Blog

Tag: philosophy

  • October 25th, 2012 12:09am

    Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.

    — Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (via quotes-shape-us)

  • October 1st, 2012 12:08pm


    thisistheverge:

    More human than human: how Philip K. Dick can change your life

    Jesse Hicks talks to Jonathan Lethem, John Alan Simon, and other ‘Dickheads’ about PKD’s enduring legacy.

    In Dick’s worlds, people could be shits and robots could be more human than human. It all came down to whether they could find within themselves a genuine sense of fellow-feeling. This aligned him less with his sci-fi contemporaries than with authors whose work proposed a strong moral philosophy, such as Leo Tolstoy and, a generation after Dick, David Foster Wallace.

  • September 30th, 2012 2:52pm

    Well, the idea of a single protagonist, I never could understand too well. What I’ve felt is that problems are multi-personal, they involve us all, there’s no such thing as a private problem…it’s only a form of ignorance. When I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my nose, and I’m broke, and my wife’s left me – it’s my ignorance that makes me thing I’m an entire universe and that these miseries are my own and they’re not affecting the rest of the world. If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something..

    — Philip K. Dick

  • September 10th, 2012 2:40pm

    To me, the core of that attraction is that she is a better reporter than he is. Think about being Superman for a second. The Olympic record for weightlifting is 1,038 lbs., but you could lift more than that as a child. The record for the 100 meter dash is 9.58 seconds, but you can travel over 51 miles in that time. Going to Vegas? You don’t need your X-Ray vision to win at Blackjack, because you can just count the cards while holding down a conversation about nuclear physics. Without really trying, you are better at just about everything than anyone else in the world.

    However, (as Mark Waid once pointed out in a podcast with Marv Wolfman) none of that really translates to your chosen profession. Typing really fast does not help your prose. Being able to lift a tank does not help you convince a source to go on record. It is as near to competing straight up with normal people as Superman would ever be capable of. Even then, it comes easily enough to him that you get a pretty lofty perch at a great paper very early in your career. It is just in this one context, there is someone better than you are: Lois Lane.

    As mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, you reach up for the first time in your life and she rejects you.

    To me, it is an inversion of the Luthor story. Luthor sees someone above him and feels hate. Superman sees someone above him and feels love.

    — Dean Hacker, comment on “Giving Lois Lane A Second Look, For The First Time” by Kelly Thompson (CBR: She Has No Head!)