Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν / Nosce te ipsum / Know thyself
— The Delphic maxim.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
— Socrates, in Plato’s Apology (38a).
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies.
“I wanted only to try to live what was striving to break out of me of its own accord. Why was that so very hard?”
— Hermann Hesse, Demian (1919), epigraph.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time.”
— John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence (1961).
« Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, / Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, / — Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants »
(There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh, sweet as oboes, green as meadows — and others, corrupt, rich and triumphant.)
— Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances”, Les Fleurs du mal (1857).
“I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation.”
— Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism (1915).
The theremin — an electronic instrument devised by Lev Termen in 1920 and played without physical contact.
Om (ॐ) — the sacred Vedic syllable of primordial vibration.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
The lotus — purity and enlightenment born in muddy water.
“…the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping…”
— Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
The alchemical stages Nigredo (blackening) → Albedo (whitening, purification).
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Imprinting — Konrad Lorenz and the “following response”.
Style of life — Alfred Adler.
Narrative psychology: the human being as the author of their own narrative.
Weight of the episode: Key.
“We could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I, §52.
“…above all, the intoxication of sexual arousal, the oldest and most primordial form of intoxication.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man”, 8.
“Music is a miniature of the harmony of the whole universe…”
— Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message, vol. II.
The interference of light.
The Charcot shower — therapy through controlled shock.
Imaginism.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Counterproductivity — Ivan Illich: beyond a certain threshold, institutions produce the opposite of what they were created for: schools that de-school, medicine that sickens (Deschooling Society, 1971; Medical Nemesis, 1975).
Index Librorum Prohibitorum — the Catholic Church’s list of forbidden books (1559–1966).
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729) — satire through the absurd.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Coincidentia oppositorum — Nicholas of Cusa.
Advaita Vedānta.
The Rebis — the androgynous figure of alchemy.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door”
— Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” (1845).
Red / black — the conflict of being.
Hieros gamos — individuation according to Jung.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Flow — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Chronos versus Kairos.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”
— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
The collective unconscious — Jung.
“I know that I know nothing” — Socrates, inverted.
— After Plato, Apology (21d).
“To attain that natural happiness one must know oneself. For that, Self-enquiry, ‘Who am I?’, is the chief means.”
— Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I? (Nān Yār).
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Plato, Republic, Phaedo.
Theosophy.
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
A source of spontaneity suppressed by norms.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946).
“Do not go gentle into that good night.”
— Dylan Thomas (1951).
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Thales of Miletus — water as the first principle.
“How it clatters along the roofs, / Like the tramp of hoofs!”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Rain in Summer” (1845).
“…it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
— Vivian Greene, popular aphorism.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Plato, Symposium — the ascent of Eros.
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars”
— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, 31.
Libido according to Jung — psychic energy as such.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
“The secret of theology is anthropology.”
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841).
“God is dead!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
“Some things are within our power, while others are not.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1.
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
— The Heart Sutra.
“Thirty spokes share one hub; it is the empty centre that makes the wheel useful.”
— Tao Te Ching, ch. 11.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Axis mundi — Mircea Eliade.
Peak experiences — Abraham Maslow.
“Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, is a voluntary life in ice and high mountains.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888), Preface, 3.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Freud: the pleasure principle versus the reality principle.
“…a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), thesis 4.
Soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Stoicism — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
The Tibetan jhator.
Robinson Jeffers — the poetry of “inhumanism” and dissolution into nature.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
The music of the spheres — Pythagoras.
Morton Feldman — music at the threshold of audibility.
“…and after the fire a still small voice.”
— 1 Kings 19:12 (King James Version).
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Anicca.
The sand mandala.
“Time is a child playing draughts; the kingly power is a child’s.”
— Heraclitus, fr. 52 DK.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Nihilism versus śūnyatā.
Prāṇāyāma.
“God is the breath of all breath.”
— Kabir, Songs of Kabir, trans. Rabindranath Tagore (1915), I.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Sublimation.
“Magic Theatre. Entrance Not For Everybody.”
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927).
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
“But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”
— Luke 15:20 (King James Version).
The Great Mother — Jung and Erich Neumann.
Avalon.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Anamnesis — Plato.
The collective unconscious — Jung.
Duende — Federico García Lorca.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
“Everything flows.” (Panta rhei)
— Heraclitus, as transmitted by later tradition.
Élan vital — Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907).
“You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §341.
Weight of the episode: Nodal.
Deep ecology — Arne Næss.
The Anima — Jung.
“Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction.”
— J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life (1953).