ORGANELLE

“I don’t think hems get enough respect. I mean, that shit is holding your clothes together… for like… years. Everyone just thinks this is status quo. But when I was a kid, hems were like rocketships or clocks… impossible. Careful analysis of these things revealed that I could easily die before being able to make one myself. Hems are fucking astonishing. And I think they deserve a holiday. Hem day. Except we can have it in May. So then we can have both hems and a holiday called Mayhem day to celebrate them. Fuck yes.”

— Bobby Yingo in Private Intoxication

“I don’t know what I cut.

Because I can’t see.”

— Ichi

“I don’t expect to convince you of my perspectives, but I do expect to learn to see more deeply, and profoundly… together.”

— infraheard

“I don’t believe that things happen for a reason. Fistly, events aren’t things, they are relations. Secondly, around 97% of the time, our relations with and use of language comprise a deception-based nightmare. Thirdly, reasons are actually things made up after-the-fact to explain events in some way that is consonant with our unacknowledged desires that led us to making shit up. So no, things don’t happen for a reason. What happens is that we invent reasons in order to assure ourselves that hardship or benefit is founded in some ‘universal order’ which we, apparently, are neither familiar with or actually aware of…”

— an anonymous informant

“I don’t “know” what to do!”

— knowing what to do.

“I do not merely think or believe that all other ecologies and organisms on Earth, and especially those I directly encounter or relate with, are, in point of fact, extensions and organs not only of my body, but my mind and my spirit. They are my origins, and I, too, am an organ of their existence.

Life on Earth is best understood as a single distributed organism from which it is not possible to be distinct.

With very few exceptions, harm to them is harm to me… and the histories and potential futures our lives are drawn from and inform. Thus, too, benefit to them is benefit to me… directly, physically, emotionally — in every way imaginable and many which cannot be imagined yet.

This is not a conjecture or philosophy; my body… my bones… are examples of this fact. And so, too… the passions and reverence for life on Earth that not only burns in my heart… but demands its pulses.

The true frontier is not space — it is memory, in and as our direct and distributed relations with other forms of life. The remembrance as our exploration of the true potentials of intelligent symbiosis with all organisms and the remaining ecologies. Which our bodies directly arise from (and, I say, for) and to whose futures ours are inexorably joined.”

— an anonymous informant

“I can see too much of what I cannot yet become. Perhaps, however, this is the result not merely of my incapacity, but of my enmeshment in context, history, habit… and relative isolation from others of like mind and heart.”

— infraheard

“I believe there is no evidence for my belief there is no evidence for my belief…”

— indicative

“I am struck by the observation that I have different minds, or rather, different minds and I participate in emergence into thought together. Consider the example where I am searching ‘my vocabulary’ for a word that I ‘know I know’. What is the mind that is searching? And what exactly is it searching? Does it actually know that which it does not possess in the moment of searching? It does not. So there is ‘another mind’, voiceless, perhaps eternal, whose scope is not determinable. What is actually happening is something like an attempt at ‘handshaking” [ connection.recognition.derivation ] between the mind that speaks and thinks… and the mind “where knowing is alive”.

Though both more and less are true, I imagine that the mind that speaks knows nearly nothing, and depends upon the relatively silent mind that dreams for all its inventions and declarations. For without this ‘other mind’ there is no dreaming, and without dreaming no meaning… and without that?

No differentiation at all.

It is the silent facets of mind who are relationally intimate with all moments, all things and beings, relationships and possibilities. (s)He does not ‘possess’ knowledge at all, though he may preserve something analogous to records; unlike a book or library (and unlike a computer entirely) he sustains blurry figures whose capacity to leap into more concise expression depends upon a fusion between the mind that speaks and the mind that dreams. The one who makes structures and the one who participates in transformations.

And these are not the only facets of mentality which I discover in myself once I am free of the idea that ‘I have a mind’; singular, possession-like, complete and at hand. The idea that we possess a mind reminds me of the idea that my hand’s actions invented my existence. The mind that thinks ‘it knows things’ is a tool-like subdivision of awareness, a leaf upon a single tree in a universe of faculties and forms of attention.

I no longer think that I am of one or even two minds, or that I possess them, even though, like most of us, this idea is still compelling. No, I suspect something vastly more strange, mysterious, and exquisite is at play. Something not bound to my body, something like many flocks of birds, or the ocean. Something like the sky, and the before of its formation… or, perhaps, not like anything at all… yet whose gestures conceive relations… from which all forms and understandings are derived.”

— an anonymous informant

“I am led by my long experience to sense that waking life is something extremely similar to a form of dreaming, and that our actual nature is something so far beyond anything we can imagine that we actually have no location whatsoever in timespace. It appears that even our bodies belong to a category language and concepts could not survive the introduction of. Perhaps our ‘location’ is at once everywhere and nowhere, and something else, too. Perhaps our ‘identity’ is at once everyone and no one, and ‘someone else’ as well.

Something happens just prior to conception that begins a process so astonishing and bizarre, that our waking minds cannot contemplate it, for it would dissolve them in forces so strangely magnificent that our identities could not remain intact. And so the waking mind is at once an expression of all of this, and a protection from its discovery.

I do not think waking life is ‘just a dream within a dream’, but the waking mind is doing something that is an extension and peculiar inversion of a kind of dreaming, and thus ‘enlightenment’ is a word we use to describe obtaining a direct experience of this, which will always be unique and personal as well as universal and generally similar to other such experiences.

This might be like a glimpse of the actual nature of the context of being and relationships, which, again, lies so far beyond the common categories and concepts we are familiar with that while partly confirming these, it obliterates them at the same time.”

— an anonymous informant