Creative writing and artful observations

[Syne]

By planning ahead, primitive humans moved beyond living hand-to-mouth, laying the cognitive foundation for complex societies, agriculture, and modern innovation.

That's what I'm saying..that this whole new experience of delayed purposeful actions only really started once we formed complex societies--those machine-like worlds wherein every person, everything, and ever moment is reduced to its functional value for enabling the machine to keep running smoothly. Nothing in-itself anymore. Always FOR some use in advancing the collective.

It says "laying the cognitive foundation for complex societies," not that planning only occurred once complex societies existed. Neanderthals didn't have "machine-like worlds." Cooperation, planning, and strategy are even necessarily for very primitive things, like hunting in groups.

[Magical Realist]

Time...that great cold abstraction of the philosophizing mind. But that is a habit of words. Where does time attach to flesh and bone and blood? How does time bind our hearts and our souls to its relentless cadence?

We wait. We probably spend more time waiting for things than on anything else. We wait in lines. Wait in traffic. Wait on a phone call. Wait for an appointment. Always waiting, feeling the slow pace of duration in every paralyzed muscle and stifled whim. The drudgery of the wait.

We anticipate. We long for the absent. We desire and yearn and pine for what never arrives. We ache for the inrushing flood of pleasure we are missing in our lives. The merciful respite after the tyrrany of the tantalizing urge..

We procrastinate. We delay. We put off till next week, always avoiding what could be done now. Time is our protector now. We use it as a blanket to cuddle up in and ignore the pressing duties of now.

We are bored. We are depressed. Time now as heavy dragging duration. The pure burden of the slow and gradual moment. Nothing feels exciting. Nothing worth doing. We endure the numbing transition of nothingness thru our lives. It makes death and finality look like a blessing.

We are in the flow of now. We are creative and spontaneous and ebullient. Bubbling up out of effervescent energy we ride the cusp of the breaking wave with the wind in our hair. We are really alive now. We feel it. We are time itself in its magical emergent nascence.

[Magical Realist]

By planning ahead, primitive humans moved beyond living hand-to-mouth, laying the cognitive foundation for complex societies, agriculture, and modern innovation.

That's what I'm saying..that this whole new experience of delayed purposeful actions only really started once we formed complex societies--those machine-like worlds wherein every person, everything, and ever moment is reduced to its functional value for enabling the machine to keep running smoothly. Nothing in-itself anymore. Always FOR some use in advancing the collective.

It says "laying the cognitive foundation for complex societies," not that planning only occurred once complex societies existed. Neanderthals didn't have "machine-like worlds." Cooperation, planning, and strategy are even necessarily for very primitive things, like hunting in groups.

It says "primitive humans moved beyond living hand-to-mouth" when they started laying the foundations of complex societies. The abstraction of the future as some non-present imaginary state to be aimed for thus arose out of structured agricultural societies where human actions were given new meaning as purely functional and serving a more important end than their own immediate fulfillment, like part of a system or machine.

[Syne]

By planning ahead, primitive humans moved beyond living hand-to-mouth, laying the cognitive foundation for complex societies, agriculture, and modern innovation.

That's what I'm saying..that this whole new experience of delayed purposeful actions only really started once we formed complex societies--those machine-like worlds wherein every person, everything, and ever moment is reduced to its functional value for enabling the machine to keep running smoothly. Nothing in-itself anymore. Always FOR some use in advancing the collective.

It says "laying the cognitive foundation for complex societies," not that planning only occurred once complex societies existed. Neanderthals didn't have "machine-like worlds." Cooperation, planning, and strategy are even necessarily for very primitive things, like hunting in groups.

It says "primitive humans moved beyond living hand-to-mouth" when they started laying the foundations of complex societies. The abstraction of the future as some non-present imaginary state to be aimed for thus arose out of structured agricultural societies where human actions were given new meaning as purely functional and serving a more important end than their own immediate fulfillment, like part of a system or machine.

Yes, so they could hunt migratory animals and in groups, survive winter, make tools, etc.. While not immediate "hand-to-mouth" survival, these were all necessary for their own long-term survival prospects. There is no "system or machine" in planning ahead to survive winter. Here it is again:

Primitive humans (early hominins and ancient Homo sapiens) actively planned for the future. Their survival depended on anticipating seasonal changes, preparing tools in advance, and storing resources.
Archaeological and anthropological evidence highlights several ways early humans engaged in future-oriented thinking:

    Resource Management: Early humans, such as Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, hunted highly migratory animals (like reindeer and bison) and timed their movements to intercept these herds during seasonal migrations.
    Tool Preparation: They did not just make tools on the spot. They engaged in "curation," shaping stone cores and saving high-quality raw materials specifically so they would have tools available for future use.
    Food Storage and Preservation: To survive harsh winters and dry seasons, primitive man preserved meat by drying, smoking, and freezing it, and stored nuts and grains for later consumption.
    Complex Concoctions: Evidence shows early humans combined different materials (like plant resins, ochre, and beeswax) to create adhesives and paints. This required gathering ingredients and intentionally saving the product for future projects.

