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