Happy Christmas

The Strangeness of Self

"…if you think you know yourself, you haven’t looked far enough —- into that distance where your strangeness is. You hold more than you know, and that is how knowing opens."
-Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh, ia an American poet, translator, and educator

The Self can seem strange to the artist because the artist seeks originality, to say something that has never been said before. When the Self speaks through the poet, it is as if the poet is hearing his own language for the first time. j.

Saul Williams

You will sit in darkness,
Swallowed by silence,
Until the angel of solitude
Ignites your spine.

-Saul Williams

Saul Stacey Williams (born February 29, 1972) is an American singer, musician, poet, writer, and actor.

Inner Noise

The problem with listening, of course, is that we don’t. There’s too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it’s a constant racket. In the same way we don’t see, and in the same way we don’t feel, we don’t touch, we don’t taste.

Philip Glass, Listening to Philip Glass

Why Does the World Exist?

In his book Why Does the World Exist?, Jim Holt explores the ideas of the great 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. 
“Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence,” Holt writes, “perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself.” For Spinoza, all mental and physical existents were temporally modified expressions of a single substance, an infinite substance that he called God or Nature. Albert Einstein embraced Spinoza’s idea that the world was divine and self-causing, as more recently have other “metaphysically inclined physicists” like Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler.

read more: the american scholar
According to Advaita (Non-dual) philosophy, the Self and the world are one. The Self is uncreated, ever existing, and the cause of itself. 

Because the world is inseparable from the Self, it too is uncreated, ever existing and the cause of itself.