Doomed to do it again & again, no choice but to play a Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise & fall.
Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome: ground to dust; plowed with salt.
Spain, France, Britain, America – burned into the oblivion of centuries.
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
At the top of the mountain, we get to soak in the view.
Start your day at 4:00 AM. You’re up any way, why do you to need to stay in bed? Sit up and meditate. Say the word “thought” over an over again trying to visualize what it looks like. If that makes you sleepy, go back to bed.
You will see change taking place no matter where you look.
Think of it as a mind expanding message from the stars, maybe not the work of human beings.
Note: On the X platform you can change the playback speed from one quarter to twice as fast.
Attend to your breathing – whether thru mouth or nose doesn’t matter. Force inhale, do not force exhale; relax, repeat.
Inhale can be deep or shallow, fast or slow, your choice. Deep & slow is spiritual. Fast & shallow is animalistic.
How long can you keep this up before losing focus?
How close are we to the brink of something? Or how close to a shore? Electrical essences in the basement! Do you realize how much things have changed in the past two centuries?
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
A man walks upright.
For him it is strenuous to climb a steep hill, because he has to keep pushing his own vertical mass upward and cannot gain any momentum.
The rabbit is better off. His forelegs support his horizontal body and the great back legs do the work. They are more than equal to thrusting uphill the light mass in front of them. Rabbits can go fast uphill. In fact, they have so much power behind that they find going downhill awkward, and sometimes, in flight down a steep place, they may actually go head over heels.
On the other hand, the man is five or six feet above the hillside and can see all round. To him the ground may be steep and rough but on the whole it is even, and he can pick his direction easily from the top of his moving, six-foot tower.
Watership Down (1972) by Richard Adams
Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible – that ideas were deathless and truth immortal.
But that was true only in the subtlest sense, and not superficially true at all.
There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the non-moral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind & speech & culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture.
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter Miller