Aphorisms

‘Of Time & other Tropes’ posted on my YouTube channel 21/11/2024

[posted August 2024]

Aphorisms: haiku of the essay form.

Watching laughing but tear-incapable chimps, we are suddenly comforted by the realisation that tears of laughter are older, and thus deeper, than tears of sorrow.

Life’s colours pull the eye to spring shimmer and summer surface, wintry black and white to depth, to form-and-formlessness. Ask any photographer.

An actor donning a mask is putting an inanimate one over an animate one.

A woman putting on cosmetics is simply highlighting or hiding features of the mask that is her face.

Clothes, body features, opinions may reveal a persona, a person. They can as little reveal who they are really clothing as a cover can reveal a book’s true contents.

The sky is a constant reminder of our true, original nature: eternal, spacious Formlessness often flecked by the many moods or dramas of life’s drifting, ephemeral clouds.

Waiting at the checkout: another opportunity to realize the eternal Now of Presence. And practise the final checkout.

Juvenal’s imperial diagnosis of ‘panem et circenses’ was right. In empires declining into increasingly oppressive authoritarianism, as in the present, the circuses tend to increase in proportion to the decrease in security of the bread supply chains.

In historical twilight times like these, obesely and mentally starved masses tend to love a good spectacle as much as a good scapegoat.

Expectation by expectation, time tumbles forward, drunk on its own eternity.

How could we perceive time unless we were timelessly outside it?

Powerful words, like poetry’s, are those that strongly maintain the link with their origin, silence.

Silence is the space of sound, space the silence of the Formless.

Time begins and ends with thought. It is the specific mode or medium only of the evolved human brain.

As time is thought, to be intensely conscious but not thinking is to be outside time, timeless, one’s Original Nature before the self is born into and as time and space.

Encore un pas, Descartes: non cogito ergo non sum.

CEOs in discreet suits, workers in hi-viz: power inversely proportional to visibility.

In old age, the feel of one’s life in review seems like that of a stranger with whom one was largely, but not completely, identified.

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The Devilish Dictionary, a collection of (mostly) aphorisms, was published throughout November 2022.

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Aphorisms about No-Thing  (posted March 2022)

Ignorant of our ignorance, we get on with life till it seems to end. Was that all? we then ask.

Who am I, you ask? The only answer, another question: WHO is asking?

And the objective world? you ask. One Big Screen of projected mutual movies we script, direct and act.

Creating our worlds, we disappear as we think, as we speak. No thinking, no we, no world.

Descartes’ open secret: I do not think, therefore I am not. (Non cogito, ergo non sum).

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to be a Buddhist.

Bend your always pointing finger back inwards. Turn your attention around 180 degrees from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’. Do you actually see anything?  No-thing here? Eureka! That art thou. You are the Seeing.

The feeling that death only happens to others is true. The I that dies is an other.

No maths without zero. No jug, no galaxy, no whole without a hole. And no thing without No-thing, no self without No-Self.

Watch this Space, we say, meaning watch what I do next. We are referring to ourselves as an empty billboard, as Space! At some deep level we know who we really are.

All things are conceived, created, arise, take place in non-conceptual No-thingness.  Nothing more useful, more real, than non-conceptual, inconceivable No-thing.

Emptiness, silence, stillness: all one non-conceptual No-thing as conceived by the differing perspectives of eye, ear, body.

Rather than some ‘it’, some third-person thing, some object seen from the outside, when seen from first-person ‘in here’ there is no I or me at all. Yet there is this sense of I-Am …

Who or what is this I-Am?  Let’s try metaphors. It seems I-Am like a frameless, glassless window, an aperture, a spacious emptiness in which things happen, are born and die. Like waves, like clouds, like dreams, like dramas, like lives.

When creation happens in the empty space of attentive interiority, of I-Am, a new universe softly big-bangs itself into existence. No need for a Hadron Collider, cosmogeny happens daily.

