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Post by ion on Sept 10, 2012 6:48:12 GMT 10
Ave
New member here.
I'm looking for inputs based on the theme of transience, mainly ritualistic stuff, autors, essays etc. At the moment I'm going through Crowley works. If you could be so kind to list what hits your mind (generally), I'd be grateful.
Thanks
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Post by Tamrin on Sept 10, 2012 10:15:58 GMT 10
Bro. Ion, I am not sure what aspect of transience you are contemplating. Is it simply the passage of time ( tempus fugit); the impermenance of life ( memento mori); or the transitioning, liminal condition twixt one state and the next? Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, tells us of flight, saying: "The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” Similarly the portal to the infinite is to be mindless of transience, i.e., to lose one’s self in the moment. This is something we can achieve through meditation. The liminal stage of initiation is where the candidate has been accepted for initiation but is not yet an initate. Allegorically s/he is neither sighted nor blind, is bound but free, etc. As is stated in the Second Section of our First Sectional Lecture: "Being neither naked nor clothed, barefoot nor shod..." In mythology one finds many examples of this liminal state. The following story is one of these examples: To test the wisdom of the daughter of one of his courtiers, a king set her an impossible task. She had to come to him not on foot and not riding, not clothed or unclothed and bearing a gift that was not a gift! The clever daughter came to him straddling a goat with one foot on the ground, not walking or riding. She was covered in a fishing net, not clothed or naked, and at the king’s feet she placed a rabbit that immediately fled, thus bringing a gift that was not a gift. The king married her. In John Yarker's, The Arcane Schools (1909, William Tate, Belfast, p.109), he cites further examples, such as: Again when Queen Dido resorts to Magical arts to detain Æneas from sailing: (Book iv.)“A leavened cake in her devoted hands She holds, and next the highest altar stands; One tender foot was shod, the other bare, Girt was her gathered gown, and loose her hair.” A maxim of Pythagoras was: “Sacrifice and adore unshod.” Ovid describes Medea as having arms, breast, and knees made bare; and Roman Postulants for religious and political offices, assumed an air of humility, with cloak and tunic ungirt, arm and breast bare, and feet slipshod. The toga candida is yet used in Masonry.
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Post by ion on Sept 24, 2012 3:27:32 GMT 10
Transience, the fact that everything changes permanently, everything is fluent, nothing is static. Well, basically I'm interested in strenghtening the overall daily acceptance of decay, of change. Not holding things, not being addicted to specific circumstances or habits. Hope this made it clearer
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Post by Tamrin on Sept 24, 2012 6:19:01 GMT 10
You may wish to consider how some cultures consider time is cyclic (seasonal), others see it as linear (uni-directional), and physicists consider time, at least at the quantum level, can be multi directional. Also, you may consider how despite constant change, we carry our past with us and are a product of it (we can never cross the same river twice but the river we once crossed remains a fixed historical fact). The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it
Omar Khayyám
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Post by Smithee on Sept 25, 2012 8:38:29 GMT 10
The past is never dead. It's not even past William Faulkner (Born this day 1897)
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Post by Smithee on Sept 30, 2012 14:53:49 GMT 10
Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past Truman Capote (Born this day 1924)
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Post by ion on Sept 30, 2012 17:55:19 GMT 10
Thanks for the reactions so far, keep going if something hits your mind please
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Post by Smithee on Oct 4, 2012 9:06:52 GMT 10
None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us Anne Rice (Born this day 1941)
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Post by Smithee on Oct 4, 2012 9:08:49 GMT 10
Change is not merely necessary to life — it is life
Future shock — the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time
Like adequate education, freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness
In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic
You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn
The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer — about biological substances that can function like a semiconductorDr. Alvin TofflerAmerican futurologist and author (Future Shock) (Born this day 1928) The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order
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