Sex is a problem because it would seem that in that act, there is a complete absence of the self. In that moment, you are happy because there is the cessation of self-consciousness, of the ‘me’. You desire more of it, more of the abnegation of the self in which there is complete happiness, without the past or the future. You demand that complete happiness through full fusion and integration, so naturally it becomes all-important. It is something that gives me unadulterated joy, complete self-forgetfulness, and I want more and more of it. Now, why do I want more of it? Because everywhere else I am in conflict. Everywhere else – at all the different levels of existence, there is the strengthening of the self. Economically, socially, religiously, there is the constant thickening of self-consciousness, which is conflict. After all, you are self-conscious only when there is conflict. Self-consciousness is, in its very nature, the result of conflict, so everywhere else we are in conflict. In all our relationships with property, with people and with ideas, there is conf
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Sex is a problem because it would seem that in that act, there is a complete absence of the self. In that moment, you are happy because there is the cessation of self-consciousness, of the ‘me’. You desire more of it, more of the abnegation of the self in which there is complete happiness, without the past or the future. You demand that complete happiness through full fusion and integration, so naturally it becomes all-important. It is something that gives me unadulterated joy, complete self-forgetfulness, and I want more and more of it. Now, why do I want more of it? Because everywhere else I am in conflict. Everywhere else – at all the different levels of existence, there is the strengthening of the self. Economically, socially, religiously, there is the constant thickening of self-consciousness, which is conflict. After all, you are self-conscious only when there is conflict. Self-consciousness is, in its very nature, the result of conflict, so everywhere else we are in conflict. In all our relationships with property, with people and with ideas, there is conflict, pain, struggle and misery, but in this one act, there is complete cessation of all that. Naturally, you want more of it because it gives you happiness, while all the rest leads you to misery, turmoil, conflict, confusion, antagonism, war and destruction. Therefore, the sexual act becomes all-significant, all-important. So, the problem is not sex, surely, but how to be free from the self.
The Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen is one of the most celebrated Chinese artists of our age. He operates in a variety of media, including video, sculpture and fine art. His work displays a deep interest in business; he appears at once charmed and horrified by commercial life. In recent years, he has become especially fascinated by supermarkets. He’s interested, in part, in how lovely they can be.
Xu Zhen, ShanghArt Supermarket, 2007/2014, Installation Xu Zhen loves the alluring packaging, the abundance (the feel of lifting something off a shelf and seeing multiple versions of it waiting just behind) and the exquisite precision with which items are displayed. He particularly likes the claim of comprehensiveness that supermarkets implicitly make: the suggestion that they can, within their cavernous interiors, provide us wit
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Artists and supermarket tycoons
The Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen is one of the most celebrated Chinese artists of our age. He operates in a variety of media, including video, sculpture and fine art. His work displays a deep interest in business; he appears at once charmed and horrified by commercial life. In recent years, he has become especially fascinated by supermarkets. He’s interested, in part, in how lovely they can be.
Xu Zhen, ShanghArt Supermarket, 2007/2014, Installation Xu Zhen loves the alluring packaging, the abundance (the feel of lifting something off a shelf and seeing multiple versions of it waiting just behind) and the exquisite precision with which items are displayed. He particularly likes the claim of comprehensiveness that supermarkets implicitly make: the suggestion that they can, within their cavernous interiors, provide us with everything we could possibly need to thrive. At the same time, Xu Zhen feels that there is something quite wrong with real supermarkets – and with commercial life in general. The products they sell are rarely the things we genuinely need. Despite the enormous choice, what we require to thrive isn’t on offer. Meanwhile, the backstories of the brightly coloured things on sale are often exploitative and dark. Everything has been carefully calculated to get us to spend more than we mean to. There’s cynicism throughout the system. In response, the Chinese artist mocks supermarkets repeatedly. His work involves recreating, at very large scale, entire supermarkets in galleries and museums. The products in these supermarkets look real; you’re invited to pick them up, but then you find out they are empty, as physically empty as Xu Zhen feels they are spiritually incomplete. His checkouts are similarly deceptive. They seem genuine: you scan your products at a high-tech counter, but you then get a receipt that turns out to be a fake; you’ve bought nothing of value. The supermarket installation takes us on a journey. At first it gets us to share the artist’s excitement around supermarkets, then it punctures the illusion: it’s a giant, deliberate let down. It’s significant that Xu Zhen’s critique of supermarkets is ironic. We tend to become ironic around things that we feel disappointed by but don’t feel we’ll ever be able to change. It’s a manoeuvre of disappointment stoically handled. A lot of art is ironic in its critiques of capitalism; we’ve come to expect this. It