. . . and all I got was this photo of Michelangelo's Pieta.

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I have not had the chance to see Michelangelo's Pieta in person, but I was happy to experience it vicariously through my wife's recent trip to Rome.

My wife also attended a General Audience at the Vatican and saw the pope at a ...

Kites -- the bird of prey, particularly in the form of Garuda -- have been in the sync stream, which put in my mind Rudyard Kipling's poem "Night Song in the Jungle":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free -- The herds are shut in byre and hut, For loosed till dawn are we.This is the ...

Less than two weeks ago, I posted "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," the title being a line spoken by Doctor Octopus in one of the Spider-Man movies. Today I ran across this in a used bookstore:

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According to the summary on Wikipedia, Klara is an intelligent robot that observes the ...

My post "All the pebbles I have seen" takes its title from a song by Donovan. Bill pointed out that the singer's name means "dark" or "black." More specifically, according to Wiktionary:

From Irish Ó Donndubháin (“descendant of (a person named) brown & black”), from donn (“brown”) and dubh ...

I came across the notion that "Writing is thinking" from post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman - in the mid 1980s; and the potentially-linked idea that "Thinking is participation" from Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield, in the past 15 years or so.

Both are valuable insights, but partial truths: writing can be ...

These two links appeared one after the other on Synlogos -- meaning that the two posts were published very close together in time, probably separated by minutes rather than hours. (Both are dated February 12, with no more specific timestamp.)

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I read "The Epstein Inquisition" first. If the web ...

PSYOPS are regarded as top-down mass psychological/ sociological manipulations; and they are all evil by nature; because they are not motivated by love - not in harmony with divine creation.

Also, since they aim to change "other peoples" behaviour in pre-determined ways, PSYOPS are intrinsically evil in that they ...

Just as in the 2020 Birdemic - when utterly wild and deeply ignorant claims of lethal-danger emanating from serial manipulators and liars; were taken seriously, made into policies, and enforced upon the world; we are now seeing the same with "predictions" about "AI": and the endemicpandemic that is ...

In "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," the name Lassie came up as being symbolically related to Colleen, as both names originated as common nouns meaning "girl" used in Celtic countries. In a comment, WanderingGondola noted the further connection that the most famous Lassie is a collie, which is quite ...

First, some comments by others on "All the pebbles I have seen," pasted here for searchability and ease of reference.

William Wright (WW) said...

When I read the line about "precious stones for Colleen", the image that actually came to my mind was Ungoliant. Specifically, the scene in which, after she and Melkor ...

If you agree that the primary unit of reality is Beings, then there are no "causes".

If beings are the reality, then the first step in anything is the freedom of some Being as expressed spiritually; and that is not "a" cause. It can be thought of as some kind of action of their "self", their ultimate nature.

This ...

"When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The ...

Altruism - helping others, especially at the expense of oneself - is widely regarded as the highest human value.

This is especially on the Left, but in a modified form also on the self-styled Right - and very commonly among self-identified Christians (who may even claim that helping-others is the single core and ...

In 1964 a hospital in the United States carried out a series of experiments on dream telepathy. While one person slept, another person would attempt to transmit telepathically a randomly selected image. The sleeper would then report his dreams, and a panel of judges would decide which of eight possible target images ...

I was re-reading the Introduction I wrote for the second edition of William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness (2019).

In this writing I am explaining Arkle's spiritual philosophy, to the best of my ability - and Arkle has been a significant influence on my own understanding over the past fifteen or so years. ...

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tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of the fire. that’s the famous dictum. i know it’s not fair to dissect a metaphor, but maybe i can learn something by it. so what are the requirements of preserving a fire.

you have to get some firewood. that involves planting trees (and that ...

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There is some kind of a consensus - especially among Christians - that Western Civilization is ending, and that this multi-stage collapse is substantially self-inflicted - partly suicidal due to hedonic materialism and cowardice of the unreligious-aspiritual masses; and partly the outcome of deliberate contrivance ...

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As I was contemplating the Three of Pentacles, two lines of an otherwise forgotten song began playing in my mind:

All the pebbles I have seenPrecious stones for Colleen

I began to hear it in my head as a round, with two voices repeating the two lines endlessly, but staggered, so that one voice ...

As I was falling asleep, I thought of a scene from Flight of the Gargoyle in which a girl had an improbably large percentage of her body eaten by a demonic creature (a razor-toothed "mermaid" with the lower body of a leech rather than a fish) while the girl herself remained alive and conscious. I thought, In real life ...

Our creator is a loving God, and the divine creation is "built" with love; so to be on the side* of Good is to live from love.

A person motivated by love, thinks and does things for other people (and other beings), because of love.

This means that the Good person will often do something that sacrifices his own ...

An excellent series of reflections and observations over at Laeth’s place today. I found the following particularly striking:

i find myself more and more at odds with both classical religion and mainstream attitudes to reality. the first one refuses to accept just how random and chaotic a world of true freedom ...

If you really believe that you personally are free, and you are a Christian; it follows that You Are Responsible.

You are not a communal being; you cannot evade your ultimate responsibility by claiming unawareness, or automatic habits; because such a claim gives-away the lie.

If you are responsible, then it is ...

The main reason why most would-be deep discussion (as well as superficial argument) is a waste is... Metaphysics.

Metaphysics is our fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality; and when these assumptions are wrong, all answers will be wrong - even if they are superficially correct.

All answers will ...

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since the individual is now primary, there is zero hope for society, and less so for humanity. (the larger the group, the less reality it has, the less sense the category makes). there is no automatic collective purpose anymore. at least for modern people. any real purpose must be consciously shared and pursued. an ...

During the five years Michael Lord and I spent in Yercaud we met many people, both Indians and Western travellers, some through our guest house and some just chance encounters. There was Arati, a Parsee lady in her 60s from Bombay who stayed with us for a couple of months, supposedly for health reasons. Her husband ...

My last post, "Wounded Rahab," quoted this verse from the Book of Mormon, in which Jacob quotes Isaiah:

Awake, awake! Put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days. Art thou not he that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? (2 Ne. 8:9)

Today I had a nasty migraine and spent most of the day ...

While I still get intermittent great pleasure from music (as evidenced by my occasional postings here) there has certainly been a tremendous decline from the days of my teens and early early twenties, when music was probably second only to literature and ideas in its importance for my life.

By music, I mostly mean ...

I checked my comments this afternoon and found a new one from Bill on "Turn around, bright eyes," a post from several days ago which prominently featured an octopus. Bill wrote:

There is another potentially interesting connection to the symbol of an Octopus I stumbled across in looking at some old LDS endowment ...