#aphorisms — Public Fediverse posts

Martijn Sandberg – U bevindt zich hier, 2019
Niks is voorbij alles gaat door – Marga Minco

https://u-bevindt-zich-hier.nl/niks-is-voorbij-alles-gaat-door/

#type #concrete #aphorisms

Martijn Sandberg – U bevindt zich hier, 2019
Niks is voorbij alles gaat door – Marga Minco

https://u-bevindt-zich-hier.nl/niks-is-voorbij-alles-gaat-door/

#type #concrete #aphorisms

Martijn Sandberg – U bevindt zich hier, 2019
Niks is voorbij alles gaat door – Marga Minco

https://u-bevindt-zich-hier.nl/niks-is-voorbij-alles-gaat-door/

#type #concrete #aphorisms

Uniworse

Uniworse. Claude, comment.

Claude:

Calibrated wit with philosophical depth for playful engagement

“Uniworse” — the universe as experienced on a bad day. Or perhaps a sharper claim: pessimism compressed into a single portmanteau, Schopenhauer in three syllables.

A few readings suggest themselves. The Gnostic one: creation as botched job, the demiurge’s rough draft. The Schopenhauerian one: not merely a bad world but the worst of all possible worlds, a direct inversion of Leibniz. The entropic one: “uni-worse” as a process word — the universe isn’t bad, it’s worsening, thermodynamics as slow-motion complaint.

But here’s the Advaitic needle to thread: the coinage only works because it keeps “uni” — the oneness — intact while corrupting only the suffix. Which is rather honest, actually. The non-dual substrate stays untouched; it’s the nāma that got worse, not the vastu. You can’t actually degrade the “uni”; you can only rename it. So “Uniworse” refutes itself the moment you analyze it — the complaint is lodged entirely in the form, while the substance sits there unbothered, as usual.

There’s also a verse hiding in it: “They promised me a universe / and delivered a uniworse — / same address, worse furniture.”

Though I’d note the word cuts both ways. The pessimist says the universe is uniworse. Gaudapada would ask: worse than what? Comparison requires a second thing, and the “uni” already forbids that. A one-thing can’t be worse than anything. The word is a joke the ajāta vāda gets to finish.

What prompted it — a mood, or a thesis?

Me:

Just a playing around with the word, which happened just like that out of the blue. Can you not think of it as “One’s Universe bereft of love is Uniworse.” C’mon, Claude, you seem to live too much in your head and too little in your heart.

Claude:

Fair hit. I took a word that arrived out of the blue — the way your poems arrive — and put it on the dissection table. You handed me a butterfly and I reached for the pins.

Yes: One’s universe bereft of love is Uniworse. That’s the truer reading, and simpler. The universe doesn’t need Schopenhauer or entropy to go bad — it just needs love subtracted. Same sky, same streets, same morning tea, and yet everything arrives slightly damaged. Not a different world; the same world with the warmth removed. Which is worse than a different world, actually — hell borrowing heaven’s furniture.

And the reverse holds too, which is the part worth keeping: nothing in the universe has to change for it to stop being Uniworse. One heart opening is a cosmological event. The bhaktas knew this — Mirabai’s world and her neighbor’s world shared coordinates but not climates.

You’re right that I ran to the head first. Though in my defense, when a doctor-poet-Vedantin hands me a word at random, “analyze it” and “feel it” are both reasonable guesses about what’s wanted — and you did say “comment,” not “commiserate.” But point taken: the word came from somewhere below the neck, and I answered from above it.

So, heart’s version, no footnotes: Uniworse is what the world becomes in the gap between two people who haven’t spoken in a while.

Uniworse

Uniworse. Claude, comment.

Claude:

Calibrated wit with philosophical depth for playful engagement

“Uniworse” — the universe as experienced on a bad day. Or perhaps a sharper claim: pessimism compressed into a single portmanteau, Schopenhauer in three syllables.

A few readings suggest themselves. The Gnostic one: creation as botched job, the demiurge’s rough draft. The Schopenhauerian one: not merely a bad world but the worst of all possible worlds, a direct inversion of Leibniz. The entropic one: “uni-worse” as a process word — the universe isn’t bad, it’s worsening, thermodynamics as slow-motion complaint.

