humanness

The journey has been long.

I have already come a long way to integrate, to reach a semi-public space.

I am still doing this relatively anonymously so that the burden of openness doesn’t become too heavy right at the start.

I want to explore humanity in all the ways I have learned. We live in large communities called “societies,” with power structures. In addition to that, within human “cultures,” the forms we repeat, there is a great deal of understanding about what good humanity is.

This (b)log exists so that I can weave these different threads together:

• Awareness, emotional skills, body awareness, awakening, moving energy, honesty, clarity of vision, critical thinking.
• Compassion, inner support, joy of life and curiosity, vitality.
• Integrity.
• Concreteness.

Whimsy and creativity, surprising angles to humanity also seem like essential aspects to this equation, so I’m also including stories and poems etc. to make a complete whole.

(Of course, I have also been building websites since the 1990s, and this handcrafting feels like a return to something concrete, something more honest. My intention is to write by hand as much as possible and to savor the truth slowly, rather than prioritizing efficiency in any way.)

In my own mind, I collect observations and understanding about life. I’ve felt that pieces have been left unintegrated along the way. Instead, I now have a vast collection of insights, beliefs, both central and peripheral. This new site feels like a good way to integrate them into a concise whole.

The entire project can be thought to have begun with collecting quotes as a teenager. Quotes have the interesting aspect of being sufficiently loose and open to interpretation. They can be true in many different contexts. The use of quotes itself has never meant to be a claim that these statements are necessarily true in any absolute sense. At the same time, I feel they have served as useful guideposts.

I feel that they resonate and in one way or another point to something that would have otherwise been too laborious, and my understanding or capacity was not yet sufficient. I have chosen to rather experience compiling fragments, so that I at least have access to earlier inspirations later, so that I can later integrate these pieces of truth into perhaps one whole being.

Now I feel that it’s time - time to put into words the meanings I read into the quotes, to test beliefs which is possible through writing them out, and to integrate different layers of my personality.

The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from. -Andrew S. Tanenbaum

This applies to both technology and humanity in general. Especially the field of self-development, self-knowledge, spirituality is full of confusion. Many conceptions, little rootedness, concreteness.

In prayer, it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. -Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi seems to be saying something about how the content of the mind in contact with reality is secondary. Western religions seem to easily embark on a project that is pure spiritual bypassing. The mind makes conclusions, but contact with concrete human experience is missing. God becomes a story, instead of lived reality.

To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition. -Woody Allen

This also well describes the misunderstanding that exists between spiritual and religious worldviews.

I suspect that Allen is talking about the same thing as the above, just through humor - the idea that connection to God would be like a party membership card from which an identity is made, is inherently contradictory, and Allen’s humor makes this obvious.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. -Martin Luther King

The real conversation seems to be between whether spirituality, faith, religion, self-knowledge work is harnessed for human agendas, goals, or whether reality is wanted as it is.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei

On the journey to oneself, it is critically important to learn to trust one’s own eyes. To not believe narratives that do not seem possible to integrate into what appears to be concretely true for oneself.

Be the spoon. -#philosophy, IRCNet on August 23, 2003