Phase Image Quotes

Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

I have to ask myself how I can possibly expect to know Jesus as he would want to be known if my life remains unscathed by trouble and grief. How can I hope to grasp anything of God's heart for this broken planet if I never weep because its brokenness touches me and breaks my heart? How can I reflect his image if I never share in his sufferings? And how will any of us ever learn to treasure his hesed and grace if we never experience phases where these blessings seem absent?

The suppression of ecstasy and condemnation of pleasure by patriarchal religion have left us in a deep, festering morass. The pleasures people seek in modern times are superficial, venal, and corrupt. This is deeply unfortunate, for it justifies the patriarchal condemnation of pleasure that rotted out our hedonistic capacities in the first place! Narcissism is rampant, having reached a truly global scale. It now appears to have entered the terminal phase known as “cocooning,” the ultimate state of isolation. Dissociation from the natural world verges on complete disembodiment, represented in Archontic ploys such as “transhumanism,” cloning, virtual reality, and the uploading of human consciousness into cyberspace. The computer looks due to replace the cross as the primary image of salvation. It is already the altar where millions worship daily. If the technocrats prevail, artificial intelligence and artificial life will soon overrule the natural order of the planet.

As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more?

If an answer didn’t come to her during this learning phase, she let the subject settle inside her. She no longer thought about it consciously, allowing instead some dark and muscled lobe of her brain to take over. The issue was broken down into components and absorbed, images from the material occasionally appearing in her thoughts like neuronal burps. Every once in awhile she’d flip through her notes, having no expectations but going through the ritual in order to goose her brain along. After her mind had worked on the problem like this for long enough—a few days, a month, maybe a whole year—the answer would suddenly hit her. The solution glittering and fully realized, as obvious as though someone much smarter had handed it to her, frustrated with how long she was taking.

As we see it, the whole outlook brought about by the scientific revolution should have been--must be--a phase, only, of the evolution of consciousness. An absolutely indispensable phase, but a passing one. What is riveting it on to us and preventing us from superseding it, because it prevents us from even imaging any other kind of consciousness, is precisely this error of projecting it back into the past.

The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.

Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discrete, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence.

In the middle of the night, he woke up and realized to his surprise that he had been having one erotic dream after the other. The only one he could recall with any clarity was the last: an enormous naked woman, at least five times his size, floating on her back in a pool, her belly from crotch to navel covered with thick hair. Looking at her from the side of the pool, he was greatly excited. How could he have been excited when his body was debilitated by a gastric disorder? And how could he be excited by the sight of a woman who would have repelled him had he seen her while conscious? He thought: In the clockwork of the head, two cogwheels turn opposite each other. On the one, images; on the other, the body's reactions. The cog carrying the image of a naked woman meshes with the corresponding erection-command cog. But when, for one reason or another, the wheels go out of phase and the excitement cog meshes with a cog bearing the image of a swallow in flight, the penis rises at the sight of a swallow. Moreover, a study by one of Tomas's colleagues, a specialist in human sleep, claimed that during any kind of dream men have erections, which means that the link between erections and naked women is only one of a thousand ways the Creator can set the clockwork moving in a man's head. And what has love in common with all this? Nothing. If a cogwheel in Tomas's head goes out of phase and he is excited by seeing a swallow, it has absolutely no effect on his love for Tereza. If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es muss sein! Though that is not entirely true. Even if love is something other than a clockwork of sex that the Creator uses for His own amusement, it is still attached to it. It is attached to it like a tender naked woman to the pendulum of an enormous clock. Thomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had. He also thought: One way of saving love from the stupidity of sex would be to set the clockwork in our head in such a way as to excite us at the sight of a swallow. And with that sweet thought he started dozing off. But on the very threshold of sleep, in the no-man's-land of muddled concepts, he was suddenly certain he had just discovered the solution to all riddles, the key to all mysteries, a new utopia, a paradise: a world where man is excited by seeing a swallow and Tomas can love Tereza without being disturbed by the aggressive stupidity of sex.

The reason for the great number and variety of Old European images lies in the fact that this symbolism is lunar and chthonic, built around the understanding that life is in eternal transformation, in constant and rhythmic change between creation and destruction, birth and death. The moon's three phases-new, waxing, and old-are repeated in trinities or triple function deities that recall these moon phases; maiden, nymph, and crone; life-giving, death-giving, and transformational; rising, dying, and self-renewing. Life-givers are also death-wielders. Immortality is secured through the innate forces of regeneration within Nature itself. The concept of regeneration and renewal is perhaps the most outstanding and dramatic theme we perceive in this symbolism. It seems more appropriate to view all of these Goddess images as aspects of the one Great Goddess with her core functions-life-giving, death-wielding, regeneration, and renewal. The obvious analogy would be to Nature itself; through the multiplicity of phenomena and continuing cycles of which it is made, one recognizes the fundamental and underlying unity of Nature. The Goddess is immanent rather than transcendent and therefore physically manifest.

I would be unfair to myself if I said I did not try. I did, even if desultorily. But desire is a curious thing. If it does not exist it does not exist and there is nothing you can do to conjure it up. Worse still, as I discovered, when desire begins to sink, like a capsizing ship it takes down a lot with it.   In our case it took down the conversation, the laughter, the sharing, the concern, the dreams and nearly - the most important thing, the most important thing - and nearly the affection too. Soon my sinking desire had taken everything else down with it to the floor of the sea, and only affection remained like the bobbing hand of a drowning man, poised perilously between life and death.   More than once she tried to seize the moment and open up the issue. She did it with a hard face and a soft face; she did it when I was idling on the terrace and when I was in the thick of my works; first thing in the morning and last thing at night.   We need to talk. Yes. Do you want to talk? Sure. What's happening? I don't know. Is there someone else? No. Is it something I did? Oh no. Then what the hell's happening? I don't know. Is there anything you want to talk to me about? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? I don't know. That's what I mean - I don't know. Toc toc toc.   All the while I tried to save that bobbing hand - of affection - from vanishing. I felt somehow that if it drowned there would not be a single pointer on the wide stormy surface to show me where our great love had once stood. That bobbing hand of affection was a marker, a buoy, holding out the hope that one day we could salvage the sunken ship. If it drowned, our coordinates would be completely lost and we would not know where to even begin looking.   Even in my weird state, it was an image of such desolation that it made my heart lurch wildly.   ***   For a long time, with her immense pride in herself - in us - she did not turn to anyone for help. Not friends, not family. For simply too long she imagined this was a passing phase, but then, as the weeks rolled by, through slow accretion the awful truth began to settle on her. By then she had run through all the plays of a relationship: withdrawal, sulking, anger, seduction, inquisition, affection, threat.   Logic, love, lust. Now the epitaph was beginning to creep up on her. Acceptance. 

