Wisdoms

Wisdom - Each of the OTs in The Verse is imbued with a wisdom that transcends all layers of The Laminate, something from further than any Technomancer has so far travelled. The Wisdom is non-mantric, non-matrix, non-tantric, serving only as a reminder that everyday there is a little more to discover, or at least, more chin to scratch.

Wisdom Index

The Baoist

So too is the divine work and the flow of human energy towards the magnificent creation. Do not waste your unique gifts chasing imaginary futures and the currency of trade and exploitation. Each day is closer to your last and upon such mighty energies as those which animate you can be built the structure of the entire universe. True work may yield financial rewards. Wonderful if so but work that you may live and that you may find the purpose for which you chose to be born in this time, this place, this incarnation. You were born to do the true work but not to be slaves to the evils of exploitation, greed, and hoarding. Do not be distracted by the obsessions laid before you as tempting as they may be. For they are created to tempt, to draw, to distract and to destroy the beauty of your inspiration. Work for a purpose. Work that others may learn to work beside you. Work to help others and thereby help yourself. Work to feed your soul and soothe your passions. Work to create the universe. Bow to no man nor woman, defer your work to none, take not that which the divine has not tasked you with. You are called. This is beautifully poetic and thought-provoking! If you’d like, we can dive deeper into its meaning or discuss what stands out to you the most. Let me know!

Noonian Spoores

At her feet was the open funnel of a never-never, a flowering plant that usually dispersed its seeds in a random pattern – but every so often the seed clouds took on momentary human form. As now. Pfft, pfft, pfft. All across the salt flats the figures appeared, and disappeared. The skirls were going mad, scrawing loudly, swooping down to catch the seeds. It looked like the birds were attacking the figures. Cady looked on in both dread and excitement: it was that time again. And she sang out loud to a tune of her own invention, "Change is in the air, change is in the air!" She snatched a handful of the seeds from the nearest figure as it appeared, and held them in her palm, tiny blue ovoids – before popping them into a buttoned pocket in her purse. She would need them later, for the special pictures they could bring her.

Jeff Noon & Steve Beard

The Sparrow

"Chicken shit!" she cried. "Don't back down on me now!" And getting up on her knees, poking him in the chest repeatedly, she began to deliver herself of a series of increasingly impolite, entirely profane and very vigorously expressed opinions on the suffering and untimely death of innocents, on the fate of Cleveland in the World Series of 2018, and on the persistence of evil and Republicans from Texas in a universe ruled by a devil who had the nerve to claim omnipotence and justice, of which Emilio earnestly translated, with wondrously pompous and Latinate phrases, into standard grovelly platitudes. Pretty soon they were clinging to each other and laughing like loons, and the whole thing got louder and rowdier until George Edwards, roused by the noise was jolted fully awake by Anne screaming, "Emilio, stop it! Old women have weak bladders!"

Mary Doria Russell

Newland's River

Numbers imprinted the building, the only markings that differentiated it from any other. 1322. And there was his brother, gliding upstairs and towards the doors then floating through them, past security guards—made double by the reflective gleam of marble floors—who looked into the distance. Equipment—blinking metal detectors, the feline purr of baggage-check machines—silent and immune inside the lobby. Ninka was through the next set of locked doors, disappearing. Markriss did the same, allowing his astral body to move past the security, through the locked doors and into a cloud of sooty, fogged space gathered beyond. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, moving deeper inside the mass. A tug, like being yanked

Courttia Newland

Octavia's Creation

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Octavia Butler

Rundell's Arboretum

Who is this, in my arboretum?

Katherine Rundell

Bush Invisibility

You stand in front of a million doors And each one holds a million more Corridors that lead to the World Of the Invisible Corridors that twist and turn Corridors that blister and burn Eye of Braille Hem of Anorak Stem of Wallflower hair of Doormat

Kate Bush

More's Trichotomy

"It is sown a psychic body; it is raised a spirtual body. If there is a psychc body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life giving spirit." Even more to the point is 1 Corinthians ii. 14-15, "The psychic man (i.e the soul) does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for (as things metaphysical) they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them (except by analogy) because they are spiritually discerned. The spritual man (i.e the self) discerns all things, but himself is not to be discerned by anyone. For, who has the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct him?" There is the suggestion, too, that S.Paul associates the spirit with the conscious Self, "for who knoweth the things of the man except the spirit of the man which is in him?" In view of these rather clear distinctions between spirit and soul, it seems strange that later theology has either confused the two or merely left the spirit out of consideration. St Thomas's description of the soul seems to involve such a confusion with the spirit.

