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#panpsychism
thetempleoftheone · 5 months
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The Body & Lust
The body is neutral; it is neither good nor evil.
It has features that are appealing because of millions of years of evolution.
These features are meant to attract a mate and perpetuate the species.
Because of this, we experience lust.
But the body is not to blame for lust. Lust, as an organic impulse, is the product of an ancient chain of causation arising within the deep seriality of terrestrial time.
Lust is simply an energy, an aspect of human life meant to perpetuate the species. It is neither good nor evil, it merely is.
When people suffer over lust, they either cling to it because they desire pleasure, or they resist it because they see it as evil or unclean.
When lust presents itself, if we greet it with clarity and mindfulness, we can see that lust is just lust.
It has no power to control us and because it is not evil, we cannot be polluted by the experience of it.
If we descend into the energy of lust and give it dominion, we suffer from endless dissatisfaction in search of more pleasure.
And when we ignorantly run from lust out of disgust or fear we deny the reality of our being and establish harsh moral dualities without any basis.
It is when we greet the energy of lust calmly and mindfully, without judgment or attachment, that it ultimately passes through and away from us. © JM Tiffany
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drondskaath · 6 months
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Acausal Intrusion | Panpsychism | 2023
American Technical Death Metal
Artwork by Daniele Valeriani
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cayrico · 4 months
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earthling-wolf · 8 months
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Ni Translocality
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Metaphors & Visual Aphorisms
The Ni function compels the individual to live a slowly paced, hands-off life of observation and reflection on the information structures of the world. They are first and foremost data synthesizers that formulate image-encoded schemas from unconsciously woven patterns in reality. The Ni user will be very graphic in their consciousness, thinking in visuals and representing the world through visual metaphors. These dynamic, but geometric, relationships are registered as essential to reality's functioning and are eventually superimposed onto other life domains in a proverbial form. "A tree's branches can only grow as far up as its roots go down", "flowing water never goes stale" or "every light casts a shadow" are examples of the graphical aphorisms that may develop from this information synthesizing process. For the Ni user, the world is not comprehended through words or axioms but through these visual relationships which words help to convey to others. These relations are often symmetrical in nature --as embodied in concepts like the Taoist yin-yang symbol-- due to the abundance of symmetry observed in life itself. An elaborate worldview inescapably develops predicated on these abstracted relationships, aimed to give life predictability and continuity of narrative. The world is never seen straightforwardly by the Ni user, as reality is formed from representative structures --not rational absolutes. Knowledge, to the Ni user, is the net awareness gained by superimposing layers of these representations on reality and mapping its landscape as far and wide as possible.
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The Mind & Panpsychism
And because he views reality as representation, the Ni user will constantly experience life as a perceptual sphere built from the interactions of mind and material. The world appears as a tapestry woven together by higher forces which underpin every object and substance – causing the objects themselves to feel like the outer shells or totems of fundamental forces. And a sense will often exist – as explored in phenomenology – that consciousness is the essential thing. In some form or another, the Ni user will come to embody the philosophy that the psyche has a degree of priority over the material. One way to imagine this is to say the world constellates itself to the Ni user as being built equally of “psyche” and of matter. Still, every Ni user will synthesize this felt sense in slightly different ways, with some believing that consciousness is the prime constituent of reality and others feeling we are co-creators of reality by our active participation in how it appears to us and how we ascribe meaning to the contents within it. This can lead magnetically to a type of panpsychism, where the Ni user views the contents of the mind seriously as entities, forces, energies and contours as perceivable as literal objects are to other people. These psychological images and forces will not only be present, but will also be persistent. To them the psyche has a steady-yet-fluid shape; an image and terrain that is to be explored through vision and internal perception. And while other types may arrive at similar philosophies through rationality, for the Ni user this sensation is not something deduced but instead simply uncovered, as it represents the default state of their experience. This proclivity naturally leads to an interest in meditation, eastern thought and spirituality which emphasizes these same psychic aspects and presents a philosophy of consciousness more natively aligned to their phenomenological experience.
