ORGANELLE

∞ To feel directly the delicate, impossible, precious beauty of another living being. The nobility of the soul. To sense this, directly. In an animal. Or a place. A tree or flower. To understand that this moment is older than all of time. To see the truth of the incredibly brevity … and courage… of life. To hold the soul of another in the palm of your heart’s hand, and know its heat, it weight, its living pulse.

∞ While the humans have slept in the toxic exhaust-dream of science, industry, and machines — the creatures of Earth have been evolving at speeds and in ways they humans cannot imagine — and therefore cannot see. Get to know a wild organism deeply. A bee or flower will suffice. If they trust you enough to show you their network, you’ll need a diaper. The internet looks like dried feces in comparison.

The sky and the Earth have known you longer and more intimately than (nearly) any human being …

It’s like you’re making a soup with everything you ‘pay attention’ to or interact with. Each ingredient lends not merely its »flavor, but the »values that orient your awareness of and interaction with it. You will have to eat this soup later. Because we also make the soup together, we should realize that others will add to it. We will »all have to eat the communal soup, as well as our personal soup.

In such a dire situation, it is »almost always best to »add nothing to the water. The exceptions are those ingredients that we know will not overwhelm the flavor, will become richer or more savory over time, and neither spoil nor poison the water.

In our modern circumstances, this is extremely challenging, as the contexts themselves »demand that we defect from our natural desire to preserve the soup’s nurturing character. We are literally »paid (or traded with) to acquire our attention, authorization, participation, time, effort, habit…

It turns out, however, that it is not so much what we add to the soup as what we refuse to add, that turns out to be fundamentally medicinal and worthy. Noble. True.

It is what we resist doing that creates the free energy that is required to see beyond our habitual submission to and agreement with forms and frames that poison the soup. Personally, and communally. In many of our lives the soup is so bad, that we would be far better off with just clean water.

Clarifying the water produces something like »lift to birds. When it is fraught with garbage, media, shadows and isolation… it is as if the bird of us is chained to the ground. We cannot know the sky this way…

“Like most of us, I have many thoughts, hopes, fears and evaluations. And some of the time they sway me; but I remember that the aspect of my mind and awareness that finds thoughts compelling is fundamentally untrustworthy in many if not most contexts. It is prone to all sorts of peculiar narratives and ‘beliefs’ or analyses, many of which have little if any resemblance to existence as it is.

Existence as it is … is fundamentally unimaginable, and though it contains beings like us, who think and ‘believe’ ideas, its nature is unlike this behavior. So while I think, I also doubt… for I know something of the nature of consciousness, and thought.

Imagine, for example, that the shapes I saw in clouds traveling across the sky… a dragon, a sword, a book, a boat… which continually transform… imagine if I believed that each one actually was what it appeared to be… and carved them in stone, identified with them, and tried to convince others of their power, meaning or reality?

One aspect of our mind is like this. And it is a very peculiar thing, prone to adore its own fictions, and to bind and grasp them as if they were more important than anything else.

So although I have ideas, thoughts and evaluations… I am also skeptical of their verity. I remember from whence they come, even though they seem real, compelling, or even irrefutable.

A dream makes no declarations, and it cannot be refuted because it forms no arguments. It has only transforming definitions — even identity itself liquefies at the oneiric door.

I suspect that the origins and nature of our minds, their fundamental natures, are to be found closer to dreaming… and art… than thinking.”

— infraheard

Uhm… ok…?

∞ The dream whose silent eyes announce that waking is yet a stranger transit; deprived of vital pulse and living variance… entombed in myriad monoliths who stand at reality’s shore like stone gods prescribing possibility and declaring words of dire and structured admonition as fact or law to rule instead. The dream whose silent speech is drawn from movements of the animals. Or living places. Another water of another order in which identity itself is soluble. The dream whose silent streaming wraps our minds in wings and wonders … ancient and beyond our habit or permission.

∞ “Just as a man, who in a wintry night wants to leave his house, lights up the flame of burning fire and prepares a winter lantern which protects the light against winds from all direction, for it dissipates the breath of the roaring wind, but the light, which penetrates (i.e through the thin walls of polished horn), because it is so much more subtle, illuminates the street with untiring rays—just so at that time (when the eye was created) the primaval fire hid itself in the round pupil, enclosed in membranes and delicate covers, cut through with wondrously wrought straight passages, that kept back the depth of the water flowing round about; but the fire they allowed to pass through to the outside, because it was much more subtle.”

— Empedocles

You will not write this, the flame said.

I agreed. I would not write this.

My other hands, however, had other eyes and girls.

I want to know the questions, I said to the flame.

You’re made of the answers, it replied.

But I must discover the questions I was made for.

I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to lean close.
The questions must be whispered, said the flame.

And it began to whisper, and I began to lean.

But just as I came close enough to start to decipher the whispers.
The heat would burn my skin and ears.
So I was going back and forth, burning and straining to hear.

I heard ‘your hand’, ‘the sky’. ‘you have to…’ and ‘remember’.

And then the flame drew down, into its roots,
And filled the sky with stars again.

“Additionally, and let’s be clear about this, the ‘off the shelf’ categories in English are, while useful to people who speak it, absurd, primitive, and we ‘mostly get it wrong’ unless we’re pointing at something inanimate, and even then we often get it wrong. Whatever a stone might be, it’s not ‘a rock’. It’s a mode of timespace. At least. We use categories like gunslingers who can only aim at their own head. One of the simplest and most crucial realizations we can have about humans and language is that their use of categories is… formally wrong. This is due to the fact that any referent some word points to has infinite qualities, relationships and ‘functions’.

We’re addicted to excerption; we snip off 97% of the actual situation to produce something resembling shadow-puppets in representational cognition… and we call this ‘intelligence’.”

— infraheard