One strives on the path of righteousness; one is tested equal to the greatness of the path chosen. Strive for the understanding, knowledge, and be prepared for your tests. Life is not a mountain that you can climb, it is more like trying to cover each square foot of the world.
I wonder how far will the human mind take us? How far will humanity push itself to really gain understanding? My greatest fear is that the majority will become complacent, dulled with pleasure. Men have seemed to stop looking for the new, within them or outside. What does it take for hundreds of thousands to meet in city of millions because of the homeless, the poor, and the hungry? The smallest percentage of people would cause ripples in this sea of complacency.
The greatest terrorist atrocities call none to the battle for humanity, to feed, to nurture and to love. As if we skip reason, or don’t know that state. We push to fight, to kill and to hate. Does it take disease to the ones you love to make change? If so then the entire world will be stricken with a cancer, which will be made malignant by our assumptions of our own humanity.
What will it take for you?
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Jean Baudrillard
[Translated in 1988 by Chris Turner from the original in French, Amerique]
A M E R I C A
...
This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being 'into', hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it
[end 35]
operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen.
A M E R I C A
...
This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being 'into', hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it
[end 35]
operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Time for me to talk.
Your Worth
You know the value of every article of merchandise,
but you don't know the value of your own soul,
it's all foolishness.
You've come to know the fortunate and the
inauspicious stars,
but you don't know whether you yourself
are the fortunate or unlucky.
This, this is the essence of all sciences -
that you should know who you will be
when the day of reckoning arrives.
Rumi- Mathnawi III 2652-2654
thats all.
You know the value of every article of merchandise,
but you don't know the value of your own soul,
it's all foolishness.
You've come to know the fortunate and the
inauspicious stars,
but you don't know whether you yourself
are the fortunate or unlucky.
This, this is the essence of all sciences -
that you should know who you will be
when the day of reckoning arrives.
Rumi- Mathnawi III 2652-2654
thats all.
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