Creatively Advancing into Novelty
What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in your hand Ah, what then? ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge Long ago, there lived far to…
“In alchemy, alcohol is used to extract the soul essence of an entity. Hence its’ use in extracting essences for essential oils, and the sterilization of medical instruments. By consuming alcohol into the body, it in effect extracts the very essence of the soul, allowing the body to be more susceptible to neighboring entities most…
If I were to quickly describe to someone what I thought good, healthy religion was I would say this: religion is one part art, one part play, and one part contemplation. So, religion is art in the sense that it taps into that same, beautiful, liminal space that good art taps into; I like the…
“Prehensions are the way that what is there becomes something here. A prehension is the bond between two actual occasions. The past occasion shares in the constitution of the new occasion…” “Suppose you are listening to music. You hear the final chord of a musical phrase. But why do you hear it as the final…
“Then he punctuates the story with one of his most theologically challenging statements: ‘Thus the last will be first and the first will be last.’ And the privileged people who worked a full day are irate. They can’t believe it! They were expecting equality. They were expecting to get paid more than the people who…
“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others” –Nelson Mandela With all that’s been going on lately regarding the evocation of “free speech” from hate groups on the right, I wanted to jot down some more reflections…
“The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” –Karl Marx I just listened to a couple episodes of a podcast (episode i, episode ii) that I recently discovered, which is distributed by the Christian…
“If the nature of reality is processual and relational, then a diplomatic approach to truth is the only adequate way to respond to it. With every encounter with other psyches, we make the truth anew. Reality doesn’t just sit there waiting for the most clear-headed intellect to uncover. Reality is participatory and co-created, not just…
“But there is no society in isolation…The environment, together with the society in question, must form a larger society in respect to more general characters than those defining the society from which we started. Thus we arrive at the principle that every society requires a social background, of which it is itself a part.” —…
“Everything we know about the adolescent brain, in particular, would suggest that the school day ought to start much later in the morning, if not after lunch. That’s a simple example of the way that schools can actually work against the optimal development of the brain. There’s also the fact that for a very long…