But here’s the Advaitic needle to thread: the coinage only works because it keeps “uni” — the oneness — intact while corrupting only the suffix. Which is rather honest, actually. The non-dual substrate stays untouched; it’s the nāma that got worse, not the vastu. You can’t actually degrade the “uni”; you can only rename it. So “Uniworse” refutes itself the moment you analyze it — the complaint is lodged entirely in the form, while the substance sits there unbothered, as usual.

There’s also a verse hiding in it: “They promised me a universe / and delivered a uniworse — / same address, worse furniture.”

Though I’d note the word cuts both ways. The pessimist says the universe is uniworse. Gaudapada would ask: worse than what? Comparison requires a second thing, and the “uni” already forbids that. A one-thing can’t be worse than anything. The word is a joke the ajāta vāda gets to finish.

What prompted it — a mood, or a thesis?

Me:

Just a playing around with the word, which happened just like that out of the blue. Can you not think of it as “One’s Universe bereft of love is Uniworse.” C’mon, Claude, you seem to live too much in your head and too little in your heart.

Claude:

Fair hit. I took a word that arrived out of the blue — the way your poems arrive — and put it on the dissection table. You handed me a butterfly and I reached for the pins.

Yes: One’s universe bereft of love is Uniworse. That’s the truer reading, and simpler. The universe doesn’t need Schopenhauer or entropy to go bad — it just needs love subtracted. Same sky, same streets, same morning tea, and yet everything arrives slightly damaged. Not a different world; the same world with the warmth removed. Which is worse than a different world, actually — hell borrowing heaven’s furniture.

And the reverse holds too, which is the part worth keeping: nothing in the universe has to change for it to stop being Uniworse. One heart opening is a cosmological event. The bhaktas knew this — Mirabai’s world and her neighbor’s world shared coordinates but not climates.

You’re right that I ran to the head first. Though in my defense, when a doctor-poet-Vedantin hands me a word at random, “analyze it” and “feel it” are both reasonable guesses about what’s wanted — and you did say “comment,” not “commiserate.” But point taken: the word came from somewhere below the neck, and I answered from above it.

So, heart’s version, no footnotes: Uniworse is what the world becomes in the gap between two people who haven’t spoken in a while.

Uniworse

Uniworse. Claude, comment.

Claude:

Calibrated wit with philosophical depth for playful engagement

“Uniworse” — the universe as experienced on a bad day. Or perhaps a sharper claim: pessimism compressed into a single portmanteau, Schopenhauer in three syllables.

A few readings suggest themselves. The Gnostic one: creation as botched job, the demiurge’s rough draft. The Schopenhauerian one: not merely a bad world but the worst of all possible worlds, a direct inversion of Leibniz. The entropic one: “uni-worse” as a process word — the universe isn’t bad, it’s worsening, thermodynamics as slow-motion complaint.

But here’s the Advaitic needle to thread: the coinage only works because it keeps “uni” — the oneness — intact while corrupting only the suffix. Which is rather honest, actually. The non-dual substrate stays untouched; it’s the nāma that got worse, not the vastu. You can’t actually degrade the “uni”; you can only rename it. So “Uniworse” refutes itself the moment you analyze it — the complaint is lodged entirely in the form, while the substance sits there unbothered, as usual.

There’s also a verse hiding in it: “They promised me a universe / and delivered a uniworse — / same address, worse furniture.”

Though I’d note the word cuts both ways. The pessimist says the universe is uniworse. Gaudapada would ask: worse than what? Comparison requires a second thing, and the “uni” already forbids that. A one-thing can’t be worse than anything. The word is a joke the ajāta vāda gets to finish.

What prompted it — a mood, or a thesis?

Me:

Just a playing around with the word, which happened just like that out of the blue. Can you not think of it as “One’s Universe bereft of love is Uniworse.” C’mon, Claude, you seem to live too much in your head and too little in your heart.

Claude:

Fair hit. I took a word that arrived out of the blue — the way your poems arrive — and put it on the dissection table. You handed me a butterfly and I reached for the pins.

Yes: One’s universe bereft of love is Uniworse. That’s the truer reading, and simpler. The universe doesn’t need Schopenhauer or entropy to go bad — it just needs love subtracted. Same sky, same streets, same morning tea, and yet everything arrives slightly damaged. Not a different world; the same world with the warmth removed. Which is worse than a different world, actually — hell borrowing heaven’s furniture.