Like a landscape, a flowing conversation or a life, everything arises spontaneously out of silence, stillness, no-thing, proceeds rhythmically, then fades back into silence, stillness, no-thing.

Ageing seems both a grumpy stuckness in diminishing body and mind AND a frequent spontaneous stepping out of that strange old other which you, through amnesia and force of habit, call your ‘self’ or personality, that alien other which for decades mostly dominated your busy, active life.

Your personality now often seems as alien as the face you shave in the mirror. Both are ‘out there’ like everything else (including body feelings), not ‘in here’ where I-Am, which never changes, never ages.

That I-Am which looked out upon the fresh new world when my body was five or six years old is exactly the same unchanged I-Am that is now looking out on a changed old body and older, sometimes still fresh, world.

Out there seemingly objectively in body and world: things, change, time. In here subjectively: no things, no change, no time, the timeless. And no subject, no experiencer, only the experiencing.

The root problem: we are self-misidentified with our ego, role, image, status, mask, personality. Realising this, is already disidentifying. You are that No-thing which seemingly identifies, disidentifies and cannot be identified.

We are all actors, acting out our roles, our characters and personalities. Most of us, however, get totally lost in our characters like young, over-enthusiastic method actors. But conscious of this, we can leave our characters and masks in the dressing room and come back to our true Self that only puts them on and acts them out on the world stage.

Waking from a dream in the morning, you are aware that you were producing and identifying with all those characters and dramas that seemed utterly real at the time. The real you is now awake and sees these nocturnal characters and dramas as unreal dream images. Now you can do the same thing regarding your waking life: wake up as the real you and realise the dramas of that life are a kind of dream you are producing and falsely identifying with.

Do we English-speakers have two eyes as a pun to remind us that we are I-I, two I’s? The conditioned, mortal I or ego that acts out its waking dream life, and the unconditioned, eternal I (or I-Am, True Self, Atman-Brahman, Original Nature etc.) that realises this and dispassionately watches the conditioned I and its dramas acted out in space-time.

Continually putting off realizing your true identity? What’s the hurry? Being eternal, you’ve got all Eternity…

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Notes from the Fire Siege [posted January 2020]

Notes from the Fire Siege (New Year-January 2019-20)

Can’t walk the dog. Refuses to wear a mask.

Now even the air and sunlight are man-made, and very ugly.

It’s a clear day: I can see 100 metres.

The smoke prefers three colours: office-grey, sulphur-orange, despair-black.

The megafire makes its own weather. It dry-thunders and prefers its raindrops black.

We’re having a catastrophe, but are we getting its meaning?

How many catastrophes do we need?

Every morning you’re a sailor: checking wind direction.

On the news an atheist firemen says he is now praying.

Will these megafires only be our Hell, or could they be our Purgatory?

The siege has its flirtatious rhythms of approach and stall. No retreat, because fires can’t.

Before an approach a dream: embers under our trees, sudden beauty of a sky-high fire column.

How surprisingly easy to let go of a lifetime’s collection of things: books, artworks, furniture.

Choosing which few paperbacks to pack. Two small piles: a few favourite poets, a few favourite mystics.

Then packing up documents, photos, hard drive. They’ll go later. With the name they gave you.

Should I take, for my son and grandsons, some practical DIY books: farming, energy, building?

37, one son, at my first catastrophe (Chernobyl). Then: rage at the order-givers, centering, liberation to act.

70, two grandsons, at my second catastrophe. Now: lack of interest in the order-givers, complicity, equanimity to act.

As with the Chernobyl Cloud, again material proof of One World: our smoke in NZ, our ash coating the Andes.

‘If your life is at risk, call Triple Zero.’ Or help organize a revolution.

In the waiting fire bucket: a drowned mouse.

‘Prepare for the emotional, mental and physical impact of defending…’ ecocidal capitalism.

‘It is too late to leave.’ But never the System.

The new utopia: clean air, blue skies, expanding forests, sound of water, stillness, slowness, silence.

