#real

Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. 'I am that I am' sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words 'Be still'. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that 'I am so and so'. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that? ↗

— Ramana Maharshi

#meditation #self #stillness #self-realization

The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#fight #identification #self-realization #uncertainly #self-realization

I felt Brighton was a perfect ending to a really interesting career. ↗

— Harold Budd

#career #ending #felt #i #interesting

But a small part of him also knew that the reason he'd never ventured anywhere was because of the worry that the reality of the world wouldn't match up to his dreams. ↗

— Jennifer E. Smith

#reality #dreams

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about. ↗

— Octavia Butler

#fantasy #first #follow #learn #open

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry. ↗

— Paul Davies

#now #physics #reality #time #time-passing

Evil will win if good people do nothing. ↗

— P.C. Cast

#real-talk #good-and-evil

The silence protrudes like an engorged stomach, while I ponder the thought of trying to sit on my own lap. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #humor #ponder #surreal #thought

A brick could used as a dagger, much like a blanket could be used to cool off after a heated argument.   ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#brick-and-blanket-iq-test #brick-and-blanket-responses #brick-and-blanket-test #brick-and-blanket-uses #funny

No one is normal. Everyone is just pretending to be normal. ↗