da sabedoria

"They're particularly fond of mental pleasures, which they consider of primary importance, and attribute mostly to good behaviour and a clear conscience. Their favourite physical pleasure is health. Of course, they believe in enjoying food, drink, and so forth, but purely in the interests of health, for they don't regard such things as very pleasant themselves — only as methods of resisting the stealthy onset of disease. A sensible person, they say, prefers keeping well to taking medicine, and would rather feel cheerful than have people trying to comfort him. On the same principle it's better not to need this type of pleasure than to become addicted to it. For, if you think that sort of thing will make you happy, you'll have to admit that your idea of perfect felicity would be a life consisting entirely of hunger, thirst, itching,eating, drinking, rubbing, and scratching — which would obviously be most unpleasant as well as quite disgusting. Undoubtedly these pleasures should come right at the bottom of the list, because they're so impure. " 

Thomas More, in Utopia [pg 86]

Impaciência do Coração

Impaciência do Coração: Comportamento Humano Desviante e Justiça - Neste programa, Gabriela Moita conversa com o psicólogo Luís Fernandes. 

What is Cardano

 View article here

Objectos transicionais e música. Removing the Suzuki tapes. When practicing becomes a narrative.

 Os objectos transicionais e a aprendizagem musical. 

Da importância da separação (insegurança) no processo da criatividade e do impulso para explorar territórios desconhecidos (D. W. Winnicott), tendo sempre, no horizonte, a certeza de que é sempre possível atingir uma perfeição. Ao percorrer esse, árduo, caminho desenvolve-se a expressão. 

"Musically we need simply observe that believing in correctness in technique breeds expression. In music, this passage occurs when standards modulate from physical events like playing with a good tone to more aesthetic measures of, for instance, a well-shaped phrase. Of course, spontaneous discoveries and happy accident inform what a musical piece should sound like. Still the composer and the performer must have a criterion to make sense of happy accidents, to select some as happier than others. In developing technique, we resolve transitional objects into definitions, and we make decisions based on such definitions. " 

Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg. 159]

Of the value of things

 In the meantime silver and gold, the raw materials of money, get no more respect from anyone than their intrinsic value deserves — which is obviously far less than that of iron. Without iron human life is simply impossible, just as it is without fire or water — but we could easily do without silver and gold, if it weren't for the idiotic concept of scarcity-value. And yet kind Mother Nature has deliberately placed all her greatest blessings, like earth, air, and water, right under our noses, and tucked away out of sight the things that are no use to us.


Thomas More, in Utopia [pg 70]

Pérolas a porcos...

"The craftsman is a more inclusive category than the artisan; he or she represents on each of us the desire to do something well, concretely, for its own sake. [...] but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. [...] From the origins of classical civilization, craftsmen have suffered mistreatment. What has kept them going humanly is belief in their work and their involvement with its materials."

Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pag 144] 

Salutary failure II

Rafael Hefti 

Salutary failure

"Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones.  Bad results will cause people to reason harder, and so improve. "

Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman [pg 96]

Patti Smith and David Lynch talk Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Pussy Riot

Compreender, é ser capaz de fazer

 

Glassblowing, illustration from the 'Encyclopedie des Sciences et Metiers'
by Denis Diderot (1713-84) engraved by Robert Benard (fl.1734) published c.1770

The images, in other words, illuminate by clarifying and simplifying movement into a series of clear pictures of the sort the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called "decisive moments."
    It might be possible to imagine an experience following this photographic procedure, one that enables our eyes to do the thinking about material things. In silence, as in a monastery, communication among people would be reduced to a minimum for the sake of contemplating how an object is made. Zen Buddhism follows this nonverbal path, taking the craftsman to be an emblematic figure who enlightens by showing rather than telling. Zen counsels that to understand the craft of archery you need not become an archer; instead, silently compose its decisive moments in your mind.
The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett [pg. 95]


Diderot's encyclopedia

"The Encyclopedia,  or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts,  edited principally by Denis Diderot [...] celebrated those who are committed to doing work well for its own sake; the craftsman stood out as the emblem of Enlightenment. "

Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman 

Of the importance of History

The master's tacit knowledge

"The most significant fact we know about Stradivari's workshop was that he was all over it, popping up unexpectedly everywhere,  gathering in and processing those thousands of bits of information that could not signify in the same way to assistants who were doing just one part.  The same thing has been true in scientific labs run by idiosyncratic geniuses; the master's head becomes stuffed with information only he or she can see the point of. This is why the secrets of the physicist Enrico Fermi as a great experimenter can't be fathomed by poring over the minutiae of his lab procedures. 

To put this observation abstractly in a workshop where the master's individuality and distinctiveness dominates,  tacit knowledge is also likely to dominate. Once the master dies, all the clues, moves, and insights he or she has gathered into the totality of the work cannot be reconstructed; there's no way to ask him or her to make the tacit explicit." 

Richard Sennett in, The Craftsman

Hands vs head

"The tactile, the relational, and the incomplete are physical experiences that occur in the act of drawing. Drawing stands for a larger range of experiences, such as the way of writing that embraces editing and rewriting, or of playing music to explore again and again the puzzling qualities of a particular chord. The difficult and the  incomplete should be positive events in our understanding; they should stimulate us as simulation and facile manipulation of complete objects cannot."

Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman

Sketches by Renzo Piano


O Doce Sabor do Mel

Há muito tempo atrás, um condenado a morte estava na prisão, aguardando o dia de sua execução. Um dia, ele resolveu fugir e, com muita dificuldade, conseguiu realizar seu objetivo. O rei do país, então, mandou um grande elefante em sua perseguição. A lei daquele país determinava que os fugitivos da cadeia fossem esmagados por um elefante. O fugitivo, sabendo que o elefante vinha em sua perseguição, corria com todas as suas forças.

Entretanto, o passo do animal era muito rápido e o fugitivo percebeu que não conseguiria escapar. Foi então que ele viu um grande poço. O fugitivo ficou aliviado: percebeu que se tratava de um excelente esconderijo e tratou de se esconder no interior do mesmo. Por um breve instante sentiu-se salvo, mas ao dirigir seu olhar para o fundo do poço, percebeu que lá se encontrava uma enorme serpente com a goela aberta, pronta para engoli-lo se ele caísse lá embaixo. Assustado, o fugitivo olhou em torno de si e viu que quatro serpentes venenosas estavam enrodilhadas nos cantos do poço, prontas para desferir um bote fatal sobre ele. O fugitivo percebeu, então, que aquele poço estava longe de proporcionar a sonhada segurança. Entretanto, não podia ele sair do mesmo, pois lá em cima permanecia o elefante alerta, pronto para esmagá-lo. O fugitivo sentiu que não tinha escapatória, mas, apostando na sorte pela última vez, agarrou-se a um cipó que crescia na parede do poço. Apavorado, segurava firmemente no cipó, seu último e frágil apoio. Foi então que ele percebeu a presença de dois ratinhos, um branco e um preto, que alternadamente iam roendo o cipó.

A cada roída o cipó ia ficando cada vez mais fino, a qualquer momento poderia rebentar e o homem cairia bem dentro da goela da serpente que o esperava lá embaixo.

O fugitivo sentiu que já estava morto. O pavor não o deixava um segundo sequer. Sentia ele que já estava no fim, que sua vida não valia mais nada. Foi então que, ao erguer os olhos para o alto, se deu conta de que uma frondosa árvore se erguia à beira do poço. Em um dos galhos da mesma havia uma colméia, da qual, a cada golpe de vento, caiam cinco gotas de mel bem dentro da boca aberta do homem. Aquele mel era realmente delicioso, sua doçura era comparável à do néctar, a sublime bebida dos deuses imortais. À medida que aquele mel delicioso refrescava sua garganta e aplacava sua sede, o fugitivo foi se esquecendo de sua situação. Chegou o momento em que ele perdeu totalmente a vontade de escapar daquele poço…

The garden, the garden, it does not abandon her in her hour of need

"They can kill me but they cannot kill my love.


I expected to find bitterness as that woman died, that the hatred towards her enemies would be endless.  Not that she forgave them,  no, not that she was ready to forget what they had done,  no  it was that she had chosen to turn from the anguish that was besieging her,  she had chosen to look through a crack in the wall of the shack where they had imprisoned her broken body,  left her to bleed into nothingness.  I saw her crawl to that slight opening in the wall, heard her think, this is what I want to see at the end,  this is what I want to take with me as I leave,  I will not spend my last moments on earth filled with terror, she saw the plants, she saw a ray of sun,  she remembered how rain had come down in a garden,  she heard the plants asking to be gathered from the ground. 

And she knew that nothing ever dies. Nothing ever really dies." 

Ariel Dorfman, The Compensation Bureau

We are quantic stardust

 A realidade, obviamente [e ainda bem] subjectiva, "só tem valores determinados quando interage com alguma coisa" como, por exemplo, na procura de pontos de referência (extrapolando para a realidade mundana).

Algo passa a fazer sentido, ou deixa de fazer sentido, quando nos colocamos em determinado ponto de observação. 


#oMundoÉquânticoEaindaBem

#ListenToTheScience 

#NadaSeCriaNadaSePerde

#WeAreStardust

#ReflexõesDomingueiras


Rick Doblin: Psychedelics


OUTLINE: 0:00 - Introduction 1:39 - Introduction to psychedelics 4:54 - Psychedelics reveals the inner depths of humans 17:28 - Differences between psychedelics 24:53 - The future of psychedelics 33:37 - Epigenetics 39:34 - DMT 47:00 - Ego dissolution 50:17 - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest 53:17 - Psychedelics and Creativity 57:10 - MKUltra and the Grateful Dead 1:01:49 - Ted Kaczynski 1:07:31 - Timothy Leary 1:14:55 - Good Friday Experiment 1:19:30 - Forming of MAPS 1:30:45 - Gaining access to psychedelics 1:39:15 - MDMA Medical Trials 2:10:45 - Clinical Trials for other substances 2:15:28 - Future of society with psychedelics 2:19:58 - Big Pharma 2:26:17 - Advice for the younger generations 2:32:02 - Meaning of life

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies: here

Rick Doblin: about

Rachel Yehuda: here