skyscrapers rise & fall storms hit & wither waves crash & recede nature neither blesses nor curses, despite the constant counting of its boons & banes; its bonanzas & broken bones one who can feel grateful in the face of ignorance & imperfection is free one who feels suffering in the absence of perfect comfort will never know freedom such a one as that imprisons himself in a cycle of imagining & coveting a perfection that has never existed
I am a witness for a self-aware world, a world that's not just chunks of matter, but an organism that dances matter into an entity that can know. It can know truth and fiction and the truth of fiction and the fiction of truth. It turns order into disorder, but with knowledge salad on the side. I'm a compartmentalized agent of a super-organism that is beyond my capacity to understand or speculate the purpose of. I am a lonely witness.
Ashtavakra Gita: by Bart Marshall
If you’re looking to attain Enlightenment, you may have turned to someone like the Buddha or Epictetus for inspiration. But I’m here to tell you, if you can put these four pieces of Shakespearean wisdom into practice, you’ll have all you need to uplift your mind.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
william Shakespeare, Hamlet
Through Yoga, practitioners learn to cultivate their inner “dispassionate witness.” In our daily lives, we’re constantly attaching value judgements and labels to everything with which we come into contact (not to mention the things that we merely imagine.) As a result, we tend to see the world not as it is, but in an illusory form.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
William shakespeare, julius caesar
In Psychology class, you may remember learning about the self-serving bias, a warped way of seeing the world in which one attributes difficulties and failures to external factors, while attributing successes and other positive outcomes to one’s own winning characteristics. Like Brutus, we need to learn to stop thinking of our experience of life as the sum of external events foisted upon us, and to realize that our experience is rooted in our minds and how we perceive and react to events.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
william shakespeare, as you like it
A quote from Hamlet also conveys the idea, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” If you grasp this idea, you may become both humbler and more readily capable of discarding bad ideas in favor of good. It’s common to want to think of yourself as a master, but this leads only to arrogance and to being overly attached to ineffective ideas. Be like Socrates.
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.
william shakespeare, julius caesar
Fears and anxieties lead people into lopsided calculations in which a risky decision is rated all downside. Those who see the world this way may end up living a milquetoast existence that’s loaded with regrets. No one is saying one should ignore all risks and always throw caution to the wind, but our emotions make better servants than masters. One needs to realize that giving into one’s anxieties has a cost, and that that cost should be weighed against what one will get out of an experience.
There it is: Enlightenment in four bits of Shakespearean wisdom.
They told it slant, but not all the truth, and it rolled into the ears of the willing and into the minds of the faithful. And in those minds it was built into a swift machine, one of great power -- if little reality. But deaths never required reality of motive, only reality of matter. So, the wild stories became wild ideas that were the bane of us all.
Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Ferber
Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide by John Heaton
The Sunny Nihilist: A Declaration of the Pleasure of Pointlessness by Wendy Syfret
Mad scientists are terrifying. Mad artists are reassuring (par for that particular course.) Mad mathematicians seem harmless enough, as long as he or she stays in his or her lane: the one with numbers and angles and sets. Mad Saints are the most hated & most beloved of lunatics. They serve as necessary examples -- not there to forcibly deprogram one, but to show that it's an option. One has the choice to be free, whether one has the will or desire to be - that's an open question. But those who sink the red pill must learn that in those waters thar be monsters. (If only those of one's own making -- i.e. Nietzsche's abyss staring back.) Voids can't gaze. Only that which one crams down its abyss-hole can do the gazing.
Humour: A Very Short Introduction by Noël Carroll
Tiger Riding for Beginners 