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Narrowness & Convergence
Yet for all their openness towards surreal ideas about consciousness, the Ni user is not at all random or unstructured in their views. They are scarcely persuaded of most things and are instead highly cautious of ideas overall. The Ni user will have a keen eye for identifying the improbability of things and will not be prone to jump on board with things unless their inner imagery already maps out an inescapable trajectory in that direction. The Ni user is not an inciter or generator of novel things, nor is his specialty a spontaneous creativity, but is instead the holistic assimilation of trends over time, and a convergence of perspective along the most reinforced trend-lines. They generally see only one or a few trajectories stemming from a given situation and are magnetically drawn to the likeliest interpretations. Thus, the ideas the Ni user arrives at are not things he creates, but things he discovers to already be "the case"; often sourcing from an inside-out evaluation of being but just as well from a panoramic evaluation of society. In this way, the Ni user is a sort of investigator or excavator of the primordial imagery in himself and society. More than any other type, the Ni user receives a linear and direct feed of the imagery of the unconscious, and because of this convergence of focus, many Ni users across time continue to re-discover and re-articulate the same things as they unearth the same territory. As Ni users from all ages inquire into questions of being, their convergent intuition guides them to parallel answers and to convey those understandings in imagery --since image is the primary means by which that information is discovered and encoded. A canonical historical archive therefore has developed over time in the form of symbology; the encrypted patterns and representative structures that underpin reality, as collectively uncovered over time.
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Symbology
In this sense, the Ni user may often find camaraderie in the symbology that has been laid down by previous pioneers for its capacity to give a form of articulation to that felt inner content. Strange as it may seem to others to believe or seriously consider such archaic and outdated emblems, the Ni user is drawn to these old images the same way the Si user is drawn to information encoded in the old earth. The Ni user may not wish to be a mystic whatsoever, and when not fully individuated may shrink away from this imagery for fear of academic reprimand. And yet they may feel as though their style of awareness drafts them inescapably into these ideas. They emerge out of themselves when any intense investigation is done or indeed even when no investigation is done. The realm of alchemical symbolism, the Tarot, ayurvedic medicine and Astrology may be studied intently for their capacity to superimpose a representation over life. Shapes also contain a powerful influence over them, and they may be drawn to sacred geometry and mandalas. Numerology may also be investigated. Over time, by studying these emblems with the intention of discovering what their true meanings are, they are slowly transformed into the likeness of those who built them. As they unearth the contents of this domain, they often become affiliated with the taxonomies used by their predecessors to try to express this underworld. However, their dabbling in these ideas may earn them a reputation as a mystic and confuse family and friends who may not understand the significance in such concepts.
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Archetypes & Stereotypes
As the Ni user matures into a personal worldview, a vast archive of typicalities form by these observations. Each pattern of life is epitmoized in the psyche as an general rule or process. This leads quite inescapably to the formation of stereotypes at the local level and archetypes at the universal level --both of which are used to map reality by providing a sense of predictability. In the positive sense, this stereotyping tendency allows for life to be an iconic series of interactions between previously indexed forces and entities. The Ni user will overlay their schema onto the world and see iterations of the same substances everywhere. From this vantage point, certain social or political interactions will appear to them as clockwork; a series of eventualities stemming from two or more colliding forces. The interactions in a neighborhood may be seen through the same light, as categories are applied to each class of person and their collisions cause transformations through a sort of necessary chemistry. But as often captured by the negative sense of the word stereotype, this can lead to errors in perception where a pattern or schema is superimposed over a situation too prematurely. A person is anticipated to be a given way, due to the symbol they represent, while turning out to be quite different. And at the archetypal level, the same simplification may occur where the Ni user reduces the global situation as something emergent from a conflict between the light and dark, the masculine and feminine, an interaction of four or five elements or some other schema which neglects certain subtleties and details. This may be infuriating to those who live with the Ni user as they may feel the Ni user is oversimplifying them, or worse that they are pigeonholing people into their categories --whether of culture, class, race or gender. Many may scoff at the Ni user for depending on what they feel are outdated prejudices and not seeing things at the individual level. But the Ni user cannot ignore what larger pattern someone or something generally belongs to and will tend to incidentally synthesize life from that lens even without any actual investment or commitment to any dogma or belief system.
