Continuing with the Sadler's Lectures podcast series on Kafka's story The Metamorphosis, here's an episode on arguably the second most-important character in the story, Grete Samsa, Gregor's sister
"All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves."
Here's what I'd share with Tom at this point if he hadn't blocked me.
#PeterRollins is a brilliant Irish philosopher and pyrotheologian. I've been following his work for several years now and find it fascinating, revelatory, nuanced, unique, and challenging. I haven't watched this whole vid yet, but the first 30min make it worth sharing:
I believe in Americanity,
sacred religion of democracy
sung by mad troubadours of city streets
who lounge in the grass on the river shore
and ride with Death in the carriage of faith
sea to shining sea in the
I've produced a new video identifying & discussing 10 commonly shared or reposted fake quotes of a famous philosopher. This time, they're quotes misattributed to Friedrich Nietzsche
The traveler who maps the signless road
across the wilderness of windy hope
lifts up their eyes to know the world is wide
with beauty of the ideal scene through hype
because they know no land is theirs to claim,
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism by Kevin Aho
Essential reading for students and researchers of existentialism and phenomenology, and also of interest to those studying ethics, philosophy and gender, philosophy of race, the emotions and philosophical issues in health and illness as well
as related disciplines such as Literature, Sociology, and Political
Theory.
Happy Saturday! Enjoy some existentialist dread as we prepare for the Holiday of holidays. (I'm doing nothing for Xmas, lol. I just realized I don't even have any fancy food here to make.)
I've been really enjoying these Hubert Dreyfus "Existentialism in Literature and Film" lectures. The ones on Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov are particularly illuminating.
This is one of the more appalling articles I've read recently. Any attempt to establish a meaning or purpose in life must begin with a head-on confrontation of existential absurdity. Any other approach builds on quicksand.
My last post about this for a while, promise! The sale on the ebook ends tonight and won't return for a year.
$3.99US ($6 off)
Hilarious, deep and darkly comic. Max Tundra must find a way to work with his annoying doppelgängers, so they can save the multiverse from certain extinction.
"All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves."
My blind mother, who walks on flowing stream,
lost her eyes when she gambled with the sun
in vain attempt to save my soul from pain,
but I can only see her now in dream
holding fabric of my being she had spun
from
Zoned out on why the girl with seven eyes
steals paper masks from museum of ghosts,
I lean against rail of the lonely bridge
and think about why the sky appears blue
as if the holy words of angels burn
visions in
@42GB Seriously, how to live in this society that's so keen on destroying itself is the question that's been bothering me most for the last few years. But we don't really have a choice, do we? If we don't allow for any happiness, desperation and depression is all there is. That can't give us the energy necessary to live or do anything. Suicide would be the only logical consequence. Deciding not to kill ourselves means we have to allow for some happiness even if it seems absurd. #existentialism
I love it to go out on the balcony by night or look out of the window, to watch the lights in other buildings go on and off, to watch people living their private-evening-selves.
I wrote about life journey and life stories in the last days, using words and images to reflect. With all this, it's easy for the ominous Self or Ego to become bigger and bigger, until all that remains of the rest of the world has crumbled to a formless something in the corner of the mind. In these moments, looking out reveals how ridiculous this it. When there is more information and life in the few images of one of the many high rises, in the few branches of a tree or the feathers of a bird than in all the what-ifs we came up with.
I often find it utterly fascinating how low the "resolution" of our dreams is. "I want to be a doctor" he says and thinks of little than his title and a bit of money. "I want to be an astronaut" she says and thinks of little but a shiny circle in the sky and maybe iron being thrusted into heights with a feeling of a shaking merry-go-round. Yet do they really think of how minutes flow into hours into days into weeks into months of doing what doctors and astronauts do?
All this becomes even more true with the internet, where after scrolling for an hour or two we struggle to remember a handful of images or stories, where reading news articles leaves us with little more than that others too don't like politician A or business person B. How humbling it is then to watch out of the window and see how many many people (or birds and trees) there are just a few minutes of walking away from us of whose lives we know so little. Lives taking place in what looks like just an aquarium from our balcony.