the ars memoria
and this is thought to be the origin of the word whiskey
the ancient mnemonic technique of building architectural databases inside your skull
"We are as chipmunks to these mighty elephants of recall. Having externalized our memories, we squirrel facts away in written texts, hard-discs, and Palm Pilots rather than swallow them whole. And yet with the immense honeycomb of cyberspace — the supreme amputation of memory — we spiral around again to the experience of memory as a space of information, a three-dimensional realm that's outside ourselves while simultaneously tucked inside an exploratory space that resembles the mind. From this perspective, Saint Augustine's paean to memory in the Confessions suggests not only the realms of the artificial memory but also the evanescent grids of cyberspace: "Behold the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things." Augustine calls this an "inner place, which is as yet no place," piled high with images, information, emotions, and experiences. "Over all these do I run, I fly," he writes, sounding like one of Gibson's console cowboys. "I dive on this side and that, as far as I can, and there is no end."
"No wonder Aristotle warned his readers that memory palaces could leak into the dreams of their users — adepts of the art were trafficking with the fierce phantasms of the unconscious."
- Erik Davis
Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft
[excerpts from TechGnosis]
I have been a text addict since the age of two. Bedtime stories were my gateway drug, my first pusher, Dr. Seuss. But then it seemed so innocent, so harmless, and so enjoyable. Indeed, my own parents encouraged my habit and, as I grew older, schoolteachers endorsed my proclivity, allowing me to sit on the edge of the playground and read, while my classmates bounced balls and swung from bars. But, in those days and at that age, it really was more wholesome."
- Richard Glen Boire
Diary of a Text Addict
"So don't ask yourself what people want. Ask instead, What is true? What really inspires me, excites me? What will really help people and take away their confusion and suffering? It's sort of a funny, crazy way to go, but I think it's the only way to bring water to the wasteland Joseph Campbell described. When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh and say, "Fantastic - I wasn't mad or alone in thinking that, after all!" So often we are left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with this external and internal propaganda system. At that point, for someone to tell us the truth is a gift. In a world where people all around us are lying and confusing us, to be honest is a great kindness."
- David Edwards
Nothing to Lose but our Illusion
"Understanding information as a specific category of consciousness is a foundation of spiritual work. Our knowledge arises from information, and the form that knowledge takes is affected not only by the content of the information we take in, but on how, when, and in what form we take it in. As kabbalists know, meditating on the organization of information is often as important as the information itself. This has never been more true than today, an age when we so desperately seek to organize the information that's gushing all around us, while simultaneously remaining sensitive to the truly relevant messages, from both within and without, that are so easily drowned out by the noise of the world."
- Erik Davis
Tongues of Fire, Whirlwinds of Noise
Images of Spiritual Information
"I go to a pub and talk to another man. He is experienced deeply part of the time, and shallowly another part of the time, depending on the quality of my consciousness. If I am very conscious, meeting him can be an experience comparable to great music or even an earthquake; if I am in the usual shallow state, he barely "makes an impression." If I am practicing alertness and neurological self-criticism, I may observe that I am only experiencing him part of the time, and that part of the time I am not-tuning-in but drifting off to my favorite “Real” Universe and editing out at the ear-drum much of what he is saying. Often, the “Real” Universe hypnotizes me sufficiently that, while I “hear” what he says, I have no idea of the way he says it or what he means to convey."
- Robert Anton Wilson
Creative Agnosticism
"One of the greatest achievements of the human mind, modern science, refuses to recognize the depths of its own creativity, and has now reached the point in its development where that very refusal blocks its further growth.
Modern physics screams at us that there is no ultimate material reality and that whatever it is we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.
- Roger Jones
Physics as Metaphor
you'll find flies,
and Buddhas"
- Issa
"Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? "
- Annie Dillard
The Writing Life
"A mystic is someone who wants to understand the universe, but is too lazy to study physics."
- anonymous
"Common sense is what tells you that the world is flat."
- Bertrand Russell
"Writing is a more faithful mistress than any woman you'll ever find."
- Charles Bukowski
you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.
You must write every single day of your life.
You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books,
and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head,
vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.
You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders
to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats
upon your crazy heads.
I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse
that will last a lifetime.
I wish craziness and foolishness and madness
upon you.
May you live with hysteria,
and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise.
Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.
And out of that love, remake a world."
- Ray Bradbury
"If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism. The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the material and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description."
- Albert Einstein
"Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance."
- Daniel Boorstin
"The Inferno of God is not in need of
the splendor of fire. When, at the end of things,
Judgment Day resounds on the trumpets
and the earth opens and yields up its entrails
and nations reconstruct themselves from dust
to bow down before the unappealable Judgment,
eyes then will not see the nine circles
within the inverted mountain, nor the pale
meadow of perennial asphodels
in which the shadow of the archer follows
the shadow of the deer, eternally,
nor the ridge of fire on the very lowest level
of the infernos of the Muslim faith,
antedating Adam and the Fall,
nor the violence of metals, not even
the almost visible blindness of Milton.
No fearful labyrinth of threefold iron,
no doleful fires of suffering, will oppress
the awestruck spirits of the damned.
Nor does the far point of the years conceal
a secret garden. God does not require --
to celebrate the merits of the good life --
globes of light, concentric theories
of thrones and heavenly powers and cherubim,
nor the beguiling mirror that is music,
nor all the many meanings in a rose,
nor the fateful splendor of a single
one of his tigers, nor the subtleties
of a sunset turning gold in the desert,
nor the immemorial, natal taste of water.
In God's infinite compass, there are no gardens,
no flash of hope, no glint of memory.
In the clear glass of a dream, I have glimpsed
the Heaven and Hell that lie in wait for us:
when Judgment Day sounds in the last trumpets
and planet and millennium both
disintegrate, and all at once, O Time,
all your ephemeral pyramids cease to be,
the colors and the lines that trace the past
will in the semi-darkness form a face,
a sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable
(the face of the loved one, or, perhaps, your own)
and the sheer contemplation of that face --
never-changing, whole, beyond corruption --
will be, for the rejected, an Inferno,
and, for the elected, Paradise."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"don't worry, nobody has the
beautiful lady, not really, and
nobody has the strange and
hidden power, nobody is
exceptional or wonderful or
magic, they only seem to be
it's all a trick, an in, a con,
don't buy it, don't believe it.
the world is packed with
billions of people whose lives
and deaths are useless and
when one of these jumps up
and the light of history shines
upon them, forget it, it's not
what it seems, it's just
another act to fool the fools
again.
there are no strong men, there
are no beautiful women.
at least, you can die knowing
this
and you will have
the only possible
victory."
- Charles Bukowski
- Robert Ingersoll
"Kerouac persuaded me to stop writing rhyme poems and revising everything fifty thousand times; to just lay it out on the page in the sequence of thought-forms that arise in my mind during the time of composition. This is traditional with twentieth century painting and calligraphy style. Shakespeare never blotted a line according to Ben Johnson. With Kerouac and Burroughs, it wasn’t so much their instruction as the whole ambiance - their directive candor and informality. We were writing for our own amusement and the amusement of our friends, rather than for money or for publication. We assumed that nothing would be published from the very beginning . So the private world of my friends became the center of our artistic activities, rather than the public world of publishing, media, universities and literature.
If you’re just writing for yourself and your friends, then you don’t have to develop inhibitions. People develop inhibitions from the commercial or social situation, they’re not born with them. So in this case, since we didn’t expect to succeed and we were just having fun with each other, we just never developed those inhibitions. So as a result, we never developed the manner or style of counterfeit literariness that is characteristic of most university or academic poetry or prose. You know that Burrough’s scene, the routine about the talking asshole in Naked Lunch? Well, it wasn’t necessarily meant to be published. I mean, at that time it was considered impossible, so it wasn’t thought of in that realm at all. It was thought of as being just intelligent humor between friends."
- Allen Ginsberg on writing with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs
1.) We judge matters so superficially that ordinary acts and words, done and spoken with some flair and some knowledge of worldly matters, often succeed better than the greatest cleverness.
2.) To be too dissatisfied with ourselves is a weakness. To be too satisfied with ourselves is a stupidity.
3.) Mean-spirited mediocrities, especially those with a smattering of learning, are the most likely to be opinionated. Only strong minds know how to correct their opinions and abandon a bad position.
4.) Wealth does not teach us to transcend the desire for wealth. The possession of many goods does not bring the repose of not desiring them.
5.) We so love all new and unusual things that we even derive a secret pleasure from the saddest and most tragic events, both because of their novelty and because of the natural malignity that exists within us.
6.) There is no one who cannot derive great help and great benefit from learning; but there are also only a few people who do not receive a great harm from the light and knowledge they have received by learning, unless they use their knowledge in a manner both fit and natural for them.
7.) Self-love is even deceived by self-love, because by looking out for our own interests and disregarding those of other people, we lose the advantage that comes with the exchange of favors.
8.) Often the desire to appear competent impedes our ability to become competent, because we are more anxious to display our knowledge than to learn what we do not know.
From the Maxims of Madame de Sablè
A contemporary of Molière
Translated from the French by Arthur Chandler
The Learned Ladies
"The nature of mind is like empty space, like the sky, which at present is filled with clouds and fog and mist and periodically has all kinds of activity such as hailstorms, snowstorms, rainstorms and thunder and lightning."
- Kalu Rinpoche
"There are two kinds of witnesses. One kind is the people that surround you. You are constantly aware that you are being watched, witnessed. With so many eyes watching you, you are reduced to an object... And you are afraid because they may not appreciate you. They may not feed your ego, they may not like you, they may reject you. Now you are in their hands.
The second kind of witnessing is totally different. It is not that you hanker for others' attention: on the contrary, you start paying attention to yourself. You become a witness to your own being. You start watching your thoughts, desires, dreams, motives, greeds and jealousies. You create a new kind of awareness within you. You become a center, a silent center which goes on watching whatsoever is happening. You are angry, and you watch it. You are not just angry, a new element is introduced into it: you are watching it. And the miracle is that if you can watch anger, the anger disappears without being repressed.
Witness the witness itself - and... the ultimate ecstasy is created. Start watching your thoughts but don't stop there... One more thing has to be done, one more step: now watch the watcher... Nothing else is left, only you are. By watching the mind, the mind disappears. By watching the witness, the witness expands and becomes universal."
- Osho
The Book of Wisdom
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin - more even than death... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
- Bertrand Russell
"Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existential tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, or panic. Nobody seems to know how to deal with it (he would of course), and plain persons generally are reported to have little difficulty in saying, seeing, hearing, and doing nothing.
The friends of nothing may be divided into two distinct though not exclusive classes: the know-nothings, who claim a phenomenological acquaintance with nothing in particular, and the fear-nothings, who, believing, with Macbeth, that "nothing is but what is not," are thereby launched into dialectical encounter with nullity in general.
If nothing whatsoever existed, there would be no problem and no answer, and the anxieties even of existential philosophers would be permanently laid to rest. Since they are not, there is evidently nothing to worry about. But that itself should be enough to keep an existentialist happy. Unless the solution be, as some have suspected, that it is not nothing that has been worrying them, but they who have been worrying it."
- P. L. Heath
"There have been men whose names are unknown because they cared little for fame, and truth radiated from them without knowing it. There have been revealers who were unaware of the revelation that was in them; modest sages who mingled their wisdom with their daily life . . . We have all of us met, at least once in our lives, one of these unheralded initiators, and received from them a priceless gift, by a kindly word, a certain look of sadness, a sincere expression in the eyes."
- Maurice Magre
The Return of the Magi
were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them
a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground,
look at it, and put it away in his pocket.
The friend said to the devil, "What did that man pick up?"
"He picked up a piece of Truth," said the devil.
"That is a very bad business for you, then," said his friend.
"Oh, not at all," the devil replied, "I am going to let him organize it."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth,'' and so it goes away. Puzzling."
- Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"The strange are often the best defended; that is how they have kept themselves strange. "I am not on my guard against deceivers, I must be without caution," Zarathustra said. Their hearts are not guarded deliberately, but by being essentially impenetrable."
[Note: All lines spoken by Zarathustra were assembled from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the translation by R. J. Hollingdale]
"Imagine that you are five years older. Imagine that, over the course of those five years, you got a tattoo. What would it say? Would you be embarrassed by it? Then why did you get it in the first place, for crying out loud? I don't see why you'd waste good money getting something you wouldn't want to show people. You're just a rotten spendthrift! Get your life together, already! Wow, that was cathartic. Okay, now imagine that you're ten years older."
- Francis Heaney
some little fables to help you in your life
"Any man, in the right situation, is capable of being a great lover. But not every man can say, "The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick." In conclusion, great lovers and tongue twisters are not as similar as you might think."
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
"Philosophy being nothing else but the study of wisdom and truth, it may with reason be expected that those who have spent most time and pains in it should enjoy a greater calm and serenity of mind, a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men. Yet so it is, we see the illiterate bulk of mankind that walk the high-road of plain common sense, and are governed by the dictates of nature, for the most part easy and undisturbed. To them nothing that is familiar appears unaccountable or difficult to comprehend. They complain not of any want of evidence in their senses, and are out of all danger of becoming Skeptics. But no sooner do we depart from sense and instinct to follow the light of a superior principle, to reason, meditate, and reflect on the nature of things, but a thousand scruples spring up in our minds concerning those things which before we seemed fully to comprehend. Prejudices and errors of sense do from all parts discover themselves to our view; and, endeavoring to correct these by reason, we are insensibly drawn into uncouth paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as we advance in speculation, till at length, having wandered through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves just where we were, or, which is worse, sit down in a forlorn Skepticism."
- George Berkeley
a treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge
"Could I be replaced with such a complete duplicate - every atom, not just genetically identical - it would think that it was me? But clearly it would not be me, especially if I were not destroyed in the replacement and continued to exist off somewhere else. We can imagine that such complete identity might produce a being that would simply see itself as existing in two places at once, but this would require some kind of communication; and that would require the existence of some kind of extrasensory or paranormal connection between the two bodies, which is not now part of established science. Without such paranormal communication, the identical individuals would each think of themselves as the original individual, although only one of them would be right; and they would immediately begin to diverge as individuals because of differing experiences."
- Kelley L. Ross
Thought Experiments on the Soul
"Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess. It is unlikely that this is an error on their part; it seems rather to be evidence in support of the view that the power of forming a good judgment and of distinguishing the true from the false, which is properly speaking what is called Good sense or Reason, is by Nature equal in all men. Hence too it will show that the diversity of our opinions does not proceed from some men being more rational than others by solely from the fact that our thoughts pass through diverse channels and the same objects are not considered by all. For to be possessed of good mental powers is not sufficient; the principal matter is to apply them well. The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues, and those who proceed very slowly may, provided they always follow the straight road, really advance much faster than those who, though they run, forsake it."
- René Descartes
Discourse on the Method
Mechanistic Philosophy and the Yellow Brick Road of Science
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