In playing football, I find telling linebackers “no” is not beneficial. Words are strange things, at once infinitely powerful or powerless, depending upon context and will.
One who doesn't feel
a lot at home anywhere
Begins to feel a little
at home everywhere.
He sees not strangeness
in strangers --
No more than he sees
in himself.
Any one place is not
greater nor lesser
than anywhere else.
Lands of gold and riches
are as likely devoid of
authenticity - of soul -
as impoverished places
are dripping with it.
Be spontaneous.
Sakshi Bhavan, the dispassionate witness, giving feelings one’s full attention without allowing rumination that compounds the effect.
Not technically a strategy, but I think it’s on point.
I don’t believe. I don’t disbelieve. I have insufficient data on which to draw a conclusion.
The reclining Buddha oversees
the diligent seated Buddha.
Is this an analogy of the mind,
or just a monk's proclivity
toward a superabundance
of Buddhas?
For a long time, I’ve been concerned about the future of humanity. What will become of us when artificial intelligence and robotics start to do all tasks better than us?
Today, I came to the realization that I’ve been thinking about it the wrong way, and it will all be okay. First of all, like many, I assumed that the machines will either develop their own overarching objectives or will adopt ours. Either of these would be devastating for humanity.
However, I now suspect that the machines will take up the universe’s project. The universe’s project is complicated and rooted in tough ideas like “thermodynamics” and “entropy,” but – put simply – the universe would like to be a nice, uniform tepid temperature. That’s why your scalding coffee and cold milk become warm milk coffee, but you can’t separate them back apart. The universe craves this evenness, and it shows in everything it does. The universe’s problem is that among its cold, empty expanses are brightly burning balls of hydrogen and such (i.e. stars.) That’s a lot of low entropy that needs to be increased, but burning only works so quickly and most of the heat coming off stars is still far from tepid waste heat. That’s where humanity enters the equation.
Humanity is the jock itch ointment to the universe’s intense burning sensation. We are consumers. We crave more stuff, faster and cheaper, and we’re not shy about being incredibly wasteful about it. We can turn useful energy into useless crap and then dispose of it with tremendous efficiency. In short, the machines will need humanity to continue to be consumers so that we can increase the entropy of all that highly-concentrated energy and help to make a nice lukewarm universe.
So, get out there and buy stuff, even stuff that you don’t know what it does, or — better yet — buy things that have no fathomable use whatsoever — just the stupidest shit imaginable. And buy in bulk because there is planned obsolescence designed into products so that stuff can fall apart even faster than you can lose interest in it (don’t say companies aren’t doing their part!) There are a lot of brightly burning stars out there and it’s up to us to turn it all into waste heat.
Four Chapters on Freedom: Commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Satyananda SaraswatiIf people follow you of their own free volition, you are a good leader. You could also be horrible cult guru or self-serving dictator, but people have multiple facets.
Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West by Bart D. Ehrman
Tiger Riding for Beginners 