An alchemist, precisely, but in an eastern tradition stranger than any Sufi’s, as if he were not only reverting to Buddhism but going beyond it, back to Tibet’s older religion, Bön as Iwang called it.
Clipping
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
As he watched her work in the afternoons, Bahram thought: love changed everything. They were all just animals after all, creatures God had made not much different from monkeys, and there was no real reason why a woman’s breasts should not be like the udders on a cow, swinging together inelegantly as she leaned forward to work at one labor or another; but love made them orbs of the utmost beauty, and the same was true of the whole world. Love put all things under a description, and only love could save them.
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can’t. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. ‘God loves you’ is the only possible sentence!
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Mowlana’s beautiful poem of reincarnation: I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose as animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar With angels blessed; but even from angelhood I must pass on: “All save the face of God doth perish.” When I have sacrificed my angelic soul, I shall become what no mind has ever conceived, Oh, let me not exist! for non-existence Proclaims in organ tones: “To Him shall we return.”
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Strange to think that each true life was only a few years long—that one passed through several in each bodily span. He said, “God is great. We will never meet again.”
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Try helping other spirits first, as if you were a bodhisattva already.
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books > The Ministry for the Future (Robinson, Kim Stanley)
Maybe that was what PTSD was— the inability to do the work of forgetting, or of not recalling.
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books > The Ministry for the Future (Robinson, Kim Stanley)
Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes.
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books > Qualityland (Kling, Marc-Uwe)
“Correct. We didn’t take into consideration that the digital markets function according to the winner-takes-all principle. That’s different to the nondigital markets.” “An example?” asks Peter. “Let’s say there are two ice-cream parlors on your street. Ice-cream parlor A is a tad better. Where would you go?” “Well, to parlor A.” “But everybody thinks like that. So there’s always a huge queue in front of parlor A. Sometimes they’ve even run out of your favorite flavor before you arrive. And parlor B really is only fractionally less good and not as crowded. Where would you go?” “Parlor B.” “And that’s how the clientele divides itself. Because ice cream can’t be copied and given out to all customers at once. Completely unlike…?” “Digital products,” says Peter. “When you get me to complete your sentences I feel like a stupid schoolboy.” “Rightfully so, rightfully so. Thus, from that we can conclude even if it were only minimally worse, there would be no reason to use the second-best search engine. Winner takes it all. Loser gets nothing. In the digital economy, nobody needs the second-best product, the second-best provider, the second-best social network, the second-best shop, the second-best comedian, the second-best singer. It’s a superstar economy. Long live the superstar, fuck the rest.”
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books > Qualityland (Kling, Marc-Uwe)
the question today is how one can convince humanity to consent to their own survival.”