Thickened Light

"We are realizing that somehow the notion of an observer outside the system with a god-like objectivity and zero input into the situation -- that was a necessary fiction for the more naive program of [Cartesian] description of nature. But as we move into the more sophisticated description of nature, we have to place the observer in the picture...We should accept that [systems are], in principle, mysterious. And so we are never explaining life, or relationships, or economies, or whatever it is we're looking at; rather we are describing them with evermore prescient accuracy. But we cannot eliminate the unknown."

People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you are afraid.

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. The life which society proposes to me to live is so artificial and complex—bolstered up on many weak supports, and sure to topple down at last—that no man surely can ever be inspired to live it, and only “old fogies” ever praise it. At best some think it their duty to live it. I believe in the infinite joy and satisfaction of helping myself and others to the extent of my ability. But what is the use in trying to live simply, raising what you eat, making what you wear, building what you inhabit, burning what you cut or dig, when those to whom you are allied insanely want and will have a thousand other things which neither you nor they can raise and nobody else, perchance, will pay for? The fellow-man to whom you are yoked is a steer that is ever bolting right the other way.

So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.

All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.