Another dream: met Greta, organised meeting, got on like a house on fire.

Columns of fleeing fire refugees kindly helped, welcomed. Will we do the same for the refugees on Manus and Nauru, from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, from drowning islands?

Updating Beckett: Godot is a fire tsunami.

Over 500 m wild animals, whole species lost. The evolved Australian ecosphere has collapsed. What will replace it?

Consumerism = conflagration. Ever more ends in ever less, right down to the smoking ruins.

The violence of this disaster is the violence hidden in the luxury good and elite policy.

Beforehand, in some: complicity guilt.

Afterwards, in all: survivor guilt.

In destroyed Cobargo for his photo op, the PM is called an idiot, told to piss off. At last, vox populi, vox dei.

These fires’ carbon will breed more fires, another vicious demonic circle like arctic melting.

And now in heat and smoke the angophora is blooming its big, white, bee-intoxicating bouquets!

At the town meeting to discuss survival plans. Looking for jokes and cold water.

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Notes from the Fire Siege 2

Fires on TV screen, unscarily real/unreal. Suddenly a talking head in uniform says: your village is burning. Is that real?

Fleeing, through our car window screen, grass fires on either roadside are scarily real/unreal, orange adrenaline pumps, as untelevisable as a spiritual revolution.

Towards your car long advancing grass fires are lines of prettily flaring Christmas lights on one side, on the other its already leaping up, licking its bling-orange lips at your car doors.

The flames are alive with the sublime of terror and beauty, like Rilke’s terrible angel.

Ember attacks are mad hornets whirling the night dizzy.

These flames are air-lava eruptions leaping from desiccated plants, soils, forgetful hearts.

These raging fires seem enraged with someone or something. What is their thunderous roar screaming?

We deeply fear and admire this, perhaps in secret resonance with something similarly volcanic and forgotten inside us.

Afterwards, returning to the charcoal paddocks around us, it is yellow murk mask weather.

Everywhere scattered black eucalyptus leaves, microwaved, elegantly shiny-smooth, brittle; fierce, wise Odin’s fleeing ravens may have lost their feathers in this Ragnarök.

Pyro-nimbo-cumulus clouds tower as beautiful, serene, pure-white, angelic Everests above their roiling red progenitors destroying all below. Like humans, nature seems to love paradox.

There will no doubt soon be more new Pyro vocabulary. Pyro-politics, pyro-poetry, pyro-anxiety and –depression.

Chaos creates community. Never so much solidarity and public love. Why not always?

These fires are both expressions and subversive of capitalist competitiveness and consumer values.

Yet we continue to allow our order-givers to extract and export coal and gas at world record rates.

Now we too have thousands of megafirewar-traumatised children.

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Notes from the Fire Siege 3

Now even weather poses unsolvable moral dilemmas: wishing the wind to blow another way is wishing someone else cops it.

General excellence of the combination of grassroots voluntarism and the state’s organisation of its fire-fighting response.

Is this excellence perhaps also a practical demonstration of the realistic feasibility of a rational, planned, organised response to our total climate and eco-emergency, i.e. as energy descent and participatory eco-socialism?

We are all responsible for climate crisis, but some infinitely much more than others: economic and political order-givers, marketing mind-manipulators, corporate media obfuscators and the global mega-rich. Consumerism, Capitalism, ‘Communism’, all kill.

Fossil-fuel, mining companies, enabling banks have donated risible amounts of their blood money to recovery. Ultimately most responsible, they should be massively levied for billions.

With a few laudable exceptions, almost all state recovery monies are to smooth the way back to the very fossil-fuelled business-as-usual that led to the disaster.

Even pacifists can now be happy: deployed, finally the army is doing something useful and life-enhancing.

The forty billion dollar defence budget could buy an awful lot of water bombers.

In this new war, how quickly one becomes used to the sound of water-bombing helicopters overhead, that rare breed of bomber one feels like waving to.

