Category Archives: Existential

21-Hail

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MACBETH:
Speak if you can. What are you?
FIRST WITCH:
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
SECOND WITCH
All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
THIRD WITCH
All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!
BANQUO
Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear things that do sound so fair? I’ th’ name of truth, are you fantastical, or that indeed which outwardly you show? My noble partner you greet with present grace and great prediction of noble having and of royal hope, that he seems rapt withal.

MACBETH
Stay, you imperfect speakers. Tell me more. A prosperous gentleman, and to be king stands not within the prospect of belief.
Witches vanish.
BANQUO
The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them. Whither are they vanished?
MACBETH
Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted, as breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!
BANQUO
Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?
MACBETH
Your children shall be kings.
BANQUO
You shall be king.

It is the part of ourselves we do not normally admit to consciousness, let alone expression in action, that slips past the inner censor into our dreams and fantasies.

OUR REBEL EMOTIONS by Bernard Mobbs (1970)

This devilishly charming fellow is only a human nature characteristic. He is human nature itself; the corporeal personality honoring, respecting, reverencing, adoring and worshipping itself as king and as god in his own world.

THE WORD – A PHILOSOPHY (1958) by Edna Sarah Beardsley (re: devil)

12-Murk

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It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville

31-Cont.

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It has always been the individual who calls the group to a larger vision, who insists on compassion and fair play. When the goal of the group ceases to be the individual, that group goes into decline.”

The Sun Magazine

Time is the essence, time is the season, time ain’t no reason, got no time to slow. Burn out the day, burn out the night, I can’t see no reason to put up a fight. I’m livin’ for givin’ the devil his due.”

Blue Öyster Cult

10-Turn

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Changing Weather

Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, because it is now that God favors your works. Enjoy life with the wife you love, all the days of the vain life granted you under the sun. This is your lot in life for the toil of your labors under the sun.

Anything you can turn your hand to, do with what power you have; for there will be no work, no planning, no knowledge, no wisdom in Sheol where you are going.

Ecclesiastes 9:7-10

12-Dirt

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Archaeology

You and I have memories
Longer than the road
That stretches out ahead”

Two of Us by The Beatles, Let It Be (1970)

385 million years from now the world will be vastly different again as well, while the universe, during the same time period, will have changed insignificantly (in comparison to its totality, of course).

The point is: you don’t have to move all that far from where you are now to experience expanded consciousness. Merely step outside. Go to the beach if possible.