Solitude has soft, silky hands, 

but with strong fingers it grasps the heart 

and makes it ache with sorrow

Tell us of Pain

 

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, 

has been fashioned of the clay which the

Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears

 

the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain 

 

Half the way will get you no where

 

Do not live half a life

and do not die a half death

Poe

 

“Out- out are the lights- out all! And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”

 

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well;

 as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all

Palm Sunday

 

The last week of Lent is Holy Week, 

which commemorates the final days before Jesus’ execution on a cross. 

It begins with Palm Sunday which marks the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. 

It was a day of triumph when crowds of followers and supporters waved palm branches and laid them on the ground in front of him

Holy Week 2026

 

• Palm Sunday – March 29.
• Holy Thursday – April 2.
• Good Friday – April 3.
• Holy Saturday – April 4.
• Easter Sunday – April 5.
• 
  

The last week of Lent is Holy Week, which commemorates the final days before Jesus’ execution on a cross. It begins with Palm Sunday which marks the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. It was a day of triumph when crowds of followers and supporters waved palm branches and laid them on the ground in front of him. In many churches, Christians are given small palm crosses to remember the day. These are the crosses that are burnt the following year to provide ashes for Ash Wednesday.

Later in Holy Week, as Lent draws to an end, some Christians mark significant days in the Christian year: Holy Wednesday, when one of Jesus’s followers, Judas, agreed to betray him; Maundy Thursday, when Jesus ate his last meal with his followers and was then arrested; and Good Friday, when Jesus was put on trial and executed. Lent ends with Easter Sunday – the day Christians celebrate Jesus rising from the dead.

 

Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not?

 

All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire

 

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content, 

but the hope of the world made new,

 is the hundredth man who is grimly bent

 on making those dreams come true

A Different Light

 

I want to make a movie
I want to put you on the silver screen

Sit in a darkened room and look at you from a distance
want to write a novel
Freeze all your expressions into words
Come back later and read about what I should have heard

I want to paint your portrait
Hang your colors on my wall

Discussing form and content with my friends and drinks
And no one thinks at all

I see you in a different light

 

To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths

 

“A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?”

 

 the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect 

 

Those who dream by day 

are cognizant of many things

 which escape those who dream only by night

 

yesterday is but today's memory 

and tomorrow is today's dream

 

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, 

We fell them down and turn them into paper,

That we may record our emptiness

 

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow

 

why people are sad

They are the prisoners of their personal history.

 Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan.

 They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person

 They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, 

and it is more than they can possibly cope with. 

And that is why they forget their dreams

 

No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. 

That is the true experience of freedom: 

having the most important thing in the world without owning it

 

Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them

 

None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward.

 Because we trust. 

Because we have faith

 

Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

 

We are travellers on a cosmic journey,

stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity.

 Life is eternal. 

We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.

This is a precious moment. 

It is a little parenthesis in eternity

 

People are capable, 

at any time in their lives,

 of doing what they dream of

 

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: 

The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, 

or in a gallery

 

Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. 

They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. 

They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, 

and it is more than they can possibly cope with. 

And that is why they forget their dreams

 

There are moments when troubles enter our lives 

and we can do nothing to avoid them.

But they are there for a reason. 

Only when we have overcome them

 will we understand why they were there

 

The two hardest tests on the spiritual road 

are the patience to wait for the right moment 

and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter

 

When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; 

at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. 

The challenge will not wait.

 Life does not look back. 

 time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny

 

When you find your path, you must not be afraid. 

You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. 

Disappointment, defeat, and despair 

are the tools God uses to show us the way

 

We can never judge the lives of others,

 because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. 

It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path,

 but it's another to think that yours is the only path

 

No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. 

And normally he doesn't know it

 

Love is an untamed force. 

When we try to control it, it destroys us. 

When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. 

When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused

 

Don't waste your time with explanations: 

people only hear what they want to hear

 

When someone leaves, 

it's because someone else is about to arrive

 

Remember that wherever your heart is, 

there you will find your treasure

 

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, 

but none about his or her own

 

The simple things are also the most extraordinary things,

 and only the wise can see them

 

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: 

the fear of failure

 

When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. 

When we strive to become better than we are, 

everything around us becomes better too

 

It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting

 

We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. 

We have been for decades now.

We just do it. 

We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. 

It just happened. 

VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. 

Without scaring us too much,

 The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it.

 But you can’t just do the locative with your nervous system. 

One day, you will. We’ll have internalized the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it.

 Then you’ll just walk down the street…

 

On the final day of 1999, an immaculately suited Jesus and a Bukowskiesque Devil warily circle each other through a series of sleazy bars and chilly law offices, trying to cut a deal that centers on Christ’s PowerBook.

 This contains the biblical Seventh Seal: 

Unlock the file and the Judgment Day program will launch, 

and then all hell will break loose.

 

Know what ‘collateral damage’ means? 

People get hurt because they happen to be near something 

that somebody needs to happen

 

If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. 

In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. 

But don’t mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, 

or even to the present.

 

The heart is a muscle. 

You 'know' in your limbic system. The seat of instinct. 

The mammalian brain. 

Deeper, wider, beyond logic.

 That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. 

What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. 

