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Quote by Kenneth Goldsmith

“You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.”

Quote by Kenneth Goldsmith

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Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith, born in 1961, is a renowned poet known for his profound reflections on language and culture. His works often employ techniques of textual collage and repetition to explore themes such as memory, history, and identity. more

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“The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven.”

StoriesWisdomPastHistoryEventsCommunicationNarrativeTransmissionTelling
Book:A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
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“After weaning the indigenous people's of Egypt: 'from their miserable and barbarous manners, [Osiris] taught them how to till the earth, and how to sow and reap crops, he formulated a code of laws for them, and made them worship the gods and perform service to them. He then left Egypt and traveled over the rest of the world teaching the various nations to do what his own subjects were doing. He forced no man to carry out his instructions, but by means of gentle persuasion and an appeal to their reason, he succeeded in inducing them to practice what he preached.”

WorldCivilizationEgyptTransmissionIndigenous PeoplesInstructionsOsiris
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Les arbres savent quand un des leurs a soif et ils savent aussi comment rediriger l’eau vers lui. Ils sont solidaires. Ils peuvent se prévenir l’un l’autre du danger, des prédateurs, assurer la survie du groupe dans son ensemble. Tout part des racines, des origines, mais le message transite par les racines secondaires et les radicelles, qui sont plus fines, s’étendent plus loin. Tout se fait en chuchotant à travers le réseau souterrain de champignons, le mycélium, ce que tout le monde croit pourri, oui.”

GayLgbtqQueerTransmissionChosen FamilyCommunautéFamilleArbreRacines
Book:Les racines secondaires
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“It's not unreasonable [...] to suppose that some kind of cosmic "sky-ground" religion lay behind the alignments to the solstices and the equinoxes at Watson Brake and at the other early sites--a religion sufficiently robust to ensure the continuous successful transmission of a system of geometry, astronomy, and architecture over thousands of years. John Clark is in no doubt. 'The evidence,' he says, 'suggests very old and widely disseminated knowledge about how to build large sites. The building lore persisted remarkably intact for so long that I think we can, and must, assume that it was part of special knowledge tied to ritual practice.' Where did this special knowledge come from before it appeared at Watson Brake?”

ReligionKnowledgeTransmissionAstronomical AlignmentsMonument Building
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“For Zen Buddhism, historical narratives do matter; stories of the "transmission of the lamp" of the awakened mind down through the ages constitute the narrative thread that holds the history of Zen together, supporting the continuity and authority of its institutional tradition. But what matters most to many sincere Zen practitioners, especially today, is how the teachings and practices embedded in those stories can illuminate and change our lives-not when, where, and by whom they were first taught and written down.”

Zen BuddhismTransmission
Book:Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism
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“The job of a Zen master is to transmit the dharma. The word dharma is a cognate of the Pali word for carrying. The dharma that is passed from teacher to student involves the essential teachings of the Buddha and the spirit of living those truths. Transmission is applied both to the ritual identification and acknowledgment of a particular student as the legitimate successor, or dharma heir, of a Zen master, and to the ordinary, daily interactions between the teacher and all students. Transmit is an oddly technical verb, and the analogies it occasions are oddly useful. If you imagine the dharma as an electrical current arcing across a distance from one conductive wire to another, you get the basic idea. However, if you have even a rudimentary grasp of physics, you know that the power of an electrical charge decreases as it travels this way This is precisely what is not supposed to happen to the dharma as it passes from master to disciple. A dharma heir is meant to be someone whose enlightenment or understanding equals or, preferably, surpasses that of the master.”

DharmaTransmissionZen Master
Book:Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center
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