The catastrophe as a failure, and de-masking, of both ‘democracy’ and capitalist business-as-usual. Can such a narrative framing now convince larger numbers than before? Unlikely, but who knows.

This may be Australia’s Chernobyl moment. Will we now push for our own perestroika and glasnost, then stop the tanks of the fossil fool reactionaries from rolling back our revolution?

Weather and fire apps are our new oracles in this end-time Ragnarök. When blue shifts to yellow, time to get nervous, yellow to red, time to leave.

Looking out of the window during 35 degree heat: is that dust or smoke or just my cataracts getting worse?

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Preliminary Notes for a Young Poet [posted May 2017]

Poetry is like life: nothing that can be said about it cannot be equally plausibly contradicted.

Don’t trust any poet over thirty. Don’t trust any poet under thirty.

Trust only your own selves. These are also protean non-selves.

Writing poetry occurs within an ongoing great dialogue of poets that stretches from tribal incantation, Homer and Lao Tzu to Eliot, Neruda, Rilke and rap. Read them.

The more individual your poetry, the more collective. You didn’t make your brain. Your brain is an evolutionary collective artifact, a product of the universe, planet and people.

In a world of war, exploitation and ecocide, poetry for poetry’s sake sucks.

Poetry as propaganda is always a whore and sucks even more.

Forget popularity. Contemporary poetry audiences are mostly poets themselves. Good-oh. Society is approaching the preliterate-tribal and anarchist utopia of a poetical society in which all are creative.

‘First thought, best thought’ (Jack Kerouac). Except when it remains there, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, stuck.

Poetry is craftsmanship: the technology of the human spirit forming air or ink.

Poetry is free breath moving through quanta of modulated breath.

Like microphysical quanta, poems are wave potentials that depend on the wave collapse of a listener’s or readers’ activity.

Like quantum waves they can be contradictory waves and bits forming neurons in two places at once.

Poetry is inspiration plus perspiration, a poet a seer and maker, shaman and engineer.

Poetry is silence speaking through the grammar of the imagination.

Poetry is the 95% of the universe (un)known as ‘Dark Matter-Energy’.

You are the universe but the universe is smarter than you. (Choose your You).

Poetry is the shimmering, quivering, loving fusion of your neocortex with your older mammal and reptile brains.

Your poetic tongue is the scent-laden flowering of your ancient spinal chord.

Poetry is an empty sky in which linear clouds of sound and metaphor appear, move, disappear, appear…

Poetry writing is risk, fail, risk again. Or risk, almost succeed, risk. Or fail.

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Commentaries on the Wisdom of Common Proverbs [posted July 2016]

Can’t see the forest for the trees.

Comment: Too much focus on empirical detail obscures the larger pattern or whole (or ‘holon’: a whole that is a part of another whole etc.). Just feeling the abnormal heat of the day won’t ever give you a notion of climate change. Just seeing that homeless beggar or the underpaid worker won’t ever give you a notion of capitalism. Step back and up. You cannot see a forest, a society, a planet, a system, a structure, you can only imagine or think it. Conceptual thinking includes seeing and sensing like a forest includes trees, but it is a higher and deeper faculty, a more evolved whole or holon. And conceptual thinking, necessarily dual in nature, in turn is included and transcended by a higher and deeper faculty, that of non-dual cognition or contemplation/meditation.

Can’t see for looking.

Comment: Who is looking? Why the strain? Can the eye see itself? You only really ‘see’ when you don’t look too hard, with strained, egoic intention, the look of potential domination, instrumentalisation, manipulation. Analysis of parts has its very necessary place, but as in contemplating a painting or landscape, in order to see the whole pattern, relax the eye, soft-focus, allow and receive rather than seek and pierce.

