Unimaginable Possibilities & Impossible Minds (with photos)

OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“Avoiding unnecessarily limiting assumptions, looking for patterns rather than randomness, looking for larger patterns rather than minimal forms, avoiding reliance on verbal and symbolic formulations, expecting the future to be different—these are abstract ways of formulating the idea that the world should be seen with sympathetic involvement, rather than with analytical coldness.” -Ray Peat
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“Blake was clearly aware that the reason for making limiting assumptions was to maintain control, and to profit from another’s suffering. Seeing that the sadistic assumptions that were put in place to regulate human life rested on a dichotomizing of soul from body, Blake’s correction was to replace them with a unity of consciousness and substance, a living world rather than a dead world.” -Ray Peat
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“A first step in avoiding dogmatic assumptions might be phrased as “remembering what you are,” a living being, and asking how you know things: The interaction with other beings, exchanging energy and information with the environment, experiencing yourself in the world.” —Ray Peat
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“The idea of a “biological cosmos” seems strange only when it is considered against an ideology which maintains that life is alone in an immense dead universe. The assumption of a dead, unintelligent, randomly moving physical world is the creation of a series of theological ideas, which Blake perceived as essentially Satanic. Blake used the language of these theologies, but inverted them, showing the ways they were used to obscure reality, and to impose a perverse way of life onto the living world.“ -Ray Peat
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“Everyone who described Blake’s physical appearance remarked on his large head. Blake commented that he didn’t like to travel or undergo physical strain, because of its effects on his health. The brain is an energetically expensive organ, which consumes large amounts of glucose. A very large brain puts a special burden on the liver’s ability to store energy, and is likely to make a person conscious of physiological processes. Blake’s descriptions of the process of seeing show that he was integrating his experience into his knowledge, describing brain physiology, incorporating his perceptions and the best scientific knowledge that was available to him, into a philosophical description of the place of conscious life in the world. The pulsation of an artery was the unit of time, a red blood corpuscle was the unit of space, enclosing eternity and infinity, eliminating arbitrary and abstract entities, and placing human life within cosmic life, while revealing cosmic life within the individual.“ —Ray Peat
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“Although the idea that “contradiction produces change” is associated with Hegel’s “Dialectic,” it was an old and well known theme in philosophy. When Blake’s idea, that “without Contraries there is no progression,” is seen in context, I think it is appropriate to think that to a great extent, Blake derived the idea from a consideration of the sexes. “Generation,” so often discussed in relation to the biblical “fall of man,” always leads to the issue of the productive interaction of the sexual contraries. The issue of sexual love permeates Blake’s work. I suspect that Blake produced even more explicitly sexual work, but since most of his work wasn’t really published, when his wife died in 1831, the bulk of his manuscripts and paintings were subject to the whims of their unsophisticated owners. But on the basis of his existing work, it is reasonable to say that sexual and imaginative energy was the motor that Blake saw producing intellectual advancement. This male-female principle of change was more fully explored by Blake than by anyone previously, since he made it concrete and personal, rather than abstract. Working in history, human energy ran into the constrictive, limiting elements, the tyrannies of policy, philosophy, and commerce. For Blake, the interaction of energy with those limits became a philosophy of freedom and revolution.” -Ray Peat
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“In Dostoyevsky’s story, Dream of an Odd Fellow, the theme is stated even more clearly—the world is very boring, and everything seems the same as everything else, until you can escape from a certain interpretive framework, to see what is really present to you. In Blake’s phrase, if the many become the same as the few when possessed, “more, more,” is the cry of a mistaken soul; Blake said, over and over, that the many do not become the same as the few, that we are always moving into a new world as we learn more, except when we find ourselves in the mental manacles of interpretation.” -Ray Peat
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms..The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.”
Robert Greene
 

Mossy

Member
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
2,043
@Rinse & rePeat
These are interesting quotes from Peat. Thanks for posting. It's good to learn of his philosophical perspective, apart from the more technical, medical side.

If anyone is interested, you can get Blake's complete works, in digital format, for very cheap ($3) from Delphi Classics.
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
@Rinse & rePeat
These are interesting quotes from Peat. Thanks for posting. It's good to learn of his philosophical perspective, apart from the more technical, medical side.

If anyone is interested, you can get Blake's complete works, in digital format, for very cheap ($3) from Delphi Classics.
I find these philosophical quotes powerful in bolstering my thinking and actions. I am happy to know you appreciate them as much as I do Mossy
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
The produce guy at my local health food store gave me this duck shaped sweet potato yesterday.

1699465775056.jpeg

1699465842158.jpeg
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
“"...That very flexibility can also help the smartest animals solve difficult problems. A 1978 experiment demonstrated its value for young rats. In this experiment, some rats were separated from their peers for 20 days by a mesh in their cage, which prevented them from playing. After the period of isolation, the researchers taught all the rats to get a food reward by pulling a rubber ball out of the way. They then changed the task to a new one where the ball had to be pushed instead of pulled. Compared to their freely playing peers, the play-deprived rats took much longer to try new ways of getting at the food and solving this problem. University of Cambridge ethologist Patrick Bateson linked observations like this more directly to the landscapes of creation when he argued that play can “fulfill a probing role that enables the individual to escape from false endpoints, or local optima” and that “when stuck on a metaphorical lower peak, it can be beneficial to have active mechanisms for getting off it and onto a higher one.” In this view, play is to creativity what genetic drift is to evolution and what heat is to self-assembling molecules."

"...If that is the case, it is hardly surprising that creative people often describe their work as playful. Alexander Fleming, who would discover penicillin, was reproved by his boss for his playful attitude. He said, “I play with microbes ... It is very pleasant to break the rules and to find something that nobody had thought of.” Andre Geim, 2010 Nobel laureate in physics, declared that “a playful attitude has always been the hallmark of my research ... Unless you happen to be in the right place and the right time, or you have facilities no one else has, the only way is to be more adventurous.” When James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix, they had help in the form of colored balls they could stick together—LEGO-like—to build a model. In Watson’s words, all they had to do was “begin to play.” And C.G. Jung, one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, said it best: “The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.”

“"...The message is clear: Just as biological evolution can require a balance between natural selection, which pushes uphill, and genetic drift, which does not, so too does creativity require a balance between the selection of useful ideas—where a focused mind comes in handy—and the suspension of that selection to play, dream, or allow the mind to wander.”
 
OP
Rinse & rePeat
Joined
Mar 10, 2021
Messages
21,494
Here is my 2nd annual Christmas ladder. I am saving so much money every year decorating the same old $20 ladder!

1701730883490.jpeg
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom