NKS →

20. London.

[touchingeyeballs]

[touchingeyeballs]

[touchingeyeballs]

[touchingeyeballs]

Alan Watts - From the Ego to the Divine

[touchingeyeballs]

A summery day in Richmond, London never disappoints. It's so lovely to see everybody out in nature eating, drinking and sleeping under the sun. Dream-like days. It was during my walk here that my friend mentioned the term "sonder", which seemed to remind her of me; a word that describes an insight some of us have somewhere along the path of life - the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own - populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness - an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might only appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

[touchingeyeballs]

[touchingeyeballs]

Saturday 3/06/17 London (Human) Attacks

Words can hardly describe how I feel after hearing of another London attack - and I hope, and am confident, that the breaking of my heart is shared by many in the early hours before we use the strength we have to hold ourselves up again. It upsets me to see that there is so much hatred in this world of ours. Times like these I cry for humanity and how some of us seem so willing to hate. 

The danger of religion, particularly religion in large doses, is obviously nothing new; history has been the greatest teacher of this, but most importantly to remind ourselves, I find, is the strange and saddening reality that people can be so willing to surrender their minds to others who are more than happy to distort and manipulate ideas and notions, and it is absolutely disappointing and tragic to see. For what, is what I continue to ask myself. For what? The story is surely long, but it must come down to an excess of ego, a desire for dominance and so forth. These are so feeble, inconsequential and fleeting when put into perspective, and yet, despite this, so powerful in the absence of individual education and individual progress. The importance of tolerance, patience and personal education away from any hive, any school of thought, is so crucial for human awakening - an awakening some evidently do not seek, nor care to seek, being too contentedly involved in illusory conceptions.

I think it’s vital to feel these emotions, to be upset or angry and disappointed, and simultaneously reflect on them. I wonder if there will ever come a time where those who preach hate, manipulate and destroy in the name of inexplicable and unproven mysteries will ever be capable of transcending all that has been fed to them, to take a step back from whatever it is that grips them so tightly there and realise that they terrorise for nothing, thinking it everything.

When the last attacks happened, I remember watching somebody on the news mentioning that when things like this happen, it makes us really tune in to appreciate the little things in life we often take for granted - things like the courtesy of a driver, strangers opening doors for other strangers, altruistic kindness. These bring incredible amounts of solace. It is a great shame because we, as a race, can be so loving to one another when we can think for ourselves, tolerate and embrace difference. 

It’s a sad night, but it won’t be sad forever. Love, empathy and kindness will always rise above hate. 

[devotedscripturient]

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Ernest Hemingway (via psych-facts)

[psych-facts]

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Fernando Pessoa (via psych-facts)

[goddamnimglam]

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”

Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems  (via goddamnimglam)