“There is a sense that people of the Middle Ages did not feel space in the same way we do, as an empty expanse through which we move, or as a box in which we are contained. In Saving the Appearances (1957), Owen Barfield suggested that medieval man did not feel he was within space as if it were a container. Rather, for Barfield, medieval man wore the world like a garment. Medieval man, Barfield suggests, saw the world quite differently than we do. For him the air was “filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood from a living heart.” The night sky was not a “homogenous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional qualitative sky . . . from which . . . the great zodiacal belt . . . the planets and the moon . . . are raying down their complex influences on the earth.”16 Barfield says that although he may not have heard it, medieval man believed in the music of the spheres and he took for granted the correspondences between things on Earth and those above: the moon’s correspondence with growth, the sun’s with gold, Venus’s with copper, that of Mars with iron, and Saturn with lead. For Barfield, this meant that our medieval ancestors lived in a much more “participatory” relationship to the world than we do. They were “in” the world in a way that we are not, much more like figures in a painting than objects in a box. There was, we can say, a felt continuity between themselves and the world around them.”
― The Secret Teachers of the Western World
― The Secret Teachers of the Western World
“In fact, this method – of deliberately seeking out stimulation, excitement, even crisis – is one of our favourite human devices for escaping that sense of ‘a cloud weighing upon us’. A depressed housewife goes and buys herself a new hat. A bored man gets drunk. A discontented teenager steals a car or takes his knuckledusters to a a football match. Generally speaking, the greater a person's potentiality for achievement, the greater his or her objection to that feeling of being ‘cut off from one's rightful resources’.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep
― G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep
“If you play a video game on your computer, such as "Doom" or "Uncharted", you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D.”
― The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
― The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
“Procrastination is an eclipse to your true potential.”
― Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination
― Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination
“The spirit world shuts not its gates. Your mind is closed, your heart is dead.”
― The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World
― The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World
Abhiroop’s 2025 Year in Books
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