New blog post up (Sept 1)

[Allegro]

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The reason I kept returning to Jeff's blog, if memory serves, in late 2004, was the graphic art work. Of course, I read his essays and the comments, but the finesse of colors and image blends in those art pieces was enough to summon whatever detectable Leonardo there is inside me.

Once seeing the art draft posted somewhere in RI months ago, now in its present form revealed in Jeff's most recent post, I wasn't surprised, imagining as a pianist the beloved piano bobbing in laps of oil. Did I get that right, Jeff -- a pool of oil?? The piece is as stunning to me as joyful memories beholding times of well practiced musicians in the company of others with like performance skills and sensibilities.

Thank you, Jeff, for the art, and for your writing! I've felt no resistance to either; just quieted beauty assisted thoughts for all things natural and universal, and mourning too into that which we cannot return in reality as yet some of us seem to live and breathe it. Written beneath Jeff's panoptic post, a comment perhaps by a familiar voice, at least for me, is reminiscent of RI. Among other insights, she wrote: "Nature is."

A couple of weeks or so ago, I found and stacked the image below with others in my library of possibilities for RI. I saw the Nietzsche quote in Jeff's post, and remembered Dexter Jones Circus Orchestra's latest album cover.

_________________

Whenever a feeling of aversion comes into the heart of a good soul, it's not without significance. Consider that intuitive wisdom to be a Divine attribute, not a vain suspicion: the light of the heart has apprehended intuitively from the Universal Tablet.
— Rumi (noted on this page)

Best to Everyone.
~ A.

[ShinShinKid]

Great post!

[Aldebaran]

Having been drawn to this forum by other paths than your blog, this is the first time I've had the pleasure of reading your work, and read I did straight through from beginning to end which, in light of my own 'net-induced ADD, is a testament to your skills as a literary engineer. Cheers, and thanks.

[JackRiddler]

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Mr. Wells, you are an artist.

I'm awed & speechless.

Thank you.

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[RocketMan]

Woo woo woo!!!

[Simulist]

Okay, the whole blog post was damn insightful, but this gem gave me a belly laugh:

If the Singularity is near enough, then the transhumanists may yet have their abiotic rapture. And I'll hand it to them, there's a dark logic to it: perhaps the only way to successfully adapt to a murdered planet is to kill yourself.

[Saurian Tail]

I enjoyed Jeff's post immensely.

One of the things that I was struck by was the hatred of the body by Kurzweil and company. Growing up Christian, I know this only too well. Dirty, sinful, inconvenient flesh. If only we could die and be free of this damned flesh and it's sinful urges! I had not fully realized the closeness of the two positions. We must all hurry up. There is a destiny "out there" somewhere. If we destroy the world along the way, oh well.

It is my belief that the miracle does not reside in some off-world god or cold singularity ... the miracle is here all around us. It's all a miracle. It is all sacred. This is the original human recognition and in our impudent adolescence we have sought to stamp it out of existence. If we are unable to imagine life as anything other than a test, why can't it be a test of the beauty of becoming a fully human person of earth?

-ST

[8bitagent]

I enjoyed Jeff's post immensely.

One of the things that I was struck by was the hatred of the body by Kurzweil and company. Growing up Christian, I know this only too well. Dirty, sinful, inconvenient flesh. If only we could die and be free of this damned flesh and it's sinful urges! I had not fully realized the closeness of the two positions. We must all hurry up. There is a destiny "out there" somewhere. If we destroy the world along the way, oh well.

It is my belief that the miracle does not reside in some off-world god or cold singularity ... the miracle is here all around us. It's all a miracle. It is all sacred. This is the original human recognition and in our impudent adolescence we have sought to stamp it out of existence. If we are unable to imagine life as anything other than a test, why can't it be a test of the beauty of becoming a fully human person of earth?

-ST

Agree a thousand percent. I am not happy with the extreme terra forming that's been done to nature, but I am happy to go on long nature walks every day and see coyotes, quails, hawks, owls, lizards, and a bunch of other characters. People are so busy with the hustle and bustle or daily drama that they can't stop to enjoy the clouds or beauty around them.

This is why I always felt uncomfortable with religion...I won't want to live in some genderless afterlife. I want to enjoy the here and now and think about making a better future.
Even if Icke and PKD had some resonance to living in a "matrix", I'll stand in a pool of blissful ignorance.

[norton ash]

Edward Hoagland on nature, sympathy, empathy and why he'd really rather end up (and begin again) as lovely, organic, dirty worm food.

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/0082413

The biochemistry of friendship can be equally a mystery, unlike perhaps infatuation, which makes evolutionary sense when it leads to copulation, or brown-nosing ingratiation, which may prove almost as advantageous. We need allies and thus want friends too, an evolutionist could say. But some friendships are just useful for empathy, not promotion or advancement or battlefield buddy-protection. And empathy is a mystery—a charitable outlet, not merely self-aggrandizing—and how we exult while birds arrow overhead, yelling through the winds, navigating by magnetic fields, the angularity of sun and stars, flock dynamics, and a landscape memory bank we still don’t understand. We can’t eat them, they’re gone, yet part of us exults, much as the marbling of a moonlit sky or the scent of cedar trees uplifts our mood. This wider span of responsiveness indicates affinities we haven’t catalogued, as though already we sense we’ll be repaying our infinitesimal loan from the universal energy pool pretty soon. Like the spume on top of a wave, we’ll slide underneath again. The affection we sometimes feel for many other species, wild or tame, helps define or signify that “universal sympathy,” as Thomas Mann in his last book described it. I hope to fortify foreign protoplasm, in my turn, as a root buds a stem or a tadpole a leg, without forethought.