mocks all that is wrong but has no alternatives to put forward. A kind of hollow, sad laughter seems the only fitting response to the compromises of commercial life. Xu Zhen is trapped in the paradigm of what an artist does. A real artist, we have come to suppose – and the current ideology of the art world insists – couldn’t be enthusiastic about improving a supermarket. He or she could only mock from the sidelines. Nowadays, fortunately, we’ve loosened the restrictive definitions of what a ‘real’ man or a ‘real’ woman might be like, but there remain strict social taboos hemming in the idea of what a ‘real’ artist could be allowed to get up to. They can be as experimental and surprising as they like – unless they want to run a food shop or an airline or an energy corporation, at which point they cross a decisive boundary, fall from grace, lose their special status as artists and become the supposed polar opposites: mere business people. We should take Xu Zhen seriously, perhaps more seriously than he takes himself. Beneath the irony, Xu Zhen has the ambition to discover what an ideal supermarket might be like, how it might be a successful business, and how capitalism could be reformed. Somewhere within his project, he carries a hope: that a corporation like a supermarket could be brought into line with the best values of art and assume psychological and spiritual importance inside the framework of commerce. Thousands of miles away from Shanghai, in the flatlands of East Anglia in the northeastern tip of southern England, just outside of Norwich, lies an impressive modern building completed in 1978 by the architect Norman Foster. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts is filled with some of the greatest works of contemporary art: here we find masterpieces by Henry Moore, Giacometti and Francis Bacon. The collection is made possible thanks to the enormous wealth of the Sainsbury family, which owns and runs the large supermarket chain that bears its name. Discounted shoulders of lamb, white bread and 3-for-2 offers on tangerines have led to exquisite display cases containing Giacometti’s elongated, haunting figures and Barbara Hepworth’s hollowed-out ovaloids.
The interior of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Copyright: Oxyman, 2008 The gallery seems guided by values that are light years from any supermarket. It is intent on feeding the soul. The patrons and curators are deeply ambitious about the emotional and educational benefit of the experience: they want you to come out cleansed and improved. From a very different direction, the Sainsbury family arrive at a strikingly similar conclusion to Xu Zhen. Art and supermarkets are essentially opposed. Like Xu Zhen, the Sainsbury’s are caught in an identity trap, although a very different one: that of the philanthropist. The philanthropist has been imagined as a person who makes a lot of money in the brutish world of commerce, with all the normal expectations of maximising returns, squeezing wages and focusing on obvious opportunities –and then makes a clean break. In their spare hours, they can devote their wealth to projects that are profoundly non-commercial: the patient collection of Roman coins, Islamic vases or modern sculptures. But the philanthropist knows that if they ever took an art-loving attitude to their businesses they might suffer economic collapse. Instead of making big things happen in the real world, they would become mere artists who make interesting little things in the sheltered, subsidised world of the gallery. The situation is strangely tantalising. The artist finds a little that is loveable and much that’s wrong around supermarkets, but can’t imagine running or bringing the ideals of art into action in one. The supermarket owners love art, but can’t imagine bringing their psychologically and aesthetically ambitious sides into focus in their business. These two parties are both like pioneers, at the edges of unexplored territory. There is a huge idea they are both circling round. The goal is a synthesis of business and art: a supermarket that was truly guided by the ideals of art, a capitalism that could be compatible with the higher values of humanity. Up to now, we have collectively learned to admire the values of the arts (which can be summed up as a devotion to truth, beauty and goodness) in the special arena of galleries. But their more important application is in the general, daily fabric of our lives – the area that is currently dominated by an often-depleted vision of commerce. It is a tragic polarisation: we encounter the values we need, but only in a rarefied setting, while we regard these values as alien to the circumstances in which we most need to meet them. For most of history, artists have laboured to render a few square inches of canvas utterly perfect or to chisel a single block of stone into its most expressive form. Traditionally, the most common size for a work of art was between three and six feet across. And while artists have articulated their visions across such expanses, the large-scale projects have been given over wholesale to businesses and governments – who have generally operated with much lower ambitions. We’re so familiar with this polarisation, we regard it as if it were an inevitable fact of nature, rather than what it really is – a cultural and commercial failing. Ideally, artists should absorb the best qualities of business and vice versa. Rather than seeing such qualities as opposed to what they stand for as artists or business people, they should see these as great enabling capacities, which help them fulfil their missions to the world. Xu Zhen will probably never get to build an airport, a marina, an old people’s home or a supermarket, but the ideal next version of him will. We should want to simultaneously raise and combine the ambitions of artists (to make the noblest concepts powerful in our lives) and of business (to serve us successfully).
