Sinew of the Social Species Quotes

“It is amazing how dispiriting it can be to enter a learning environment and to be made immediately to suppress your own exploratory inclinations. So many learning environments in the world are still like this. Don’t question what you are taught! Just listen and get good marks on the test! It conditions us to be slaves. The minute we abandon our inquisitive nature, we cede our consciences to the whims of tyrants. We are capable of better. We owe it to ourselves and each other to create better opportunities that enhance human potential. Education is the externality that allows for this, but our methods of education must promote self-guidance and self-reliance.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Perhaps, there is no such person who can be called truly free, but only those who can be deemed so by comparison.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“He remembered a version of himself untrammeled by expectation, unimpeded by Ego. He had suffered in the many years since then, seeking to return to that original self, if, in fact, it ever existed. And yet, he was helpless but to regard that unmistakable fear that gripped him in his dream as a sign that his unevenness lent him now to utter incongruity with this specter of past.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Never miss an opportunity to be truly and deeply humiliated! The shame will carve you down to an individual of exquisite layering, and in the process, etch within you the arcs of exceptional narrative.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“The temporal heart resonates at whispers
From a Truth overarching
Of whose countenance
Timeless Intellect yearns vainly to fathom”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Obligation is a more effective weapon against the Will than any penalty, threat or act of force.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.

Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten.

Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Doubt has become the veritable wellspring of my creative process and my philosophic explorations. It has equipped me with the temerity and wherewithal to question certain truths deemed ‘fundamental’ by my betters. Defiance has made me stubborn—possibly even arrogant—enough to shrug off rejection and all fears thereof, no matter how lacerating to the self-esteem these could be. It has given me the will to seek only to satisfy myself.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Human freedom brings with it the burden of choice and of its consequences. As humankind is akin to claim for its own special privilege a certain unique destiny not afforded with equal measure to other organisms, so must it further—if paradoxically so—entertain the assumption that, in spite of this glorious determinism, there persists nonetheless a thread of free will—or, at the very least, some vague delusion thereof—woven seamlessly into the tapestry of collective experience. Of course, this conception that destiny is to be forged by one’s own hands more often engenders greater restriction than it does greater extension to the potential of human happiness.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Writing creatively is a process of self-consumption that requires one to dive deeply inside of oneself with no guarantee of reemergence.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Etchings endure,
But not in Sand
Meanings Collide
To Unresolved Fragments
Codes fizzle to Static
They are not lost
But Unheard
Never lost
Fading slowly to Silence
By infinite degrees”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species