"It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one´s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know!" (James Baldwin)

"If you have never believed yourself to be entitled to anything, you are less likely to turn against others than you are to turn against yourself." (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)

"We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people. This is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures." (John A. Powell)

"When our actions begin to integrate with our beliefs, when we are doing some of the work that we know needs to be done, we have less need for the various doubles our culture offers up disguised as a good life. The allure of disappearing into our digital avatars wanes. Doubles are our opiates, we have less need for them when there is less pain and dissonance to escape." (Naomi Klein - Doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world)

"You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach. You probably don´t feel your body in those places. It is as if you have two distinct bodies. You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about you day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales...a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger." (Daisy Hildyard - The Second Body)

"At some point you´d have to live as if the truth was true." (weather station/tamara lindeman - loss).

"When people and societies enter into a state of shock, they lose their identities and their footing. Calm is a form of resistance. Calm is not a replacement fo righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves." (Naomi Klein - Doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world)

"Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feeling right - the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else´s profit, te feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it´s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy. Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion. But suspicion directed at the wrong target is a very dangerous thing." (Naomi Klein - Doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world)

"The people who are the exploiters of this planet are people who put themselves first. Unable to unself even for a moment. Put a little differently, the climate crisis can be understood as a surplus of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. It can also be understood as a surplus of self - a result of all the literal and figurative energy it takes to perform and perfect the selves fortunate enough to live outside the Shadow Lands"

(Naomi Klein - Doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world)

fixed

"He who builds children palaces tears down prison walls." (Julius Tandler)

JAMILLOS: Kéž by to tak bylo, ale oni do té propasti nepadají - ta hrstka těch druhých je neustále zachraňuje. (kdo je vlastně hloupější?)

“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.” (José Saramago)

"Aby se člověk cítil ve světě doma, musí si ho svou imaginací zabydlet." (Martin Heidegger)

"Choosing non-duality over duality is dualistic act." (David Chaim Smith)

PF 2024

Aubade
BY PHILIP LARKIN

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Devs - Poetry Scene - (Aubade by Philip Larkin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DtMAUZ-p8

There can be no knowledge of oneself except in relationship - in relation to all of life. Why? Because, in truth, there is but a single body - the body of life. The enlightened wisdom that all beings seek is found in perfect relationship so intimate that there is no separation between known, knower and the knowing. In this knowledge we are the oak, and the one who cuts down the oak, and the bird who lives in the oak and the watcher of the oak.

Technology, information, knowledge, these all tend to give "mastery over" but not the wisdom of what to do with that mastery. If this partial knowing is developed lopsidedly, as within our culture, then there is deep alienation with ourselves, our bodies, nature. This alienation breeds an aggression whose hostility lashes out at the body of life. As the anorexic is at war with their embodiment, humanity is now at war with its enworldment.

The frenetic pace of technology allows for greater communication but less and less communion. Social media allows for huge amounts of talking but there is little true listening. To understand life in its wholeness, to understand yourself, or any "other", you must develop a tremendous stillness, capacity for listening, observation. For this you must face the addiction to stimulation that our culture offers to replace the loss of intimacy.

To know the world with open-hearted tenderness insures that one will indeed be broken hearted but also that one will know joy - both the joy of this world and an unborn joy beyond touch of decay or corruption. in this joy one discovers a love of live, a love in life, a love that pervades life. This Love of Life knows there must be relationship unspoiled by the wounds of memory. The mind, still, silent, without avoidance is swept through by the wildfire of Love and grief.

100 Days of Enlightened Mind by Traktung Khepa - Issuu
https://issuu.com/traktung.khepa/docs/eye_to_form_is_only_love_original