Science fiction is one of the most popular but at the same time least prestigious of the literary arts, frequently dismissed as a subgenre consumed primarily by young males obsessed by the goriest or oddest possibilities for the future of our species Yet science fiction is a much-underestimated tool in business; in its utopian versions, it invites us to explore imaginatively what we might want the future to be like – a little ahead of our practical abilities to mould it as we would wish. Science fiction may not contain precise answers (how actually to make a jetpack or a robot that loves us) but it encourages us in something that is logically prior to, and in its own way as important as, technological mastery: the identification of issues we would like to see solved. Changes in society and business seldom begin with actual inventions; they begin with acts of the imagination, with a sharpened sense of a need for something new, be this for an engine, a piece of legislation or a social movement. The details of change may eventually get worked out in laboratories, committee rooms and parliaments, but the crystallisation of the wish for change takes place at a prior stage, in the imaginations of people who know how to envisage what doesn’t yet exist. In his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published in Paris in 1870, Jules Verne narrated the adventures of the Nautilus, a large submarine that tours the world’s oceans often at great depth (the 20,000 leagues – about 80,000 kilometres – refer to the distance travelled). When writing the story, Verne didn’t worry too much about solving every technical issue involved with undersea exploration: he was intent on pinning down capacities he felt it would one day be important to have. He described the Nautilus as being equipped with a huge window even though he had no idea how to make glass that could withstand immense barometric pressures. He imagined the vessel having a machine that could make seawater potable, although the science behind desalination was extremely primitive at the time. And he described the Nautilus as being powered by batteries – even though this technology was in its infancy.
‘Wouldn’t glass shatter at that pressure?’ Keeping certain questions at bay for long enough to shape a vision. Alphonse de Neuville and Edouard Riou, Illustrations for Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1871. Jules Verne was not an enemy of technology. He was deeply fascinated by practical problems. But in writing his novels, he held off from worrying too much about the ‘how’ questions. He wanted to picture the way things could be, while warding off – for a time – the many practical objections that would one day have to be addressed. He was thereby able to bring the idea of the submarine into the minds of millions while the technology slowly emerged that would allow the reality to take hold. The key mental move in science fiction – ‘what would we want life to be like one day?’ – has traditionally been focused on technology. However, there is no reason why we would not perform equally dramatic thought experiments in quite different fields, in relation to family life, relationships and, as we’re about to do here, capitalism. Asking oneself what a better version of something might be like, without direct tools for a fix to hand, can feel immature and naive. Yet it’s by formulating visions of the future that we can more clearly start to define what might be wrong with what we have - and set the wheels of change in motion. Through science fiction experiments, we can get into the habit of counteracting detrimental tendencies to inhibit our thinking around wished-for scenarios that seem (in gloomy present moments at least) deeply unlikely. Such experiments are often deeply relevant, because when we look back in history we can see that so many machines, projects and ways of life that once appeared simply utopian have come to pass. Not least Captain Kirk’s phone.
Sometimes ideas drafted in science fiction pave the way for real-life developments. Captain Kirk’s ‘communicator’ from Star Trek. Copyright: NBC Television, 1968 We all have a science fiction side to our brains, which we are normally careful to disguise for fear of humiliation. Yet, as Verne showed us, our visions are what carve out the space in which later developments can occur. What follows is an attempt to work out aspects of a wiser future for capitalism.