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.

The real question is: What is expiation? Is it compatible with a pure image of God? Is it not a phase in man’s religious development that we need to move beyond? If Jesus is to be the new messenger of God, should he not be opposing this notion? So the actual point at issue is whether the New Testament texts—if read rightly—articulate an understanding of expiation that we too can accept, whether we are prepared to listen to the whole of the message that it offers us.

Hey, yourself.” I beamed at the cheerleading squad's captain and then leaned down to whisper to La La. “What’s her name again?” “Jackie.” La La slung her jean satchel on her right shoulder and exhaled noisily. “I can’t wait until you get out of your Shapeshifter horny phase.” “The proper name is Season.” I drank in Jackie’s image as she jumped around, doing a cheer. Those round melons bounced with each movement. “And it usually takes Shifters seven to ten years to mature out of it, so buckle up and enjoy the ride.” La La snorted.

The silence of the image is equalled only by the silence of the masses and the silence of the desert. The dream would be to be a photographer without a lens, to move through the world without a camera, in short, to pass beyond photography and see things as though they had themselves passed beyond the image, as though you had already photographed them, but in a past life. And perhaps we have indeed already passed through the image phase, in the way we pass through different animal phases, the mirror phase being a mere reverberation of all this in our individual lives.

Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases, turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country it scours, approaching the tidal mark where it puts off majesty, disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta, punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country, wearies to its final act of surrender, effacement, atonement in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled attractive child ever dreams of, non-country, image of death as a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely monsters, our tales believe, can be translated too, even as water, the selfless mother of all especials.

She’s probably used to being held like that, being looked at like that. It’s foreign to me, though. No boy has ever seen me in that way, because I’m not a girl like Poppy. It’s not as if I don’t think I’m pretty. When I look in the mirror, I generally like what I see. I don’t wish I had straight hair or lighter skin. It’s just that, to most guys, my kind of pretty isn’t the same as Poppy’s kind of pretty—even with the gray hair. I’m an acquired taste, and Poppy is, like, pizza. Pizza doesn’t have to worry if people are just ordering it to look cool or complete some type of image. No one goes through a pizza phase. Pizza is universal.

Celtic spirituality linked the number three with all things divine and so Brigid the Goddess began to appear in lore and image in triplicate form. Contemporary images of Brigid often depict her as maiden, mother, and crone, associating the three sisters with the phases of the moon: waxing, full, and waning, but this is not a correct correlation. Brigid has historically been considered a solar Deity and as three identical women of the same age, sometimes called the Three Brigid Sisters: Woman of Healing (Ban leighis), Woman of Smithwork (Ban goibnechtae), and Woman Poet (Ban fhile). In addition to being the living earth, Brigid was also seen as the living embodiment of spring.

But it is the nature of narcissistic entitlement to see the situation from only one very subjective point of view that says “My feelings and needs are all that matter, and whatever I want, I should get.” Mutuality and reciprocity are entirely alien concepts, because others exist only to agree, obey, flatter, and comfort – in short, to anticipate and meet my every need. If you cannot make yourself useful in meeting my need, you are of no value and will most likely be treated accordingly, and if you defy my will, prepare to feel my wrath. Hell hath no fury like the Narcissist denied. Narcissists hold these unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves uniquely special. In social situations, you will talk about them or what they are interested in because they are more important, more knowledgeable, or more captivating than anyone else. Any other subject is boring and won’t hold interest, and, in their eyes, they most certainly have a right to be entertained. In personal relationships, their sense of entitlement means that you must attend to their needs but they are under no obligation to listen to or understand you. If you insist that they do, you are “being difficult” or challenging their rights. How dare you put yourself before me? they seem to (or may actually) ask. And if they have real power over you, they feel entitled to use you as they see fit and you must not question their authority. Any failure to comply will be considered an attack on their superiority. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger rage and self-righteous aggression. The conviction of entitlement is a holdover from the egocentric stage of early childhood, around the age of one to two, when children experience a natural sense of grandiosity that is an essential part of their development. This is a transitional phase, and soon it becomes necessary for them to integrate their feelings of self-importance and invincibility with an awareness of their real place in the overall scheme of things that includes a respect for others. In some cases, however, the bubble of specialness is never popped, and in others the rupture is too harsh or sudden, as when a parent or caretaker shames excessively or fails to offer soothing in the wake of a shaming experience. Whether overwhelmed with shame or artificially protected from it, children whose infantile fantasies are not gradually transformed into a more balanced view of themselves in relation to others never get over the belief that they are the center of the universe. Such children may become self-absorbed “Entitlement monsters,” socially inept and incapable of the small sacrifices of Self that allow for reciprocity in personal relationships. The undeflated child turns into an arrogant adult who expects others to serve as constant mirrors of his or her wonderfulness. In positions of power, they can be egotistical tyrants who will have their way without regard for anyone else. Like shame, the rage that follows frustrated entitlement is a primitive emotion that we first learn to manage with the help of attuned parents. The child’s normal narcissistic rages, which intensify during the power struggles of age eighteen to thirty months – those “terrible twos” – require “optimal frustration” that is neither overly humiliating nor threatening to the child’s emerging sense of Self. When children encounter instead a rageful, contemptuous or teasing parent during these moments of intense arousal, the image of the parent’s face is stored in the developing brain and called up at times of future stress to whip them into an aggressive frenzy. Furthermore, the failure of parental attunement during this crucial phase can interfere with the development of brain functions that inhibit aggressive behavior, leaving children with lifelong difficulties controlling aggressive impulses.