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Synchronicity & Parapsychology
Another effect that often emerges from the Ni function is a belief in synchronicity. Because of how Ni registers life through a delicate tracking of "significance" --not by the rigidity of causal chains-- the Ni user will instinctively see the value in data associations that converge in theme and motif, even when the cause is yet unknown. As is often the case for both intuitive processes, the pattern is recognized first without needing to have the sensory points explicitly traced and neither does the absence of a sequential explanation make the information alignments vanish. And when Ni is especially strong, seemingly disconnected layers of existence are woven together through an entangled point; compelling many Ni users to contend with the possible existence of the acausal. Certain events or datasets may be felt as crossing different planes of reality and being inexorably related even when a surface examination would see no trace between them. They may be struck by compelling evidence for the existence of extra-sensory perception or remote viewing which allows us to see through the eyes of others or predict their thoughts. For some, relationships may be intuited to exist between oneself and previous lives. Areas of the body may be associated with certain psychic energies through emotional tapping, chakras, iridology or palmistry. Certain recurring numbers may be felt as omens of blessings or catastrophes. If these intimations persist, they can become highly suspicious and feel that certain events will come about in the near future when a given number, detail or sign suggests a karmic force is strongly at play.
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-Behaviors Under Stress
Conspiracy Theories
When the Ni user falls out of mental health, their suspicions degrade further into superstitions, death omens and a persistent state of anxiety. Life becomes chaotic and unpredictable. The world will feel utterly uncertain to them and they will not be able to clearly see the cause of their own suffering or that of society. As they struggle to intuit their situation through perceptual projection, the misfortunes they experience are not interpreted as localized occurrences but are instead epitomized as emerging from some extra-personal force looming over all things. They will start to perceive a woven network of intentions behind everything, pulling the strings of society at large. It's here that we see the Ni user fabricate conspiracy theories; extraterrestrial hypotheses, occult government sects, the imminent rise of a new world order and the like. A sense exists that something unseen is making all this happen, and for once the Ni user loses their non-committal nature and becomes utterly fixated on certain interpretations of life. This will cause them great difficulty in their daily lives as the Ni user may be quickly ostracized from society for their bizarre premonitions. More than a few distressed Ni users throughout history have been branded the local lunatics; eventually growing morose and resentful for what they feel is the lack of foresight and idiocy of the common man.
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Apocalyptic Visions
A different effect we often see in a distressed Ni user is a series of apocalyptic visions. They may experience nightmares, either when asleep or awake, vividly depicting scenes of war, destroyed buildings, massacres and the end of a civilization. And the Ni user may experience these sudden flashes with the same level of physicality with which they experience their waking life --making it difficult to discredit them as illusions. Here we see an unconscious projection and intrusion of their polar sensory function into their mind, causing literal sensations to trigger their nervous system without an actual cause. The relationship between intuition and sensation is a two-way street, where one can seep into the other unbidden when an excessive repression is at its breaking point --allowing their intuitions to unconsciously fabricate sensory experiences that are patterned after their thematic convergence. These unsettling images may cause them to feel that their visions are in fact pending actualities. A memento mori will settle over them. Society is on the brink of collapse; everything is headed in the worst direction and anything short of immediate correction will lead to an irreparable catastrophe.
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constructbreakdown · 2 months
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R.I.P. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623 - 1673)
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If I had a time machine, I would take Margaret Cavendish to Comic-Con.
Song is Panpsychism by Kat Wilson.
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mbti-notes · 8 months
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This is unrelated to MBTI but do you believe in eternity? Is there anything in this life that y believe lasts forever? I have a Christian friend who believes in this concept, hearing her talk about eternal life after death frequently makes me actually curious whether to believe whether anything could last forever. Thanks for reading;)
As a general rule of thumb, I'm open to discussing but not debating matters of faith. Discussion is a process of exploring ideas and concepts, whereas debate is about critically examining ideas and concepts with the goal of arriving at truth. Matters of faith are, by definition, beliefs that are presumed true and thus do not require any explanation or justification. Trying to debate them usually just takes you round and round in circles. If you enjoy that, more power to you, but I personally don't.
What motivates people to hold beliefs based only on faith? Sometimes, it's because you don't know enough but you still need to proceed as though you do. Sometimes, it's because there's no better option. Do YOU want to believe in an eternal afterlife? Why would you? Most likely because you fear the unknown and/or you fear loss. Both fears stem from a deep-seated fear of death that is present in every human who understands their own mortality. Anyone who claims they don't fear death is either lying or hasn't properly acknowledged it yet. People can certainly face death bravely, but it doesn't mean they feel no fear.