You can’t step in the same river twice. (Heraclitus, c. 500 BCE)

Comment: All is flow (anatta, panta rhei). But who is doing the stepping? A river stepping into a river? Can ‘you’ even step into a river once? And does a wave need to do anything to realize it is water?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Comment: All is change and flow, and flow is apparent or ‘empty’: it depends on something stable and fixed to flow past, and the apparently stable and fixed is in fact also changing and flowing. Although the current and river constantly change, the current and river also stay Current and River, ‘watercourse way’, Tao. This flow is the furious action of appearing/disappearing and of non-action (wu wei). On a social level: the more capitalist society changes, the more it furiously creates and destroys things and relationships in search of profit, the more it stays capitalism (self-accumulating money, domination, heteronomy, elite power). Many revolutions have ended up the same way.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Comment: Instrumental, ego-centred intention and goal, egoic cause and effect, just set up more unintended causes and effects, and so on. Vicious circles ad infinitum, samsara, karma. Like bad intentions, good intentions get in the spontaneous way of The Way (Tao). Rather than willing the good, simply get out of your own Way, and all will be Good (if not always good).

If you meet a Buddha on the path, kill him.

Comment: Every Ism means schism. Even the dogma of no-dogma can be a dogma preventing self-realization. ‘No more grand narratives’ is itself a grand narrative. Use Wittgenstein’s ladder to meaning, then kick it away. Use the raft of words, then leave them at the shore. All else is word idolatry, word magic that entrances minds, that people often even kill for, and the core reason for existential human suffering.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Comment: No attachment, no-mind rolling with the Flow of Tao gathers no fixations, opinions, dogmas. Keep mentally on the move, nomadic, flexible. Yet ‘rolling’, loosely held opinions can also be necessary, can be pretty little green growths after the rains of thinking, helping to fix and build soil on which forests of wisdom may grow, each idea-tree singing a different tune in the wind that blows where it will. So:

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Comment: Don’t totally reject the old or bad, rather sift through its self-contradictions and partial truths, lift up and integrate them into the new and better. This latter process is Hegel’s ‘Aufhebung’ or supercession: negate, preserve, lift up. This three-step waltz also defines human growth: differentiate, dis-identify, integrate. Then do the same for the new integration all over again. Never-ending development to ever higher levels. Never let thought stand still in some static position, some binary, cocksure of itself, dogmatic, complacent, stagnant, dead.

Jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Comment: This often happens when the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, and then the more things change, the more they stay the same. This may describe the trajectory of many failed political revolutions. The usual solution to this danger of the binary non-alternative is: a pox on both your houses, choose neither frying pan nor fire but a qualitative leap upwards from both into a completely new field of perception, enquiry and action.

To understand everything is to forgive everything.(Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner)

Comment: This blows open everyday mind. Against our habitual narrow moralizing and hasty judgementalism, this is the proverb both of all great art and of the Buddhist Boddhisattva: compassion (karuna) comes from standing back and seeing sub specie aeternitatis all the infinite web of causes-and-effects that form deeds and behaviour we might not like, i.e. seeing everything from the perspective of eternity, of awareness, insight, wisdom, enlightenment (prajna), and from the heart.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

Comment: Chanting this one, even children here realise the essence of both nominalism and Buddhism. Names, insults, are, objectively, just hot air, word magic, voodoo. Words can only hurt the other-directed, i.e. those who live by them, take them in, identify with them, are dependent on, and see themselves as no more than functions of, other people’s words and opinions. When there is no such heteronomous, crowd- and other-directed self, there is nothing to be hurt.

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Dark Aphorisms [posted 01/15]

All good people contain – indeed must contain – a spark of dark, all evil people a splinter of light. If not, they become inhuman, cardboard caricatures of angels and demons. They become dangerous, or, worse, boring.

Iago is more interesting than Othello, Mephistopheles than Faust, the Trickster than the Dali Lama or Mother Theresa. We humans love the twisted and wide, are quickly bored by the straight and narrow.

To embrace one’s own dark is not to identify with it. To identify with it is to deny one’s goodness. To deny one’s goodness is as predictable and boring as the opposite.