The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, installation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual's life-crises and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the bride, the widow, the priest, the chieftain; at the same time rehearsing for the rest of the community the old lesson of the archetypal stages. All participate in the ceremonial according to rank and function. The whole society becomes visible to itself as an imperishable living unit. Generations of individuals pass, like anonymous cells from a living body; but the sustaining, timeless form remains. By an enlargement of vision to embrace this superindividual, each discovers himself enhanced, enriched, supported, and magnified. His role, however unimpressive, is seen to be intrinsic to the beautiful festival-image of man—the image, potential yet necessarily inhibited, within himself. Social duties continue the lesson of the festival into normal, everyday existence, and the individual is validated still. Conversely, indifference, revolt—or exile—break the vitalizing connectives. From the standpoint of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing—waste. Whereas the man or woman who can honestly say that he or she has lived the role—whether that of priest, harlot, queen, or slave—is something in the full sense of the verb to be. Rites of initiation and installation, then, teach the lesson of the essential oneness of the individual and the group; seasonal festivals open a larger horizon. As the individual is an organ of society, so is the tribe or city—so is humanity entire—only a phase of the mighty organism of the cosmos.

Psychologically, the United States is a bizarre mixture of overconfidence and insecurity. Interestingly, this is the precise description of the adolescent mind, and that is exactly the American condition in the twenty-first century. The world’s leading power is having an extended adolescent identity crisis, complete with incredible new strength and irrational mood swings. Historically, the United States is an extraordinarily young and therefore immature society. So at this time we should expect nothing less from America than bravado and despair. How else should an adolescent feel about itself and its place in the world? But if we think of the United States as an adolescent, early in its overall history, then we also know that, regardless of its self-image, adulthood lies ahead. Adults tend to be more stable and more powerful than adolescents. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that America is in the earliest phase of its power. It is not fully civilized. America, like Europe in the sixteenth century, is still barbaric (a description, not a moral judgment). Its culture is unformed. Its will is powerful. Its emotions drive it in different and contradictory directions. Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn’t live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for. Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and that their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism undermines self-certainty Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle.

The Joachitic speculation comprises a complex of four symbols which have remained characteristic of the political mass movements of modern times. The first of these symbols is that of the Third Realm—that is, the conception of a third world-historical phase that is at the same time the last, the age of fulfillment. The second symbol Joachim developed is that of the leader, the dux, who appears at the beginning of a new era and through his appearance establishes that era. God is understood by the secularist sectarians as a projection of the substance of the human soul into the illusionary spaciousness of the “beyond.” Through psychological analysis, this illusion can be dispelled and “God” brought back from his beyond into the human soul from which he sprung. By dispelling the illusion, the divine substance is reincorporated in man, and man becomes superman. The act of taking God back into man, just as among the older sectarians, has the result of creating a human type who experiences himself as existing outside of institutional bonds and obligations. The third of Joachim’s symbols is that of the prophet. With the creation of the symbol of the precursor, a new type emerges in Western history: the intellectual who knows the formula for salvation from the misfortunes of the world and can predict how world history will take its course in the future. In the further course of Western history, the Christian tide recedes, and the prophet, the precursor of the leader, becomes the secularist intellectual who thinks he knows the meaning of history (understood as world-immanent) and can predict the future. In political practice, the figure of the intellectual who projects the image of future history and makes predictions cannot always be clearly separated from that of the leader. The fourth of the Joachitic symbols is the community of spiritually autonomous persons. In this free community of autonomous persons without institutional organization can be seen the same symbolism found in modern mass movements, which imagine the Final Realm as a free community of men after the extinction of the state and other institutions. The symbolism is most clearly recognizable in communism, but the idea of democracy also thrives not inconsiderably on the symbolism of a community of autonomous men.

Hitler initially served in the List Regiment engaged in a violent four-day battle near Ypres, in Belgian Flanders, with elite British professional soldiers of the initial elements of the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler thereby served as a combat infantryman in one of the most intense engagements of the opening phase of World War I. The List Regiment was temporarily destroyed as an offensive force by suffering such severe casualty rates (killed, wounded, missing, and captured) that it lost approximately 70 percent of its initial strength of around 3,600 men. A bullet tore off Hitler’s right sleeve in the first day of combat, and in the “batch” of men with which he originally advanced, every one fell dead or wounded, leaving him to survive as if through a miracle. On November 9, 1914, about a week after the ending of the great battle, Hitler was reassigned as a dispatch runner to regimental headquarters. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. On about November 14, 1914, the new regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Philipp Engelhardt, accompanied by Hitler and another dispatch runner, moved forward into terrain of uncertain ownership. Engelhardt hoped to see for himself the regiment’s tactical situation. When Engelhardt came under aimed enemy smallarms fire, Hitler and the unnamed comrade placed their bodies between their commander and the enemy fire, determined to keep him alive. The two enlisted men, who were veterans of the earlier great four-day battle around Ypres, were doubtlessly affected by the death of the regiment’s first commander in that fight and were dedicated to keeping his replacement alive. Engelhardt was suitably impressed and proposed Hitler for the Iron Cross Second Class, which he was awarded on December 2. Hitler’s performance was exemplary, and he began to fit into the world around him and establish the image of a combat soldier tough enough to demand the respect of anyone in right wing, Freikorps-style politics after the war. -- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 88