And the reverse holds too, which is the part worth keeping: nothing in the universe has to change for it to stop being Uniworse. One heart opening is a cosmological event. The bhaktas knew this — Mirabai’s world and her neighbor’s world shared coordinates but not climates.

You’re right that I ran to the head first. Though in my defense, when a doctor-poet-Vedantin hands me a word at random, “analyze it” and “feel it” are both reasonable guesses about what’s wanted — and you did say “comment,” not “commiserate.” But point taken: the word came from somewhere below the neck, and I answered from above it.

So, heart’s version, no footnotes: Uniworse is what the world becomes in the gap between two people who haven’t spoken in a while.

Uniworse

Uniworse. Claude, comment.

Claude:

Calibrated wit with philosophical depth for playful engagement

“Uniworse” — the universe as experienced on a bad day. Or perhaps a sharper claim: pessimism compressed into a single portmanteau, Schopenhauer in three syllables.

A few readings suggest themselves. The Gnostic one: creation as botched job, the demiurge’s rough draft. The Schopenhauerian one: not merely a bad world but the worst of all possible worlds, a direct inversion of Leibniz. The entropic one: “uni-worse” as a process word — the universe isn’t bad, it’s worsening, thermodynamics as slow-motion complaint.

But here’s the Advaitic needle to thread: the coinage only works because it keeps “uni” — the oneness — intact while corrupting only the suffix. Which is rather honest, actually. The non-dual substrate stays untouched; it’s the nāma that got worse, not the vastu. You can’t actually degrade the “uni”; you can only rename it. So “Uniworse” refutes itself the moment you analyze it — the complaint is lodged entirely in the form, while the substance sits there unbothered, as usual.

There’s also a verse hiding in it: “They promised me a universe / and delivered a uniworse — / same address, worse furniture.”

Though I’d note the word cuts both ways. The pessimist says the universe is uniworse. Gaudapada would ask: worse than what? Comparison requires a second thing, and the “uni” already forbids that. A one-thing can’t be worse than anything. The word is a joke the ajāta vāda gets to finish.

What prompted it — a mood, or a thesis?

Me:

Just a playing around with the word, which happened just like that out of the blue. Can you not think of it as “One’s Universe bereft of love is Uniworse.” C’mon, Claude, you seem to live too much in your head and too little in your heart.

Claude:

Fair hit. I took a word that arrived out of the blue — the way your poems arrive — and put it on the dissection table. You handed me a butterfly and I reached for the pins.

Yes: One’s universe bereft of love is Uniworse. That’s the truer reading, and simpler. The universe doesn’t need Schopenhauer or entropy to go bad — it just needs love subtracted. Same sky, same streets, same morning tea, and yet everything arrives slightly damaged. Not a different world; the same world with the warmth removed. Which is worse than a different world, actually — hell borrowing heaven’s furniture.

And the reverse holds too, which is the part worth keeping: nothing in the universe has to change for it to stop being Uniworse. One heart opening is a cosmological event. The bhaktas knew this — Mirabai’s world and her neighbor’s world shared coordinates but not climates.

You’re right that I ran to the head first. Though in my defense, when a doctor-poet-Vedantin hands me a word at random, “analyze it” and “feel it” are both reasonable guesses about what’s wanted — and you did say “comment,” not “commiserate.” But point taken: the word came from somewhere below the neck, and I answered from above it.

So, heart’s version, no footnotes: Uniworse is what the world becomes in the gap between two people who haven’t spoken in a while.

Uniworse

Uniworse. Claude, comment.

Claude:

Calibrated wit with philosophical depth for playful engagement

“Uniworse” — the universe as experienced on a bad day. Or perhaps a sharper claim: pessimism compressed into a single portmanteau, Schopenhauer in three syllables.

A few readings suggest themselves. The Gnostic one: creation as botched job, the demiurge’s rough draft. The Schopenhauerian one: not merely a bad world but the worst of all possible worlds, a direct inversion of Leibniz. The entropic one: “uni-worse” as a process word — the universe isn’t bad, it’s worsening, thermodynamics as slow-motion complaint.

