Creative writing and artful observations

[Magical Realist]

“We are only chance visitants to this jungle of blind mutations. The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was opened in our heads. The moment we stepped through that door, we walked out on nature. Say what we will about it and deny it till we die--we are blighted by our knowing what is too much to know and too secret to tell one another if we are to stride along our streets, work at our jobs, and sleep in our beds. It is the knowledge of a race of beings that is only passing through this shoddy cosmos.”― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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Laughing and crying must be closely related--hand in hand like a brother and a sister. Two uncontrollable spasms of the lungs expunging bestial vocalizations of feelings no words can even remotely articulate. I've noticed the older I get the more I both laugh and cry. I am regressing into some more primitive being, haunted as I am by fireside tales of my upcoming migration.

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[Magical Realist]

It's never just a question of what you know. It's where are you standing such that you came to know this? And how can I get there myself? I call this our "epistance."

[Magical Realist]

“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
–Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

[Magical Realist]

If physical reality was all there is, there'd be no way we could know that. Just like a fish could never know what water is. To even just think of a physical reality is to stand outside of it, as a non-physical mind looking into it.

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[Magical Realist]

“Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.”― Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays

Space is very intimidating to me. So many ways of losing one's way..

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Of all the virtues I prize the most highly, the ability to have interesting conversation is perhaps the most worthy of all to me. It is an uncommon skill not only essential in this life, but in all afterlives to come. We might as well learn how now.

[Magical Realist]

Substrates. Physical substrates like spacetime or the quantum vacuum. Metaphysical substrates like Being or information or a universal Mind. But when you think of this metaphor, you usually conjure up the image of an abrupt ending or 2D surface at the bottom of everything else. How can we visualize a substrate of 4D space itself--the absolutely impenetrable bottom of reality itself? It would have to underlie spacetime and matter and energy. It would have to be approachable not by going down, but by going within---into the very depths of spacetime itself. It would be what gives rise to spacetime as well matter and energy and all events. It would be infinitely creative as infinite possibility yet nowhere localizable. Unbounded itself, it would bind everything together as one thing. Imagine such a continuum composed entirely of infinitesimal points shrinking down and yet amplifying in magnitude at infinite speed. Imagine consciousness and reality coming out of this same infinite transparency. Got it? Good. You just fleetingly glimpsed what a substrate to our reality might be like!

[Magical Realist]

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[Magical Realist]

Rules are only necessary to facilitate the smooth and fluent playing of the game. Once the game is played they are no longer needed. Everybody can shake hands and laugh it all off. This is how none of the morality of this world applies to the afterlife. And all this bluster and hand-wringing about being rewarded or punished there is simply much ado about nothing. It's all about soul-deepening and evolving into higher vistas of experience---of opening oneself up and not closing oneself off.
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“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

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[Magical Realist]

Sentences come in many flavors. Not only can they state a fact or describe something, they can codify possible actions in the form of rules and laws. They can ask questions about things we have no knowledge of. They can be endearing promises to someone to do something in the future. They can exclaim a present state, as in pain or fear or surprise. They can be used as weapons to attack others with. They can present hypotheticals that help us better understand things. They can be sung as a lyric or recited as a poem to inspire and move us. They can tell stories that fascinate and intrigue us. They can be commands that something be done. They can be acknowledgments of certain things being right or true. They can be jokes and witticisms that provoke laughter. They can be vows expressing a firm decision. They can be calls for action or for someone to come to us. They can define any word in our language. They can lie, deceive, mislead, seduce and persuade. They can express inner feelings and thoughts. They can express desires and feelings to higher beings or be used as spells of magical intent. They can be chants or mantras for achieving higher states of consciousness. They can encapsulate a credo of beliefs. They can even be philosophical statements that imply universal truths. How strange this variegated and multi-purposive nature of the simple sentence--a mere string of typed punctuated text or spoken sounds!

[Magical Realist]

A fantastic post by Courtney Buterbaugh on Substack about her abduction experiences and the role of memory in recovering them as synchronistically triggered by watching "Disclosure Day"..

https://substack.com/home/post/p-202013976

Here's an account of how other experiencers were triggered by the cardinal motif in the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiwJAqcARc

And then there's THIS brilliant insight from an equally brilliant article:

"The content of contact experiences is all over the map. The fairy court looks nothing like the grey alien. The six-winged seraph in Isaiah looks nothing like the entity in the DMT lab. The messages the Fátima children received sound nothing like the star map Betty Hill sketched under hypnosis.

But the operation is always the same. A threshold gets crossed and ordinary reality is suspended. Something non-human shows up, overwhelming in presence and unmistakably possessed of agency. It communicates not by handing over facts, but by changing you. And then the return: incomplete, charged, carrying something that can’t be fully passed on to anyone who wasn’t there.

That’s the deep structure of contact. It’s in every serious case in the literature. It’s there under every one of the five doors from Part II. It’s in the shamanic initiations of every culture that developed them, in the medieval mystics, the Hebrew prophets, the Amazonian healers, the clinical DMT volunteers, and the UAP experiencers whose accounts fill the case files.

The content changes. The operation does not."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-202315986