The Trickster creates culture, innovation, change. And their destruction. A bit like capitalism. Thus the anarchist quandary: How can we eliminate capitalism without losing the Trickster?

When the first humans left Africa, they were following the Trickster’s footsteps in the sands. Now his footsteps are leading us back to that little one world we had, but on a planetary scale.

The Trickster’s shimmering, Luciferian light leads us forward with its spark of dark.

Look in my eye, said the spider to the fly. Hello Shadow, my old friend, it’s good to talk to you again, said the fly. And saw the universe open up like a black hole pregnant with potential. So this is what ‘dying’ is, it thought, just before no-thought.

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Thinking and Not Thinking [posted 07/13]

Thinking is talking to yourself. Thought is self-speech.

Talking to yourself is the way you maintain ‘you’ and your world. What that first ‘you’ is, is a mystery.

The deep truth of both indigenous notions of The Dreaming and of Descartes: speaking/singing maintains the world, ‘cogito ergo sum’.

When you stop talking to yourself, both ‘you’ and the world stop.

What is there when they stop can, by definition, no longer be thought or said. A possible term pointing towards that which is beyond thought, language, world and self is the necessarily negative one of the ‘non-dual’, or ‘nirvana’.

‘We’ and our worlds thus emerge from, or are, the ‘non-dual’ or nirvana that talks to itself. The dual and its sufferings (‘samsara’) arise from nirvana and the non-dual.

99.9% of our time is spent thinking-doing, maintaining our sense of ourselves and world, keeping it stable. Perhaps we could stretch the 0.1% of the time in which we are mindful of doing so.

This lifetime of thinking-doing would seem to imply a deep, seldom conscious fear as our main driver in life, a fear of instability, insecurity, dissolution, death. Perhaps this is the mental equivalent of our physical drive for survival.

Talking to ourselves, expressing ideas and opinions happens especially strongly when people come together.

Talking with others, different people bring out different aspects of our thinking and thus ourselves, even as they tend to reinforce our mutual or separate mind cages, our personal versions of collective ‘word magic’ that define ourselves and our worlds and act as invisible membranes blocking them from direct perception.

Not-thinking is thus easier when alone, in solitude but not loneliness, but still difficult.

Not-thinking is not supressing thought, which is just another process of thinking. As ‘mindfulness’ or ‘awareness’, it seems to be a synthesis of doing and not-doing, of practice and grace.

The brain or mind can be seen as a filter, a collectively evolved organ inside all of us, that keeps us from being seemingly overwhelmed by Reality, the non-dual or nirvana beyond thinking. It does this by constant chattering.

With our evolved brain acting as a filter, we are thus saved from overwhelm at the price of being shut out from Reality, from realising No-Separation, from seeing directly instead of ‘as through a glass darkly’.

Rationality is rationalisation. Although we are seldom aware of it, thoughts arise from deeper layers than the rational neo-cortex.

With practice we can become aware that conscious thoughts come AFTER impulses, desires, wishes, intuitions, judgements, decisions which have occurred in the deep body-brain, traditionally often located in the guts, heart or ‘hara’ centre.

Thus even extended and differentiated processes of thought, as in philosophy or political theory, are merely extended rationalisations of deeper, pre-rational feelings and intentions. I almost instantly know what I really like/dislike, and I’m now going to rationally ‘prove’ and persuade you of it.

All thinking, all philosophy, tends to dualism because its medium – language, talking to yourself – is itself dual: it expresses and maintains a seminal split between self and other, subject and predicate, observer and observed, conscious and unconscious.

Philosophy is the history of pursuing a plethora of unsolvable conundrums, polar opposites, puzzles and contradictions (aporia) that are not in Reality but the result of its own thinking.

Dialectical thinking is a vain but valiant attempt to transcend philosophy while remaining within it.

