Scriptor Ignotus > Recent Status Updates

"The knower cannot be known by the knower, just as fire cannot be consumed by the consuming fire; and there is no other knower different from brahman to whom brahman can become a separate knowable."

- Ādi Śaṅkara, commentary on the Kena Upaniṣad


Brahman is awareness, limitless, non-dual, and self-existent. All awareness is one and the same.

The elites don't want you to know this.

"Some person [said] to [Jesus], 'Tell my siblings to share my father's possessions with me.' He said to that person, 'My good fellow, who has made me into an arbitrator?' He turned to his disciples and said to them, 'So am I an arbitrator?'"

- Gospel of Thomas, n.72


haha

"From his weapons on open land
no man should step one pace away;
for it can't be known for certain, out on the road,
when a man might have need of his spear."

- Sayings of the High One, v.38

Similar to the celebrated American proverb, "Stay strapped or get clapped."

"Multiple limbs and demon faces
impervious to clubs and knives
we leave the world millions of times
but never the palace of the King of Nothing."

- Tao-ch'uan

[The King of Nothing is the Buddha]

My first, useless comment on this book is that it has a lot of typos. The funniest one I've encountered is on page 17 and refers to "out-of-wedlock marriage".

My second is that I appreciate Deneen's desire to transcend the merely oppositional stances of populists and (liberal) elitists alike with a return to the ideal of the "mixed regime."

Gonna listen to this on audio book while I spin around in circles.

https://media.tenor.com/5vCFypXT9hwAA...

"To the question 'who are we?' we can then answer finally that we are latent archetypes embedded in the Divine Reality, which is the ultimate root of every 'I,' and that through that archetype, which has become existentiated by God, we have existence in all realms of being from the spiritual to the physical...We were brought into this world in order to realize who we are and...to live accordingly while on earth."

"[M]an...does not penetrate the phenomena to see what is truly to be admired, and admires instead what he sees....Of all the things that appear to be good, how many of them endure?..It is clear that everything is, in itself, nothing at each particular moment of time, since it is always evolving into something else through the process of change....Mortal men, as you look upon the universe, see in it your own nature."

"The sovereign and highest Good, whose nature is goodness, this is divine nature itself...Now since those who have come to know the highest good, desire completely to share in it, and since this good is limitless, it follows that their desire must necessarily be coextensive with the limitless, and therefore have no limit. ...For it may be that human perfection consists precisely in this constant growth in the good."

It is so over

"A true man, born from above by the moral deed of self-renunciation, guides the living power of God to the mortified body of nature and shapes the entire world in the universal Kingdom of God. To believe in the Kingdom of God means to combine faith in man and faith in nature with faith in God. All delusions of the mind, all false theories...descend from the division of these three faiths."

2/2

"Not only faith in man, but also faith in nature returns to us with a real and complete faith in the Deity. We know nature and matter separated from God and perverted in itself, but we believe in its redemption and its union with divinity, its transformation into God-matter and as intermediary of this redemption and renewal we acknowledge a true, perfect man, i.e., a God-man in His free will and action. . . ."

1/2

"But it did not know - no one in the world knew - that the fullness of human maturity had been fulfilled, that, in the Jordan desert, the greatest of those born of women was waiting for his hour to come. The ways of God are unfathomable to man."

3/3

I love it when Bulgakov gets literary.

"Greece was surrendering itself to the sweet luxuriousness of its aesthetic and philosophical contemplation. The waves of the human ocean were rising and falling. Great political events, international wars, civil cataclysms were ripening and taking place. The world was living with all the intensity of the life of human genius and creativity, of sin and vice. . . ."

2/3

"The world was intoxicated and deafened by its own grandeur. Tiberias reigned on the world's throne. The hosts of Rome controlled the universe. Roman law held the universe in its iron grip. Horace was writing his odes, Tacitus his history, Vergil his Aeneid, and Seneca and Epictetus their philosophical works. . . ."

1/

'They stood together a moment; both her hands were in both of his. “You’ve been my best friend,” she said.

“It was for you that I wanted—that I wanted to live. But I’m of no use to you.”

Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept that; she could not part with him that way. “If you should send for me I’d come,” she said at last.'

😢

m'lady

*tips fedora*

"Reason is not given to make us wise, but to convince us of our folly and ignorance; just as the Mosaic law was given to the Jews not to make them righteous, but to make them more conscious of their sins." - Hamann, to Kant

"Indeed, inasmuch as he mediated Hume, Hamann may have proved to be the genius behind Kant's critical philosophy after all, with its critical assessment of reason's limits." - John Betz

Got this book on loan from the Air Force Academy, of all places.

"For twenty years the kaiser had been warning Europe that if it did not stand up to the 'yellow peril,' it would be overrun by the hordes of Asia. With House he spoke of Japanese 'fanaticism' and the 'semi-barbarous' character of Slavs and Latins. As the only countries able to advance Christian civilization, the United States, Germany, and England ought to unite against the rest of the world, the kaiser said."

lol

"If he scribbles I will chase him away, but if he writes well I will adopt him as my son, for I have never seen a more discerning ape."

These are like really long, surreal jokes with no punchline.

"[Ben] Franklin was the aberrational delegate who opposed property qualifications [for voting in Congressional elections] on the merits. He argued that the convention 'should not depress the virtue and public spirit of our common people, of which they displayed a great deal during the war.' He reminded his colleagues that '[s]ome of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with were the richest rogues.'"

lol based

"Newspaper[s]...denounced Rhode Island's government for its 'villainy, rascality, oppression, cruelty and devilishness.' A Massachusetts resident wrote that 'the other states will justly consider [Rhode Island] as cheats--traitors to the nation, public robbers, and armed plunderers of their neighbors.'...Critics began frequently to refer to the state as 'Rogue Island' and "Fool Island.'"

Rhode Island delenda est

It was fashionable among Italian elites of the sixth century BC to wear wide-brimmed hats with tall, pointed crowns, making them look like cowboys. 🤠

https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/sc...

The ancient roots of the spaghetti western.

The frame story for this is probably the most inappropriate thing you could possibly read on Valentine's Day.

"The erotic movement from God towards creatures, and from creatures back towards God recapitulates the mode by which what is is, and reveals the space of the whole universe as the unquantified and unmeasured how of a loving communion--a space which can be understood only in poetic categories ('in the good[...]'), only as dynamic disclosure 'outside God' of the mystery of the love of the Trinity."

"A cross-like withdrawal from our natural will is the only possibility we have of discerning, beyond the fantasies of the phenomenal, the truth of things. The truth of things becomes knowable only within the terms of personal relation...the possibility of ecstatic 'standing outside' that closed circle of life which is physical individuality, a humble study [and] ... loving reception of this logos."

4/4

"We need to draw back from the physical demands of the senses if we are to know the true beauty of the world - the world's 'personal' beauty. . . . Asceticism, as the Church's experience has established it...aims at the denial of individual desires so as to free our personal capabilities...for communion and loving self-offering. Maximus says: 'All phenomena need the cross.'

3/