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Be Beautiful and Strange
Western cultures believe we must be alive for a purpose, to work, to make money. Some indigenous cultures believe we’re alive just as nature is alive: to be here, to be beautiful and strange. We don’t need to achieve anything to be valid in our humanness.
— Melanie Lau
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In all fairness, Aesthetics (ie. anything that activates you by stirring up emotions) encompasses any and all emotions.
It’s the same reasons why conservatives generally don’t want to and can’t make good art: in having low trait of Openness, they have poor interest, poor fluency and interest in cultural experiences, imaginations and visual symbolism, language, and ideas (ie. abstractions, as opposed to concrete physical objects).
— Robert Ogilvie
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We are not open to love, and other finer processes that are taking place within us, because we are all too enclosed by our own ambitions, by our own achievements, by our own desires. Surely it is good to retreat from all that, is it not? Stop being a member of some society. Stop being a Brahmin, a Hindu, a Christian, a Mussulman.
Stop your worship, rituals, take a complete retreat from all those and see what happens.
— Krishnamurti
