At times, one should cultivate the ability to perceive oneself as an object external to one’s ordinary sense-perception — such a perspective is sure to yield surprising results; this is not to be a simple exercise in metacognition; rather, it is a process by which the self is to be rendered wholly unfamiliar, an act of phenomenological ostranenie, so to speak.
May the Lord bless the master Courbet, whose blending of the sky and the sea has evoked a rather strange sense of stability in this one; it was unwonted in him to make a placid show of the nature he saw, and one is grateful — particularly considering the master’s penchant for dramatic rhythms of the pelagic.
The awareness of a particular inarticulable peculiarity, an ineffable strangeness, is one of the steps towards the realization of the potentiality of what is called the human distinction of reason.
The illusion of agency is a great blessing from the One.
All are indentured in a world of loans — appearances may vary.
Seized by a star inside me! radiating outwards, pressing on bone and flesh, in the shape of four tulips culminating in a point.
Properly attuned consequentialist ethics is the great stabilizer of civilization; by properly attuned, one means that there is a clear sense — in the mind and not necessarily as existent — of what is meant by good and bad arrived at through a variety of self-evident and reflective methods.
Pessimism is primarily a contextual orientation, a mood in a particular moment, whilst its inverse — a state of locating benefit in the ostensibly harmful existents — is a much more stable and eternal mode of habitation: a particular bad can become rather good in certain conditions. This is not applicable to social morality per se, with regard to words and their sense, but rather to goodness and its inverse in objects of creation, such as modes of technology or substance itself.
One of the key factors that precipitated a distrust of pure reason amongst the mystics was not necessarily the insufficiency of reason in se, but rather the haughtiness of its practitioners.