Science fiction is one of the most popular but at the same time least prestigious of the literary arts, frequently dismissed as a subgenre consumed primarily by young males obsessed by the goriest or oddest possibilities for the future of our species Yet science fiction is a much-underestimated tool in business; in its utopian versions, it invites us to explore imaginatively what we might want the future to be like – a little ahead of our practical abilities to mould it as we would wish. Science fiction may not contain precise answers (how actually to make a jetpack or a robot that loves us) but it encourages us in something that is logically prior to, and in its own way as important as, technological mastery: the identification of issues we would like to see solved. Changes in society and business seldom begin with actual inventions; they begin with acts of the imagination, with a sharpened sense of a need for something new, be this for an engine, a piece of legislation or a social movement. The details of change may eventually get wo
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The nautilus and capitalism
Science fiction is one of the most popular but at the same time least prestigious of the literary arts, frequently dismissed as a subgenre consumed primarily by young males obsessed by the goriest or oddest possibilities for the future of our species Yet science fiction is a much-underestimated tool in business; in its utopian versions, it invites us to explore imaginatively what we might want the future to be like – a little ahead of our practical abilities to mould it as we would wish. Science fiction may not contain precise answers (how actually to make a jetpack or a robot that loves us) but it encourages us in something that is logically prior to, and in its own way as important as, technological mastery: the identification of issues we would like to see solved. Changes in society and business seldom begin with actual inventions; they begin with acts of the imagination, with a sharpened sense of a need for something new, be this for an engine, a piece of legislation or a social movement. The details of change may eventually get worked out in laboratories, committee rooms and parliaments, but the crystallisation of the wish for change takes place at a prior stage, in the imaginations of people who know how to envisage what doesn’t yet exist. In his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published in Paris in 1870, Jules Verne narrated the adventures of the Nautilus, a large submarine that tours the world’s oceans often at great depth (the 20,000 leagues – about 80,000 kilometres – refer to the distance travelled). When writing the story, Verne didn’t worry too much about solving every technical issue involved with undersea exploration: he was intent on pinning down capacities he felt it would one day be important to have. He described the Nautilus as being equipped with a huge window even though he had no idea how to make glass that could withstand immense barometric pressures. He imagined the vessel having a machine that could make seawater potable, although the science behind desalination was extremely primitive at the time. And he described the Nautilus as being powered by batteries – even though this technology was in its infancy.
‘Wouldn’t glass shatter at that pressure?’ Keeping certain questions at bay for long enough to shape a vision. Alphonse de Neuville and Edouard Riou, Illustrations for Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1871. Jules Verne was not an enemy of technology. He was deeply fascinated by practical problems. But in writing his novels, he held off from worrying too much about the ‘how’ questions. He wanted to picture the way things could be, while warding off – for a time – the many practical objections that would one day have to be addressed. He was thereby able to bring the idea of the submarine into the minds of millions while the technology slowly emerged that would allow the reality to take hold. The key mental move in science fiction – ‘what would we want life to be like one day?’ – has traditionally been focused on technology. However, there is no reason why we would not perform equally dramatic thought experiments in quite different fields, in relation to family life, relationships and, as we’re about to do here, capitalism. Asking oneself what a better version of something might be like, without direct tools for a fix to hand, can feel immature and naive. Yet it’s by formulating visions of the future that we can more clearly start to define what might be wrong with what we have - and set the wheels of change in motion. Through science fiction experiments, we can get into the habit of counteracting detrimental tendencies to inhibit our thinking around wished-for scenarios that seem (in gloomy present moments at least) deeply unlikely. Such experiments are often deeply relevant, because when we look back in history we can see that so many machines, projects and ways of life that once appeared simply utopian have come to pass. Not least Captain Kirk’s phone.
Sometimes ideas drafted in science fiction pave the way for real-life developments. Captain Kirk’s ‘communicator’ from Star Trek. Copyright: NBC Television, 1968 We all have a science fiction side to our brains, which we are normally careful to disguise for fear of humiliation. Yet, as Verne showed us, our visions are what carve out the space in which later developments can occur. What follows is an attempt to work out aspects of a wiser future for capitalism.
We have associated love with sex, and because there is pleasure in it, we have made an extraordinary thing of it. Sex has become the most important thing in life. We have tried to find some deep meaning in it, a deep reality, a sense of great union, oneness, and other transcendental things. Why has sex such significance in our life? Probably we have nothing else; maybe in every other field we are mechanical. There is nothing original in ourselves, nothing creative – not ‘creative’ in the sense of producing paintings, songs and poems, that is a very superficial part of what is really a sense of creativeness. As we are more or less secondhand people, sex and pleasure have become extraordinarily important. That is why we call it love, and behind that mask we do all kinds of mischievous things.
What is love? Is it pleasure? Is it desire? Is it sex? Is it jealousy, possessiveness, domination, dependency? Is it? If you depend, then you are caught in fear. If I depend on my wife because she gives me pleasure, sexual or otherwise, if I depend on her for comfort, companionship, that dependency breeds fear, jealousy, hatred, antagonism, possessiveness, the desire to dominate. Is all that love? Question it, go into it, find out. And is love the pleasure that is associated with sex? Why has sex become so extraordinarily important in life? Why in the modern world, and also in the ancient world, have we made sex into such a colossal affair?
