flâneur

Isabel

56 followers · 29 following · 2220 views

on the atlas — 117

highlights — 1590

  • Their ego paradoxically frees them to act inappropriately while going unchecked, because their inner circle is probably too intimidated to call them out.
    humility vs. hubris - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • High ego people intimidate you with their dominance and apparent self-assuredness. You do things for them because you’re scared of what will happen if you don’t.
    humility vs. hubris - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • They think their judgement is superior. They think they know others better than those individuals know themselves. They make assumptions about others’ behaviour without consulting them (or exercising compassion for where that behaviour might come from).
    humility vs. hubris - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • a life that feels meaningful, what leaps to mind is always a life in which I am making things that are expressive manifestations of my ideas and belief
    How to write and what to write about
  • It feels like I’m trying to sketch a picture with my eyes closed or rolling a wheelchair uphill, which is to say it's hard work with shaky results.
    How to write and what to write about
  • To make better things, to write better words: that’s something that no object can give you, no person or experience. Which means that you have to give it to yourself. I
    How to write and what to write about
  • The secret to creative success is disequilibrium, which is to say noticing things in the world that confound you. When we pay attention, we see things that disturb our expectations of how life should be. Our surprise revises us.
    How to write and what to write about
  • “Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.”
    How to write and what to write about
  • I don’t feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer.” I think about this all the time. I want to make things and I don’t necessarily feel that what I make right now is very good, but I'm aware that I'm getting better.
    How to write and what to write about
  • How do you get better if you don’t put in the practice?
    How to write and what to write about
  • I'm at a point where I'd like to write less about relationships, physical appearance, interpersonal conflict and emotional turbulence. Not because I’ve artistically exhausted any of those things, but because I’m personally exhausted of them
    How to write and what to write about
  • So: I guess this is a long-winded way to present my (apparently contrarian?) take that toxic traits are, in fact, traits we are meant to recognize and then earnestly address. We should be aware of them, yes, but we need to go beyond awareness to make the realization functional
    the toxicity of "the toxic trait" - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • having a toxic trait (which is really just a characteristic lodged into your psyche that is limiting you) is not helping you. It is keeping you from living a more equanimous, healthy life. It is you hurting yourself more than anyone else.
    the toxicity of "the toxic trait" - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • Awareness is like information: it is only as valuable as what you do with it. What’s that quote? It goes something like: “Change is being in the same situation, but making a different choice than the one you’ve always made.”
    the toxicity of "the toxic trait" - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • Awareness also doesn’t guarantee growth. Knowing you are doing something toxic and continuing to do it does not make you enlightened—if anything: it exhibits the opposite. One of the biggest disservices you can do to yourself is consciously make a choice you know you will regret
    the toxicity of "the toxic trait" - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • Suddenly, you start thinking extremely destructive, self-destructive thoughts about how dreadful your life is, and everything is dark and gloomy.” When this happens, Tolle says it’s important to detach from the destructive thoughts. “The key is to be aware that there’s something in you that wants the drama and the pain, but that is not you,” Tolle says. “It’s an emotion that lives in you, but it’s not you. You are the consciousness behind it, which is aware of it. Freedom lies in recognizing yourself as the awareness and the presence, so that you’re not completely identified with the emotions …
    How Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle Helped Guide Kendrick Lamar’s New Album | Complex
  • “Then, periodically, the pain-body awakens from its dormant state and needs them to experience additional pain in order to stay alive.
    How Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle Helped Guide Kendrick Lamar’s New Album | Complex
  • “To summarize, everybody carries a certain amount of emotional pain in their energy field, and it often originates in childhood,” Tolle tells me. “The emotional suffering leaves residues in the energy field. It doesn’t just disappear. The residues gradually build up, and by the time a person reaches adulthood, he or she carries an emotional energy field inside that can be described as pain that you carry from the past. This bundle of emotional pain that lives in you, I call the pain-body.”
    How Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle Helped Guide Kendrick Lamar’s New Album | Complex
  • Then he gives an example of someone developing a sense of self based on things that were done to them as a child, laying the groundwork for Kendrick’s own reflections on childhood abuse.
    How Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle Helped Guide Kendrick Lamar’s New Album | Complex
  • “I was very favorably impressed by him,” Tolle recalls. “We got on very well. I found him soft-spoken, quite present, and more introverted than extroverted. We had a talk, and while we were talking, I couldn’t detect any ego in him. He was very present, so I had a good feeling about him.”
    How Spiritual Teacher Eckhart Tolle Helped Guide Kendrick Lamar’s New Album | Complex
  • Reflect well and you will know that there is no such thing as ‘I’. The more you peel the skin of an onion, the more skin only appears - you cannot get any kernel. So when you analyse the ego, it vanishes away into nothingness. What is ultimately left behind is the Atman, pure Knowledge. God appears when the ego dies.
    mental.pdf
  • I got hella sad songs, I just don’t put ‘em out that much, but I had to get over that. I read that
    Smino on Luv 4 Rent, Hair, J. Cole, Denzel Curry
  • once you write something down and put it out, that shit don’t belong to you no more
    Smino on Luv 4 Rent, Hair, J. Cole, Denzel Curry
  • “when I had to face [a mirror], I was almost speechless, clearly observing that I was just what was in front of me: a limited being, imprisoned, forced to cease to exist before everything else, even before its closest things. If I avoided mirrors the impression was not so strong, and yet something within me denied the fact that I was no longer part of everything else, that I had been kicked off from it, that I could no longer find refuge there”
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • “our most elementary, most intimate experiences do not deliver their secret to words. What is truly essential remains hidden in the unexpressed”
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • Your words failed because a society too busy with silencing women couldn’t listen to their silence.
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • “You are coming into conflict with society, with the family, with the woman’s natural profession!”[xv]? You were simply claiming the right to a spiritual path the ultimate meaning of which was not to demonstrate something about this or that man, but the realization of one’s own very personal goal
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • You wrote that “the intellectual and practical competition that [a woman] can engage with a man, the desire to prove at all costs that she is equal to him in any profession and that she can do as well as he did, is a real monstrosity, and the resulting ambition is the most dangerous feeling a woman can cultivate”
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • “Become what you are!”, but like the other great men you’ve met he wanted you to become what you were to him.
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • The erotic takes an intermediate position between the two great groups of feelings of selfishness and altruism […] these two opposing principles, which on the surface are divided and irreconcilable, are instead united at the root by the deepest dependence, and the affirmation of those who lose themselves: “I want to be everything!”, like that of the stingy-avid: “I want to have everything!” have the same meaning, the search for a supreme communion with everything[xiii].
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • These eyes looked inward and at the same time far away, or rather, inwardly as if in a distance”
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • To the hasty observer, his figure had nothing special: this man of medium stature, simple dressed, with relaxed features and backward combed brown hair could easily go unnoticed. The contour of his mouth, thin and expressive as ever, was almost entirely hidden by his big moustache; he had a quiet laugh, a quiet way of speaking, a cautious and meditating gait; it was difficult to imagine such a man in the middle of a crowd: he carried the mark of those who remained on the sidelines, of those who were alone.
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • “your idea of reducing philosophical systems to the personal acts of their authors is precisely an idea that has come out of a brotherly brain: I myself in Basel set out the history of ancient philosophy in this sense, and I loved to say to my listeners: “This system is refuted and dead – but the person behind it is irrefutable, the person cannot die’”
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • “I can’t live according to a model, nor can I ever be a model for anyone, but I will build my life in my own image, and I certainly will, whatever it takes”[vi].
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • I could not recommend to anyone the profession of the pure writer – much less to a woman. […] Your daughter is an exceptional woman, she has a childlike purity and straightforwardness of mind, and at the same time she has no childish or feminine orientation of intellect”[v].
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • Nietzsche tried to pick you up as soon as he saw you (“From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?”[i] – what a player!), while Paul Rée became immediately a doormat at your feet. And then R. M. Rilke, Ferdinand Tonnies, Gerhart Hauptmann, Franz Wedekind – the latter two being little-known men who even killed themselves for you. You also charmed Freud;
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • two people fall in love because the soul of one is the sounding board that echoes every sound in the other’s chest.
    A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse” - The Philosophical Salon
  • People just want something to believe in, and TikTok feels just dynamic and democratic enough to fit the bill. “Of course, none of it is authentic in the traditional sense,” she says. “How could it possibly be?”
    #121: TikTok and the elusive promise of reality
  • Evidently, documenting yourself pouring milk into your coffee complicates the otherwise simple act. In physics, this might be referred to as the observer effect, whereby “observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes it.”
    #121: TikTok and the elusive promise of reality
  • That it’s okay to be intense, but important to express it in a gentle way.
    bookbear express
  • At the end of the day I think love is just being able to hang out with someone for 50 hours straight and have a good time. And then want to do it again 12 hours later. It’s not conceptual—I love you for x quality, I love you for y quality—it’s about tolerance. I like you when you’re calm and occasionally when you’re crazy. I can live with your attachment problems and help you feel better when you’re panicked. I could raise a child with you.
    bookbear express
  • In my opinion this is all there is to compatibility: do your problems fit into my problems? And it takes a reasonable amount of contact to figure that out. Somewhere between eight months and two years.
    bookbear express
  • I told S that I believe us all to be a video game in the mind of God. I play seriously but also with a sense of humor.
    bookbear express
  • I am privileged, which makes it possible for me to pursue what I want without self-doubt.
    bookbear express
  • That’s one part of myself I prefer not to expose. There are a few others.
    bookbear express
  • Similarly, ignorance is the lowest state, knowledge is the middle state and beyond knowledge is the highest state, the two extremes of which seem the same.
    wit.pdf
  • You must always bear in mind that the extremes look very much alike
    wit.pdf
  • In Karma Yoga, the lecture entitled ‘Each is Great in His Own Place,’ contains the following analogy that was surely inspired by the great scientific discoveries of the time. “The extreme positive and the extreme negative are always similar. When the vibrations of light are too slow, we do not see them, nor do we see them when they are too rapid. So with sound; when very low in pitch, we do not hear it; when very high, we do not hear it either. Of like nature is the difference between resistance and non-resistance. One man does not resist because he is weak, lazy and cannot, not because he wil…
    wit.pdf
  • In this talk, I want to focus on the wit and wisdom of Swami Vivekananda
    wit.pdf
  • But as they say, even the jokes of a realised being will transport us to the divine realm.
    wit.pdf