"The zen tradition has this great saying, 'Here comes the hearth god, looking for the fire.' You’re looking everywhere for the fire, and it’s IN you. and when you start to find it in yourself, others find you."
– Richard Doyle
Read more on SolPurpose:
solpurpose.com/2013/12/31/solpurpose-conversations-episode-2-richard-doyle-on-approaching-the-cloud-of-unknowing/
---> ABOUT SOLPURPOSE CONVERSATIONS:
SolPurpose Conversations is a new series of visionary-yet-personal dialogues between
SolPurpose.com editor-in-chief Michael Garfield and a coterie of inspirational thinkers: musicians, artists, scientists, spiritual teachers, and combinations thereof. More than interviews, these long-format exchanges allow ample time to explore the depths and heights of the human condition in our age of accelerating change.
---> ABOUT RICHARD "MOBIUS" DOYLE:
"I compose and teach in the esoteric traditions of rhetoric, science fiction and emerging technoscience – sustainability, space colonization, biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychedelic science, information technologies, biometrics –and the cultural and literary contexts from which they sprout."
After getting his PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and his Post-Doctoral work in History at MIT, Richard Doyle is now Professor of Information Science, Rhetoric, and Science Fiction at Penn State and author of a trilogy on emergent forms of knowledge, the latest and most acclaimed of which is the epic treatise, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Nöosphere. (Editor's Note: this book is probably the finest example yet of 21st Century "psychedelic" writing.) Doyle is also a Fellow at the Hybrid Reality Institute and a Distinguished International Fellow of the London Graduate School, and explores nondual spirituality and happiness beyond thought with Penn State colleague Gary Weber.
---> MORE QUOTES FROM THIS CONVERSATION:
"If we’re insects, religion is the flower on which we alight."
"So little 'nothing at all' occurs that we become dumbfounded by it."
"We can see a great deal of 20th century poetry and art as being the exfoliation of that 'me me me me me me' meme."
"Information is the cluster of heuristic attempts to guess at thermodynamic outcomes…'Hot, or Not?'"
"If anybody wants any proof of infinity – not in the mathematical sense of being completely unbounded, but in the practical sense of being unlimited – all they need to do is think about their own desire."
"We have to look at our own awareness and see what it is."
"Our brains have been the frontier of capitalism for the last twenty years, of which the internet is just one manifestation, and the pharmaceuticalization of everything is the other. It’s like we’re on the border of Oklahoma in the 19th century and the gunshot goes, and everybody goes to stake their claim - it’s like the inner realm is that space, now."
"What seems to be missing from the discourse of love, at least as I come across it in the contemporary space, is that it’s always a love BETWEEN beings, or a love of a being for another being."
"The very nature of love and the very nature of gratitude is to tear open and tear down the egoic self."
"We don’t need to create another identity politics around evolving consciousness. Because that’s how we won’t evolve consciousness. But we do need other like-minded souls…to help us by verifying, and debugging, and debunking all the stuff we’re working through as all this stuff continues to unfold."
"We’re not going to be able to get out of these gatherings, no matter how sublime they are, the infinite for which we seek."
"Any internal turn begins to silence that narrative mind, and productivity WILL go up, because the ego is not getting in the way to quite the same extent. you’re not engaging in as much self-thwarting behavior, because there is less self to thwart."