In order to avoid the deafening of conspecifics, some bats employ a jamming avoidance response, rapidly shifting frequencies or flying silent when foraging near conspecifics. Because jamming is a problem facing any active emission sensory system, it is perhaps not surprising (though no less amazing) that similar jamming avoidance responses are deployed by weakly electric fish. The speed of sound is so fast in water that it makes it difficult for echolocating whales to exploit similar Doppler effects. However, the fact that acoustic emissions propagate much farther and faster in the water medium means that there is less attenuation of ultrasound in water, and thus that echolocation can be used for broader-scale 'visual' sweeping of the undersea environment. These constraints and trade-offs must be resolved by all acoustic ISMs, on Earth and beyond. There are equally universal anatomical and metabolic constraints on the evolvability of echolocation that explain why it is 'harder' to evolve than vision. First, as noted earlier, a powerful sound-production capacity, such as the lungs of tetrapods, is required to produce high-frequency emissions capable of supporting high-resolution acoustic imaging. Second, the costs of echolocation are high, which may limit acoustic imaging to organisms with high-metabolisms, such as mammals and birds. The metabolic rates of bats during echolocation, for instance, are up to five times greater than they are at rest. These costs have been offset in bats through the evolutionarily ingenious coupling of sound emission to wing-beat cycle, which functions as a single unit of biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Sound emission is coupled with the upstroke phase of the wing-beat cycle, coinciding with contraction of abdominal muscles and pressure on the diaphragm. This significantly reduces the price of high-intensity pulse emission, making it nearly costless. It is also why, as any careful crepuscular observer may have noticed, bats spend hardly any time gliding (which is otherwise a more efficient means of flight).

Techniques Phase 1 Night is the time to practice this technique, as you will require deep, undisturbed concentration, and the airways are less likely to be cluttered during the dark of the day. You will be using the visualization function initially, but instead of retaining internalization, you are going to externalize your consciousness (as in shapeshifting). Seat yourself in your usual working position. Go into meditation to center yourself. Visualize yourself standing directly in front of where you are. Observe the back of your head, your height, your stance—everything about yourself that you can see. It is not possible to observe your own face in this context, just as it is not possible to observe your own physical form (except in a mirror), as we are aware only of our internalized externalization of image and not the way we appear to an observer. Next you are to project your consciousness into your body. By this I mean that you are no longer the person observing, but the person being observed. Look around your immediate environment. Go to the doorway and walk around the room, looking at everything: look behind objects, inside cupboards and boxes, look closely at books, pictures, everything. Continue this exercise nightly until you are familiar with your immediate surroundings. Always reenter your prone material body the way you left. Phase 2 Begin with meditation. Go with the process of projecting into the externalized image of yourself. You may now proceed to leave the room with which you have oriented yourself over the preceding nights and travel around the house in which you live, observing at all times and remaining aware of all things your senses perceive. If there are other people in the house, you may pick up on their emotions, moods, dream patterns, etc., but at this stage, do not work at having them become aware of your presence (they may become aware of you anyway, especially if they are asleep and traveling close to their physical habitat). Continue with this exercise until you are familiar with the process. Phase 3 Begin with meditation. Project your consciousness into your self-image. You can now leave the house and move around outside. Be aware of the time. Observe all that is around you. Now you can begin the process of expanding your entity. If you bend your knees and jump, you will discover that you are weightless and can keep rising into the atmosphere as long as you desire. You can also think your astral body from one place to another without necessarily following a familiar route. Practice this often, but don’t forget to follow the return-to-body procedure! I tend to stress this like a mother-hen. I’ve had horrible postastral dysfunction occur due to both interruption and lack of experience, and it has sometimes been days before I stopped feeling dizzy and/or nauseous and disoriented. Sleeping lots tends to fix it, though.

Memory alone had proven elusive under such reduced conditions, defying all attempts to record it indirectly. The only efficient way it could be captured and simulated was secondhand, by interviewing the original at length about his or her past and using physical records to supply the images. Emotions could be attached later, during the fine-tuning phase, to color the recollection correctly, even though the details might still be slightly askew. Preawakening memory in such a mind was, at best, a patchwork quilt pieced together from a million isolated fragments.

These two ways to incorporate mindfulness sit well with art therapy: first, by incorporating meditative or contemplative methods to facilitate relaxation and deepen the inward turn for connecting with deeper consciousness in all phases of the art task; second, by introducing cognitive skills to bring clients into the present moment with what they are feeling. Not how (guilt, anger, shame), but what (I feel helpless, unworthy, agitated). Cognitive mindfulness also provides a skillful means for dialoguing with art, where remaining open and image-centered may result in deeper insights.

In the initial section on shamatha, the Vajra Essence has the practitioner take the mind as the path, using the specific approach of taking appearances and awareness as the path, also known as settling the mind in its natural state. In brief, this consists of observing all arising mental phenomena without grasping on to them. Your thoughts, emotions, images, and so forth are observed closely with mindfulness, but you do not encourage, discourage, or involve yourself in any way with the arising mental phenomena. The aim at this stage is to settle the mind in the substrate consciousness (alayavijñana)—the ground of the ordinary mind. The text also comments on the many meditation experiences (nyam) that may be encountered and how to behave when they appear. Pitfalls are described, along with some of the deeper possibilities of this phase of practice.

Opening and closing images frame our whole lives, like birth and death. But I’m really talking about the dynamic phase of our lives when we’re making our way in the world. The opening image is when we’re eighteen, say, and our closing image is when we’re about fifty. We all have thirty-two years to get our closing image right, and hardly anyone succeeds. When we’re on our deathbed, will we be proud of our closing image, or tormented by it? That’s the challenge of the movie of our life. That’s when we know if we’re going to heaven or hell. That’s the Final Judgment.

