Saga in Cyberspace

The individual who understands transformism can escape identity, understanding that the distinctions between things are fluid and nothing ever does perfectly conform to any distinct model. Escaping identity means escaping from conformity to a model. In Guo Xiang’s commentary of the Zhuangzi, the ‘self’ is taken to refer to a false notion of our identity. For the true self Guo typically uses a particular word, zi 自, which has an unusual grammatical character: it also means ‘self’, but it can be read as an adverb rather than a noun, meaning ‘spontaneously’. Thus, Guo could be suggesting that the true self is not a thing at all, but a kind of spirit of spontaneity. All other kinds of self are what he calls ji 跡, or ‘traces’. Ji 跡 literally means ‘footprints’, meaning models to be imitated – ideas of the various identities that we could potentially give ourselves.

Many places have a "forest that shouldn't be entered." Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don't know what is there, but I think they are real . . . The world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. The world doesn't exist just for humans. So I think it is all right to have such things. This is why I think it's a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings . . . I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.

We measure and evaluate and judge. We distinguish and classify and categorize. We hypothesize and test and infer. By doing these things repeatedly, we construct a perfectly objective world that we can perfectly understand and perfectly control.

“A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.”

“The unspeakable is, of course, not a boundary dividing a positive area of allowability from a complete and totalized negativity, a boundary located at least one step beyond the forbidden (and the forbidden, by definition — no? — must be speakable if its proscriptive power is to function). If we pursue the boundary as such, it will recede before us as a limit of mists and vapors. Certainly it is not a line drawn in any absolute way across speech or writing. It is not a fixed and locatable point of transgression that glows hotter and brighter as we approach it till, as we cross it, its searing heat burns away all possibility of further articulation. Rather it is a set of positive conventions governing what can be spoken of (or written about) in general; in particular, it comprises the endlessly specialized tropes (of analysis, of apology, of aesthetic distance) required to speak or write about various topics at various anomalous places in our complex social geography — places where such topics are specifically not usually (or ever) spoken of: What is speakable between client and accountant is unspeakable between newly introduced acquaintances at a formal dinner party. […] What is speakable between a magazine essayist and an audience concerned with art and analysis is unspeakable between a popular journalist and an audience concerned with “everyday” news.”

“What I wrote you here is an electronic drawing without past or future: it is simply now.”

If we take Heidegger seriously, people can adopt attitudes toward modern technology that avoid dehumanization. In the Heideggerian context, "dehumanization" means for people to lose their understanding of human Dasein's world-disclosive capacity and thus to become nothing but clever animals, that is, particularly flexible raw material useful for increasing the power of the self-sustaining technological system . . . Successful coping with the new technological opportunities and requirements would involve learning how to be attuned to oneself as a flexible resource, while not understanding oneself as such a resource at all times and places.

“Each of us has suffered a primordial inner schism with the result that any given human self is only part of a once-intact greater self. Each of us is alienated from the world (man contra world) because each of us is alienated from himself, not just warring or in conflict: no: the parts of the self have become separated from each other and because of that, experience of world is partial, occluded, impaired, deformed. A partial self experiences a partial world, with the result that world is alien, irreal, hostile, strange, arousing perplexity and dread. Man does not understand world because he does not understand himself…”

“This state of ‘no-mind’ exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation. To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit.”

"not pantheism, just pan-"

“For Freud, the questions for the modern person are not just 'How can I survive?’ but ‘What makes my life worth living for?’ ‘What are the pleasures without which I cannot live?’ It is among the contentions of this book that our unlived lives — the lives we live in fantasy, the wished-for lives — are often more important to us than our so-called lived lives, and that we can't (in both senses) imagine ourselves without them; that they are an essential part of the ways in which we answer Freud's questions. And it is not incidental to this that in our unlived lives we are rather more transgressive than we tend to be in our lived lives.”

“Who among us has not, by chance, looked in the mirror and felt surprised? For a fraction of a second we see ourselves as an object to be looked at. Some might call this narcissism, but I would call it: the joy of being. The joy of finding in our external face echoes of our internal face: ah, so it's true, I didn’t just imagine myself, I actually exist.”

"Anyone who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it: yet this incommensurability, between the particular and the universal, between the vecu and language itself, is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge."

« I have indicated that the energy for the work of self-discipline derives from love, which is a form of will. It follows, then, not only that self-discipline is usually love, translated into action, but also that any genuine lover behaves with self-discipline and any genuinely loving relationship is a disciplined relationship. If I truly love another, I will obviously order my behavior in such a way as to contribute the utmost to his or her spiritual growth. […] Passion is feeling of great depth. The fact that a feeling is uncontrolled is no indication whatsoever that it is any deeper than a feeling that is disciplined. […] We must not assume that someone whose feelings are modulated and controlled is not a passionate person. »

In the course of the eighteenth century, alchemy perished in its own obscurity. Its method of explanation “obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius” (the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown) was incompatible with the spirit of enlightenment and particularly with the dawning science of chemistry towards the end of the century. But these two new intellectual forces only gave the coup de grace to alchemy. Its inner decay had begun at least a century earlier, at the time of Jakob Böhme, when many alchemists deserted their alembics and melting-pots and devoted themselves entirely to (Hermetic) philosophy. It was then that the chemist and the Hermetic philosopher parted company. Chemistry became natural science, whereas Hermetic philosophy lost the empirical ground from under its feet and aspired to bombastic allegories and inane speculations which were kept alive only by memories of a better time. This was a time when the mind of the alchemist was still grappling with the problems of matter, when the exploring consciousness was confronted by the dark void of the unknown, in which figures and laws were dimly perceived and attributed to matter although they really belonged to the psyche. Everything unknown and empty is filled with psychological projection; it is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter, or thinks he can see, is chiefly the data of his own unconscious which he is projecting into it. In other words, he encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious.

"& I ran out of money because my work

“Your presence is translucent, crystalline, I see gardens beyond it and am swept away to high wildernesses,”