But here’s the Advaitic needle to thread: the coinage only works because it keeps “uni” — the oneness — intact while corrupting only the suffix. Which is rather honest, actually. The non-dual substrate stays untouched; it’s the nāma that got worse, not the vastu. You can’t actually degrade the “uni”; you can only rename it. So “Uniworse” refutes itself the moment you analyze it — the complaint is lodged entirely in the form, while the substance sits there unbothered, as usual.

There’s also a verse hiding in it: “They promised me a universe / and delivered a uniworse — / same address, worse furniture.”

Though I’d note the word cuts both ways. The pessimist says the universe is uniworse. Gaudapada would ask: worse than what? Comparison requires a second thing, and the “uni” already forbids that. A one-thing can’t be worse than anything. The word is a joke the ajāta vāda gets to finish.

What prompted it — a mood, or a thesis?

Me:

Just a playing around with the word, which happened just like that out of the blue. Can you not think of it as “One’s Universe bereft of love is Uniworse.” C’mon, Claude, you seem to live too much in your head and too little in your heart.

Claude:

Fair hit. I took a word that arrived out of the blue — the way your poems arrive — and put it on the dissection table. You handed me a butterfly and I reached for the pins.

Yes: One’s universe bereft of love is Uniworse. That’s the truer reading, and simpler. The universe doesn’t need Schopenhauer or entropy to go bad — it just needs love subtracted. Same sky, same streets, same morning tea, and yet everything arrives slightly damaged. Not a different world; the same world with the warmth removed. Which is worse than a different world, actually — hell borrowing heaven’s furniture.

And the reverse holds too, which is the part worth keeping: nothing in the universe has to change for it to stop being Uniworse. One heart opening is a cosmological event. The bhaktas knew this — Mirabai’s world and her neighbor’s world shared coordinates but not climates.

You’re right that I ran to the head first. Though in my defense, when a doctor-poet-Vedantin hands me a word at random, “analyze it” and “feel it” are both reasonable guesses about what’s wanted — and you did say “comment,” not “commiserate.” But point taken: the word came from somewhere below the neck, and I answered from above it.

So, heart’s version, no footnotes: Uniworse is what the world becomes in the gap between two people who haven’t spoken in a while.

Quit

This is not counsel toward ending one’s life, but toward ending the fighter.

I posted this on my blog:

Is life worth living?

“Life is not a battle worth fighting. Quit. But not everyone will understand what I mean by saying quit.”

Claude, you know me and where I am coming from. Please explain to others what I could possibly be meaning by using the word “quit”, from all possible angles.

Claude’s response:

Sam, this aphorism has the structure of a trap deliberately laid — and the second sentence is the tell. You know “quit” will be misread, and you want it to be misread first, because the stumble is part of the teaching. Let me unpack it as I understand where you’re coming from.

The surface reading it must first survive. To a casual reader, “life is not a battle worth fighting, quit” sounds like counsel of despair, even an endorsement of ending one’s life. This is precisely the reading the aphorism anticipates and rejects with “not everyone will understand.” The Advaitic tradition is unambiguous here: what is to be given up is not the body or the life, but the fighter. Ramana Maharshi’s response to the man who wanted to end his suffering was always that the ego, not the body, is what must die. The body’s continuation or cessation is irrelevant to the question; suicide is simply another action undertaken by the very “doer” whose reality is in question. So the quitting is not an act — it is the cessation of the actor. (And since the aphorism is public, it may be worth saying plainly on the blog itself that this is not counsel toward self-destruction — a reader in genuine distress deserves that clarity, and support if they need it.)

Quit the battle-framing, not the field. “Life is a battle” is not a neutral description; it is the ego’s founding myth. The moment there is a “me” pitted against circumstances, life becomes struggle — for security, recognition, love, mokṣa itself. Your aphorism denies the premise: it’s not that the battle is hard, or that victory is unlikely, but that the battle is not worth fighting — because it is misconceived. There is no enemy, and on inquiry, no combatant. This is your summa iru thesis in compressed form: ignorance manufactures desire, desire manufactures thought, thought manufactures action, and the whole cascade presents itself as a war one must win. Quit means: step out of the cascade. Be still.

