a tumblr of Soma

When we try to examine the mirror in itself we eventually detect nothing but the things reflected by it. When we wish to grasp the things reflected, we touch nothing but the mirror. This is the general history of knowledge.

— Nietzsche (via metaconscious)

30 July 2010 • reblog: metaconscious

(via silent-musings)

(via silent-musings)

30 July 2010 • reblog: silent-musings

It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

— Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975 (via commondense) (via yourwonderingmind)

Word.

29 July 2010 • reblog: commondense

(via silent-musings) Mystifying.

(via silent-musings)

Mystifying.

29 July 2010 • reblog: silent-musings

alchemism: Which of the Watchers are you?

alchemism:

Which of the Watchers are you?

23 July 2010 • reblog: alchemism

23 July 2010

As Above, So Below: The Denial of Death

Whatever we deny in our conscious minds will possess us. Not to face the ways we all traffic in death is to cling to innocence—which is, essentially, an Ego-oriented position—and deny Soul. And it is also to be the unconscious and unwitting agent of what we deny. We are often possessed by death…

21 July 2010 • reblog: metaconscious

the origins of Positive thought

One of the most fruitless questions that can be asked of religions is whether or not they are “true”. For the sake of argument and the flow of this article, let us simply assume from the start that they aren’t true in the supernatural sense. For a certain kind of atheist, this is the end of the story; but for those of a more ethnographic bent, it is clearly only a beginning. If we made up our gods to serve psychological needs, a study of these deities will tell us a crucial amount about what we require to preserve our sanity and balance, and will raise intriguing questions about how we are fulfilling the needs to which religions once catered.

20 July 2010

(via silent-musings)

(via silent-musings)

19 July 2010 • reblog: silent-musings

Faith and Belief

Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul’s words, Mohammed’s words, Marx’s words, Hitler’s words—-people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history—-sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church’s inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. “Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”

-Raja of Pala (in Aldous Huxley’s Island)

7 July 2010 • reblog: alchemism