Not the growing stem or the leaf blowing in the wind; not the opening bud or the emerging radicle; not the fourfold root yearning for water.

Presentation of Self I am only fully actual when determined in all of my parts, when I am the sum of all predicates that can be attributed to me. Only then I am fully cognized and known as I truly am. May I present myself as the Absolute I?

Pond Life If water is the primal origin of all things (as the ancient Greek sage Thales of Miletus supposed), then considering how hard it is to wade through, it must also be oil and pitch, mercury and salt, sulphur too, with differing degrees of power and viscosity, all stirred up and blended into a huge pool of liquid substance, thick enough to get yourself stuck in. But don’t call on the old gods and nymphs of Thales’ day to be your life guards. They won’t jump in and save

What fact makes a principle true? Quid Facti. That is the question.

The Quality of a Quantum I am nothing and you are nothing. but the relation between us isn’t nothing. Infinitesimally small differences establish the continuity between our discrete bodies. Intensive or extensive? Unity thought as plurality or plurality as unity? I can’t decide. (Either way we take up space and time.) We are two thought as one and one thought as two. If a complete synthesis is beyond us, remember this: In God’s infinite understanding we know just a little, an

The Fact of Being Is Always True Said the professor — I am in a vortex, a maelstrom, below the eye’s surface, standing on the abyssal plain, the fundament of all that is. The atmosphere is moving thickly, dark submarine green, the tempo of sea-bed’s colour, darkly illumined and populated by gods, the eternals, singing songs of Necessity and Fate. And a word carved deep on the forehead of the chief eternal stares straight at me like a cyclopic eye — That word is destiny. Tonig

In the Beginning Was Strange to think I am the universe and everything in it too. I call out. No voice returns other than my echo. So evidently, I am my own cause and, worse, horribly alone. Bored, I fall into a deep sleep and dream of many things: wave-like particles in plasma; diverse organisms, vertebrates and invertebrates; metals and gases; all kinds of finite bodies with perishable qualities, competing for succession and place and rank. Time passed and, with time, entro

Itself in Mind for the Future We see the visible world as somehow inevitable, with all its ratios of movement & rest, its manifold shapes & ecstatic forms, not realising that nature is always busy, acting unseen in all its power, without external cause, producing within itself its own effects, differentiating this idea from that idea, bypassing one potential in favour of another, & making actual a particular mode of being (a mutation, a thing, a body, a colour), while keeping

Leibniz’s Soul What is amazing is not that my corpse was contracted and compressed into the earth’s dark matter (while my grave went unmarked and unremarked for some fifty years) but that my soul, of magnitude so tiny it was nothing more than a vibrating point, escaped its prison and went its own way. No longer confined, the vibrating point was free to enter into compounds with unseen bodies of atomic size and together they let so much light pass through that they were barely

Thought Putting aside the extensive facthood of properties and things distributed in space, one has to wonder whether existence’s sense of itself -- the subjective correlative of the world at large -- is a prolonged sensation of horror, a horror that exceeds all the little horrors that we (as feeling individuals) experience over and again.

The World Is Folded in to Every Object The world is folded in to every object And each thing or idea is the folding And unfolding of space, time and history. And the atom is folded and refolded Until the outside becomes inside And matter becomes thought. Matter folded and refolded And unfolded over and again, Until it's thin and translucent, Like consciousness.

Fichte / Picture There is nothing real anywhere, neither outside of us nor in us. I know of no being at all. Not even myself. Images there are. They are all that exist, connected to each other, interpenetrating, merging, overlapping, an irreducible multiplicity of unframed pictures in movement. It is a strange dream making pictures of other pictures, the image of your mind picturing pictures, and the picture of my mind picturing you doing so.

Bergson Memory is a cloud wherever my body is; A fog of the virtual enveloping the actual. The past contracts to the present at the point Of sensation, then widens again: a mutual Interpenetration of time. I see into things, See them whole, unique and ineffable: God’s gift of intuition.

Descartes' Dream I was a lonely cripple Seeking shelter; I heard thunder, saw fire. Sleeping too much, Snow on the rise. My bones warm in an oven. I am outside again, Near the church entrance. A whirlwind spins me round. I fall on my knees, drag Myself along the damp ground Towards my own grave. Is this the path I should take? What of thinking? I awake but I am still Sleeping. What did The thunder say? What? Can geometry put Flesh on the bone? Can it save the soul? I cannot

Artful Agaze, the artist is beset by eros Of no vulgar kind. Crossing the chorismos, He takes his tools, kneads and forms And sculpts. Substance yields to some thing new. But partially obscured by dark spots, The result is more product Than idea.

Little Owl A minute before midnight, the owl of Minerva watches today grow fat behind time’s horizon. At twelve he blinks. One eye for the night of disappearing and the other for the day that is becoming.

Circling We move in circles around each other, encircled and encompassing, each turn driven in part by our own will to move and be moved, driven too by that First Cause, the Prime Mover, whose very existence guarantees the endless movement of time and the unceasing, ever-expanding production and reproduction of man’s vain desire to touch and be touched. But that First Cause does not turn, cannot turn; it thinks Itself alone and is unmoved, or at best does not know of the stri

To Spinoza nomads we traverse a flat shimmering world breeding images. signs & erratic/ erotic encounters; surfaces effacing depth...we killed being you and I – for what? for the sake of ecstatic form. modes counterfeit substance, producing a synthetic real. If being exists it does so as an effect of the imaginary, of imaging. so, not-being, not-at-all-being then, not even becoming.

Thinking of Being without Heaviness or Depth Part 1: Being and heaviness People who suffer from depression often complain of a feeling of heaviness; not just in the emotional or mental sense, but as something physical — a visceral sensation pressing on the chest or wrapping itself around the body and the legs. Some sufferers say it is like having lead weights on their legs. Among the DSM-IV criteria for atypical depression is: “Leaden paralysis (i.e. heavy, leaden feelings i

Is Spinoza’s Pantheistic Ontology a Template for Authoritarianism? OVERVIEW: ● The pantheist ontology of Baruch Spinoza (b.1632 – d.1677) is an attempt to deny the accountability of political evil. ● Spinoza’s instinct for statist control and his distrust of the common man are displayed in Theological-Political Treatise (published 1670). His masterwork, Ethics (published posthumously in 1677), is a bold attempt (in the guise of ontology) to classify minds and bodies as attrib