Animystic » aphorism

Buckminster Fuller on the nature of changing things

Adam — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:48:51 +0000

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller

Bateson on Story

Adam — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:23:45 +0000

This is a very serious matter… that the way that human beings think, certainly the way that I think, is in terms of stories… Now what is a story? A story, if it so please you, is a metaphor… If you look at these two plants, you will see that they are essentially metaphors, one of the other, that metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive…

These are stories, a story being an aggragate of formal relations scattered in time… It has a certain sort of minuet or formal dance to it. It gets more complicated, because this is where we live. And the funny thing about living there is that we care about it intensely. And when the metaphors get jangled by unfortunate events… we get very upset. You see, the idea that there is any mental process going on that isn’t metaphoric is a very late, school-marmish idea. What they were killing each other over in the 14th Century was metaphor. Is the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ. The Catholics said yes. The Protestants said no; it stands for body and blood. And they felt that this was worth burning for. No one would ever think that now.

The set of mental processes – aesthetics, feeling, poetry perhaps – is precisely where dream is made… And the Protestant view of the sacrament was a policy decision to exclude from the church that part of the mind which is concerned with poetry, feeling, fantasy, metaphor, stories

Gregory Bateson, quoted on http://www.trismegistos.com/ as being from an audio tape

What is the difference…?

Adam — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:02:29 +0000

What is the difference between the apple, and the taste of the apple on the tongue?

I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

Adam — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:00:25 +0000

One of my favourite quotes of all time. And it makes sense to me to approach one’s own convictions with a degree of humility, flexibility, joyful uncertainty and playful doubt. Bob did it so well.

I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

I strongly suspect that a world “external to,” or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense.

I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignity, like Internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology.

I somewhat suspect that Theism and Atheism both fail to account for such decentralized intelligence, rich in circular-causal feedback.

I more-than-half suspect that all “good” writing, or all prose and poetry that one wants to read more than once, proceeds from a kind of “alteration in consciousness,” i.e. a kind of controlled schizophrenia. [Don't become alarmed -- I think good acting comes from the same place.]

I sometimes suspect that what Blake called Poetic Imagination expresses this exact thought in the language of his age, and that visits by”angels” and “gods” states it an even more archaic argot.

These suspicions have grown over 72 years, but as a rather slow and stupid fellow I do not have the chutzpah to proclaim any of them as certitudes. Give me another 72 years and maybe I’ll arrive at firmer conclusions.

Robert Anton Wilson, 1932-2007

Everything is alive

Adam — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:59:49 +0000

Everything is alive. What we call dead is an abstraction
David Bohm

I seem to be a verb

Adam — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:56:56 +0000

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.
Buckminster Fuller