Category Archives: Existential

27-NAPS

Hesitation

Zugzwang means “a compulsion to move”. It is a term used in chess to describe a situation where the player is forced to make a move, but every available move is a disadvantage.

If it wasn’t an obligation, the player would prefer not to move at all.

16-TURN

Destination

Changing Weather

GO, and 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

31-Perf

Infinity

Chivalry by Neil Baiman & Colleen Doran

Man must part company with the inferior & superficial. The important thing is to remain firm.

Accomplish one’s task – Courage, no matter what happens.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Ben Klinefelter (American, b. 1955)

15-Teob

Hyperventilation

Matteo BassiniQuanta

With a neurophysical/biological computer embedded inside our skulls, we are fields of consciousness transcending time & space. Consciousness is an expression of a cosmic intelligence that permeates the entire universe and all of existence.

The Holotropic Mind by Stanislav Grof

10-Rior

Seduction

Who but an atheist could think of leaving the world without having first made up his account?

It is then he will find in what mighty stead that heathen goddess, that virtue, which you and all other deists of the age adore, will stand him.

Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding

Avoid at all cost the priorities in your life that aren’t in your top five, because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to form the core of your life, yet seductive enough to distract you from the priorities that matter most.

Oliver Burkeman

19-Hill

Revelation

I glanced round the bus.

Though the windows were closed, and soon muffed, the bus was full of light. It was cruel light.

I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded.

One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then-there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus – I caught sight of my own.

And still the light grew.

The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

12-Dirt

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.