Category Archives: Existential

10-Rior

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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

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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

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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.

26-Trak

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Framework

Willow Glen Plaza
Odd August (6-day week!) <- click to get current month

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire–why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express & admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals–and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

23-Cosm

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Everything

Map of the Universe According to Tycho Brahe’s System

Copperplate engraving on paper, hand colored from the Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1660)

How do you feel about it all?