The yogic scriptures paint a picture of perfection, and perfection can be your aim, but I can tell you sad stories about myself and others who have entered into a state of premature holiness with unpleasant consequences.
It is therefore no wonder that modern thought, to the extent that it reduces man from a spiritual to a purely biological entity, elevates the state of inexorable competition, conflict, and self-serving aggression from a tragic lapse of our ordained d...
hand. I was charged with organizing the messages: descriptions of the creatures, descriptions of their space vessels, descriptions of their conveyances, of their weapons, of their movements. Positions of our soldiers, of our allies’ soldiers. Troop...
Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.
I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize,...
. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and h...
In the Solar System, Enceladus ought to be one of the highest priorities for the world's space agencies. Enceladus has a source of energy (tidal heating), organic material, and liquid water. That's a textbook-like list of those properties needed for ...
Democrtitus, in the fifth century B.C. had declared that all the world was composed of only two elements: atomes and the void. This reduction of the myriad of forms to only two was the ultimate in dualistic reasoning. Christianity adopted dualism whe...
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within ...
When your stomach turns somersaults every time you see your love interest, when you can go without eating for half a day because you can't think of anything else, and when the sound of her voice blocks out every possible distraction each time you hea...
The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears i...
I had read history too closely, read of Caesar and the Roman Empire. I had not noticed that in the books there were white spaces between each line; the white spaces are there to remind you of the unspoken, unwritten truth. When one only reads the wor...
When you look at it objectively, that’s what most colonists do—they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole peo...
If untruths become part of our language—untruths that in context are intended to be interpreted as polite expressions or figure of speech—then each person is left to decide for themselves the meaning of any sentence. And when language and meaning...
But I looked out at the waves far below the bluff. They looked violent, erupting against the cliff. I watched them rising - up, up, higher, higher - then falling, crashing, swirling into chaos, passing away. I breathed deeply. I tried to breathe spac...
And a mother without children is not a mother at all, and if I am not a mother, than I am nothing. Nothing. I am like sugar dissolved in a glass of water. Or, I am like salt, which disappears when you cook with it. I am salt. Without my children, I c...
He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space ...
Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in w...
They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. ...
She started life with a number, not a name. Class: S, No. 13295. She has them memorized by rote, though nobody ever calls her that. The Scientists feel foolish addressing her in long, bewildering strings of alphanumerics. They have told her so themse...
Time, place, and space for all things, but spending [the] majority of one's time playing in outer places, and far less time exploring inner space, is perhaps the worst form of neglect. Don't play yourself; the real you awaits.