Take jealousy. Becoming aware that you are experiencing a certain feeling, you recognise it through the word ‘jealousy’. You have had the same feeling before, and the memory of that feeling, which you have named jealousy, pops up every time the feeling recurs and you say, ‘I am jealous.’ So you never look at the fact but merely recognise what you think is the fact. Now, what happens when you look at the feeling without the word ‘jealousy’, that is, without the whole business of verbalisation, recognition, association, memory? When, without the word, you look directly at that which you have called jealousy, is there jealousy? As long as you are merely going through the process of recognising, which is looking at the new thing in terms of what has been, conflict is inevitable. Therefore, there is no renewing; there is nothing new. This is a psychological fact. If you go deeply into yourself, you will see it all in a flash; you don’t have to listen to me or anyone else. In throwing off the burden of words, in being free of the whole structure
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Take jealousy. Becoming aware that you are experiencing a certain feeling, you recognise it through the word ‘jealousy’. You have had the same feeling before, and the memory of that feeling, which you have named jealousy, pops up every time the feeling recurs and you say, ‘I am jealous.’ So you never look at the fact but merely recognise what you think is the fact. Now, what happens when you look at the feeling without the word ‘jealousy’, that is, without the whole business of verbalisation, recognition, association, memory? When, without the word, you look directly at that which you have called jealousy, is there jealousy? As long as you are merely going through the process of recognising, which is looking at the new thing in terms of what has been, conflict is inevitable. Therefore, there is no renewing; there is nothing new. This is a psychological fact. If you go deeply into yourself, you will see it all in a flash; you don’t have to listen to me or anyone else. In throwing off the burden of words, in being free of the whole structure of symbols, ideas, and looking directly at the thing itself, there is a rejuvenation, a freshness; something totally new is taking place.
If one would understand the whole process of envy, one must go into it very deeply and not merely accept or reject envy, or try to resist it or cultivate a virtue in its place. When virtue is cultivated, it is no longer virtue. One who tries to cultivate goodness has ceased to be good. Goodness is something entirely different. If I try to free myself from envy by cultivating a state of mind in which there is no envy, I am still envious, because the drive to cultivate a state of non-envy is based on envy. If I were to eradicate the feeling called envy, I must understand this whole problem, so that the mind can dissociate itself from all words, including that particular word ‘envy’. And if it does, is there envy? But merely getting rid of the word, as a clever trick in order not to be envious, does not bring about a mind that is completely still, without a word. Only the mind that is completely still, without a word, without a movement, without an image, that is no longer functioning from the centre which is society, only such a mind is free from envy, and can therefore
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If one would understand the whole process of envy, one must go into it very deeply and not merely accept or reject envy, or try to resist it or cultivate a virtue in its place. When virtue is cultivated, it is no longer virtue. One who tries to cultivate goodness has ceased to be good. Goodness is something entirely different. If I try to free myself from envy by cultivating a state of mind in which there is no envy, I am still envious, because the drive to cultivate a state of non-envy is based on envy. If I were to eradicate the feeling called envy, I must understand this whole problem, so that the mind can dissociate itself from all words, including that particular word ‘envy’. And if it does, is there envy? But merely getting rid of the word, as a clever trick in order not to be envious, does not bring about a mind that is completely still, without a word. Only the mind that is completely still, without a word, without a movement, without an image, that is no longer functioning from the centre which is society, only such a mind is free from envy, and can therefore function in a totally different dimension. To me, such a mind is a religious mind.
While it's raining outside with an Air Quality Index still near 200, I can't help but recognize how many different extremes we've experienced just in my backyard this July.
Here are some of those headlines across central Pennsylvania... drought to record heat to severe storms to wildfire smoke.
TIL about palaeontologist Mary Anning whose "findings contributed to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth", but her work, as a woman scientist in the early 19th century, was never properly recognised.
"I'm not as big a fossil fan; the main reason I wanted to do it was to make sure she got the recognition she deserved."
For more than a decade Trowelblazers.com was a source for stories of women over the last century or two who had been hidden from their place in history in #archeology #paleontology #anthropology #geology etc.
The site is closed for submissions for new names, but the archive is vast.
Sadly, I miss hearing from people like Tori Herridge, Brenna Hassett, Suzanne Pilaar Birch and Rebecca Wragg Sykes when I abandoned that other place.
They were involved in helping to get the Mary Anning statue built, to support the young girl's efforts
If one has gone so deeply in discovering for oneself, then the religious mind does exist, and it does not belong to any individual. It is the mind, it is the religious mind apart from all human endeavours, demands, individual urges, compulsions, and all the rest of it. We have been describing the totality of the mind, which may appear divided by the use of different words, but it is a total thing in which all this is contained. Therefore, such a religious mind can receive that which is not measurable by the brain. That thing is unnameable; no temple, no priest, no church, no dogma can hold it. To deny all that and live in this state is the true religious mind.
