#transcendence

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#day-to-day #escape #explanation #freedom #future

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ↗

— Leonard Bernstein

#art #creativity #epiphanic-moment #epiphany #inspirational

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence. ↗

— Pierre Bourdieu

#rationalism #reductionism #transcendence #art

Dream Song of Thunders: Sometimes I go about pitying Myself, While I am carried by the wind Across the sky. ↗

— Frances Densmore

#irony #old-songs #transcendence #wind #dreams

Never forget: we walk on hell, gazing at flowers. ↗

— Kobayashi Issa

#life #old-songs #sword-sentiments #transcendence #wind

SUN, MOON, AND STARRY SKY Early summer evenings, when the first stars come out, the warm glow of sunset still stains the rim of the western sky. Sometimes, the moon is also visible, a pale white slice, while the sun tarries. Just think -- all the celestial lights are present at the same time! These are moments of wonder -- see them and remember. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#evening #evenings #heaven #light #lights

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92) ↗

— Joseph Campbell

#transcendence #art

...he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it -- say, in a nice stained-glass window -- not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#age

What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands? ↗

— Aberjhani

#faith #heaven #hope #humanity #massacre

Consciousness is endless, from one incarnation to the next. It simply will and does manifest in other places and times, regardless of what becomes of the human race. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#death-of-the-human-race #life-after-death #materialism-versus-spiritualism #reincarnation #transcendence