Category Archives: Books
The Peripheral
If you made me pick one author as my #1 favorite, I’d have to go with William Gibson. And his novel The Peripheral is near the top of my short list. I’m not convinced it’s possible to do justice to this story in film but I’ll be watching season one starting October 21st on Amazon Video. Here’s Mr. Gibson reading excerpts from the book.
The Other Side of Nothing
(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”
We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.
Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.
In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.
In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.
“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi
Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.
When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.
The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”
The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.
“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki
Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading
The Order of Time
“The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but becoming. He says, “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have limited duration.” He gives a rock as an example of a thing, as contrasted with an event. But, he says, “On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most ‘thinglike’ are nothing more than long events.” A rock isn’t a rock forever — even though it might seem like that to us humans. It starts off as a bunch of sand, gets compressed and melted, exists as a rock for a while, and eventually wears away into sand again. Even to say it started off as sand is wrong, because the sand wasn’t always sand either. The molecules that make up each grain of sand have their own complicated history. Therefore, any given rock’s existence as a rock is an event within the long, long history of its constituent, parts.”
— The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (quoted in The Other Side of Nothing by Brad Warner)
Pop Music
“It crept into you like mist under an ill-fitting door, until words you didn’t know you knew had taken up residence–words like love, heartbreak, forever. People her age spent years having poetry hammered into them at school, and emerged without a couplet intact. But each and every one knew what followed “I’ll never dance with another.”
— The Last Voice You Hear (Mick Herron)