House, M.D.

Today I'm going to share with you some quotes from Dr. Gregory House (portrayed by Hugh Laurie), from the T.V. show House, which I have recently started watching. I just finished watching season one yesterday, and most of the following quotes are from it, and all are spoken by Dr. House himself. I realize some of these quotes won't make much sense out of context, but they will still give you something to think about. While watching the show, not only did I find the show interesting, but I also related to Dr. House's ideas. He has a philosophical side, he's an asocial misanthrope, and he's cynical and narcissistic.

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"Everybody lies."

"Humanity is overrated."

"Reality is almost always wrong."

"There is not a thin line between love and hate. There is --- in fact --- a Great Wall of China with armed sentries posted every 20 feet between love and hate."

"The most successful marriages are based on lies."

"People like talking about people. Makes us feel superior. Makes us feel in control. And sometimes, for some people, knowing some things makes them care."

"I choose to believe that the white light people sometimes see... they're all just chemical reactions that take place when the brain shuts down.... There's no conclusive science. My choice has no practical relevance to my life, I choose the outcome I find more comforting.... I find it more comforting to believe that this isn't simply a test."

"It's a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies... the only variable is about what."

"If you can fake sincerity, you can fake pretty much anything."

"You want to know how two chemicals interact, do you ask them? No, they're going to lie through their lying little chemical teeth. Throw them in a beaker and apply heat."

"It's one of the great tragedies of life — something always changes."

"In this universe effect follows cause. I've complained about it but—"

"If you talk to God you're religious. If God talks to you, you're psychotic."

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I realize you may not agree with everything he says (I personally don't), but it's still interesting to think about it. If you have time, watch the show. Hugh Laurie is an excellent actor, and he fits Dr. House's character perfectly.

"Humanity is overrated." ~ Dr. House

"Hell is other people."

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, "Hell is other people." The quote seems to be very misanthropic on the surface, and it is so. However, there's a deeper connotation: If hell is other people, then one's self is not included. Therefore, Sartre seems to imply that one's self isn't hell, but all other human connections are hell. So, while the quote may seem misanthropic, I believe Sartre's original idea is this: Heaven is one's self. This may even serve as a prelude to the quote mentioned earlier. Oscar Wilde once wrote, "I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly." Wilde's quote implies the same notion in many of his other writings. For example, he also wrote that "The only possible society is oneself." While not necessarily misanthropic, this quote points out that Wilde's nature is more of asocial (or antisocial). He didn't say he hated all humans (including himself), but that he prefers the company of himself over that of others. He can be alone without being lonely.

God bless.

(:

Rise.

If I could give only one word of advice in my dying moments, one word to live by, it would be this:

Rise.

It's such a beautiful word. We, as whatever we are, need to rise. Get up. We need to do more than just existing. Being is an option, but it is not enough to just be. You need to constantly rise to truly be. Transcend. Be something more than you are. Face the fear. Face the chaos. Face the pain. Face yourself and everything that is, and help them rise too. You do not rise alone. We all rise together, and it is so because we are all one, no matter how different we may seem.

So, in my dying moments, I will ask of you to rise. Be. I will not explain what you should do, because you will know in good time. In the meantime, prepare. Do not ask me how. You don't choose to be prepared, it happens. If you're not prepared enough, then it's not the moment yet for you to truly rise.

Be.

Rise.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come."

~ William Wordsworth

( Lines 58 to 64 from Ode: Intimations of Immortality )

Slow explosions of beauty

I maintain my point of view that everything in nature is a slow explosion of beauty. Imagine an explosion in slow motion: the bomb  slowly grows in size as the pressure inside it increases, and then it bursts. Slowly, the debris will be scattered in all directions around. Now, of course in real life this means that harm is done, but in nature no harm is done. Think of anything... take a tree for example. It would seem as if the leaves on the tree were the debris spreading further from the center (the trunk) of the tree, until they fall down. How about a cloud? Imagine a cloud slowly and constantly expanding from the center, until it rains in the end. You could do the same with anything... from flowers in a garden to galaxies in space. Everything is a slow explosion of beauty. With people, it's also the same. We're born, and we keep growing on the outside and the inside (spreading further from the center of the explosion) and, at one point, we fall. The explosion is over. Make the most of your explosion before it is over.