Perhaps I'm wrong to assume, but the impression I get from believers in the afterlife is that they believe mainly because they are afraid. Very few people want to believe that death is the absolute end. It's quite painful to confront the possibility that you and everything you've experienced, accomplished, and loved just disappears. And then the world just continues chugging along as though your time meant nothing. Being unable to cope with meaninglessness is an easy way to trip into nihilism. From the perspective of your emotional health and well-being, faith seems like a better option than nihilism, doesn't it?
For the most part, I am a rational person, which means that I strongly prefer my beliefs to be well-supported by facts and reason. However, I will readily acknowledge that what humans know about the universe is infinitesimal. Being trained in philosophy, I'm more than happy to face up to all the things I don't know and, most importantly, I am relatively comfortable existing in ambiguity and uncertainty. Therefore, I don't have much use for faith, on the assumption that people use faith for the purpose of soothing existential fears. I accept and embrace my existential fears.
If I were to seriously consider the question of "eternity", I wouldn't do it from the perspective of death and religion but from physics and metaphysics. Whether there exists anything eternal is a question of what the universe really is at its most fundamental level.
The concept of eternity as it relates to religious afterlife is based on a particular view of physics. For example, it assumes that our conventional human conception of time is objective and real, as in, there is actually a past, present, and future. It also assumes that the true source of what we call human consciousness isn't the physical human body. Given what we currently know about physics and biology, both of these assumptions are difficult to defend.
I don't believe in an afterlife in any religious sense of heaven, hell, purgatory, or reincarnation, though I flirted with these ideas when I was younger and confused by the many religions around me. However, I do tend to believe that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, a view that some theorists call panpsychism. If I was forced to hold a faith-based belief, this is what I would choose.
The "consciousness" that panpsychism refers to is not the same as ego consciousness or whatever you include in your definition of who/what you are. It refers more to whatever animates the fundamental building blocks of the universe and produces the will to move and evolve. In this view, for reasons not yet fully understood, consciousness is neither created nor destroyed but just is, and it's always changing form. I suppose you could call that "eternal". Some people don't like the word consciousness and prefer "energy" or something like that.
Perhaps consciousness doesn't disappear at death but rather dissipates and reconstitutes as something else. Does this count as an "eternal afterlife"? I don't think it does, since there is no meaningful continuation of my personal ego consciousness. But the idea does grant me the tiniest speck of solace nonetheless.
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thebardostate · 2 months
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The Word of God
Lyrics and melody © 1994 by Catherine Faber
From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things - how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.
And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
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afrosatanist · 2 months
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The astrological philosophical perspective I hold is one that combines several different philosophies at its foundations. It is a polytheistic, cosmobiological, panenthiestic, panpsychic, phenomenological approach. It blends understanding through the application of mathematical-spiritual techniques & interpretations to help querents and astrologers alike come to a deeper reverence, purpose, clarity, and awakenings while engaging with and interpreting the chart.
The polytheistic cosmobiological portion helps us render truth from the power-obsessed and Imperial-minded monotheistic conception of spiritually, and the cosmos itself. This philosophical portion combats the notion that Divinity is a singular entity creating and destroying as it sees fit based on some ancient religion and it's particular precepts, or some other temporal religious/mystical/cultural instantiation of orientation of the divine in it's regional-historical scope.
The polytheistic-cosmobiologal portion discussed how in the multiplicity of Divinity's manifestations truth is everything but singular. Truth, if I must make an axiom, is multiplicity itself. This thus means there are now an expansive, yet finite relevant logics that can offer us a spiritual clarity as we remove the impetus to find a hill to war and die in with our individual conception of the Divine Mystery. It speaks it's truths in ways that create, deeper, and resolve dualities, dichotomies, and tensions through a logic that is alive, conscious, and in inextricable relationship to Time. The celestial bodies of our solar system become a relevant discussion for our understand of the methodology of his astrology is capable of functioning as a diviner's tool, but also as a spiritual/cosmically intelligent arithmetic that provides a language and logic for the material and metaphysical events that happen in our human lives on our own celestial planetary home.