(2) According to the Shäntong tradition, primordial wisdom is what is to be realized and discriminative wisdom is the means to realize it. In this view, discriminative wisdom is of two kinds, these being the discriminative wisdom focusing outwards and the one focusing inwards. Generally speaking, discriminative wisdom is the ability to individually discriminate each and every object. This ability in its aspect of focusing outwards is also native to ordinary beings. In the Shäntong view, discriminative wisdom constitutes the ability to discern all relative phenomena, each individually, and to know them for what they are. While the relative phenomena are examined by means of discriminative wisdom, their way of existence and their way of appearance are understood. It is seen that they are empty, lacking inherent existence, that they do not truly exist and yet appear on a relative level like a dream image or a magical illusion. In the Shäntong view, primordial wisdom is considered as being within all sentient beings. This is because in this view it is no other than the mind itself in terms of its true existence. The essence of mind is emptiness and its nature is clear light. These two aspects being inseparable, primordial wisdom is equivalent to the inseparable union of emptiness and clear light, or of spaciousness and awareness. With regard to this primordial wisdom three aspects are distinguished: those of the basis, path, and fruit. The primordial wisdom present within all beings needs to be realized in order to reveal itself immediately or directly. This realization has to take place in such a way that primordial wisdom itself recognizes its own face (Tib. ye shes rang ngor shes pa). The primordial wisdom present from the very beginning within the stream of being, which is the true nature of the minds of all sentient beings, the inseparable union of emptiness and clear light, is called the basis primordial wisdom and also “ever-present wisdom” or “ever-present dharmakaya.” The phase in which this nature of mind is initially realized and during which this realization is cultivated is called the path primordial wisdom. At the time when all the adventitious stains of delusion are eliminated, this inseparable union of emptiness and clear light is called the fruit primordial wisdom.

I felt I was New Age before it became hip (and now passé), and disliked the name given to this 'recent' wave of spiritual interest in the 1980s because the word 'new' was in it: this word automatically implies that the phase will soon pass into something either “established” or stale, or will be chronicled as an ephemeral fad or phase to be found on some old bookshelf one day. Again, passé. For instance, the New Thought movement faded with the smoke of the Great War, the war to end all wars – which later was reclassified as WWI. Indeed, just a few years into the new 21st century, New Age was becoming old. Smooth jazz seemed to replace the name in music, and holistic and integral were the latest catch words describing the eclectic philosophy of the past decades. Astrologers were laughing: they knew the planetary alignments that predicted this network of integrated thought; it was the same inspiration behind the world wide web. Uranus (technological innovations, groups) and Neptune (images, imagination) reunited in the mid 1990s in the practical sign of Capricorn; we all became more connected with the next jump in electronics, technology and vision, right on cue. The world wide wave (www) was here. That wave came in, peaked in the 1990s, everyone was refreshed and expanded (some got drenched), and the promoters were now looking for new packaging. By the end of the 1990s, the Dot.com bubble burst. It was time for the next phase.

Perhaps the agnostic even prefers signs to reality. Perhaps he prefers this undecidable situation, since you can play with these floating signs and that is not possible with so-called 'objective' reality. The move from the real to the sign opens up an enormous field of play and uncertainty. Particularly where the reality of power is concerned. For if there is, indeed,a risk of anaesthesia and manipulation by signs and images that is to power's advantage, there is the risk that power itself may find itself reduced merely to the signs of power. This profusion of signs and of what is manifested does, moreover, effect a profound change in the symbolic relation to power. That relation is based on the unilateral gift (of laws, institutions, work, security, etc.). It is not so much by violence and constraint, but only by this symbolic obligation that power exists. Now, from the point when all that it gives us is signs, our debt to it is infinitely less great. With power distributing nothing but signs to us, we merely give back signs in return, and our servitude is the lighter for it. Admittedly, the enjoyment of immaterial goods is not so great, but this also means we owe little in return and we respond to the airiness of signs with an equal indifference. We can deny power and set it aside by mere incredulity, simply responding to the signs of power with the signs of servitude. This is perhaps what is meant by 'weak thought' (pensiero debole). With Virtual Reality, this process of disinvestment becomes even more radical, and we enter upon a phase of unbinding [deliaison], of quasi-total disobligation.

So what was Jonah like before high school? As a kid?” “As a kid?” Hallelujah brings up the picture in her mind. “He was . . . sweet, I guess. Dorky. He’d wear these outfits his mom picked out—pleated khaki pants and polo shirts, with his hair slicked down with gel. And he would get really enthusiastic about things. Too enthusiastic. He went through this cowboy phase where he wore a cowboy hat and boots to school every day. Didn’t care what anyone thought.” The mental image makes her smile. “And he and Luke were best friends?” “Starting in middle school, yeah. They played soccer together.” “Huh.” Rachel pauses. “So when did Jonah get cute?” “He was still pretty short in middle school. And skinny. But he did start dressing better.” “No more pleated khakis?” “No more pleated khakis. And then the summer before ninth grade, he had this growth spurt. And he started to, uh, fill out. So I guess ninth grade is when I noticed . . .” Hallelujah fades off. “This is embarrassing.” “No, it’s not. This is what girls talk about.” Rachel grins. “Besides. I wanted to see if you were paying as close attention to him as he was to you.” “I didn’t realize I was. We were just friends.” “You can be friends and still objectively notice someone’s cuteness.

Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul—and worse, the souls of your friends—for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep. Saints are those who die before the end of the story. The others, those who live out their destiny, no longer dare look at themselves in the mirror, afraid they may see their inner image: a monster laughing at unhappy women and at saints who are dead…

As if sensing weakness, Arthur said, his voice even softer, “I’m willing to forgive your transgression as long as you understand that this—this phase is over. You will not flaunt your… unnaturalness. I do not care what you do in the privacy of your bedroom, but you are to marry Cadogan’s girl.” To Ryan’s consternation, Jamie didn’t refuse immediately. “What a touching speech,” a familiar voice said. Tristan was leaning against the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, a bored look on his face. But it was Arthur ’s expression that caught Ryan’s attention. Jamie’s dad paled, his eyes wide as he stared at Tristan. He looked as if he’d just seen a ghost. Tristan met Arthur ’s gaze. “What?” he said softly. “Do I look that much like her?” His forehead creasing, Ryan glanced between Arthur and Tristan before looking inquiringly at Jamie. Jamie shrugged with a confused frown. “Yeah, when I was a kid, I was told I was the spitting image of her,” Tristan said amiably. “Except for the eyes, of course.” His blue-green eyes were very cold, contrasting with his pleasant, nice smile. Those eyes were…Fucking hell. They were exactly like Arthur ’s, down to their frosty expression. Tristan was the same medium height and build as Arthur. Realizing where it was going, Ryan stepped closer to Jamie and touched his wrist. Jamie grabbed his hand and squeezed, looking between his father and Tristan. “Dad?

