M. Simon

Oh wow. It was a good year!

YouTube video by Phil Ochs - Topic Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends

Et voilà ! #TIL - thank you!

youtu.be/9uUmLVzUQTA?...

might be one of the funniest videos i’ve ever seen

And a power masochist. Few men get as severely whipped, by someone that hot, without having to open their wallet.

Thunberg said, “If Israel, with the whole world watching, can treat a well-known, white person with a Swedish passport this way, just imagine what they do to Palestinians behind closed doors.”

He’s a late bloomer though. Kinda like a triffid.

Bien sûr!!

Cutting up other drivers and cyclists without warning, especially across cycle lanes, is so much more thrilling than pétanque, n’est-ce pas?

Great to see your post, @aaronbalick.com - it got me thinking and reading, instead of doomscrolling!! merci!!

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that this sheet of paper is full of clouds. Without the cloud, there will be no rain; without the rain, the trees cannot grow; and without the trees, we cannot make paper. So the cloud and the paper inter-are.”

Comparing and contrasting (🤓) Thích Nhát Hahn’s concept of “interbeing” (‘The Heart of Understanding’, 1960)

“Emptiness does not mean nothingness. Emptiness means interbeing. We cannot be by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be.”

Cf. the sutra itself (trans. Conze)

“Form is not different from emptiness,
emptiness is not different from form.
The same is true of feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.”

That which is void is precisely form, and that which is form is precisely void."

We always know what we mean by contrasts. Because of the inseparability of these opposites they always go together, this as it were hints at some kind of unity that underlies them. Space and form in that sense go together as the fundamental things we're dealing with in this universe.

But to suggest how very powerful and important this nothing at all is, let me point out to you that if you didn't have space you couldn't have anything solid. To begin with, if you didn't have space outside the solid you wouldn't know where the solids edges were.

"We tend to think of space as nothing. Space as such, that is to say whatever it is that lies between the earth and the moon and the earth and the sun, is considered to be just nothing at all.

Here, in ‘The Nature of Consciousness’, he addresses the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom that illuminates the form/emptiness relationship directly:-

I’m not sure *this* is the best; while it illustrates the concept of impermanence beautifully, equating emptiness and nothingness oversimplifies the concept of ‘sunyata’ to one that our language is, with a single word, unable to express.

Chicago priest Father Michael Pfleger: "The state of emergency is in AMERICA, not Chicago. It's birthed from this president and his admin's reign of terror."

( ht: @mikenellis.bsky.social )

Occam's Razor always rules. Always.

Preoccupation, even 😉

Existence has a lot to answer for. I blame mine - and everyone else’s - for my ADHD. When, that is, I have time.

Right now, I’m reflecting upon whether, given how the world might look in 30, 20 or even 10 years, whether that extra decade is even worth passing on fries, ketchup and mayo. #longevity -vs- #philosophy

A photo of the California #Nebula I took from my driveway… if you dropped the Earth into this scene, it wouldn’t even be the teeny tiniest speck… #astronomy #astrophotography #perspective

She’s been radicalised as a Woke Left Liberal Feminist Feline.