In Western Astrology, we liken the planets unto mythic deities, with desires, tendencies, domains, and intentions and then track what those may manifest as when interpret placements, aspects and other patterns in the slew of different charts we have for our different analyses. If in our practices, both now as a divination tradition passed down historically with it's particular philosophical schools, and as a functional language when applying said philosophical schools notions for interpretations, it's smooth and consistently accurate when we give (divine) consciousness to multiple celestial bodies, we reinforce the logical proof of the next portions of my philosophical foundation, Panpsychism and Panenthiesm.
This becomes logically overlapping and expansive with ideas above. If it makes sense, spiritually through meditative practice or enhanced perception, if it makes sense linguistically and practically through interpretations that lend clarity and healing, and it makes sense logically and atithmetically through the mathematical techniques applied that gave us the interpretative clarity, we run into territory of Panenthiesm's logical forms. Panenthiesm asserts that Divinity is in all things, and all things are within Divinity. There's is nothing that exists that doesn't contain or isn't made up of the same celestial-conscious materials of the very deified cosmos themselves. This also becomes an important backdrop by which can show that no matter the occurrence, it's form, it's energetic presences, it exists and belongs within the cosmos. All things have a significance and purpose under this understanding, taking us to our explanation of Panpsychism. The Deified Consciousness of the cosmos is itself the ground floor of all of materiality, Panpsychism's philosophy asserts. That all things are conscious in varying degrees, but still built of the very same Divine Intelligence that allows our astrological (or any divination tradition/tool/technique) to be capable of provide any worthwhile, meaningful application and answer.
The mathematical, the biophysical, the cosmic/astronomical, the spiritual, the psychic/emotional all become interconnected and layered over each other multidimensionally in this perspective. It becomes the logical tracks that Divinity can communicate to itself, i.e. whether through humans practicing divination or plants growing in predetermined (and also dynamic) shapes and forms.
Next becomes a very important philosophical portion for those practicing and receiving astrological divination. The phenomenological approach of the utmost importance when it comes to both a diviner and a querent. The phenomenological approach asserts that this is matter of cross-paradigmatic navigation every time we communicate anything, let alone what are supposed to be Divined Communiques from Cosmic Deific Forces themselves. The Phenomenological portion reminds us that in the multiplicity of truth, power is humility, grace, an open heart and mind, because in the lack of understanding language, our bodies are attuned to respond to feelings/energetic resonances. What may not make sense in my worldview, individually or culturally, is still capable of being received, heard, and felt (again, even if nonsensically), meaning that spiritual practice and one's personal worldview is inevitably and inextricably linked to the ability to divine, interpret, or receive the fullness of any understanding or awareness. We speak through semiotic veils at all moments, and the more complex of a topic or logic we get to the more paradigmaric curtains must be acknowledged, and to the best of our ability, pulled back. This keeps us from an arrogant assumption of a singular divine truth needing to break through another's world for value and integration, no psycho-colonialism needed, just an open hand and clarified awareness of the moment and the information for the sake of healing, evolution, and further awakenings.
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mentagenesis · 7 months
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Soul Abilities Rediscovered.
by Daniel Wolfert. For a long time I’ve been convinced that materialistic rationalism has robbed us of abilities that are innate and quite natural to us as humans. During the 18th and 19th centuries cultures that had adopted materialistic and rationalistic thinking came into contact with what they considered to be primitive cultures and dismissed their beliefs as mere superstition. Ironically,…
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escuerzoresucitado · 2 years
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thetempleoftheone · 5 months
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Being Is A Relational Spectrum
Each of us is an aggregate of approximately 37.2 trillion cells that has taken approximately 13.82 billion years to come into existence.
We evolved from a brilliant eruption of energy into an expanding cosmic void. We are manifestations of this energy’s complexity, expressions of the infinite configured minutely in microcosmic array.
We are the energy and matter of the universe: we have been and will be trillions of things. And yet, always, we are that which we were and will be: all that is.
You are the conscious universe made flesh in a dream of self. We are the living, dreaming universe, and participate in its creation; our agency, and our perceptions, combine with chaos, and pattern, to form the golden knot which binds us, one to another, and all to totality.