The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, 

mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. 

And makes it buy things

 

The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts 

or so few labels

 

Do we have a past, then

History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,

Who did what to whom. 

With what. 

Who won. Who lost. Who mutated.

 Who became extinct

 

That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally:

 the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery

 

Because there were so many companies already the good names had been used up. 

He had a computer that knew all the names of all the companies,

 and another one that made up words you could use for names, 

and another one that checked if the made-up words meant 'dickhead' or something in Chinese or Swedish

 

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. 

We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. 

Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves

 

Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget

 

Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil 

were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine,

 because they already were. 

 it was always a mistake, 

to believe those people were different, special, 

infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, 

fundamentally other

 

Until the 17th century, scientists thought blood was a one-way street. 

They believed blood was produced by the liver and consumed like food by the body's tissues.

 Until British physician William Harvey published a treatise so explosive, it was banned in England. He posited that blood was part of a circulatory system, continuously pumped through the body and recycled by the heart.

 In other words, when it comes to blood, what goes around comes around.

 Breaking new ground is never easy. You have to pull the rug out from under people. Shatter their reality. Ask more questions than you answer. 

It takes what Dr. Harvey called a love of truth. And a whole lot of intestinal fortitude.

 But it also requires faith. 

That the world won't come crashing down around you. 

That you won't be burned at the stake. 

And that this new reality is going to be better. 

Or at least truer than the one that came before.

Lava Lamp

 

The lava lamp is protosociety's purely unconscious expression of the primeval ooze on one level, 

shaping itself into our most remote sea-slime ancestors; 

on another level, the lava lamp is the pleroma, 

the fundamental stuff that gives birth to the existential condition... 

tabula rasa for the unconscious

 

Cyberpunk

 

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction set in a dystopian future. It is characterized by its focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features a range of futuristic technological and scientific achievements, including artificial intelligence and cyberware, which are juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. A significant portion of cyberpunk can be traced back to the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, prominent writers such as Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison explored the impact of technology, drug culture, and the sexual revolution. These authors diverged from the utopian inclinations prevalent in earlier science fiction.

Comics exploring cyberpunk themes began appearing as early as Judge Dredd, first published in 1977. Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel Neuromancer helped solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Frank Miller's Ronin is an example of a cyberpunk graphic novel. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. The Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation (also directed by Otomo) later popularizing the subgenre.

Early films in the genre include Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, one of several of Philip K. Dick's works that have been adapted into films (in this case, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Judge Dredd (1995), and The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) were also successful cyberpunk films. The 1987 show Max Headroom is considered the first cyberpunk television series, taking place in a futuristic dystopia ruled by an oligarchy of television networks, and where computer hacking played a central role in many story lines.

Newer cyberpunk media includes Tron: Ares (2025) and Tron: Legacy (2010), sequels to the original Tron (1982); Blade Runner 2049 (2017), a sequel to the original 1982 film; Dredd (2012), which was not a sequel to the original movie; Ghost in the Shell (2017), a live-action adaptation of the original manga; Alita: Battle Angel (2019), based on the 1990s Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita; the 2018 Netflix TV series Altered Carbon, based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel of the same name; and the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and original net animation (ONA) miniseries Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), both based on R. Talsorian Games's 1988 tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk plots often involve conflict between artificial intelligence, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in far-future settings or galactic vistas. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors ("the street finds its own uses for things").  Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. Over time, cyberpunk has shifted from a literary movement to a subgenre of science fiction.

Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.

Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from crime fiction—particularly hardboiled detective fiction and film noir—and postmodernist prose to describe an often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society. The genre's vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Gibson defined cyberpunk's antipathy towards utopian science fiction in his 1981 short story "The Gernsback Continuum", which pokes fun at and, to a certain extent, condemns utopian science fiction 

In some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring the line between actual and virtual reality.  A typical trope in such work is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems. Cyberpunk settings are dystopias with corruption, computers, and computer networks.

The economic and technological state of Japan is a regular theme in the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s. Of Japan's influence on the genre, William Gibson said, "Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk."  Cyberpunk is often set in urbanized, artificial landscapes, and "city lights, receding" was used by Gibson as one of the genre's first metaphors for cyberspace and virtual reality.

The cityscapes of Hong Kong has had major influences in the urban backgrounds, ambiance and settings in many cyberpunk works such as Blade Runner and Shadowrun. Ridley Scott envisioned the landscape of cyberpunk Los Angeles in Blade Runner to be "Hong Kong on a very bad day". The streetscapes of the Ghost in the Shell film were based on Hong Kong. Its director Mamoru Oshii felt that Hong Kong's strange and chaotic streets where "old and new exist in confusing relationships" fit the theme of the film well. Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City is particularly notable for its disorganized hyper-urbanization and breakdown in traditional urban planning to be an inspiration to cyberpunk landscapes. During the British rule of Hong Kong, it was an area neglected by both the British and Qing administrations, embodying elements of liberalism in a dystopian context. Portrayals of East Asia and Asians in Western cyberpunk have been criticized as Orientalist and promoting racist tropes playing on American and European fears of East Asian dominance; this has been referred to as "techno-Orientalism". The city Chongqing in mainland China is often referred to as a "cyberpunk city".