Friday, February 22, 2008
Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and [...]
I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading any thing that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the ease, the child will soon find [...]
…we are free, we are terrifyingly free, which is why we’re still shut up on this planet, deliberately ignoring what we truly see…because we’re scared to be free. Yet we have more possibilities and powers than any of us have ever imagined. Look at history. There are natural forces from which we grew estranged during [...]
Control of the energy of thought…The old dualism is dead. The entire Right Wing-Left Wing system. Just two monolithic lies propping each other up over a chasm. Two adjacent fingers of the same hand, in the same game, waving at each other as though they were opposites. Likewise all the other nineteenth-century reductionist rationalist fixations [...]
Thursday, October 11, 2007
For a long time now information has been streaming into this world, into our varied minds, important information, from sources beyond our planetary system. The information itself is clear enough, but reception here has been poor. We have been picking it up in confused and incomplete form. One person intuits one part of the jigsaw, [...]
The complexities are endless. Nobody agrees. There is no clarity in such theories. No useful light is shed. They reduce [him] to the status of robot or puppet, explaining his every action as the result of influence by other directed forces, giving him no free will at all. The arguments advanced by on faction (good-bad) [...]
…many of us have been educated to deny myth-thinking as part of the baggage of a nightmare past from which we are now struggling to awake. To pay heed to myth (as the Nazis did) can seem to mean a terrifying regression back to a superstitious sleep from which science and reason have but lately [...]
Sunday, September 23, 2007
…how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and he message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing [...]
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Desire for goodness, Mister Reese, leads to earnestness. Earnestness in turn leads to sanctimonious self-righteousness, which breeds intolerance, upon which harsh judgement quickly follows, yielding dire punishment, inflicting general terror and paranoia, eventually culminating in revolt, leading to chaos, then dissolution, and thus, the end of civilisation. or Good living and health, as you say, [...]
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
I want to ask, you ever wonder why the dominant culture says certain stuff? I mean, really hammers on you that some stuff is absolutely, deadly impossible? For instance, what science calls the “Grandfather Paradox”? How it works out that you should never, ever even consider time travel, because you might go back in time [...]