There are no problems in this world—only what is. The problem begins when the human mind imagines what is not. It wants to be rich, it wants peace, it does not want to die from starvation, thirst, or violence. These are all part of life's experience. The greatest problem is the one created by thought.
To study the true beauty of power, agency, and uncertainty, look at a real conflict—one that has remained stalled and unresolved after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts to resolve it:
I just updated the #OpenStreetMap contributor stats at wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/St… for Q2 2026. And yes, we have an all time high in monthly contributors, surpassing the likely pandemic driven peak in early 2021. And next month might be even better.
@aaron it simply illustrates that most new users start off with iD (the browser embedded editor), then with the editor function in maps.me/organic.map/comaps (that is likely mostly comaps these days), then SC with a couple of percent, and the reset us all < 1 percent. DeFlock is new (started end of last year) and moving things around.
What the graph doesn't show, which in the end is more important, is mapper retention which overall is the thing that matters.
ahh I see, thanks a lot - yeah, that's the thing with many projects, right? people see something, get excited, start to do something and then it fades away... few people take on the challenge to be there for the long run to contribute.
Then there is a natural and unavoidable shift from mapping terra incognita to gardening that will change activity patterns and the general attractiveness in well mapped areas. It just isn't social media and their metrics for success simply don't apply.
thanks for the extra info! I wasn't aware of the Maps.me impact, that explains things. I guess the kind of contributions and size of changesets evolve in interesting ways too, from foundational to maintenance, from wide scale to micro-mapping, and from large change sets to bitesize refining from mobile apps (Organic Maps, OsmAnd, StreetComplete...).
“Climate change is increasing the risk of critically-dry conditions that set the stage for extreme fire behavior — and that's exactly what we've seen so far in 2026.” 🔥
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
We’ve certainly seen this heat and dryness here in the southwest USA. 10 years ago we averaged 10 inches of rain during monsoon. Now we get maybe 6 inches.
This entry was edited (Friday, July 17, 2026, 10:23 PM)
The true religious mind does not belong to any cult, any group, any religion, any organised church. The religious mind is not the Hindu mind, the Christian mind, the Buddhist mind or the Muslim mind. The religious mind does not belong to any group which calls itself religious. The religious mind is not the mind that goes to churches, temples, mosques. Nor is it a religious mind that holds to certain forms of beliefs and dogmas. The religious mind is completely alone. It is a mind that has seen through the falsity of churches, dogmas, beliefs and traditions. Not being nationalistic, not being conditioned by its environment, such a mind has no horizons, no limits; it is explosive, new, young, fresh, innocent. The innocent mind, the young mind, the mind that is extraordinarily pliable, subtle, has no anchor. It is only such a mind that can experience that which you call God, that which is not measurable.
The religious mind is the non-committed mind, because only such a mind can discover what is true and what is false. It is only such a mind that can find out if there is or is not a reality, God, a timeless thing – but not the committed mind, not a mind that believes or does not believe. Obviously, the religious mind is not the mind that goes to the temple, that does puja and all kinds of tricks. The religious mind sees the falseness of all that totally, completely. Therefore, being free and not having a platform from which to proceed to inquire, it begins all inquiry from freedom. Such a mind is dispassionate, objective, sane, rational, capable of reasoning – which is, after all, the scientific mind. The scientific mind is not a religious mind. The scientific mind is committed to examining a certain part of existence, a segment of life, so the scientific mind cannot understand the totality which the religious mind can understand. To have such a religious mind, there must be a revolution – not economic or social, but a psychological revolution, a revolution in the
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The religious mind is the non-committed mind, because only such a mind can discover what is true and what is false. It is only such a mind that can find out if there is or is not a reality, God, a timeless thing – but not the committed mind, not a mind that believes or does not believe. Obviously, the religious mind is not the mind that goes to the temple, that does puja and all kinds of tricks. The religious mind sees the falseness of all that totally, completely. Therefore, being free and not having a platform from which to proceed to inquire, it begins all inquiry from freedom. Such a mind is dispassionate, objective, sane, rational, capable of reasoning – which is, after all, the scientific mind. The scientific mind is not a religious mind. The scientific mind is committed to examining a certain part of existence, a segment of life, so the scientific mind cannot understand the totality which the religious mind can understand. To have such a religious mind, there must be a revolution – not economic or social, but a psychological revolution, a revolution in the psyche, in the very process of our thinking.