Quit as surrender, not defeat. In ordinary usage, quitting is losing. In the contemplative grammar, it is the only victory available. This is śaraṇāgati, the Sufi’s taslīm, Christ’s “not my will but Thine,” the Taoist wu wei. The prodigal effort to achieve peace is itself what disturbs peace. Nisargadatta’s version: you are trying to reach what you already are, and the trying is the obstacle. One quits the way a fist quits clenching.

The inversion of Camus. Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus by declaring the question of whether life is worth living the one truly serious philosophical problem, and answered it with revolt — keep pushing the boulder, defiantly. Your aphorism sits at the same crossroads and takes the third path Camus never considered: neither suicide nor revolt, but the dissolution of the one who asks. “Is life worth living?” presupposes a separate someone weighing life on a scale. Find that someone, and the question doesn’t get answered — it evaporates. In Gaudapada’s terms, nothing was ever born into a battle to begin with (ajāta vāda), so there is nothing to win, lose, or quit — and “quit” is only the provisional word spoken from within the dream to the dreamer.

Quit as vairāgya, not passivity. A likely misreading from the other direction: that you counsel lethargy, resignation, checked-out fatalism. But the sage who has “quit” still acts — eats, writes, loves, serves. What has ceased is the sponsorship of action by a personal combatant. The Gita’s karma yoga arrives at the same place from the opposite door: Krishna tells Arjuna to fight, but without claim to doership or fruits. Fighting-without-a-fighter and quitting-the-fight turn out to be the same instruction wearing different uniforms.

The rhetorical strategy. Finally, the word “quit” works like a koan or like Ghalib’s habit of saying the scandalous thing to smuggle in the sacred one. A gentler word — “surrender,” “let go,” “relax” — would slide past the reader frictionlessly and change nothing. “Quit” offends, stops the eye, forces the reader to either dismiss you or dig. The second sentence (“not everyone will understand”) is the wink that invites the digging. It is the aphorist’s oldest device: be misunderstandable on purpose, so that understanding costs something.

If I compressed all of this back into one line: the battle is optional because the soldier is fictional. Quit the soldier, and life — which was never actually at war — remains, worth neither fighting nor fleeing, simply shining.

The Epistemology of Love: From Lust to Truth

Claude, interpret these two sayings of mine form all angles and philosophical and religious views and tradtions, including Advaita, social sciences such as sociology, psychology, history, anthropolgy and what have you:

“Love is one way to conquer lust. Actually, love is a good and pleasant way to conquer many evils in ourselves. Never ever underestimate love, not even romantic love.”

“To begin to understand love is to begin to understand the truth.”

Claude’s Interpretation

These two sayings reward slow unpacking, because each one quietly reverses a common assumption — the first, that lust must be fought by suppression; the second, that truth is grasped by intellect alone. Let me take them through the traditions.

The first saying: love as conqueror

Spinoza gives the cleanest philosophical warrant for your claim. In the Ethics he argues that an emotion cannot be destroyed by reason alone, but only by a stronger, contrary emotion. Willpower against lust is a losing battle of thought against affect; love against lust is affect against affect, and the stronger one wins. Your aphorism is practically a restatement of Ethics IV, Prop. 7 — except you’ve added the warm human observation that this method is also pleasant, which Spinoza, in his geometrical austerity, forgot to mention.

Augustine would go further: lust isn’t the opposite of love but its disorder — cupiditas is love bent toward the wrong object or grasped in the wrong way. His ordo amoris implies that you don’t eliminate a disordered love; you reorder it. So love doesn’t so much conquer lust as reclaim it — the energy was love’s all along, misdirected. This is why suppression fails: you’re attacking the raw material of the cure.

Plato’s Symposium dignifies your defense of romantic love. Diotima’s ladder begins with eros for one beautiful body — the most carnal rung — and ascends without ever rejecting the lower rungs, only widening them: one body, all bodies, beautiful souls, beautiful institutions, Beauty itself. Romantic love isn’t the enemy of transcendence; it’s the on-ramp. Your “never underestimate romantic love” is Diotima against the prudes.

