Quote of the day

[Magical Realist]

“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

[Magical Realist]

“The future that we want - this is it. This is the future of all the previous thoughts you've ever had about the future. You're in it. You're already in it. What is the purpose of all this living if it's only to get some place else and then when you're there you're not happy anyway, you want to be some place else. It's always for 'when I retire,' 'when I graduate college,' 'when I make enough money,' 'when I get married,' 'when I get divorced,' 'when the kids move out.' It's like, wait a minute, this is it. This is your life. We only have moments. This moment's as good as any other. It's perfect.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

[Magical Realist]

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
― Thomas A. Edison

---

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

[Magical Realist]

“I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.”
― Jerry Garcia

[Magical Realist]

"I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra," ----Carrie Fisher

[Magical Realist]

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

[Magical Realist]

"I have a friend named, Emmanuel. Some of you have met him through his books. He is a spook, a being of Light that has dropped his body. Emmanuel shares a lot of great wisdom. He is like an uncle to me. I once said to him, “Emmanuel, I often deal with the fear of death in this culture. What should I tell people about dying?”And Emmanuel said, “Tell them it’s absolutely SAFE!” He said, “It’s like taking off a tight shoe.”---Ram Dass

[C C]

"I have a friend named, Emmanuel. Some of you have met him through his books. He is a spook, a being of Light that has dropped his body. Emmanuel shares a lot of great wisdom. He is like an uncle to me. I once said to him, “Emmanuel, I often deal with the fear of death in this culture. What should I tell people about dying?” And Emmanuel said, “Tell them it’s absolutely SAFE!” He said, “It’s like taking off a tight shoe.”---Ram Dass

Death as even authentic oblivion or "absence of everything" would be just that: Removing the restrictions and the worldly things we formerly deemed "all-important". Because even those pleading reasons of "why I want to hang around to seek or accomplish _X_, fulfill obligations to loved ones and community, develop my hobbies and interests further, enjoy life, do what is necessary to diminish my potential suffering, etc" -- which keep us addicted to life in the first place -- would be gone as background passions, stimulants, commands, regrets, and irritants. What prevents us from recognizing that a "not even nothingness" is the perfect peace, bliss, paradise is the very continued presence of these thoughts and feelings and desires which abhor such non-consciousness, portraying it (and their own elimination) as the most horrid of fearful nightmares.

But with that said, from a pessimist's or cynical skeptic's POV it almost seems too good to be true in the context of that interpretation (i.e., that we really do wind-up with a brand of nirvana). Not much different from how a theist's expectations of Heaven would seem naive / laughable to the same scoffing outsider. There's the lurking suspicion of a fly in the ointment, of that eventual deterioration into "emptiness" merely being a mediating bridge that dissolves the incommensurability between one identity and another. So that experience continues, a relationship to another sequence of temporal parts could be possible. Just as the latter parts featured a lesser version of inter-connections themselves in the manner of a cognitive transition from one moment / body-state to the next.

The "taking off a tight-shoe" of a particular identity and discarding the former pains, pleasures, and concerns of its burden of understanding would still be available. But simply a timeless interlude of utter liberty and a hub for passage to the unknown showings and manifested content of yet some other being-hood (for better or worse). Perhaps even a variation of the same old life, but minus any memory from the last slightly altered rerun that could validate such a Sisyphean hell.

[elte]

universe “undergo catastrophic vacuum decay”
--Stephen Hawking

That could end all the suffering.

[Magical Realist]

5 things I have learned in life:

Those Dorito nacho tacos at Taco Bell? They fall apart. Don't order them.

As you get older, you take things more in stride. The little things aren't as important.

If the universe sends you a message, and you ignore it, it will eventually hit you with a 2 X 4 upside the head. Not learning is not an option.

Don't judge people by the car they drive, They are just like you,,trying to get somewhere as easily as possible.

Have a healthy disrespect for the law. Speed a little, jaywalk a little. The law was made for man, not man for the law.