DAILY PHOTO: Zaftig Ladies of Fernando Botero
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PROMPT: Business
If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?
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A “Human Skills for Humans School” that teaches all the important competencies that have been left out of an educational system that is 75% about making the workers of yesterday and 25% about making citizens, but which doesn’t care a whit about building emotional intelligence, self-confidence, natural setting problem solving, movement skills, creativity, primitive living, combat skills for a robot apocalypse, etc. Those worker bee skills are already starting to show their obsolescence and are very likely to continue to do so at an accelerating rate.
The bad news is that AGI and robots are sure to do almost all productive tasks better than humans by the end of the century. The good news is that we have plenty of room to be grow as a species.
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DAILY PHOTO: Embalse Peñol-Guatapé
PROMPT: Healthy Eating
What are your best healthy eating habits?
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Don’t eat after 7pm. Make vegetables and fruit the largest component of consumption by mass.
Alternatively, I can get behind anything in Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, as summarized by his haiku:
eat food.
mostly plants.
not too much.
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PROMPT: Life Hacks
What are some life hacks that you practice?
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As far as I’ve seen of so-called “life hacks” they seem to mostly be inelegant solutions for problems that either: a.) already have more reliable and tested solutions, or b.) are needlessly complicated / exaggerated to suggest they need a solution when they really don’t. The whole “life hack” industry seems to be people sitting around trying to figure out how to go viral by creating the illusion of cleverness. It is not Wú Wéi.
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DAILY PHOTO: City Wall, Cartagena
DAILY PHOTO: Monserrate
PROMPT: Karma
Do you believe in karma?
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As a general principle about how acting selflessly and as a force for good tends to help one find one’s way, YES. As a clockwork cause-and-effect accounting of one’s life activities, NO. In fact, in the latter sense, I believe the idea has quite a dark side that is frequently overlooked.
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BOOK: “Senjutsu to Ninjutsu” by Doshi Shigetsu (Trans. by Eric Shahan)
Senjutsu to Ninjutsu by Doshi ShigetsuMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Author’s Amazon Site
This essay presents thoughts about the practices of what Taoists would call “Immortals.” (The work was apparently created as a speech or lecture.) The translation used in the book is “mountain ascetics,” which might lead readers to believe that it is talking about Shugenja or Yamabushi. I don’t know a great deal about the Japanese language or those systems, but the character used — 仙 (Xiān, in Chinese) — is almost always translated as Immortal in the Chinese language. Shugendo is a syncretic tradition of Esoteric Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, and folk religion, and it certainly has some overlap (mountain setting, Taoist influence, harsh training practices, etc.) but I don’t know that the two systems would be viewed as equivalent. (Though maybe they were considered so at the time and place of publication.) The author does try to clarify who it is he is talking about, largely by distinguishing them from Celestial Maidens (天人) and Tengu (天狗, crow-goblin-swordsmen.)
At any rate, the primary objective of the lecture / essay is to counter the tendency to be dismissive of these systems. The piece is dated 1901, and so there was an increasing proclivity to dismiss the supernormal as mere superstition. The author argues that practitioners who develop unwavering self-confidence through the practice of intense / death-defying activities (e.g. fasting) may be capable of things that would be unfathomable by ordinary people, leading ordinary lives.
The “ninjutsu” bit of the title results from the proposition of a linkage of the methods and approaches between Japan’s famous caste of warrior-spies, i.e. the ninja, and the ascetics / immortals discussed throughout most of the book.
This is an interesting read, particularly so because of its timing (after the era of Samurai and Ninja, but before modernity so advanced that the supernatural was entirely relegated to a societal fringe.)
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Head of the Table [Haiku]
yellow bird perches:
the chairback at table's head.
it's eyed like a boss.