a world remade in the image of Walt Disney, and driven by an increasingly sophisticated communications technology, is the total breakdown of civilization.20

How many planes there are, we do not know. The levels of nature that science discriminates give us no clue, for these all pertain to size which, being an aspect of space, belongs to our plane only. (We discount as irrelevant for present purposes the peculiar modes of space we experience when dreaming.) The entire size-continuum, from minutest particle to our 26-billion-light-year universe, falls along the horizontal arms we see. The planes that bracket this central one—central from our point of view—may be indefinite in number, but even if they are, something can be said about their antipodes. As the levels of reality array themselves along the vertical axis in descending degrees of reality, reality being (as noted in the preceding chapter) worth's final criterion, the bottom of the arm represents the point—a fraction of a degree above absolute zero as we might say—where being phases out completely; all that could lie beyond this margin is a nothing that is as unthinkable as it is non-existent. The top of the axis represents the opposite of this, that is, everything. Opposites being well acquainted, this everything shares in common with its antithesis the fact that it too cannot be imaged, but unlike complete nothingness it can be conceived. Being we experience, whereas nothing, by itself, we do not. The zenith of being is Being Unlimited, Being relieved of all confines and conditionings. The next chapter will discuss it; for now we simply name it. It is All-Possibility, the Absolute, the In-finite in all the directions that word can possibly point." from_The Forgotten Truth_

The Recipient will take whatever time they need to return to full consciousness at the conclusion of the tuning process and then wash their hands in cold running water as well as drink a glass of cold water to settle themselves and sever the connection to the Reiki Master doing the remote tunings. How to Perform the Reiki Distant Attunements Step 1: Agree the day, date and time of the attunement ceremony with the receiver. Step 2: Decide on the connection method. Print a picture of the receiver's home or location from Google Maps if needed. Step 3: Decide how you will use the Direct Intention and Surrogate method during the attunement ceremony. We think a printed image / video of the receiver is really helpful, so ask the receiver to send you a picture of yourself to use during the tuning. (Please note: although it is not essential to use a receiver photo during the distant tuning ceremony). Step 4: Be ready with the reiki chant or heartbeat music playing in the background, at least 5 minutes before the agreed time. Taking a few minutes to interact with the energies of the reiki and pull in the energy / images in which you will work during the remote tuning ceremony. Step 5: Intone a short prayer, quietly. (Example: "I call upon Reiki, the Universal Life Force, all past, present and future Reiki Masters (remember Reiki is not bound by time or space) in particular Dr. Usui, Dr. Hayashi and Mrs. Takata to close and participate in this sacred distant tuning ceremony for (insert name of students). I ask that Reiki's power and wisdom establish this connection now and guide and assist me by allowing our energies to connect across time and space so that I can pass on Reiki's gift through the tuning of (insert the name of the students) to Usui Reiki Level 1, 2 and 3. I propose that this ritual be an uplifting and encouraging event for (insert the name of the students) so that (insert the name of the students) the optimistic and strong Reiki Master / Teacher can go forward from this point on. Phase 6: Now, when you look down, imagine / visualize the surrogate / proxy being linked and transferred through time and space, so you're in the room with your student / recipient. Based on the amount of tuning you are doing, envision or picture yourself now in front of the receiver and go through the entire process in your imagination or through the surrogate / proxy physical actions using the strategies outlined in Lesson 8, 9, 10 or 11. You should ask the power and wisdom of reiki to sever the connection between you and the student / recipient at the end of the tuning ceremony and ask reiki to return you to your present location. Conclude the ritual with a brief thank you prayer, then then wash your hands in cold running water and drink a glass of cold water to stabilize yourself and sever the bond between yourself and the recipient / student entirely.

The Fall marred the original image of God in man. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were innocent, free of sin, and incapable of dying. They forfeited those qualities when they sinned. When someone puts faith in Christ, however, that person is promised that the image of God will be restored in him or her. “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son” (Rom. 8:29; cf. 2 Cor. 3:18; Col. 3:10). God will make believers sinless like Christ when they enter the final phase of their eternal life.

Spaces of four, five, or more dimensions tax the visual imagination of even the most agile topologist. But complex systems have many independent variables. Mathematicians had to accept the fact that systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom—untrammeled nature expressing itself in a turbulent waterfall or an unpredictable brain—required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable, and it was Landau’s image for turbulence: infinite modes, infinite degrees of freedom, infinite dimensions.

In this hysterical phase, it was, so to speak, the femininity of man which projected itself on to woman and shaped her as an ideal figure in his image. In Romantic love, the aim was not now to conquer the woman, to seduce her, but to create her from the inside, to invent her, in some cases as achieved Utopian vision, as idealized woman , in others as femme fatale, as star - another hysterical, supernatural metaphor. The Romantic Eros can be credited with having invented this ideal of harmony, of loving fusion, this ideal of an almost incestuous form of twin beings — the woman as projective resurrection of the same, who assumes her supernatural form only as ideal of the same, an artefact doomed henceforth to l'amour or, in other words, to a pathos of the ideal resemblance of beings and sexes - a pathetic confusion which substitutes for the dual otherness of seduction. The whole mechanics of the erotic changes meaning, for the erotic attraction which previously arose out of otherness, out of the strangeness of the Other, now finds its stimulus in sameness - in similarity and resemblance. Auto-eroticism, incest? No . Rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same eyeing up the other, investing itself in the other, alienating itself in the other - but the other is only ever the ephemeral form of a difference which brings me closer to me. This indeed is why, with Romantic love and all its current spin-offs, sexuality becomes connected with death: it is because it becomes connected with incest and its destiny - even in banalized form (for we are no longer speaking of mythic, tragic incest here; with modern eroticism we are dealing with a secondary incestuous form - of the protection of the same in the image of the other - which amounts to a confusion and corruption of all images). We have here then, in the end, the invention of a femininity which renders woman superfluous. The invention of a difference which is merely a roundabout copulation with its double. And which, at bottom, renders any encounter with otherness impossible (it would be interesting to know whether there was not any hysterical quid pro quo from the feminine in the construction of a virile, phallic mythology; feminism being one such example of the hystericization of the masculine in woman, of the hysterical projection of her masculinity in the exact image of the hysterical projection by man of his femininity into a mythical image of woman).

