"When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living mother. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty."
Utopia said, "Do not lie, and do not do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing covered that will remain undisclosed."
"The dead are not alive, and the living will not die.
"During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it alive. When you are in the light, what will you do? "On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"
Utopia said to them, "No matter where you are, you are to go to the sages, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being."
Utopia said to her followers, "Compare me to something and tell me what I am like."
And the first said to her, "You are like a just messenger."
And the second said to her "You are like a wise philosopher."
And the third said to her, "Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."
Utopia said, "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended."
And she took her, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to her.
When she came back to her friends, they asked Her, "What did Utopia say to you?"
She said to them, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you."
"When you go into any region and walk through the countryside, when people receive you, eat what they serve you and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you; rather, it what comes out of your mouth that will defile you."
"If you become my followers and listen to my sayings, these stones will serve you. "For there are five trees in paradise for you; they do not change, summer or winter, and their leaves do not fall. Whoever knows them will not taste death."
She said to them, "It is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for birds of heaven."
"For this reason I say, if the owner of a house knows that a thief is coming, She will be on guard before the thief arrives and will not let the thief break into the house of her estate and steal her possessions. As for you, then, be on guard against the world. Arm yourselves with great strength, or the robbers might find a way to get to you, for the trouble you expect will come. Let there be among you a person who understands.
"When the crop ripened, the person came quickly with sickle in hand and harvested it. Whoever has ears to hear should hear."
They said to her, "Then shall we enter the queendom as babies?"
Utopia said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the female will not be female nor the male be male, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the queendom]."
She said to them, "Whoever has ears should hear. There is a light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark."
Utopia said, "When you strip without being ashamed and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then you will see the child of the living one and you will not be afraid."
"You do not know who I am from what I say to you. Rather, you have become like the crowd, for they love the tree but hate its fruit, or they love the fruit but hate the tree."
She said to them, "What you look for has come, but you do not know it."
She said to them, "You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence and have spoken of the dead."
She said to them, "If it were useful, children's fathers would produce them already circumcised from their mothers. Rather, the true circumcision in spirit has become valuable in every respect."
She said to her followers, "{...} that person {...} around the lamb."
They said to her, "So that she may kill it and eat it."
She said to them, "She will not eat it while it is alive, but only after she has killed it, and it has become a carcass."
They said, "Otherwise she cannot do it."
She said to them, "So also with you, seek for yourselves a place for rest, or you might become a carcass and be eaten."
"Who are you ? You have climbed onto my couch and eaten from my table as if you are from someone."
Utopi change to reflect that fact. Our attitudes to copying are a reflection of our attitudes to ownership. Our attitudes to ownership are, for the most part, incoherent.
Who owns meaning? We all do.
"A Nobel Prize is waiting for the person who figures out the economics of information." - Jay Ogilvy
Made or non-made, it's all the same. Sublime.
"The self reflected in the mediated sublime is an artful creation of a life that shapes and fashions symbols as if they were reality. In a symbolic economy, symbols are as real as it gets." - Jay Ogilvy
Symbols are as real as it gets.
The Web's as real as it gets.
"Stephen Donadio, a professor of American literature at Middlebury College, has argued that represented experience (as seen on the video screen) is rapidly replacing direct experience as the defining sensibility in American life. Echoing Percy Walker's earlier observation about the movies, Donadio suggests that television certifies what it shows (and, by implication, decertifies what it does not show)." - Ron Powers
The web certifies everything.
Made and non-made reality, it's the same stuff.
Every experience is equally legitimate, no matter what it is.
"Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing." - Kevin Kelly
"You can't make up anything anymore. The world is a satire. All you're doing is recording it." - Art Buchwald
Realness is the quality of interconnectedness.
"Linearity in print and thought has made language unable to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, except as pathology." - Terence McKenna
"In the matter of understanding the self, we have yet to leave the playpen in the nursery of ontology." - Terence McKenna
"There will come a moment that will be an absolute leap into faith, and we will simply have to believe that something is waiting there because the dominator style of the ego has left us no choice." - Terence McKenna
Let go.
We are made of others.
The human virtues are about connection.
Only connect. Only be connected.
"The future is already here. It's just that it hasn't been evenly distributed." - William Gibson
"The art of order is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive." - A.N. Whitehead
Order and novelty are not disjoined.
Receive from the past. Live in the present.
Late October, 1995: "The first major survey of Internet use among the general population has found that adults in the United States and Canada spend as much time surfing the Internet each week as adults devote to watching rented videocassettes...figures suggest that the Internet is approaching mass-market penetration much more quickly than earlier studies had predicted." - The New York Times
The web is a vacuum.
Shaping your future is a question of which connections you choose.
Connecting is inevitable.
Everyone's vision works best.
For Alix