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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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  • Weird Studies

    • Weird Studies/Tarot/The Star

    13 May 2022 - 30 Jul 2023
    Open in Logseq
      • Spiral growth vs. building (Tower)
      • JFM: the card gives me the box a telos comes in, but not the telos itself.
      • JF: identifies as a dwarf, interestingly enough (a creature familiar with material and material forces, the constructed rather than the grown). C'est moi aussi, at least that's what MIT trained me to be (not clear how well it took). MIT is like the Vatican of the Builder stance, and is dismissive of the hippie-holistic-Growth stance of The Star.
        • I'm not sure it's fair to label MIT in such a reductive fashion, it had all kinds of smart people and was not about an ideology, even if it had one. I've come to question it, but I always did, or always tried to pull against it. I know when I was a wee undergraduate I got a lot of very alty texts, like Rene Thom's Catastrophe Theory and On Growth and Form, that promised something more, some higher meaning than could be found in math class or an engineering lab.
      • And with The Chariot as a less egoic form of goal or hope? Star is naked, Charioteer is not only dressed but armored. The Star is about how one might submit to a cosmic will. A magic spell is chariot-like, a miracle is something that happens outside of individual will, but nevertheless affirms my sense of what should be in some moral instinct acausal way (whoops lost me there). Something about star is symbol of willing to trust the cosmic will, of some inherent and vast goodness of existence.
      • Arousing of the bodhi mind -- the decision to start practice – the realization that there is something wrong and we can become better. But implies a dualism, a value judgement. A YES answer to the question of whether we can distinguish good and bad and try to separate them.
        • But it is itself delusion, a dualism
        • The Star represents the hope of resolving all these dualisms
      • Lower waters vs higher waters. Lower waters would be just meaningless change if not for the more transformative, vertical influence of the higher waters.