“Life is nothing but moments, and every moment is nothing but another culmination of the universe’s incalculable ripples. Out where we can’t see, they’re crossing and merging, bringing toward us new forms and experiences that are almost perfectly unpredictable. Yet the way we think about life seldom reflects that reality. We plan and worry and forecast and dread, all with an absurd sense of certainty, like we’re setting up snooker shots and we can see all the balls.”
— David Cain
“Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.”
“In a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers in Australia were able to predict basic choices participants made 11 seconds before they consciously declared their decisions.”
“In the study, 14 participants—each placed in an fMRI machine—were shown two patterns, one of red horizontal stripes and one of green vertical stripes. They were given a maximum of 20 seconds to choose between them. Once they’d made a decision, they pressed a button and had 10 seconds to visualize the pattern as hard as they could. Finally, they were asked “what did you imagine?” and “how vivid was it?” They answered these questions by pressing buttons.”
“Using the fMRI to monitor brain activity and machine learning to analyze the neuroimages, the researchers were able to predict which pattern participants would choose up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision. And they were able to predict how vividly the participants would be able to envisage it.”
“Lead author Joel Pearson, cognitive neuroscience professor at the University of South Wales in Australia, said that the study suggests traces of thoughts exist unconsciously before they become conscious.”
Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye
Amazon: “In Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad Warner tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo by 13th-century Zen master Dogen. Illuminating Dogenâs enigmatic teachings in plain language, Warner intertwines sharp philosophical musings on sex, evil, anger, meditation, enlightenment, death, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the power and pain of the punk rock ethos.”
This book got a lot of my highlighter. A few examples below:
“There are two basic kinds of thought. There are thoughts that pop up unannounced and uninvited. These are just the results of previous thoughts and experiences that have left their traces in the neural pathways of our brains. The other kind of thought is when we grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it.”
“Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing.”
“Thoughts are nothing more than electrical activity, changes in the organic chemistry of the brain.”
“Words cannot capture what your life really is. […] All humankind’s problems today stem solely from our inability to see that words are just words.”
“Everything you ever do is always, always, always a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Yesterday was the 800th consecutive day on the cushion. I started meditating ten years ago but didn’t begin keeping a log of my daily practice until 2014. I’ve only missed two days in those four years. In all my reading about meditation there is general agreement it should be a daily practice. I sit for 30-45 minutes.
I’m not up to reviewing Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book (21 Lessons for the 21st Century) but I liked this one by The Guardian. I really liked his two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, and you can read some of my favorite excerpts in previous posts. I’m doing the same below but first I’ll say this book made me questions some of my long held beliefs. Nationalism, Religion and Immigration, just to name a few. This is a good example of what I mean when I suggest you ditch Facebook and TV news and read a book.
“The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body.”
“If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then again, if somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false.”
“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.”
“As a species, humans prefer power to truth.”
“Trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords, and North Korean tyrants.”
“A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed.”
“In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine, and several other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, car accidents, or suicide.”
““Once AI makes better decisions than we do about careers and perhaps even relationships, our concept of humanity and of life will have to change.“”
““Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.””
“In the twenty-first century data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.”
“So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.”
“We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”
“If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.”
“Life is like looking out of the window while sitting in a train. You have no control over what appears in view. There’s even the moment after the train has paused, when it imperceptibly begins moving again. The appearance is that the train is motionless, but the scenery outside the window is moving. That, too, is a view that life sometimes gives us, a falsely relative view. We make no attempt to control the scene observed outside the train, knowing that wishing that it was something that it isn’t would be useless. And so it is, for the person who relaxes into Absolute awareness. Whatever passes across the screen of consciousness, whatever the organism experiences, is viewed dispassionately. The viewer acknowledges that all things change, and merely witnesses the changes impartially.”
— Abiding In Nondual Awareness (Robert Wolfe)
Suzuki Roshi on the inner experience of Zen: “The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track.”