[Jeff]

Along these lines -

I've been rereading Marcus Aurelius, because I think Stoicism has a lot to say to our time. (Which I'm beginning to name the Apocalyzoic Era.) His definition of death particularly struck me, contra Kurzweil:

[Death is] nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should anyone have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil that is according to nature.

[Avalon]

Kurzweil was raised Unitarian, and thus his attitude to the human body probably didn't come from his upbringing. The death of his father seems to be a big painful issue driving him his quest to transcend death.

[Bryter]

Along these lines -

I've been rereading Marcus Aurelius, because I think Stoicism has a lot to say to our time. (Which I'm beginning to name the Apocalyzoic Era.) His definition of death particularly struck me, contra Kurzweil:

[Death is] nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should anyone have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil that is according to nature.

Reminded me of something UG Krishnamurti said (not to be confused with Jiddu Krishnamurti!)

It is the body which is immortal. It only changes its form after clinical death, remaining within the flow of life in new shapes. The body is not concerned with “the afterlife” or any kind of permanency. It struggles to survive and multiply NOW. The fictitious “beyond”, created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same, in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence. Such permanence is foreign to the body. Thought’s demand for permanence is choking the body and distorting perception. Thought sees itself as not just the protector of its own continuity, but also of the body’s continuity. Both are utterly false.
- From http://www.seekeraftertruth.com/ug-krishnamurti-the-certainty-that-blasts-everything

[Allegro]

.
The three quotes directly above have been stacked here for reference, and I've added a fourth at the bottom. The quotes are not the entirety of—but point to—my personal cosmology, the persistence of which is, as you might understand, being unconcealed right in front of my nose, right here at RI.
~ A.

Edward Hoagland on nature, sympathy, empathy and why he'd really rather end up (and begin again) as lovely, organic, dirty worm food. [REFER.]
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/0082413


The biochemistry of friendship can be equally a mystery, unlike perhaps infatuation, which makes evolutionary sense when it leads to copulation, or brown-nosing ingratiation, which may prove almost as advantageous. We need allies and thus want friends too, an evolutionist could say. But some friendships are just useful for empathy, not promotion or advancement or battlefield buddy-protection. And empathy is a mystery—a charitable outlet, not merely self-aggrandizing—and how we exult while birds arrow overhead, yelling through the winds, navigating by magnetic fields, the angularity of sun and stars, flock dynamics, and a landscape memory bank we still don’t understand. We can’t eat them, they’re gone, yet part of us exults, much as the marbling of a moonlit sky or the scent of cedar trees uplifts our mood. This wider span of responsiveness indicates affinities we haven’t catalogued, as though already we sense we’ll be repaying our infinitesimal loan from the universal energy pool pretty soon. Like the spume on top of a wave, we’ll slide underneath again. The affection we sometimes feel for many other species, wild or tame, helps define or signify that “universal sympathy,” as Thomas Mann in his last book described it. I hope to fortify foreign protoplasm, in my turn, as a root buds a stem or a tadpole a leg, without forethought.

Along these lines -
I've been rereading Marcus Aurelius, because I think Stoicism has a lot to say to our time. (Which I'm beginning to name the Apocalyzoic Era.) His definition of death particularly struck me, contra Kurzweil: [REFER.]

[Death is] nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should anyone have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil that is according to nature.

Reminded me of something UG Krishnamurti said (not to be confused with Jiddu Krishnamurti!) [REFER.]

It is the body which is immortal. It only changes its form after clinical death, remaining within the flow of life in new shapes. The body is not concerned with “the afterlife” or any kind of permanency. It struggles to survive and multiply NOW. The fictitious “beyond”, created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same, in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence. Such permanence is foreign to the body. Thought’s demand for permanence is choking the body and distorting perception. Thought sees itself as not just the protector of its own continuity, but also of the body’s continuity. Both are utterly false.
- From http://www.seekeraftertruth.com/ug-krishnamurti-the-certainty-that-blasts-everything

Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck, and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit. [REFER.]

[hiddenite]

[url]http://libcom.org/library/karl-marx-iroquois-franklin-rosemont
[/url]

Jeff, I think this might interest you .

[elfismiles]

.
The three quotes directly above have been stacked here for reference, and I've added a fourth at the bottom. The quotes are not the entirety of—but point to—my personal cosmology, the persistence of which is, as you might understand, being unconcealed right in front of my nose, right here at RI.
~ A.

<snip>

Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck, and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit. [REFER.]

Thanks for those allegro.

The last comes synchronistically for me after my wife and I's encounter last night with a small to medium sized praying mantis. I've not seen one face to face in a long time and they are amazing. It struck me that part of the reason they are so striking to humans is there ability to turn their heads and LOOK AT something whereas most insects do not seem to have that ability.