So far we have considered the effects of varying the type of illumination, so at this point we can sum up how one specimen can be imaged in four separate ways. In a conventional microscope with bright field illumination, contrast comes from absorbance of light by the sample (Figure 7a). Using dark field illumination, contrast is generated by light scattered from the sample (Figure 7b). In phase contrast, interference between different path lengths produces contrast (Figure 7c), and in polarizing microscopy it is the rotation of polarized light produced by the specimen between polarizer and analyser (Figure 7d). This is ‘converted’ into an image that has colour and a three dimensional appearance by the use of Wollaston prisms in differential interference microscopy. For virtually any specimen, hard or soft, isotropic or anisotropic, organic or inorganic, biological, metallurgical, or manufactured, there will be a variety of imaging modes that will produce complementary information. Some of the types of light microscopy we have looked at above have direct parallels in electron microscopy (Chapter 4).

The widespread vision of Her as a Triple Goddess also expressed the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. The original God-in-Three-Persons, the Goddess was believed to manifest both successively and simultaneously as Maiden, Mother, and Crone. As Maiden, She guarded and expressed the beginnings of life and its early development; in this aspect She was seen as a young girl or the Kore. Her Mother aspect referred not necessarily to the biological condition of having a child but connoted the fruition of life, its maturity, in this aspect, She was seen as a mature woman. As Crone, She was seen as most powerful of all, for it was the Crone, representing the aging and end of life, who made the link between life and death; in this aspect, She appeared as an old woman or skeletal hag. But the destruction of life brought about by the Crone was also an initiation into Her most profound mystery: that, out of death, She would create new life. Thus were the Crone and the Maiden inextricably linked and the cycle repeated and ongoing. In Her triple form, the Goddess, also bestowed a meaningfulness and even sanctity to each phase of a woman's life. Unlike our culture, which values only a woman's youthfulness, earlier cultures valued the aging woman. In the vision of the Old Religion, it was the Crone who carried the most wisdom and power.

This picture in people’s heads is the reality they live in, and one of the losses that takes place during the ending phase of a transition is that the old picture—the mental image of how and why things are the way they are—falls apart. Much of the pain of the neutral zone comes from the fact that it is a time without a viable organizational picture.

Isobel grimaced, refusing to let her brain jump back, to let it roll through memories like a rolodex, showing image after image of her parents. Of their “bond.” The Death Phase wasn’t the scariest part of bonding, in her opinion. It was the happily never after. It was being tied to a person who would use her, suck her dry, and rule over her until she disappeared without even an aftershock to prove she was ever alive or a funeral to prove she had ever died.

At this critical point, the factions of magnets come in all sizes, ranging from single isolated magnets up to huge clumps that stretch across the entire magnet. If we added more magnets to make an array as big as the United States, the same thing would happen. The factions would range from tiny clumps to massive blobs stretching from New York to Los Angeles. As we know, the geometric regularity of any power law implies a lack of any typical scale—a feature that shows up clearly in the critical point image. But one picture really can’t do justice to the character of the critical state, which is forever changing. If you were to take snapshots at different moments, you would see the alliances of the factions constantly shifting, with some dissolving and others forming up. The critical state is subject to tremendous fluctuations, and always remains poised on the very edge of sudden, radical change. To call it “hypersensitive” would be an understatement. Since the army of arrows is balanced on the precipice between its two phases, always on the verge of falling into line, even the tiniest influence can push it over the edge. Just a single magnet flipping over can trigger an avalanche of further flippings that would rampage from one side to the other.

Atticus: I've been working there four fucking weeks! I'm going to be eating ramen noodles for the rest of my life. Asher: Never tried them. Atticus: Dude, fucking disgusting. Trust me. Asher: Matilda's making roast au jus for dinner tonight with those homemade Yorkshire puddings you like. Atticus: I hate you. Loathe. Despise. Basically every synonym for hate there is. Asher: Call me? My phone rang a minute later, and I whined long and loud into the receiver in place of saying hello. I'd been accused of being overly dramatic in the past. There might be some truth behind it. Asher chuckled. "You're pathetic." "Why have you not run away with me? We've been separated. I can't stand it. It's like the individual cells in my body are trying to divide again and make another you. It hurts. I can't do it twice." I whimpered again for emphasis. "Ash, I'm screwed, and not in the bend me over the hood of the Jag and pound my ass type of way. The bad way. The painful way. The oh-crap-my-bank-account-is-in-the-negative way. I'm fast running out of ideas, and you're over there living the high life and eating roast au jus with my goddamn Yorkshire puddings." "I get the sense you're trying to tell me something, but whatever it is, it's getting lost in translation. You're rambling. What's going on? Speak-a the English. What's the problem?" "What isn't the problem? I'm poor and miserable. I was not ready for adulthood this soon. Tell Mom and Dad it was all lies. It was a phase. I'm over it. Ha, good joke, right?" "Riiight, and how do you propose I magically make the burned image of your mouth around Ryan Vector's cock disappear from Matilda's mind?" "Fuck. You know what? We don't need a housekeeper. Fire her ass! Tell Mom and Dad she's a big fat liar who lies and hates me. Tell them she's stealing from them. She's an illegal immigrant! No, tell them, she's a housekeeper by day and a hooker by night. I saw her walking the streets of Fifth Avenue after sundown in a mini skirt and fishnet stockings." I paused, envisioning our sixty-year-old housekeeper/used-to-be-nanny in that kind of attire. Asher and I both audibly ewwed at the exact same time. "Dude, that's fucking gross as shit, and you know it. I just threw up in my mouth. Why would you put that image in my head?" "I regret many of my life decisions. Add it to the list. Ash, I'm serious. Just make something up. Get rid of her. We don't need a housekeeper, and we're long past requiring a nanny. Especially one who walks into rooms without knocking. What was she thinking?" "The door wasn't closed." "Not the time, Ash!" "Okay, so let's pretend for five minutes Matilda dies in a horrible car crash." "We could make that happen.

