Human brains, however, are closely interconnected with, and embedded in, the distributed networks of culture from infancy … Humans are collective thinkers, who rarely solve problems without input from the distributed cognitive systems of culture. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
… really tired of this physical tiredness i have been experiencing this week… the humid hot weather doesn’t help…
Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Spiritual life is first and foremost about commitment to a way of thinking and behaving that honors principles of inter-being and interconnectedness. (bell hooks, All About Love)
ultimate meaning will always lie beyond what reason can conceive or everyday language express. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
“The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation,” Emerson had written, “for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs.” (Maria Popova, Figuring)
In retrospect, it is evident that the emphasis on “man as enemy” deflected attention away from focus on improving relationships between women and men, ways for men and women to work together to unlearn sexism. (bell hooks, Feminist Theory)
In assessing the mechanistic view of the world, still to prevelant, McGilchrist has this to say:
A machine has clear boundaries; a natural system does not. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
‘What Zeno shows’, as philosopher George Melhuish puts it, ‘is that continuity cannot be composed of discrete elements even if there is an infinity of them.’ It has to be inhabited whole; it cannot be composed from without. Flow is an irreducible, not an emergent, element in the universe. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Conceptualizing anything is a way of asking ‘what it can do for us’, says Bergson. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Imagine how different our lives would be if all the individuals who claim to be Christians, or who claim to be religious, were setting an example for everyone by being loving. (bell hooks, All About Love)
Conservatives have their Eden before the fall—it usually involves strong fathers and demure women and nonexistent queer people—and liberals also have stories about when everything was uncorrupted, about matriarchal communities and Paleo diets and artisanal just about anything, from cheese to chairs. (Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names)
In a vintage frame of mind…
July 28, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
Hard to overstate the moment we are in… vote ya’ll…
When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.
He passed it to us.
It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope.
It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly…
… i think my shishito peppers have been partying with the scotch bonnets… my SB peppers have had no heat, but there have been some fiery shishitos…
… my wife’s favorite lilly… not sure why the are called “Black Beauty”…
… must our ideas come to something… what is that something in the context of a vast universe?… the idea that there must always be growth?… isn’t that the same as assuming our ideas must come to some thing?… what is it with things anyway?… why are they so important?…
Contaminated by the superstition of action, we believe that our ideas must come to something. (E. M. Cioran and Richard Howard, The Temptation to Exist)
Greed subsumes love and compassion; living simply makes room for them. Living simply is the primary way everyone can resist greed every day. (bell hooks, All About Love)
Every group which finds a way to accumulate wealth finds ways to hold onto it and to increase it. (Rhyd Wildermuth, Here Be Monsters)
… our economic system and Nation States are built on transferring what should belong to everyone into private ownership…
The idea of owning the earth and the legal norms related to land ownership as we know them today were born in the crucible of sixteenth-century Europe and the rise of the “nation-state.” Then, in an abrupt and violent flash, “Between 1520 and 1900, colonial powers put billions of acres in private hands,” writes historian Louis Warren. (Jeff Golden, Reclaiming the Sacred)
Thus, a person can have a male body-soul and a female wandering soul and find peace (and societal recognition) in accepting both equally rather than trying to change one to conform to the other. (Rhyd Wildermuth, Here Be Monsters)
… it is not so much that we speak language, but that language, the storehouse of generations of experience, speaks in us. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
My belief that God is love—that love is everything, our true destiny—sustains me. (bell hooks, All About Love)
Myths also have this quality, like language itself, that they do not just derive from one mind alone but from a shared consciousness that stretches over time and place, and are not even consciously – cannot be consciously – conceived. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)