The Immovable, said to lasso evil & vanquish it with his flaming sword. And I have so many questions... -can one vanquish evil? -what material must a sword blade be made of to fatally wound something so conceptual? -why don't we see more vanquishing these days? [It seems to be an activity that's fallen out of favor.] where can one obtain a conceptual blade to vanquish a conceptual fault? i conclude that it's all made of mind.
In the pagoda garden, the philosopher stares into the inky darkness, contemplating its slow flow into the light, reflecting upon the light embedded in all darkness, light that he sees in a glint of moonlight on still waters.
From its perspective, we live in a vacant upside down underworld. It can't understand our terror over death and our obsession with life. Just thinking about it gives it nightmares, heebie-jeebies of being overrun by endless piles of creatures -- endless piles with endless needs. We may wrinkle a nose in disgust at its worldview, but it finds ours positively suffocating. But it forgives us our simple ways, we are just its food, after all.
A streetcorner Socrates calls out those who grow forests of words -- not because he doesn't love the trees, but because they impede his view, making for perpetual dimness in a mind that craves light. The trick is not to clearcut, but to leave only that which enhances the view.
Nature dresses up the detritus of our fallen civilizations. After all but the most resolute stonework has crumbled, cool faces of stone having sloughed off to leave rugged, pitted rock, all that stands testament to life is the tall grass that sways in the wind.
Some love attributing sacredness -- places beyond place, times beyond time, the infinite & the infinitesimal. But anything elevated to the sacred becomes a thing for which people will kill or die. Often, people don't make this reckoning until the dying 's done: -death for a sign -death for a symbol -death for a chunk of dead earth -death for a vaguely evaluated idea The agents of sanctification will kill us all.
Only too eager to have the machine installed in their brains, they did what they could, and, instead, installed their brains into the machine. Data sparkled in the mind void, bouncing about and careening into other bytes and clusters. But the crash cascades always came, a cannibalistic consumption of fact, transmogrifying it into a shabby soup of quasi-reality. Brain-pans paining, densely packed with alternate realities that could never be rectified. By the time they realized the virtue of going out to play, they were no longer sure what "outside" meant -- Outside of what? Where's the exit? Where is there something else? -something simple? How's one get off this speeding bus? It became the pain that ruled that last lost generation.
The boy pressed his hand to the cool interior wall, sitting on the floor of a dark, empty chapel. Outside the sun blazed, and humidity oppressed. The orphan created a narrative in his head, one based on some strange logic. If hell was an "eternal torment of flames," then the cool interior of the monk's chapel must be the anti-hell -- a place that devoured the heat of hell-fire... but what did that make that baking place that was outside those thick walls.
They shouted irate philosophies about the foul leviathan. The angry measure of angry men, and all those foul winds blew back on them.
On the shore of angry seas I hear the crash of foamy waves, but miss the crisp sudsy sizzle that one hears on a sunny summer day. That nuanced note is lost to the Churn