Dialectical thinking attempts to overcome dualism by not resting on any side of the polarity, by running fast and light-footedly like Hermes, by sudden twists and reversals like the Trickster. Yet in the end it’s more like that cartoon moment when the road runner is madly whizzing his legs in the air just after he’s run over the edge of the cliff and just before he drops like a stone to the bottom of the canyon.

Even as philosophy differentiates more and more, it remains the cat chasing its own tail, the drum beating itself in search of a (non-existent) fugitive. Its greatest use is in using words to at least point out the cat, the tail, the drum, the fugitive.

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MASK APHORISMS [posted 02/12]

‘Person’ and ‘personality’ come from the Latin ‘persona’, an actor’s mask, literally ‘that through which the voice comes’. Most now seem to completely identify themselves with their own personalities, yet European languages still carry an awareness of our personalities being mere social masks, and thus implicitly, of our real selves, or non-selves, speaking through them.

As an actor takes on a mask, the mask takes over the actor. As we take on personalities, our personalities take us over.

People with weak characters have rigid personalities. They seem wedded to their social masks. People with strong characters use their personalities flexibly. They play with their masks.

Poets, as Keats noted, have no identities. Behind their many masks is the Void, the great Emptiness that makes up 95% of the universe. Actually, in this they are no different to anyone else. Their masks just sing and write more.

There are true and false masks. Acting the role of a great singer may just be bullshit or it may help you stay in tune. While wearing a false mask depersonalizes you and makes you a fake, wearing a true mask may help you be more authentic.

Even with true masks, we are both within and without them. We are always actor and audience at the same time. We are the eternal witness trying on personalities and behaviours.

We, all things, are the masks of God, says Vedanta. What a strange, brilliant and inhuman actor he must be. What fun he must have even as wars rage and civilisations collapse.

Looking in the mirror each morning can fill you with wonder at the randomness with which that particular face and body were chosen to clothe your life.

No matter what masks we wear, our eyes stay the same. Often the compulsively smiling or supercilious mouth is the social mask while the soul’s portals, the eyes, are clouded, absent, in pain.

Long eye-gazing is what new lovers do. Falling in love is often falling into another’s eyes. The task is to not just see your own reflection. Narcissus cannot love another.

Avoiding eye contact is what many old couples do. The task is to maintain soul contact through the patina and habitudes of years.

Where infants have lacked the mirror of the warm maternal gaze of affirmation, identity is wobbly or cracked. Life may be spent vainly seeking affirmation in the mirror of others’ eyes. This narcissism now seems to have become something of an epidemic in our culture.

My definition of centredness: a complete absence of interest in mirrors both physical and human.

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IT Aphorisms [posted 01/12]

Information gathering is like consuming mass-produced jelly. Knowledge is the effort of chewing your way through meat from an animal you have laboriously tracked through swamps and forests and then slaughtered yourself.

Because the spectacle, capitalist consumer society, knows nothing but information consumption, the labour of gaining knowledge in this society is inherently subversive.

Information deals with fragments and bytes. Knowledge deals in wholes and holons. Wisdom’s currency is silence.

The computer, by definition, can never reproduce the mind and its explicate, the universe. It is ontologically different: it is defined in all its workings by its basic technical structure of 1/0, yes/no, either/or, i.e. by dualism. The structure of the mind/universe, like poetry, is yes-and-no and both/and, i.e. non-dual.

Reading on screen, you quickly skim and scan the surface of information as if the text were an image made of letters floating on the shallows. Reading on paper, you are drawn deeply into the text and, thoroughly immersed, lose yourself as you swim with strong strokes in the complex currents of meaning.

Digitalisation is both potentially democratising and the totalisation of the Spectacle – Capital’s reign of the image – into the very pores of everyday life. Work, i.e. capital accumulation, becomes 24/7.

A computer in every child’s bedroom, a wall-length 3D TV in every living room and the real world dissolves into distraction. This very much suits the powers that be.

Computer screens, like TV screens, inherently hate long arguments. As talking heads are ‘bad (boring) TV’, so reasoning is ‘bad cyberspace’. The medium is the problem, not its contents.

