there is nothing less real than this body that I touch

 

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The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

—Alan Turing

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It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools—that we are sown into time like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone. 

The joke part is that we forget it. 

Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras. 

We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.


―Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm

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Creation, invention: there is nothing more real than this body that I imagine; there is nothing less real than this body that I touch that turns into a heap of salt or vanishes into a column of smoke. 

With that smoke my desire will invent another body. 


—Octavio Paz
An Erotic Beyond: Sade
Elliot Weinburger version

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Discover yourself.

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body.

Discover that current and stay with it.


—Nisargadatta Maharaj

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