Official homepage of Pepper&Carrot, a free(libre) and open-source webcomic about Pepper, a young witch and her cat, Carrot. They live in a fantasy universe of potions, magic, and creatures.
The obvious out card was used, you must now wait 28 days for you “Cheap Out”-card to regenerate, any further use of this skill shall send you to a penguin-infested lend of your choice! Those are the rules in Dragodungionia! @irina
Not to be that guy but if you get penguins you're as far off from your North Pole Spell l as you can possibly get! ;) (and yet it still kinda works, accidentally :D )
so in a world were magic exists penguins live at North Pole. Is that just a coincidence or is magic causing that or is penguins living there a mandatory condition for a magic world?
Totally, true, they are on my world, "Hereva". But I just don't want readers to focus on this "no penguin in north pole" fact if they know it, it can just break the immersion, and so, the little joke for them. 🙂
This entry was edited (Wednesday, July 15, 2026, 6:17 PM)
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
you’re in good company: Gary Larson lists a Far Side cartoon where a polar bear keeps eating penguins as one of those that got him the most mail from furious fans.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, July 15, 2026, 7:24 PM)
Weeeeell. The *original* species carrying the name "penguin" lived in the northern hemisphere (until the last living specimens were strangled by humans): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_au…
We can thus conclude that Pepper's house is on the southern hemisphere:
It seems to be summer there, as it isn't always as hot there as in this and recent episodes.
Bright light is coming from the portal, much too bright to be moonlight (even with 3 moons and one teapot). But if it were summer on the northern hemisphere, it'd be winter on the southern hemisphere and thus polar night at the geographic south pole (assuming similar axis tilt of Hereva as that of Earth).
This entry was edited (Wednesday, July 15, 2026, 8:20 PM)
Thus, it must be polar day at the other side of the portal, and thus summer also there, and Pepper's house and the pole must be on the same hemisphere.
(Assuming the portal doesn't distort time more than a few months.)
wait until she finds out that penguins poop everywhere with either no control, or no interest in control (the penguin exhibit at the San Francisco Zoo was a horror show to the eyes and the nose).
Hmm I wonder if you could open a portal to slightly underground on a cold planet.
Then, as long as you can stop the rock from flowing through the portal (which should be easy if it's only slightly underground and therefore under low pressure), your unwanted heat will be absorbed by the cold rock.
@martouf 🥇 ← Médaille d'or du meilleur jeu de mot sur cet épisode, décerné par moi et @Nartance qui à fait la trad en français! ( et qui me gratifie souvent de petit gag de traduction avec les MR framagit.org/peppercarrot/webc… )
Alternative ending: penguins are leaving because the portal actually send heat to the pole and since every witches are doing the same, the pole is melting.
The portal is now an analogy of A.C., witches are the Occident and the penguins are climate refugees.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, July 15, 2026, 8:31 PM)
I also read through the thread after commenting, and noted from you this was a fantasy world, not earth. So your light coming through the portal is valid.
@QCCEChris I believe @davidrevoy's depiction is accurate even in our world, as the ambient light comes not from the sky, but rather from Linux's broken graphics drivers keeping the penguins' monitors backlights on
saw it, liked it, notices it has lots of comments and went to read them happily wanting to find out what cool things they have said, only to find that people are nitpicking about several facts that dont necessarily apply to said fantasy world.
@whangdoodler Haha, yes. I always love that. Fun time. Btw, no comments about how a 9 years old witch was able to make a portal with the South Pole, and speak to her cat (biped by the way). This part must be realistic.
@cryptoparty Thank you! I was expecting the AI industry to get plenty of crazy novelties while I put the Gothic Sorceress and her AI Parrot on pause, to feed new stories with both of them, but unfortunately so far, nothing really technically substantial to make new comic strips with her. But I'm still studying how she could reappear, I start to miss drawing them.
wouldn't the sudden cold in the area cause massive windstorms to appear? Also guessing that the portal is one-way and there isn't any heat transfer in the antarctic
@OlofKnight Yes, I played a bit with the idea, and the atmosphérique pressure and temperature difference , in reality would make such a portal a siphon-like twister with very violent winds and storm because of friction. But that was too trash for this tiny story :)
@dimnosal Good question! Depending of the orientation of the compass, I'm sure you can obtain a high spinning one. Maybe a good idea to design a fan that spins on magnetic energy.
Yes, that's what the article—not just the headline—is trying to address. We will shift to new "normals" more quickly, and those new normals will be more extreme. It is trying to explain that we are losing what we once had, with little chance of a quick return to previous conditions.