By planning ahead, primitive humans moved beyond living hand-to-mouth, laying the cognitive foundation for complex societies, agriculture, and modern innovation.
- Gemini

"laying the cognitive foundation for... agriculture" means agriculture did not yet exist.

[Magical Realist]

On Negative Continuums

Think about darkness for a moment. It is basically not something but nothing. It is the absence of visible light. As a negative or non-being, it is therefore not confined to being in space or time. It is everywhere at once, and yet nowhere. It is inside the dark room, and inside the walls of the dark room. It extends everywhere as one timeless/spaceless state at all scales. The darkness in between photons is the same darkness in between galaxies. I call this a negative continuum. An entirely non-physical yet also negatively-perceivable kind of qualitative space permeating matter and space and time and energy. It underlies and precedes everything. To be conscious of darkness is to be unconscious, which is simply becoming one with the darkness always inside our skulls. And what lives in the shadows can travel anywhere at any time.

“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills,
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
'
“(...) darkness is beautiful. It has tremendous depth, silence, infinity. Light comes and goes; darkness always remains, it is more eternal than light. For light you need some fuel; for darkness no fuel is needed - it is simply there.”― Osho, Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself

[Magical Realist]

All accounts of what an aura is that I've read online always fall way short for me. It is not just an energy field indicating some emotional/spiritual state. Think of it more as your own personal astral cloak. But it is a magical cloak, like Dr. Strange's cloak. When I walk thru the park I can see it moving ahead of me like a light blue net or membrane, constantly swaying from left to right as if keeping a watch on whatever is coming. When I sit down it sometimes just goes away, and then comes back. Your aura is your sartorial companion/sentinel. So always treat it with respect!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpWJQmU0R5g

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The gift of language is that it constantly exceeds what merely can be described or reasoned out. It reaches far and beyond sense-making into the domains of nonsense, mythology, fiction, satire, poetry, and even utter gibberish. It is this inherent openness to what always exceeds being merely true or making sense that enables it to encompass and so objectify reality at all times.

“Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

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Say what you will about forums like Ouora or Reddit but sometimes I stumble upon a real pearl of an observation amidst all the sludge and detritus. Like this one:

“One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I.’—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Jeffrey Werbock

musician, lecturer, documentary film maker Updated 1y

“When you are thirsty, you say, “I am thirsty”. But “I” is a thinker / speaker / observer / reporter, a language machine, not a mouth and gullet, etc. It would be more accurate a representation for “I” to say, “my body is thirsty”, or something like that. And indeed, the body is not only the one which is thirsty, the body is the one which knows how to get up, walk across the room, go to the kitchen, open the cabinet door, select a glass, turn on the tap, watch the water fill up the glass, all the time looking out for specs of dirt on or in the glass, the water. “I” just goes along for the ride, observing yet absolutely clueless how the body knows how to do all that. LW was a language skeptic; he once said that philosophy is “merely insisting on a certain jargon”.

[Magical Realist]

Deathbed tip #215:

Remember that dreams and reality can coexist. You don't have to choose between them. You can go back and forth between them and live in both.

[Magical Realist]

While it's possible to have a thought without a feeling, it is not possible to have a feeling without a thought. Even if you are not really conscious of that thought, it is still there inside the feeling empowering it in an unconscious way. Take for example a feeling of excitement you have. Now it just so happens that you are planning a trip in a few days. But it is not something you are thinking of constantly. And yet the mood or feeling of being more elevated and jovial stays inside you, coloring your whole day with renewed interest and possibilities. The idea of traveling in the near future resides in the core of your uplifted mood, charging you up with energy and enthusiasm you wouldn't normally have. This same dependence of mood and feeling on a specific thought applies as well to anxiety, anger, sadness, boredom, passion, and even depression. This is the core concept behind cognitive therapy. Change the idea behind the mood, and change the mood!

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It's not like all the lies of our society are told to us once and we fell for them. It's like the lies are repeated to us over and over again everyday for years, breaking down our resistance to them to the point that we just give in and even mindlessly repeat them to ourselves and others. The lies aren't accepted because they are particularly persuasive. In fact they're quite ludicrous. It's just that they are so ubiquitous and universally drummed in that the very conceivability of there being anything else like truth fades away. Everything is just given and the way it's always been, no questions asked. Resistance is futile.


"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."---Henry David Thoreau

[Magical Realist]

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

[Magical Realist]

The man who tells himself that anything is possible to get himself going in the morning had best forget such a prospect when he turns his lights out for the night.