Claws to the Weak

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A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.

George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950

Groundlessness

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The disenchanted investigation of empirical and psychological phenomena, the canny co-creation of an evolving world, the death of (our conceptions about) God - all of these are stations, or rather nodes, of the path. The network path only blossoms when we accept that we will not transcend the sometimes agonizing disjunctions between our various structures of belief and practice. We will not simply sew up the conflicts between faith and skepticism, the stones and the stories, the incandescence of the absolute and the mundane absurdity of an everyday life growing more bizarre and frightful by the minute. Instead, these tensions and conflicts become dynamic and creative forces, calling us to face others with an openness that does not seek to control or assimilate them to whatever point of view we happen to hold. By replacing the need for a common ground with an acceptance and even celebration of our common groundlessness, the network path might creatively integrate these gaps and lacunae without always trying to fill them in. You can no more banish the noise on this network than you can banish the void from a cup - nor would you want to. You just attend to the chaos that comes until something unexpected blossoms: a dilation in the mind, a dawning in the heart, and a shared breathing with beings so deep it reaches down to sinew.

Erik Davis, Techgnosis

Glass Bead Game

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All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an organist on a organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Rhizomes

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Grasses, orchids, lilies, and bamboos have no roots, but rhizomes, creeping underground stems which spread sideways on dispersed, horizontal networks of swollen or slender filaments and produce aerial shoots along their length and surface as distribution of plants. They defy categorization as individual entities.

Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones

Regeneration

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The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human - these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of *all together*, in a direction in which *all together* can join and find completion in a spiritual regeneration of the earth.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man