The effective answer, which is the slow answer, is 'Organize!'. The more of us in more groups stridently demanding real solutions to real problems, and being part of local, effective solutions, the better.
Our representatives don't lead, they follow. So, even with few resources, we push, and they have to catch up.
Powerful economic groups, at both national and international levels, have shaped and maintained a trade-based system that prioritises profit over human and ecological wellbeing, thereby undermining attempts to move towards trade-free products and services. Advocates, researchers and campaigners who promote systems based on access, cooperation and sufficiency remain relatively powerless compared with these organised interests.
This suggests that attempting to solve social, health and environmental problems within a trade-based framework—by placing responsibility on individual consumers—is, so far, a largely insufficient response to the question: How can we make a difference?
It also indicates that deeper structural change is required: a transition away from trade-driven production and distribution towards systems organised around shared access, sustainability and collective need. Such a transformation would require confronting entrenched economic power, dismantling profit-centred incentives, and challenging the political structures that sustain the current t
... Show more...
Powerful economic groups, at both national and international levels, have shaped and maintained a trade-based system that prioritises profit over human and ecological wellbeing, thereby undermining attempts to move towards trade-free products and services. Advocates, researchers and campaigners who promote systems based on access, cooperation and sufficiency remain relatively powerless compared with these organised interests.
This suggests that attempting to solve social, health and environmental problems within a trade-based framework—by placing responsibility on individual consumers—is, so far, a largely insufficient response to the question: How can we make a difference?
It also indicates that deeper structural change is required: a transition away from trade-driven production and distribution towards systems organised around shared access, sustainability and collective need. Such a transformation would require confronting entrenched economic power, dismantling profit-centred incentives, and challenging the political structures that sustain the current trade-based society—one which drives many of the problems it claims to solve.
The ideas relevant to actions that are difficult to achieve—such as transitioning away from a trade-based system—depend on the scale and nature of those actions. While individual efforts alone are often insufficient, meaningful progress can be made by developing and participating in collective, trade-free alternatives.
One approach is to collaborate with others to share time, skills and resources, creating local systems based on access rather than exchange. For example, communities can organise food growing, repair networks or shared services that operate without monetary transactions, thereby reducing dependence on trade-based structures. These initiatives demonstrate practical models of provisioning that prioritise sufficiency, cooperation and sustainability over profit.
Another approach involves forming or joining networks of like-minded individuals to advocate for broader systemic change. This can include lobbying for policies that support commons-based systems, public access to essential services, and the gradual replacement of profit-driven production
... Show more...
The ideas relevant to actions that are difficult to achieve—such as transitioning away from a trade-based system—depend on the scale and nature of those actions. While individual efforts alone are often insufficient, meaningful progress can be made by developing and participating in collective, trade-free alternatives.
One approach is to collaborate with others to share time, skills and resources, creating local systems based on access rather than exchange. For example, communities can organise food growing, repair networks or shared services that operate without monetary transactions, thereby reducing dependence on trade-based structures. These initiatives demonstrate practical models of provisioning that prioritise sufficiency, cooperation and sustainability over profit.
Another approach involves forming or joining networks of like-minded individuals to advocate for broader systemic change. This can include lobbying for policies that support commons-based systems, public access to essential services, and the gradual replacement of profit-driven production with needs-based provisioning. Such collective action can challenge existing economic power structures and influence political decisions at local, national and global levels.
Ultimately, scaling up change requires both grassroots experimentation and coordinated efforts to transform the underlying structures of society. By combining practical alternatives with collective advocacy, it becomes possible to move beyond a trade-based system towards one that better addresses social and environmental challenges.
Stretching over 3,800 hectares, the Rothbury Estate in Northumberland is abundant with opportunity. It’s the largest continuous area of land to appear on the market in 50 years.
PeaceNick🇨🇦 🍁
in reply to Stefan Bohacek • • •For more than a decade Trowelblazers.com
was a source for stories of women over the last century or two who had been hidden from their place in history in #archeology #paleontology #anthropology #geology etc.
The site is closed for submissions for new names, but the archive is vast.
Sadly, I miss hearing from people like Tori Herridge, Brenna Hassett, Suzanne
Pilaar Birch and Rebecca
Wragg Sykes when I abandoned that other place.
They were involved in helping to get the Mary Anning statue built, to support the young girl's efforts
trowelblazers.com/
Stefan Bohacek
in reply to PeaceNick🇨🇦 🍁 • • •