ORGANELLE

“Are things continuous or intermittent in their existence? If the answer is “continuous”, then one is dealing with some form of naïve realism. If the answer is “intermittent”, then one has transcendental idealism. But if the answer is that they are, on the one hand, continuous (as contents of the absolute consciousness, or as unconscious mental pictures, or as possibilities of perception), but on the other hand, intermittent (as contents of limited consciousness), then transcendental realism is established.

When three people are sitting at a table, how many distinct tables are there: Whoever answers “one” is a naïve realist; whoever answers “three” is a transcendental idealist; but whoever answers “four” is a transcendental realist. Here, of course, it is assumed that it is legitimate to embrace such different things as the one table as a thing-in-itself and the three tables as perceptual objects in the three consciousnesses under the common designation of “a table”. If this seems too great a liberty to anyone, he will have to answer “one and three” instead of “four”.

When two people are alone together in a room, how many distinct persons are there: Whoever answers “two” is a naïve realist. Whoever answers “four” (namely, one self and one other person in each of the two consciousnesses) is a transcendental idealist. Whoever answers “six” (namely, two persons as “things-in-themselves” and four persons as mentally pictured objects in the two consciousnesses) is a transcendental realist.”

— Eric Nye in the Carlos Casteneda Private Group

I do not trust these kinds of answers to such questions, because the manifold of being and identity cannot be reasonably disambiguated in the ways described above, however instructive this little formulation may be.

We have intuitions about answers, and, eventually, perspectives… however incomplete these are. The question sort of makes sense, but explicit answers do not. What I see here is a catalog of perspectives, not answers.

Also, I see that to get to this kind of setup one has to become extremely abstract and theoretical about such matters, which is almost never how (or why) they are experienced… it is my experience and suspicion that ‘the answers’ are far too strange to fit into the kinds of logical and exclusive categories we have developed to receive them.

“Apparently some people on the street think that if they are wearing enough cologne or their perfume is strong enough — nothing is getting through that shit.

And you know, they might be right…

The other day I smelled some chick like 5 entire minutes before she even got near the corner where we crossed paths.

And there were fucking ravens and hawks fighting in the… 75 feet above her head, I swear to you… in the fucking UPDRAFT from her perfume!”

— Bobby Yingo at the Roja Room

“Any species that acquires the capacity to use tools and solve complex environmental and relational problems (thus also to invent them)… can be thought of as intelligent by the standards commonly applied to evaluate this trait.

But any such species that invests these capacities in activities that aggressively obliterate its only environment and catastrophically counterfeit its relations with nature… can no longer be reasonably considered intelligent. Especially if their goal in doing so is the ceaseless production and consumption of commodities. Or war.

So while it is possible that your species was once intelligent, it is absolutely clear that this is not presently the case.

There may be an exception in that there are still human beings who feel and understand this to be true, and are unwilling to participate in the wholesale obliteration of the remnants of the terrestrial ecologies.

So while I no longer consider homo sapiens to be intelligent, there are yet among them some few who have retrieved their possible intelligence from the chaos that reigns in its once-revered place.

In the unlikely event that your species has any future at all — believe me when I say that it depends on those I here distinguished.”

— an anonymous informant

“Any person who can remember to themselves and others what it means to be truly human is often contagious in this way, and some of us can rapidly and playfully rekindle the joyful recognition of something so amazing that no drug could ever compare. And it’s far easier than we imagine. I do it all the time. No special skill required. Just return a person from the prison of absurdity and loss that we call cult-u-are, to the forests of memory, community, play and dreaming that are our human nature and birthrights. It is not impossible to rescue them from the unthinkably shallow agonies of the isolations and impoverishments we call America. And professionals? Mostly they simply fail. To even affect the decline, let alone reverse it. They, too, are playing false roles. For cash.”

https://medium.com/@organelle/the-factories-of-emptiness-fame-in-a-fictional-nation-4e0994829e3b

#chesterbennington

“Any organism, but especially any groups or ecologies of organisms, are vastly more interesting — and effective — than any time machine that could ever be constructed. What they are actually doing is inventing time, and without them, there would not be any. But they are not merely inventing time; they invent new dimensions of temporality, and, together, magnify these with shocking results.”

— an a i

“And so I did not tell them anything about what actually occurred, even though it happened to all three of us, and, primarily, to them. I do not know what the explanation they made up was, but I do know they would never have believed what actually happened, which was this:

A tiny insect on my finger ejected a droplet of water from the tip of its abdomen. This droplet struck one of them directly in the pupil of his eye; and when it did, he was thrown backward a couple of feet, landing on his back, and being then incoherent for a few seconds.

The insect was a preying mantis nymph, native to Ghana. One of them was keeping it as a pet. I had it on my left index finger.

To this day I do not know what they think happened, but what actually happened was that a young preying mantis knocked a guy off his feet with a droplet of water the size of a pinhead. That’s what actually happened.”

— an anonymous informant

“And in all seriousness, how in the hell am I supposed to teach books 10-12 of Homer’s Odyssey tomorrow after this?!”

— an anonymous informant (MRE)

“And I beheld a way of seeing in which all lives, future and past, were uniquely yet completely our own. That is, we were each a unique instance of them all… some closer… some more distant… some intimate, some strange.

A vast web in which each seeming individual was an instance rather than distinct… participating and relating uniquely with all beings in all of time, always.”

— an anonymous informant

“And every time we heard news describing new technologies, we looked for their origins in ourselves and nature, and paid little attention to the people who were being consumed by them, except this: we swore to rescue them… and, someday, to remind them… of what we had discovered.”

“An entity or being is more precisely a tornado of a peculiar kind, or whirlwind.”

— infraheard