Diary

"Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."

-- Chuck Palahniuk, from Diary: A Novel

Art (Chabon)

Every great work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city – in every cranium – in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

– Michael Chabon, from Manhood for Amateurs

Goal of philosophy (Wittgenstein)

The goal of philosophy is to build a wall where language comes to an end.

-- Wittgenstein

On Limits (Wittgenstein)

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.61 Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits …. What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it happens. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happenings and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

– Wittgenstein, from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophus

Self-sustenance of nature (Aurelius)

Nature has no door to sweep things out of. But the wonderful thing about its workmanship is how, faced with that limitation, it takes everything within it that seems broken, old and useless, transforms it into itself, and makes new things from it, so that it doesn't need material from any outside source, or anywhere to dispose of what's left over. It relies on itself for all it needs: space, material, and labor.

-- Marcus Aurelius, from the Meditations, sect. 8.50

Resolved

Resolve in this new decade to pull harder on the energies from above, to open up to more and more light & wisdom, to dig deeper and uplevel your own energies within and around you.

YES in the face of change

As we approach the end of another calendar year, and in fact the beginning of a new decade, our thoughts may turn to the inevitability of change. When we embrace change and the challenges of a new year in our own lives, we find that our transformation is accelerated. Resistance to change does not alter its inevitability. On the path, only a continual "YES" to the processes of change moves us forward in a substantial way.

Aurobindo on inconscience

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil with its sweet and bitter fruits is secretly rooted in the very nature of the Inconscience from which our being has emerged and on which it still stands as a nether soil and basis of our physical existence; it has grown visibly on the surface in the manifold branchings of the Ignorance which is still the main bulk and condition of our consciousness in its difficult evolution towards a supreme consciousness and an integral awareness. As long as there is this soil with the unfound roots in it and this nourishing air and climate of Ignorance, the tree will grow and flourish and put forth its dual blossoms and its fruit of mixed nature. It would follow that there can be no final solution until we have turned our inconscience into the greater consciousness, made the truth of self and spirit our life-basis and transformed our ignorance into a higher knowledge.

-- Aurobindo, from The Life Divine, p. 627

Srimad Bhagavatam 1.2

The wise say that the truth of reality is known as Brahman, Paramatma, or Bhagavan -- the highest, unmanifest cosmic Consciousness. Sages who with wisdom and non-attachment delve deeply into this will see within themselves and this conciousness in pure devotion what they have read in the scriptures. For all types of human, regardless of station, the highest form of practice is found in devotion to God. With this devotion as a focal point for the mind, the Lord within is unveiled to one.

-- Srimad Bhagavatam Canto I Ch. 2, vv. 11-14.

Petros class: Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Petros will be giving a one-hour class introducing the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali on Friday, 11 December 2009 at Alpha Books (4532 N. 7th St. Phoenix).

The Yoga Sutras may be read at: http://home.earthlink.net/~xristos/patanjali.htm.