This is probably why I like Explosions in the Sky. They are a post-rock band, and their music is beautiful (to me). Their music begins slowly, peacefully, and culminates in an explosion. Sometimes the explosion is noticeable, other times it seems as if the whole instrumental was the moment of the explosion, spread out over a lifetime. You don't feel it because you are in it.

You are my favorite explosion.

(:

God, creation and existence..?

Taking on the view that God is an all-powerful being, a paradox arises: How did God create creation (as a universal mechanism)? A similar question: If God exists, did he create existence (again, as a universal mechanism), or was it there before he was (meaning he didn't create it and therefore cannot be the true god?) While these questions cannot be answered with a definitive reply, a counter-argument exists: the problem with these questions is that, to form them, we have used our own faulty logic. We, for example, tend to think of Time in a linear manner, where one thing happens after the other. However, God, who created Time, may have made it so that it's not linear. A quick look at quantum physics also suggests that, in some theories, time is not linear, and that we can (theoretically) travel in it if we can access the higher dimensions of our physical universe. Since we can't yet, we can only move in one direction in time: forward. Another example of logic being at fault is the assumption that our view of time applies to God. View it as such: God always is. He's never in the past nor the future. He is always in the present. He is the present. Think of this as if we're living in one single moment of time that repeats itself infinitely, meaning that there is no past or future. They're just illusions, and all we truly have is the present. In the same manner, God is always the present if this view is true. Since we can't know, we shouldn't judge. We, as humans, should be free to question all authorities (but with limits, of course), but we should never definitively judge them if they're higher than us (in this case, them meaning God).

But why do we, as humans, sometimes refuse the answers? Why do we refute the existence of God? Well, again, the problem is us being faulty beings. Man is too arrogant to believe. Overcoming this arrogance is the key to belief, even if it has nothing to do with religion. Once you accept that some greater entity than you exists, you will believe.

God bless.

(:

Other forms of existence..?

Choice, chance, power, illusion, creation... what are these? Ideas? Quite possible. But then, thinking again, they're different from most ideas. They seem to be closer to ideals than ideas, but they're neither this nor that. As far as ideas go, they follow the definition of them being elaborate mental constructs, but what kind of mental constructs (and whose) are they? As far as ideals go, the aforementioned forms of existence can be found in almost all situations and forms of existence, but they are not goals that can be developed but never fulfilled. So, neither the former nor the latter choice is a description of what they are. However, whatever they are, they point to an important idea: that there is a creator. Consider this: can you, as a human, create? Can you imagine something that isn't like anything you have ever seen? Here's an example: if I told you to imagine a creature, you'd automatically assume that it either has a body or doesn't. Why can't there be a third choice? If we were truly able to create, the choices would be infinite. However, since we are not creators, we can only mix and match between the things we know to make something new. It's impossible for humans to create, and thus Man cannot be God. It is only God who could have created the elaborate mechanisms of  things such as chance, choice, and power. It also only Him, the true creator, who could have created creation. This is very similar to this thought: what was there before there was Time? We don't know. We can't know. This simply re-enforces the idea that God is there, and that he is the one and true creator.

Since I am still in the first stages of thought as to what the forms of existence I listed earlier are, I will be visiting this topic later once I've developed this train of thought more. I'm thinking at the moment that they are the pillars of the house of existence, but I will need to work on this mental construct further in order to understand more. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments.

God bless.

(:

Layers of existence: The Flammarion engraving

In a follow-up to my last post about the layers of existence, I wanted to share a piece of art that's related to the idea I'm presenting. The art piece is the Flammarion engraving (the artist is unknown), which you can see below.

The following text is from Wikipedia:

"The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion's 1888 book L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology"). The engraving has often, but erroneously, been referred to as a woodcut. It has been used to represent a supposedly medieval cosmology, including a flat earth bounded by a solid and opaque sky, or firmament, and also as a metaphorical illustration of either the scientific or the mystical quests for knowledge."

We may take the picture to represent the man crossing the border from the physical existence to the ideal existence, with the emotional existence being always inside him in both realms.

God bless.

(: