"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone...

if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom;

for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. –

Arthur Schopenhauer

This why Xi's attempt to control using an AI Panopticon is doomed.

"We feel relieved in solitude because this effort to control our image and behaviour is exhausting.

Now there’s no need to play a part, you can take off your mask and resume being the real you.

In fact, as Goffman points out, to be perpetually on stage would destroy us.

Without the choice of what to reveal to others, we would have no individuality at all.

Privacy is essential to sanity."

mass madness will ensue.

May Sarton on the luxury of a period of time to be alone:

"We are one, the house and I, and I am happy to be alone—time to think, time to be.

This kind of open-ended time is the only luxury that really counts and I feel stupendously rich to have it."

CoSo in a nutshell?

re SM:

"Staying networked isn’t necessarily an inferior form of solitude;

it’s just a different way of being alone. It’s about deliberately letting other people’s words, voices or presence into your aloneness, in a way that you control.

Networked solitude retains the vital element of choice:

you decide which connections you to make, how long to maintain them and when to let them go."

"researchers have found many of us dislike being left alone with our thoughts, and would rather do almost anything else.

So you might have to push through some internal resistance to discover what mindfulness can do for you.

Focused contemplation isn’t exclusive to Buddhism. In the fourteenth century, an anonymous Christian mystic wrote a work called The Cloud of Unknowing,

encouraging the faithful to pursue reflective solitude and contemplative prayer as a way to get to know God better."

"Buddha drew the same distinction between social and psychological solitude that we saw above.

He considered physical seclusion to be the most important, and saw psychological solitude state of non-attachment where the mind was kept free of negative thoughts and emotions.

For him, the ‘good’ reasons to seek solitude were to reflect or examine yourself, to support spiritual growth or simply for the contentment of being alone."

"There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death,

but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site

That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity."

Emily Dickinson

"That state is close to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation:

a state of awareness and concentration where you maintain your focus on the present moment,

while calmly acknowledging and accepting your feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations."

"As is suggested by the name of the divinity, a symbol
of time, is most interestingly

composed from libido
symbols. The lion, the zodiac sign of the greatest summer
heat,

is the symbol of the most mighty desire.

(“My soul roars with the voice of a hungry lion,” says
Mechthild of Magdeburg.)

In the Mithra mystery the
serpent is often antagonistic to the lion, corresponding to

that very universal myth of the battle of the sun with the dragon."

i.e., eclipse.

another version.

reminiscent of some Tibetan thankas.

"in the Mithraic religion, a strange God of Time,

Aion,
called Kronos or Deus Leontocephalus,

because his
stereotyped representation is a lion-headed man, who,
standing in a rigid attitude, is

encoiled by a snake, whose
head projects forward from behind over the lion’s
head.

The figure holds in each hand a key,

on the chest
rests a thunderbolt,
upon his back are the four wings of the wind;

in addition to that, the figure sometimes bears
the Zodiac on his body."

hummingbirds often nest all around Cooper’s hawks’ nests in order to avoid the nasty nest-robbing habit of jays and other corvids.

"When we humans are part of the baseline habitat, the birds’ use of us as a safety barrier is more widespread than we might imagine.

House sparrows hang around our feet at outdoor cafés for more than just the crumbs."

"the God of Job and the God of Jesus

represent the pairs of opposites within the psyche.

They are manifestations of logos and eros, as well as the concepts of anima and animus.

Straight or gay or other, we fall in love with the unknown, the mystery that is unconscious within our psyche, and gender has nothing to do with it."

"One of the most fascinating discoveries about the brain is that our two hemispheres normally function as complementary opposites through the corpus callosum.

However, if the corpus callosum is divided, that third connecting principle is lost and the hemispheres can actually demonstrate competing interests."

" the computer has shown us is that complexity can emerge spontaneously from simple beginnings and simple recurring rules called algorithms.

Stephan Wolfram has a theory called computational equivalence:

the universe has evolved according to simple rules that recur over and over again, as if there were an order in the universe,

building up three-dimensional complexity in the way that a longrunning computer program with the right rule models two-dimensional complexity on computer paper."

"remember that a myth is a metaphor for something unknown at the conscious level.

there is an essential unity in both inanimate and animate nature.

One of the most interesting examples of this recursive meta-pattern at the very small living scale is the evolution of bacteria into mitochondria, the engines in our cells that produce energy.

This is an example of emergence in complex systems."

Richard Ott, Dinergy: the Primordial Meta Pattern in Nature.

auroras are only one effect.

ROCKS AND SOIL ELECTRIFIED BY THE SUPERSTORM: Across the USA on May 10th and 11th, the biggest geomagnetic storm in decades.

something was also happening underfoot.

Strong electrical currents were surging through rocks and soil.

The biggest voltages along the US eastern seaboard and in the Midwest were as much as 10,000 times normal.

NOAA and the US Geological Survey shows some of the 'hot spots' during the early hours of May 11th.
https://spaceweather.com/

“The infantile and moral danger lies in belief in the
symbol

because through that we guide the libido to an
imaginary reality.

The simple negation of the symbol
changes nothing, for the entire mental disposition remains
the same;

we merely remove the dangerous object.

But the object is not dangerous; the danger is our own
infantile mental state,

for love of which we have lost
something very beautiful and ingenious through the
simple abandonment of the religious symbol."

CGJung

garden update.

Siberian Irises blooming 🥰

she took a short nap beside the bird bath, then lay in it for awhile to cool off.

now she's foraging for insects and sunflower seeds missed by the squirrels.

my raccoon is here for the second time today during daylight hours.

my rehabber friend says she's got kits in a den somewhere or she wouldn't be foraging during daylight.