Alan Watts

Wedderburn Radical

Wedderburn emerges out of the liminal waves to bring Londoners social visions born of rage at the iniquities of the colonial system. he is a new Raphael come from afar, ready to transmit utopian truths, gained not from having seen the perfect society but having lived in its opposite.

Niall Kishtainy

The Taoist

The whole world recognises the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognises the good as the good, yet this is only the bad. Thus something and nothing produce each other; The difficult and easy complement each other; The long and the short off-set each other; The high and the low incline towards each other; Note and sound harmonise with each other; Before and after follow each other. Therefore the sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words.

Lao Tzu

Elsewhere Rebirth

Now what every child knows is that a grub enters a chrysalis and emerges as a butterfly. But that is not correct. A caterpillar in a cocoon, a grub in its case, a maggot in its pupa - they do not change form, but break down. They become a chemical Urschleim. Their body, their brain quite gone. They are nothing. And out of those chemicals of their desctruction self-organizes quite another animal. The butterly, the moth, is a newborn constituted of the dead flesh of another. A pupa is not a place for regeneration or revivification. It is an execution chamber and birthing room all at once.

China Miéville & Keanu Reeves

Moore's London

He supposed it was a bit like London and the war, with nobody pretending that those seven years hadn't occured, but everybody keen to put it all behind them and not look at it again. He even wondered if at some point in the unimaginably distant future, both he and the city might eventually become nostalgic for the terrifying times they'd been through, although just then passing the rock garden of Great Eastern Street, he knew the concept was laughable in either instance. He could see how London harboured sentimental feelings for the 1920s, when there wasn't yet a war, or how he could look fondly on his infancy for the same reason, but nostalgia for the Blitz or severe heads in pot-pourri was clearly never going to be a trend, for London or for Dennis. Some things, surely, were too raw to finish up in souvenir shops, or he hoped they were.

Alan Moore

The Hologram

A metaphor for the way that the past is stored in the implicate can also be found in the hologram. If each phase of an activity, say a woman blowing a soap bubble, is recorded as a set of successive images in a multiple image hologram, each image becomes as a frame in a movie. If the hologram is a "white light" hologram - a piece of holographic film whose image can be seen by the naked eye and does not need laser light to become visible - when a viewer walks by the film and chnages the angle of his or her perception, he/she will see what amounts to a three dimensional motion picture of the woman blowing a soap bubble. In other words as the different images unfold and enfold, they will seem to flow together and present an illsion of movement. A person who is unfamiliar with holograms may mistakenly assume that the various stages in the blowing of the soap bubble are transitory and once perceived can never be viewed again, but this is not true. The entire activity is always recorded inthe hologram and it is the viewer's changing perspective that provide the illusion that it is unfolding in time. The holographic theory suggests that the same is true of our own past. Instead of fading into oblivion, it to remains recorded in the cosmic hologram and can always be accessed once again.

Michael Talbot

Infernal Desire

"Let me tell you a parable," he went on. "A man made a deal with the Devil. The condition was this: the man delivered up his soul as soon as Satan had assassinated God. "Nothing simpler" said Satan and put a revolver to his own temple. "Do you cast Dr Hoffman as God or Satan?" The Minister smiled. "As my parable suggests, the roles are interchangeable."

Angela Carter

Le Guin's Exile

The settlers of Annares had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his story, is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

Ursula Le Guin

Pooh Bear

"Sing ho! for the life of a bear!" "My favourite part," he added. "But, they don't sing, 'sing ho! for the life of a bear!' in the 'Ode to Joy'" I said. "They don't?" "No, they don't" "Why not?" "Well, because they hadn't thought of it, I guess" "They what?" "Neither Ludwig van Beethoven nor the man who wrote the words of the 'Ode to Joy' put anything in it about bears." "Oh, I must have been thinking of Ludwig van Bearthoven" "Pooh, there is no Ludwig van Bearthoven. You wrote that song yourself." "I did?" "That's right." "Oh, so that's where I heard it," he said.

Benjamin Hoff