“Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.” — Georges Braque (1882–1963)
Category Archives: Philosophy
The Philosophy of Solipsism
“Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.” (Wikipedia)
The Other Side of Nothing
(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”
We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.
Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.
In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.
In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.
“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi
Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.
When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.
The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”
The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.
“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki
Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading
Bangkok Haunts
“(You) think the Western mind is some Frankensteinian product of a botched religion and a bunch of ancient Greek pedophiles, the same unholy combination of schoolboy logic, lust for blood and glory, we-know-best, and destroy-to-save that slaughtered three million in Vietnam, most of them women and children, all in the name of freedom and democracy, before we ran away because it got too expensive.”
“Modernism is largely a form of entertainment, and a superficial one at that. It doesn’t survive environmental disasters or oil shortages. It doesn’t even survive terrorist attacks. It certainly doesn’t survive poverty, which is the lot of most of us. One flick of a switch, and the images fade from the screen. […] Confusion seeks relief in bigotry, which leads to conflict. One high-tech war, and we’re back to the Stone Age.”
— Bangkok Haunts (2007) by John Burdett
Good to be alive!
Don’t recall where I found this or who said/wrote it, but it goes something like this:
You died ten years ago and –somehow, miraculously– were brought back to life ten minutes ago. You’re fully aware of having missed the last ten years but have all of your memories and sense of who you are (or were).
Before digging into what you missed in the last decade, you begin getting a sense of what’s going on now. A deadly virus killing millions; a climate crises that might be too big and too late to fix; fascism on the rise; the flame of American democracy flickering.
And your response to this horrible state of affairs?
“Man, it’s good to be alive!”