In the life of 32 years, I've never heard about the concept of self-love. I only knew that love is to save a life. I knew my reputation is my own responsibility & my name is a gift from my parents which I need to preserve throughout this life. I never loved myself. I loved books, people, my prices, passion, education, nature etc. I may not love myself or may be. But there was small span of time. I don't know that was good, bad or best. I really looked myself in mirror. There are so many beautiful women in this world but for sometime, she was the most beautiful woman I ever seen. I still remember, she was smiling. She opened her long hairs to see how she looks. Shall it be ok if open haired image upload to social media? What will people say? Everyone does it. You can also do it. She made it. Now I'm thinking of those days. Of course that was all nonsense I made & I never felt happy by doing all. Somewhere, I tried to connect with people. I did all those things to talk with them. I come to know that the reason behind the success of social media apart from marketing. It is a self marketing. I should have had to realized her behavior before. I know she was innocent, untouched, holy but she was best at the first place where she was belong to. I cut her long hairs & slapped her so many times to make her as old me but I have to convince myself that self love is the most selfish thing which you are doing for yourself some phases of life & self love & self care could be understand by the people who really loves you, cares for you. It is a high standard definition may questions your loyal responsibility in commoners.

The only way to separate yourself from a person like my mother is to embody her fears and insecurities about herself, to become as far removed from her idealized self-image as possible. Or, to be more specific: Go through an awkward Goth phase. Buzz all your hair off in the middle of the night, surprising her in the morning. Get a memento mori tattoo somewhere conspicuous, a reminder that the body is nothing. Put on twenty pounds and wear a tight dress. Now you're free.

Mathematicians had to accept the fact that systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom-untrammeled nature expressing itself in a turbulent waterfall or an unpredictable brain-required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable, and it was Landau's image for turbulence: infinite modes, infinite degrees of freedom, infinite dimensions.

From Freud’s biological image of man via the psychological images of Adler and Jung there arose the more spiritual images of man proposed by Frankl and Assagioli. In the thinking of Rudolf Steiner we find an image of man which embodies all three of these aspects at once, so that it does not envisage a separate form of psychotherapy but, instead, a total therapy of body, psyche and spirit.

And just as rhythm is not an artificial embellishment of language but a form of expression which predates language, so visual images and symbols are not fanciful embroideries of concepts, but precursors of conceptual thought. The artist does not climb a ladder to stick ornaments on a facade of ideas-he is more like a pot-holer in search of underground rivers. To quote Kretschmer for the last time: 'Such creative products of the artistic imagination tend to emerge from a psychic twilight, a state of lessened consciousness and diminished attentivity to external stimuli. Further, the condition is one of "absent-mindedness" with hypnoidal over-concentration on a single focus, providing an entirely passive experience, frequently of a visual character, divorced from the categories of space and time, and reason and will. These dreamlike phases of artistic creation evoke primitive phylogenetic tendencies towards rhythm and stylization with elemental violence; and the emergent images thus acquire in the very act of birth regular form and symmetry.

Un exemple de symbolisme, à première vue arbitraire et excessif mais en fin de compte plausible, est le hadîth qui voue les peintres et les sculpteurs au fond de l’enfer. On objectera évidemment que les arts plastiques sont naturels à l’homme, qu’ils existent partout et qu’ils peuvent avoir une fonction sacrale, – c’est là même leur raison d’être la plus profonde, – ce qui est vrai, mais passe à côté de l’intention essentielle du hadîth. C’est-à-dire que le sens littéral de la sentence, par sa violence même, représente une « guerre préventive » contre l’abus ultime de l’intelligence humaine, à savoir le naturalisme sous toutes ses formes : naturalisme artistique d’une part et naturalisme philosophique et scientiste d’autre part ; donc imitation exacte, extériorisante et « accidentalisante » des apparences, et recours à la seule logique, à la seule raison, coupée de ses racines. L’homme est homo sapiens et homo faber : il est un penseur et par là même aussi un producteur, un artisan, un artiste ; or, il est une phase finale de ces développements qui lui est interdite, – elle est préfigurée par le fruit défendu du Paradis, – une phase donc qu’il ne doit jamais atteindre, de même que l’homme peut se faire roi ou empereur mais non pas Dieu ; en anathématisant les créateurs d’images, le Prophète entend prévenir la subversion finale. Selon la conception musulmane, il n’y a qu’un seul péché qui mène au fond de l’enfer, – c’est-à-dire qui ne sera jamais pardonné , – et c’est le fait d’associer d’autres divinités au Dieu unique ; si l’Islam place les dits créateurs dans la géhenne, c’est qu’il semble assimiler fort paradoxalement les arts plastiques à ce même péché gravissime, et cette disproportion prouve précisément qu’il a en vu, non les arts dans leur état normal, – bien qu’il les interdise assurément, – mais la raison pour laquelle il les interdit ; à savoir la subversion naturaliste dont les arts plastiques sont, pour la sensibilité sémitique, les symboles et les préfigurations (1). Cet exemple, auquel nous nous sommes arrêté un peu longuement, peut montrer comment les formulations excessives peuvent véhiculer des intentions d’autant plus profondes, ce qui nous ramène une fois de plus au principe credo quia absurdum [je le crois parce que c'est absurde]. (1) En condamnant les images, l’Islam – bienheureusement « stérile » – refuse en même temps le « culturisme » qui est la plaie de l’Occident, à savoir les torrents de créations artistiques et littéraires, qui gonflent les âmes et distraient de la « seule chose nécessaire ».

In their nature, many artists lean toward one of two categories: Experimenters or Finishers. Experimenters are partial to dreaming and play, finding it more difficult to complete and release their work. Finishers are the mirror image, a backward reflection. They move quickly to the end point with immediate clarity. They are less interested in exploring the possibilities and alternatives that the Experimentation and Craft phases can suggest. Each might find it helpful to borrow from the other.