to others is practically impossible. There's a fine line separating the sensory from the mystical. Between the visceral and the ineffable.

Similar with any characteristic or object of experience, though. Tell an intelligence that lacks all sensations that a "ball is round" and it simply defines or understands "round" by referring to more words or to a formula or by executing outward behavioral responses. It doesn't apprehend what "round" is as a manifestation or as a sequence of tactile feelings adhering to spatial extension and shape.

The point being that qualia are no more ineffable than what anything else would be when phenomenal appearances are totally absent. Unlike a house, "red" does lack structure to it. But even when describing a house in terms of its components and their relationships or arrangements, that is still not manifesting the latter for an aphenomenal entity. And you eventually reach the fundamentals of house description (no more structure), where the aphenomenal intelligence has even less clue as to what you mean beyond its continuing dictionary model circularity of words referring to more words, etc.

I have always been wary of this gap between intellectual acknowledgement and really learning something new. Many times I write down some truth or lesson I've inferred from my experience. But I always wonder if I really do believe in the truth of it. Can it really be that I have learned something new in my life simply by thinking it thru? It seems doubtful at first. But over time, and after many more rewritings of that realization in my life, the idea begins to settle in. Surprisingly it eventually becomes a working premise of my life--something I understand and know on a deeper gut level.

Once we learn to dispense with this ingrained chimera of substance--of in-itself being--which is nowhere to be found in our experience but seemingly always assumed as an abstraction or ideal, we can also dispense with its antipode insubstantiality. In a reality which at every point is being generated by time itself and by systemic processes, the notion of insubstantiality is as bogus as that of substance. Other realms and entities can thus assume their purely energetic and yet symbolic form---as dyadic manifestations of both phenomenal and agential existence.

Christ and Satan had something deeply in common---the loveless aloneness of grandiosity and monstrosity. The "one and onlyness" of the messiah and the pariah. Both are excluded from the humanizing ocean of love and intimacy and kinship--forever estranged and apart from a world they are never allowed to participate in.

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Part of the amazing art of film is to allow us to perceive a version of reality that is otherwise imperceivable to us. By arranging a series of perspectives on a timeline as if its events were happening on their own without our even being present to them. The film thus becomes a sort interperspectival narrative or story granting a succession of points of view we simply lack on our lives. One moment sharing the intimate thoughts and feelings of a character. The next simply recording the cold and objective happening of events to noone in particular. A kind of dialectical interplay between empathy and sensory perception and aesthetic affect all entangled together in one temporal experience of meaningfulness. Chronology edited and ordered to communicate ideas and moods and impressions.

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Qualia of force, movement, and tangibility...

1) roominess

2) tightness

3) free movement

4) being pushed or pulled

5) falling or vertigo

6) strain and exertion

7) tension

8) claustrophobia

9) paralysis

10) prickly or tingling

11) being embraced

12) molding and rubbing

13) itching and scratching

14) heat and cold

15) being in water

16) resting

17) electrical shock

18) stickiness

19) hardness and softness

20) wetness and drynesss

21) aiming and throwing or shooting

22) dancing

23) resisting or restraining

24) agility or dexterity

25) goose pimples

26) bruising

27) breaking bone

28) coziness and wrapped up in a blanket

29) sexual stimulation

30) flushness or blushing

31) cutting or poking

32) fatigue and tiredness

33) twitching

34) sunburn

35) cramping or spranging

36) squeezing and smushing

37) texting

38) gripping or holding onto

39) hitting or punching or kicking

40) biting, chewing, sucking, swallowing

41) facial contorting

42) gesturing

43) walking or running

44) heaviness or weightedness

45) throwing up

46) breathing, choking, drowning, panting, suffocating

47) being tickled

48) feeling shaken or vibrated