Pearl

(The title of the post is because I didn't think the rest of the movie was worth watching, but THIS....oh yes.)

George

Great Quote from Total Recall

(the new version)

The past is a construct of the mind. It blinds us. It fools us into believing it. But the heart wants to live in the present. Look there. You'll find your answer. 

Time

I'm a a little frustrated because I read a great image but it isn't written in a way to make a tidy quote. So, I have to paraphrase and I'm not sure I will do the idea justice. It comes from Terry Pratchett's DiscWorld book, Theif of Time. I guess it's a counterpoint to Death's Lifetimers, with each life flowing from the Past, through the pinch of Now into the Future. In the perspective of Time, there is no Past. It no longer exists. There is no Future. It doesn't exist, yet. There is only always, Now. Everything eternally destroyed and created. Always Now.

Men in Black, III

Go see this movie, even if you haven't seen the other 2 and don't care for science fiction.  I"m not kidding.

Mostly, it's just fun.

But then, there's Griffin.

He's not in the other ones.

He makes the whole series worthwhile.

Really.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world

those that understand binary and those that don't.

chuck had a movie in our Netflix Watch Now queue that I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about.  It looked like  a sexual obsession movie and I'm kind of BTDT with those.   But it wasn't.

Stone in either a sexual obsession movie or it's a movie about losing fear.  Which film you see depends on your perspective.

Bad dream?

Light my fire!

Pratchett

This man is one of my dearest friends and he has never heard of me.  His books are always twofers.  They are very entertaining and they occasionally have glimmers of Truth.

Inception

"They come here to dream?"

"No.  They come here to be woken up.  The Dream has become their Reality.  Who are you to say otherwise?"

Under the Dome

I have no hand. I have no body. Bodies aren't real. Bodies are dreams.

Rumi

Story Water

A story is like water
that you heat for your bath.

It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!

Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.

A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.

Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.

The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that's blazing
inside your presence.

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what's hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.

A Hat Full of Sky

There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens and what we do.

-----------------------------

What's a mind but another world of dreaming?


-----------------------------

Is there any "me" at all, or do my thoughts just DREAM of me?

The Dark Tower

Referencing Leonard Cohen's song "A Crack in Everything". He says "that's how the light gets in." Various books seem to have cracks in them. And I don't necessarily think that the writers are on the Advaita bandwagon. I suspect that it's kind of that "hero with a thousand faces" thing. The waves of the Ocean of Singularity move across the entire ocean, not just on a solitary beach.

I hate reading books that tell me what to think or how to be. But I do get a kick out of it when someone sneaks something in on me.

Stephen King's Dark Tower series is seriously cracked.

Today, one of the characters got hit in the face with the knowledge that he is a character in another book. And it is tearing him up. "It's not a story. It's not a story, it's my life!"

Ha!

Small Gods

We are Here and this is Now. After that, everything turns toward guesswork.

- Philosopher Didactilus



(Made me smile.)

Zen Jazz

Attributed to Wynton Marsalis in A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore:

Jazz was a zen art. Controlled spontaneity. Like sumi-e ink painting. Like haiku. Like archery. Jazz wasn't something you planned. It was something you did. In jazz, every moment is a crisis and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis. It's all right there. No future. No past. Just that moment and how you deal with it. Art happens.

from Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

Page 9.

And this is the room where the past pours into the future via the pinch of the now.

Timers line the walls. Not hour-glasses, although they have the same shape. Not egg-timers, such as you might buy as a souvenir attached to a small board with the name of the holiday resort of your choice jauntily inscribed on it by someone with the same sense of style as a jelly doughnut.

It's not even sand in there. It's seconds, endlessly humming the maybe into the was.

Singularity

from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

How to Build a Universe

No matter how hard you try, you'll never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small. A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom which is itself, f course, an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on a printed "i" can hold something in the region of 500 billion of them. Rather more than the number of seconds contained in half a million years. So, protons are exceedingly microscopic to say the very least. Now, imagine if you can, and of course you can't, shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small it could make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter.

Excellent.

You are ready to start a Universe.

I'm assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary Universe. If you prefer to build a more old fashioned, standard Big Bang Universe, you'll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is, every last mote and particle of matter between Here and the Edge of Creation, squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a Singularity.

In either case, get ready for a really big bang.

Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no Where. When the Universe begins to expand, it won't be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.

It is natural, but wrong, to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot, hanging in a dark, boundless Void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no around around it. The is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there, whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.

And so from Nothing our Universe begins.

The lights in the sky are scenery

"Humans are inquisitive. That is a function of their humanity. The beings that built this universe did so because it was unthinkable that they should not. Creation is not what gods do, it is something that they are."

"'We built the universe didn't we,' she said. 'Not us precisely, but the thing in us that makes us what we are. The thing that dreams while the rest of us are asleep.'"

from Strata by Terry Pratchett.