We seem to think we’re so limited by the world and the confines, but we’re really just creating them.
I mean, I’m not saying that you don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Caveh and Films
Bazin … he believes, for him reality and God are the same. You know, like … and so what film is actually capturing is like God incarnate, creating. And this very moment, God is manifesting as this. And what the film would capture if it was filming us right now would be like God as this table, and God as you, and God as me, and God looking the way we look right now, and saying and thinking what we’re thinking right now, because we are all God manifest in that sense. So film is actually like a record of God, or of the face of God, or of the ever-changing face of God.
You have a mosquito. Do you want me to get it for you? You got it.
Timothy Levitch
Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him.
To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action, and actually the waking perception and action.
More Existentialism from Solomon
The more that you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he’s not talking about something abstract. He’s not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It’s something very concrete. It’s you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences.
It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It’s always our decision who we are.
Virtues of Life. Robert Solomon
I’m afraid we’re losing the real virtues of living life passionately, sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life.
On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path of what we desire.
Instincts
What I’m trying to say is that somehow I believe reincarnation is just a - a poetic expression of what collective memory really is. There was this article by this biochemist that I read not long ago, and he was talking about how when a member of our species is born, it has a billion years of memory to draw on. And this is where we inherit our instincts.
Words are dead.
When it gets really interesting, I think, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we’re experiencing. What is, like, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say “love,” the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person’s ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, you know, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I’m saying and they say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed.
It’s unspeakable.