Reasoning takes time, patience, listening. Previously, democracy and reasoning were considered coterminous. This is no longer the case. Where the sound bite and PR media event rule, democracy doesn’t.

Not exercised, the muscles of reasoning slacken and atrophy. The new muscles being exercised are those of scanning and shallow reading, twittering and sound biting, image projection and immersion. And, simultaneously, those of globalizing a One World consciousness.

Information technology and the internet are as ambivalent as capitalism, their matrix. Their potentials point towards the post-capitalist utopia of One Humanity, their actuality is crass commercialism and totalised state surveillance.

Only social and cultural revolution can liberate the democratic and anarchist potentials now nascent in anti- and post-capitalist cyber-phenomena like free software, open source, creative commons, wikis.

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[The following aphorisms were first published here as posts in July 2011]

Good aphorisms are like good poems: sharp little pinpricks reminding you of what you know already.

Poetry is how cells communicate when they are healthy.

Poetry and psychology map the universe. Astronomy and physics map the soul.

The deepest sense of the universe can be gotten listening to the sound of a strong wind in pine trees.

A great sense of security in life can be provided by the certainty of the passing of the four seasons.

Looking in the mirror each morning can fill you with wonder at the randomness with which that particular face and body were chosen to clothe your life.

Trying to find your true self is like scientists trying to find the dark energy/matter that makes up ninety five per cent of the universe. Both are a matter of trying to find the dark with a torch.

Trying to find a reason for your cancer may be cancerous.

Like all other religions, socialism is one that has not been tried yet.

Anarchism is aristocracy democratised.

Mature anarchists are aristocrats without serfs.

***

Meditation is death’s way of getting you to practise it.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to be a Buddhist.

The whole universe rests on the rock solid foundation of change and ambivalence.

There is nothing perfect in all the universe except the universe.

Democracy is inversely proportional to the number of followers and spectators.

Anarchism is democracy brought to its logical conclusion.

Anarchism is not anarchy but free, self-managed order.

As Zen to Buddhism or Dadaism to art, so anarchism to socialism: the anti-Ism ism.

As long as violent anarchism is not an obvious oxymoron, it will merely strengthen oligarchic power. Violence is always the language of power and domination.

The Achilles’ heel of all oligarchic power is a movement of non-violent, mass civil disobedience. The Achilles’ heel of all resistance to, and abolition of, such power is violence.

I have never understood what, apart from the obvious physical features, the difference between men and women is supposed to be. The same goes for people of different nationalities and races.

Like other forest biota, a good forester is an expression and tool of the forest.

The wise gardener, like the wise poet, knows paradise is a lot of work and a lot of letting go.

The small organic orchard is one that trains and enriches the orchardist as he trains and enriches it.

Physically, chemically and mentally separated by the veil of money, the commercial farmer has neither the time nor inclination to pay close attention to his or her land. That is why it is being ruined. You cannot love a thousand acre paddock of wheat or cotton.

In my utopian (‘good’) society there would be little shrines dotted about the country and cities. Each would contain a jug of fresh water and a small box filled with humus.

Perhaps children can be most quickly and simply taught about the mysterious beneficence of decay, decomposition and death by making and gardening with compost.

The core problem of schools is that they have always been too middle class. Children are born workers who want to DO practical, useful, creative things, not just talk about them, or, worse, be talked to about them. Children are also born poets, philosophers and aristocrats who want to get the widest possible view about everything in the known and unknown universe. Most of the many problems of the middle class school system stem from its structural repression of the practical, creative and philosophical.

A poet is simply someone who isn’t just star dust but knows it.

In the great poem the stars sing from the gutters. In bad poems there are just stars and gutters.

Where was the first moon landing achieved from: Cape Canaveral or the Caves of Lascaux?

Perhaps the perfect eulogy: he was kind, generous, and had a bit of bite. He contributed.