chambermaid 1967 © Patti Smith

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“Reality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape.” Miles Hingston, Polytopian, Researcher, Writer, Introduction and Disclaimer, 2011 (via amiquote)

[Piotr Binkowski :: @piotrbinkowski :: "The world blinked, and the frame no longer fit."

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“The core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future (…) The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events. (…) It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.” Tali Sharot, a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, Optimism Bias: Human Brain May Be Hardwired for Hope, Time, June 6, 2011 See also: ☞ The Optimism Bias and Memory (via amiquote)

Egon Schiele

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“In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.” ”

Shaolin Monks Training pic.twitter.com/5NOJalzh57:: — 41 Strange (@41Strange)December 27, 2018

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“Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.” Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist

(via amiquote)

“The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.”

—Kathryn Schulz, American journalist and author, Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong, TED talk [12:00-12:17], Mar 2011. (via amiquote)

Art by Sharyn Bursic

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"If a person were to stop all his outer and inner movements at a given moment in order to see what is acting in him, he would nearly always feel a tendency which has about it something narrow, something heavy, something with a negative aspect that tends to be against, to be egoistic. All that is usually going on unseen. But if he tries to awaken to what is going on in himself, to be sincere, he will be able to witness, in addition to what could be called the 'coarse' life in him, another life of another quality - much subtler, much higher, lighter - that is also part of himself. The contact with this other quality of life helps him to have a quieter presence, as deeper vision. And he feels an urge at that moment to be open to a quality of this sort that would have a force that would be a centre of gravity. He begins to search for a way to serve what he feels would be his real being. “Then he begins to really know that if he lets his attention, his interest, be taken by his automatic tendencies, it deprives him of contact with that other source of life he is searching for. It could be said that there is a continual tendency to sin, in that sense. When these sins are spoken of as deadly, it means that these tendencies - if they are allowed to rule - at every moment deprive the human being of the possibility of turning towards this real life.”

~ Pauline de Dampierre

Sidney Herbert Sime, “Landscape Decoration” (nd), oil on canvas (courtesy Sidney H. Sime Memorial Gallery)  :: [Guillaume Gris]

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[Woodchuck Waits – Dec. 1, 2022]

“Deep in his burrow he’s safe from other mouths. It’s his own hunger he has to escape. Winter has wiped bare his vegetarian table. He would starve if he stayed awake. Asleep—a sleep so deep his heart barely beats and his body cools to nearly the temperature of ice—he expends almost no energy. Only at a glacial pace does he burn the fat he added eating up to three pounds of greens and fruit each lush day of summer. In deep sleep his hunger is subdued, his substance shrinks, but is not consumed.”

–Gayle Boss, All Creation Waits: the Advent Mystery of New Beginnings,  p. 45