Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Bizarre mushrooms photographed by day (top) and then after dark (lower), emit enough light to record their shapes on film. Millions of these light-producing fungi glimmer in damp, shadowy nooks around the world. To luminesce, plants probably use the B vitamin riboflavin. Scientist are uncertain of the light's biological function.
Hans Christian Andersen's mermaid had to give up her ability to speak in order to receive a pair of legs, a symbol of sacrificing one's right of speech for acceptance. The sixteenth-century Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus professed that when a mermaid married a mortal and had a child, she received a soul.
lightness
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every mood we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.
Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.
Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.
"Holy people are a dime a dozen, but they’re one in a million. You should learn from everybody. Learn from within and let everyone learn from you. Consume it all or be consumed, whatever you are. It’s all the same. One guy says to go to work, the other guy says serve, the other guy says go sit up in the mountains. they’re all saying the same thing. Love don’t hate." Ma Jaya
Magical paths : labyrinths and mazes in the 21st century
'the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by
thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the
surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority
but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techniques, arts). Once a discourse is thus
driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the 'unreal: exiled from all gregarity, it has
no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.'
Roland Barthes
'Pride, if renounced, makes one more agreeable; anger, if renounced, brings no regret; desire, if renounced, will make one rich; avarice, if renounced, brings one happiness. True tranquility is of the heart... mercy may be defined as wishing happiness to all creatures... Ignorance is not knowing one's duties... wickedness consists of speaking ill of others.' The Mahabharata
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