Being is a relational spectrum and a closed whole: there are no individuals, only aggregates bonded by essential life processes within greater and more complex aggregates that emerge and disappear within a torus of void and energy: spiraling entwined in constant transubstantiation, all things come to be and pass away in accord with the rhythm of the One.
There are endless worlds and countless dreams within the spiraling whole, all singular in source and name, each of them flowers blooming in the dark limbs of Eternity, all of us seeds sewn in the glittering garden of the Night.
©️ JM Tiffany
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technicolorshow · 28 days
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don’t worry we’re all connected
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cayrico · 3 months
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imo reality is a self-reflective network of prismatic mirrors, reflecting and refracting the light of being in infinite ways
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footnotes-2-plato · 10 months
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NYTimes profile on mycologist Merlin Sheldrake mentions Whitehead (and me)
Today’s New York Times featured a profile on my friend, mycologist Merlin Sheldrake. In addition to discussing the philosophical implications of his scientific research, the article shares a bit about his magical childhood and fascinating family. Do give it a read. Merlin was kind enough to mention a collaboration with me to sort out the various conceptual tendrils linking his mycological…
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third-nature · 1 year
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Words without context is confusing. “Culty anon” mentioned “creepy religious ceremony” when referring to D0llfies. It’s most likely a case of hearsay gone very wrong, but I still find it interesting regardless. Call it an Oldie’s moment, if you will.
Most polytheistic cultures believe in some forms of panpsychism. This a belief that inanimate things can be sentient. If you think this is some esoteric mumbo-jumbo, you don’t have to look very far from New Age concepts of “Mother Earth” and “energy healing” to see it in action. Even the oft-referred “Law of Attraction” finds its origins in panpsychism – “The Universe” is a sentient being that listens to you and interacts with you on a personal, intimate level. It’s the lyrics to “Colours of the Wind” if you will. The diametrical opposite of panpsychism is materialism, which is a belief that everything can be reduced to unfeeling matter and anything can be interchanged.
Asian cultures take panpsychism seriously. Everything around you has some kind of a sentience, from the ground you walk on to your daily utensils. People are encouraged to live harmoniously with everything around them because everything has a spirit. This belief shows up even more prominently when something inanimate takes on the form of something alive, like a BJD.
V0lks built a mythology for their dolls, partially based on this firm belief in panpsychism. This shows up in everything they produce and this belief has leaked into BJD parlance. In the V0lks lore, spirits are encased in the BJDs and they age much as you do, until the spirit is reincarnated into another doll. These are called “tenshi”, or angels. (More information here: ) Therefore, when you acquire a doll, you are not just buying a chunk of plastic, you are bonding with a sentient being. This is why in BJD parlance, you will still hear people say “I am bringing a so-n-so home”, “I’m adopting a so-n-so” or “I can’t bond with so-n-so.” Before anyone screams “Japanese people are different”, this system of belief is actually seen in the west as well. We’ve sees the same thing with Cabbage Patch Kids and Build-a-bear workshops.
And similar to the Babyland General Hospital where you can adopt a Cabbage Patch kid from the nursery (complete with birth certificate and swaddling clothes!), you can do something similar at the main 0olks store. The adoption “ceremony” is called “Omukae”, which means “Welcoming”. You welcome a new spirit into your home and your life. Here’s a recording of a Omukae:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp9P4Gxxt9w (Incidentally, the large statue is called Mother Super D0llfie. The equivalent is Mother Cabbage over at Cleveland, Georgia.)
Is this “culty” as anon said earlier? Well, that really depends on what you consider to be a cult. I find the word being thrown around rather carelessly without much thought. If having a consensual make-belief rite that you can choose to participate is considered cult behaviour, then all fraternity with a pledge would be cults. (So is the Cabbage Patch, since they have been doing this “adoption” ceremony since the 1970’s.) Words have meaning, after all – and context is paramount. Without a set of agreed-upon definitions, anyone can throw words around. On the other hand, since materialism is the polar opposite of panpsychism, you’ll also see folks who prefer to refer to their dolls as mere possessions. They are “chunks of plastic” that are only incidentally desirable. The dolls are bought and sold like commodities. And the consideration given to them is that of merchandise: price points, competitions and profit. Most of us live somewhere along the spectrum of panpsychism and materialism. And how we see our dolls reflect where we are along this line as well.
~Anonymous
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