Creative writing and artful observations

[Syne]

Just keep demanding that people regularly ignore the person they are talking too.
That won't make you sound more narcissistic. 9_9

[Magical Realist]

Just keep demanding that people regularly ignore the person they are talking too.

Only when they're listening to what they're saying. Why does this offend you so much?

[Syne]

Just keep demanding that people regularly ignore the person they are talking too.

Only when they're listening to what they're saying. Why does this offend you so much?

So you pay attention to the person when you're not listening to what they're saying? @_@
Like I said, keep demanding this is normal behavior.

[Magical Realist]

The System is always pressuring us to specialize and become limited to one area of knowledge and expertise. This is due to the inherent machine-like nature of the System of always requiring more and more cogs to keep its wheels grinding on. "Become functional and useful to us", commands the System, "and we will reward you." The problem with this is humans were not meant to be so defined and pigeon-holed. We are meant to be wide-ranging and horizon-grappling, we former nomads of the vast African plains. The quality we need to cultivate is versatility and many-mindedness, comfortably moving from one idea and area of knowledge to another. Find in your own breadth of interests and fire of curiosity the purpose that the System falsely promises to reward you with for becoming a mere tool for its own inhuman machinations.

[Magical Realist]

Aging has nothing to do with being alive. Everything made of matter ages. Rocks. Chairs. Houses. People. It's the price we pay for being static clumps of molecules in an entropic universe. But what doesn't age is energy. Self-renewing and indestructable, it flows thru matter and refreshes it and gives us life. We are the energy inside our flesh and our brains. So maybe don't worry so much about what you see in the mirror.

[Syne]

Maybe try to improve what you see in the mirror. Your "energy" can do a lot of amazing things if you use it.

[Magical Realist]

Where exactly IS what we are used to calling "our mind"? We already have a vague assumption that it must be contained inside our brains, much as a computer is contained in its circuitry. But that is not really how we experience it. The intelligibility of our world and our experience exists as something separate from our own bodies. It isn't in spacetime like physical things are. It is in essence non-local and not spatially extended, like time is or the laws of physics. Think of it in terms of the Internet's location in respect to your laptop or phone. It relates whatever happens to us to a fundamental matrix of order and pattern that frames that event and even all events in a meaningful and true context. Many times it is intuitive and inferential, capable of making lightning fast correlations and projections and schematizations far exceeding our immediate awareness. It is a universal and implicate perspective that transcends the specificity and uniqueness of our immediate bodily experience, making sense of it and revealing its place in an overall scheme of ontic necessity.

[Magical Realist]

“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

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[Magical Realist]

Our consciousness is used to personifying our anomalous experiences--of anthropomorphizing whatever high strangeness we encounter in our lives. We are programmed to see in the Other that is the antipode to our selfness another being that is relatable and understandable to us. The loving companion or the wise and just king. But such is not the case. Because with every attempt to raise to our rational consciousness the image of a being with a mind and nature much like our own we blind ourselves to its ultimate otherness to us. This is why gods, while wholly humanized by their believers with thoughts and feelings and purposes like them, still retained a fundamental mystery and alien-ness to them. A cold and impersonal side that sometimes gleefully crushed humans like insects. All the mythologies of demons and titans and monsters testify to this grasp of this absolute otherness of the transcendent. Of the dangers of the consuming fire that is the most Holy. We must therefore tread cautiously in the presence of the numinous and uncanny, remaining open to and ready for the absolutely wild and inexplicable nature of its very being.

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[Magical Realist]

It’s curious to me that all those moments of our past when were thinking about the future and planning ahead or worrying about something are never the ones we actually remember. It is only those moments when we were totally absorbed in the here and now, with no forethought or preparation for tomorrow, that get visited again and again in our memory. The times when we threw caution to the wind and took a chance on something not planned out or expected. That’s the story we remember, every experience equally important and real--- a shifting montage of flashing vignettes of when we felt most spontaneous and alive and free.