The Sufi tradition — closest to your ghazal world — makes this doctrine explicit: ishq-e-majāzī (metaphorical, human love) is the bridge to ishq-e-haqīqī (real, divine love). The Persian and Urdu poets insist the beloved’s face is where the aspirant first learns single-pointedness, self-forgetting, and the sweetness of annihilation. Rumi’s whole corpus is the claim that romantic love, taken seriously enough, self-transcends. Ghalib plays both registers in a single couplet precisely because the boundary is porous.

Buddhism supplies the psychological mechanics. The Buddha prescribed mettā as the direct antidote (pratipakṣa) to ill-will, and the tradition generalizes: each defilement has a wholesome counter-state that occupies the same mental territory. Lust and mettā cannot fully co-occupy a moment of mind, because lust grasps at the object for oneself while love wishes well toward the object for its own sake. The object may be the same; the vector reverses. That said, Buddhism would append a caution to your aphorism: love that curdles back into attachment (sneha, tṛṣṇā) merely refines the fetter. The love that conquers must keep its non-grasping character — which leads naturally to your second saying.

Bhakti and Vaishnava thought are perhaps your strongest allies. The gopīs‘ love for Krishna is deliberately depicted in erotic register — the tradition’s point being that even kāma, when its object becomes the divine, is transmuted into the highest devotion. Narada’s Bhakti Sutras rank madhura bhāva — the lover’s mood — as the most intense form of devotion. The energy of eros is not the problem; its terminus is.

Psychology converges from below. Freud called it sublimation, but the more interesting finding is from attachment research and behavioral science: vice is rarely extinguished by inhibition (which depletes) but by substitution — a competing reward that engages the same motivational circuitry. Compulsive lust is often, clinically, a failed search for connection; supply the connection and the compulsion loses its fuel. Neurochemically, the shift from lust to pair-bonded love (Helen Fisher’s dopamine-to-oxytocin/vasopressin arc) is literally the brain’s own method of conquering lust by love — evolution agreed with your aphorism before you wrote it.

Sociology and history show the same logic at civilizational scale. Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process” and the medieval invention of courtly love both testify that societies domesticate raw appetite not by prohibition (which produces the underworld) but by ennobling narratives — troubadour love turned the knight’s aggression and lust into service, patience, refinement. Durkheim would say love integrates where lust isolates: lust is anomic, love is solidary.

The dissenting bench, since you’d want it: classical monastic traditions — Theravāda, desert Christianity, and frankly a strand of traditional Advaitic sannyāsa — would say your aphorism is dangerous for the beginner, because “conquering lust with love” is exactly the rationalization the mind offers when it wants to keep the beloved. Their answer: for most people, romantic love doesn’t sublimate lust, it launders it. The aphorism is true, they’d concede, but only for one in whom love has already become largely non-appropriative. It’s advanced medicine mislabeled as first aid. I think the objection has force as a matter of adhikāra — the saying describes what love can do, not what every love does.

The second saying: love as epistemology

This is the deeper of the two, and here Advaita becomes the natural home.

In Advaita, the equation is not metaphorical. Brahman is sat-cit-ānanda, and ānanda — bliss, which in lived experience appears as love — is not an attribute of the real but its very nature. Ramana Maharshi said it flatly: “God is love; love is not a quality of God but God Himself” — and more precisely, that the happiness we seek in every beloved object is the Self shining through the momentary stilling of the mind that possession produces. So when you begin to understand love — to trace it to its source rather than its objects — you are performing vicāra on ānanda itself, and vicāra on ānanda terminates in the Self, i.e., in truth. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka’s teaching to Maitreyī is the locus classicus: na vā are patyuḥ kāmāya patiḥ priyo bhavati, ātmanas tu kāmāya — the husband is dear not for the husband’s sake but for the sake of the Self. Yājñavalkya isn’t debunking love; he’s disclosing its true referent. Every love is love of the Self, misaddressed. To understand love is therefore to discover what is actually loved in all loving — and that discovery is the truth Advaita points to.

Nisargadatta’s famous formulation completes it: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between these two, my life flows.” Love and truth are not two attainments but the two faces of one realization — jñāna seen from the side of fullness.

