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Memes

121–140 of 4,816

The Screen Revolution is Breaking the Thread of Literacy

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate”…

Statistics on Politically Motivated Killings in America

A total of 3,599 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025. Murders committed in terrorist attacks account for about 0.35 percent of all murders since 1975. Only 81 happened since 2020, accounting for 0.07 percent of all…

Nuestra Piel es Una Gran Página en Blanco

Nuestra piel es una gran página en blanco; el cuerpo, un libro. El tiempo va escribiendo poco a poco su historia en las caras, en los brazos, en los vientres, en los sexos, en las piernas. Recién llegados al mundo, nos imprimen en la tripa una gran «O», el ombligo. Después, van apareciendo lentamente otras letras. Las…

Medieval Book Curse

Steal not this book my honest friend For fear the gallows should be your end, And when you die the Lord will say And where's the book you stole away?

Online Comment Culture

Being an active commenter felt like being an internet socialite, part of an elite society of people who put their voice out there instead of lurked. And my fellow internet socialites responded in turn. Some upvoted, responded, debated. Some liked what I said, some hated it. A few of my comments made it to the top and…

Wikipedia Works Because It Focuses on Process

Over the ensuing two decades, editors amended policies to cope with conspiracy theorists, revisionist historians, militant fandoms, and other perennial goblins of the open web. There were the three core content guidelines of Neutral Point of View, Verifiability, and No Original Research; the five pillars of Wikipedia…

The Magus by Eliphas Levi

They are without fears and without desires, dominated by no falsehood, sharing no error, loving without illusion, suffering without impatience, reposing in the quietude of eternal thought... a Magus cannot be ignorant, for magic implies superiority, mastership, majority, and majority signifies emancipation by…

Time Does Not Pass

To say that time passes, is like saying that a path travels. A path does not walk. It allows walkers to travel. Likewise, a musical score cannot sing. It allows singers to sing. In other words, there is something static in time because it is invariant. But it is also dynamic because the present is constantly renewed…

Where One Puts the Mind

We say that: If one puts his mind in the action of his opponent's body, his mind will be taken by the action of his opponent's body. If he puts his mind in his opponent's sword, his mind will be taken by that sword. If he puts his mind in thoughts of his opponent's intention to strike him, his mind will be taken by…

The Myth of Individual Responsibility Regarding Obesity

When mining jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, communities were left with neither industrial employment nor the agricultural infrastructure that had once sustained them. Into this vacuum stepped corporations like Dollar General, which has explicitly targeted rural communities with limited retail options. The…

The Orchid and the Wasp

How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterri-torialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a…

Each of Us is Several

Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves…

Zen Spontanaity

Suzuki has translated a long letter from the Zen master Takuan on the relationship of Zen to the art of fencing, and this is certainly the best literary source of what Zen means by mo chih ch'u, by "going straight ahead without stopping." 13 Both Takuan and Bankei stressed the fact that the "original'' or "unborn"…

Zen and the Art of Mastering Something

Every one of the arts which have been discussed involves a technical training which follows the same essential principles as training in Zen. The best account of this training thus far available in a Western language is Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, which is the author's story of his own experience under…

Zen Perception of Time

In its own way, each one of the arts which Zen has inspired gives vivid expression to the sudden or instantaneous quality of its view of the world. The momentariness of sumi paintings and haiku, and the total presence of mind required in cha-no-yu and kendo, bring out the real reason why Zen has always called itself…

Moritake Haiku

A fallen flower Returning to the branch? It was a butterfly.

Releasing the Cramp in the Mind

One method of muscular relaxation is to begin by increasing tension in the muscles so as to have a clear feeling of what not to do.15 In this sense there is some point in using the initial koan as a means of intensifying the mind's absurd effort to grasp itself. But to identify satori with the consequent feeling of…

Breaking out of Symbology

A monk asked Ts'ui-wei, "For what reason did the First Patriarch come from the West?" Ts'ui-wei answered, "Pass me that chin-rest." As soon as the monk passed it, Ts'ui-wei hit him with it. Another master was having tea with two of his students when he suddenly tossed his fan to one of them, saying, "What's this?" The…