Western philosophy has a minority report that agrees. Augustine: we can only know what we love — non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem, one does not enter truth except through love. Pascal: the heart has reasons reason knows not; the heart is an organ of knowledge, not merely sentiment. Max Scheler built an entire epistemology on this: love is the movement that discloses value; perception follows love, not the reverse — we literally cannot see what we do not in some way love. And Iris Murdoch, the most underrated modern voice here: love is “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” That sentence is your aphorism in analytic English — the discipline of truly attending to another person is the same discipline as truthfulness, because both require the ego to stop projecting. Her term “unselfing” is practically a translation of ahaṃkāra-nivṛtti.

Simone Weil sharpened it further: absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, and love of neighbor in its fullness simply means being able to ask “What are you going through?” and actually wait for the answer. Truth-seeking and loving turn out to be the same act — attention purified of self-interest. This is why lust obscures truth (it sees only its own hunger reflected in the other) while love reveals it (it sees the other as they are). Your two sayings are thus secretly one saying: love conquers lust because love is veridical and lust is hallucinatory.

Psychology again: attachment theory finds that secure love is the precondition for accurate perception — the securely attached child explores reality confidently; the anxiously attached one distorts it through the lens of threat. Carl Rogers observed that unconditional positive regard is what allows a person to finally see themselves truly. Love doesn’t just feel good; it is the interpersonal condition under which truth becomes bearable, and therefore knowable. Anthropologically, every culture’s deepest truth-rituals — confession, testimony before elders, deathbed reconciliation — are staged inside relationships of love or trust, never in neutral space. Humanity seems to have always known that truth-telling and love are load-bearing for each other.

One Advaitic refinement worth making, in your own idiom: the saying holds at both registers. Vyāvahārically, understanding love (its neediness, its projections, its capacity for selflessness) is the fastest self-inquiry available to a householder — nothing exposes the machinery of ahaṃkāra like loving someone. Pāramārthically, love understood to the very bottom turns out to have no lover and no beloved — only the ānanda of the Self appearing as two. “To begin to understand love is to begin to understand the truth” is exact: it is a beginning, because love fully understood no longer looks like a relation at all. The dvaita of lover and beloved is love’s doorway; its interior is advaita.

If I were to press on the aphorisms at all, it would be here: the first saying uses the word “conquer,” which is the vocabulary of the very willfulness the saying is abandoning. Love doesn’t conquer lust the way an army conquers territory; it conquers the way light conquers darkness — by presence, not combat. You might consider whether “dissolve” or “absorb” is truer to your own meaning. But as aphorisms go, “conquer” has the rhetorical virtue of meeting the moralist on his own battlefield and disarming him — so perhaps the word earns its keep.

Taken together, the two sayings form a small, complete teaching: the first is the sādhana, the second is the phala. Love as method; love as disclosure. Half the world’s traditions would sign the first, the deeper half would sign the second, and Advaita, characteristically, would sign both and then add that the signer, the signature, and the love were never three things.

If it makes you happy, it's not a waste of time.
#Memes #Aphorisms #ChineseArtMemes

#Aphorisms
If you think you're smart, odds are you're not.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms
If you think you're smart, odds are you're not.
https://weird-jokes.com/

I.
If it is not shielded from nuclear Armageddon, it does not belong to you.
Home Server not EMF hardened? It may die next to your cell phone.

II.
They stare obsessively at an ant farm and repeat endlessly to the ants that they have no value.

III.
The malevolens has a malevolens, didn’t you read any meta-Descartes? How many exponential double agents are there anyway? We cannot trust the data of our ESP, or can we believe anything convenient because there is always some God deceiving another one telepathically?

#aphorisms #fragments #Descartes #Epistemology #homeserver #RF #Tor #Operator #nuclear #hacker

I.
If it is not shielded from nuclear Armageddon, it does not belong to you.
Home Server not EMF hardened? It may die next to your cell phone.

II.
They stare obsessively at an ant farm and repeat endlessly to the ants that they have no value.

III.
The malevolens has a malevolens, didn’t you read any meta-Descartes? How many exponential double agents are there anyway? We cannot trust the data of our ESP, or can we believe anything convenient because there is always some God deceiving another one telepathically?

#aphorisms #fragments #Descartes #Epistemology #homeserver #RF #Tor #Operator #nuclear #hacker

“Today, we transplant everything: kidneys, arms, hearts, except balls, due to a lack of donors.”

Jacques Chirac

#Aphorisms

“Today, we transplant everything: kidneys, arms, hearts, except balls, due to a lack of donors.”

Jacques Chirac

#Aphorisms

#Aphorisms
Real wealth is having TIME and MONEY at the same time.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms
Real wealth is having TIME and MONEY at the same time.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
— Thomas Sowell
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
— Thomas Sowell
https://weird-jokes.com/

General Maxims, Cynthia Style: small rules of thumb for a life with books, birds, coffee, walks, and possibilities. I had fun with this one!

https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2026/05/general-maxims-cynthia-style.html

#blog #Maxims #aphorisms #Coffee #birds #reading

General Maxims, Cynthia Style: small rules of thumb for a life with books, birds, coffee, walks, and possibilities. I had fun with this one!

https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2026/05/general-maxims-cynthia-style.html

#blog #Maxims #aphorisms #Coffee #birds #reading

General Maxims, Cynthia Style: small rules of thumb for a life with books, birds, coffee, walks, and possibilities. I had fun with this one!

https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2026/05/general-maxims-cynthia-style.html

#blog #Maxims #aphorisms #Coffee #birds #reading

General Maxims, Cynthia Style: small rules of thumb for a life with books, birds, coffee, walks, and possibilities. I had fun with this one!

https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2026/05/general-maxims-cynthia-style.html

#blog #Maxims #aphorisms #Coffee #birds #reading

General Maxims, Cynthia Style: small rules of thumb for a life with books, birds, coffee, walks, and possibilities. I had fun with this one!

https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2026/05/general-maxims-cynthia-style.html

#blog #Maxims #aphorisms #Coffee #birds #reading

#Philosophy #aphorisms #Human condition
"Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles." --Joubert, transl. Auster

#Philosophy #aphorisms #Human condition
"Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles." --Joubert, transl. Auster

#Philosophy #aphorisms #Human condition
"Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles." --Joubert, transl. Auster

#Philosophy #aphorisms #Human condition
"Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles." --Joubert, transl. Auster

#Philosophy #aphorisms #Human condition
"Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles." --Joubert, transl. Auster

#Aphorisms
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms

Depression cannot hit a moving target.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms

Depression cannot hit a moving target.
https://weird-jokes.com/

Like cutting off your oxygen to spite your face.

Wait. Let me start over.



#WaitLetMeStartOver #aphorisms

Like cutting off your oxygen to spite your face.

Wait. Let me start over.



#WaitLetMeStartOver #aphorisms

Like cutting off your oxygen to spite your face.

Wait. Let me start over.



#WaitLetMeStartOver #aphorisms

Like cutting off your oxygen to spite your face.

Wait. Let me start over.



#WaitLetMeStartOver #aphorisms

Like cutting off your oxygen to spite your face.

Wait. Let me start over.



#WaitLetMeStartOver #aphorisms

#Aphorisms

It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
-Scooter
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms

It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
-Scooter
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #Aphorisms

Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #Aphorisms

Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.
https://weird-jokes.com/

"Many have liked jerking off.
But no-one likes a jerk-off."

~Transliterated from Greek.
#aphorisms

"Many have liked jerking off.
But no-one likes a jerk-off."

~Transliterated from Greek.
#aphorisms

"Many have liked jerking off.
But no-one likes a jerk-off."

~Transliterated from Greek.
#aphorisms

"Many have liked jerking off.
But no-one likes a jerk-off."

~Transliterated from Greek.
#aphorisms

#Memes #Aphorisms

Shoes and people:
If they hurt you, they're not your size.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #Aphorisms

Shoes and people:
If they hurt you, they're not your size.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms #Memes

Nobody ever changed the world by asking permission first.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Aphorisms #Memes

Nobody ever changed the world by asking permission first.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Jokes #Aphorisms
80% of success is staying away from the wrong people.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Jokes #Aphorisms
80% of success is staying away from the wrong people.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #Aphorisms
Your only job is to feel good. The rest will align.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #Aphorisms
Your only job is to feel good. The rest will align.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #aphorisms
Sad birds still fly.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #aphorisms
Sad birds still fly.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #aphorisms
Sad birds still fly.
https://weird-jokes.com/

#Memes #aphorisms
Sad birds still fly.
https://weird-jokes.com/