“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
― Ellen Goodman
“Emergence theory is a new physics model currently being developed by a Los Angeles based team of scientists. Emergence theory intricately – yet simply – weaves together quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, the standard model and other mainstream physics theories into a complete, fundamental picture of a discretized, self-actualizing universe.”
“Physics allows the possibility that all the energy of the universe can be converted into a single, conscious system that itself is a network of conscious systems. Given enough time, what can happen will eventually happen. By this axiom, universal emergent consciousness has emerged via self-organization somewhere ahead of us in 4D spacetime. And because it is possible, it is inevitable. In fact, according to the evidence of retro-causality time loops, that inevitable future is co-creating us right now just as we are co-creating it.”
“People think they follow advice but they don’t. Humans are only capable of receiving information. They create their own advice. If you seek to influence someone, don’t waste time giving advice. You can change only what people know, not what they do.” — God’s Debris
For most of the 40 years of my working life, I was what we used to call “middle management.” The person at the top decided what was to be done and my job was to get the people “under” me to do it. I can say unequivocally I never persuaded anyone to do something they didn’t want to do. Never. Ever. Which is a pretty good argument for the irrelevance of middle managers. (Or that I should not have been one)
Which reminds me of another favorite. I won’t put this in quote because I have no idea who said it but it has stuck with me for years. Unless you hear the following words, never offer an opinion: What do you think, Steve?
And you know what? I think I can count on one hand how many times I’ve heard that question in my life.
I forgot how often Dave Winer says things I think but can’t find the words for. Below are a few excerpts from his comment guidelines on Scripting News.
They should always take into account what is said in the post. If you haven’t read the post in full, reasonably carefully, don’t comment. If it is obvious that you have not read the post, your comment will be deleted.
It’s not a free speech zone. It’s not a place for you to be heard.
It’s not a place for you to promote your products, services, blog, initiatives, political causes. Don’t post spam.
I’m not interested in debates here on my blog. If you want a debate, host it somewhere else, and if I’m interested in participating I will.
Absolutely no personal comments about me or anyone else.
In The Tao of Zen, author Ray Grigg devotes 170 pages to tracing the historical roots of Buddhism, Taoism and Zen. I find it tough sledding every time. The rest of the book explores the philosophical similarities between Taosim and Zen. Chapters on: Wordlessness, Selflessness, Softness, Oneness, Emptiness, Nothingness, Balance, Paradox, Non-doing, Spontaneity, Ordinariness, Playfulness, Suchness.
After three readings, my copy of this book has so many underlines, margin notes and highlighter, it’s getting hard to read. Here are few ideas from the final chapter:
In Taoism and Zen, suchness is accommodated by emptying. This is the process of clearing away the attitudes, the judgements, the roles, and all the conditioned patterns of thinking and feeling that shape ordinary experience. This means no questions, no answers, no explanations, no justifications, no rationalizations, no utilitarianism. It also means no moralizing, no personifying, no empathizing.
“Our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived through the senses.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau
(In Taoism and Zen) self is a soft and flexible persona worn for the practical purpose of identification. This was Alan Watts’ point when he said that he was not really Alan Watts, he was only called Alan Watts.
“I don’t have faith. I have experience.” — Joseph Campbell
The Way of Taoism and Zen comes of itself. “It” happens when “It” is ready.
“My second objection concerns the idea that social media is harmless. Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.”
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (New York Times)
“A thousand years is but an instant. There’s nothing new, nothing different; same pattern over and over. The same clouds, same music, the same things I felt an hour or an eternity ago. There’s nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember, this happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible knowing that it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, filled with joy and sorrow and laughter, empathy, compassion, and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from, and how I became human, why I hung around, and now my final departure’s scheduled. This way out, escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but Infinity.”
From Waking Life by Richard Linklater
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, by James Gleick (1999)
Most of us suffer some degree of “hurry sickness,” a malady that has launched us into the “epoch of the nanosecond,” a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we’re still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon. (Goodreads)
The obvious question was: how relevant is a book — written seventeen years ago — about how everything in our lives is accelerating? The author clearly understood the book would be dated before he completed it. Can only hope he write a follow-up (More Faster?). Here are a few bit that got some highlighter:
The Otis Elevator Company estimates that its cars raise and lower the equivalent of the planet’s whole population every nine days.
The fastest passenger elevators, mostly in Japan, travel at more than thirty feet per second. The record holder in the late 1990’s was a special Mitsubishi elevator in a sightseeing tower in Yokohama: more than forty feet per second, a good climb rate for an airplane.
Anger at elevators rises within seconds, experience show. A good waiting time is in the neighborhood of fifteen seconds. Sometime around forty second, people start to get visibly upset. […] Door dwell (how long we’ll wait for door to close) tends to be set at two to four seconds.
(Cigarettes and shots of whiskey) are additives for our engines. We take them to modify the working of what we now quite consciously think of as the human machine.
It was only in the machine age that people became aware of speed as a quality that could be measured, computed, and adjusted.
Reading on-line becomes another form of channel-flipping.
(In 1984) Only eighty thousand fax machines were sold nationwide. Just three years later, in 1987, virtually every American law firm had a fax machine, and within two more years, realtors and takeout restaurants and hardware stores had jumped on the train. Businesses and individual consumers bought two million fax machines in the United States in 1989.
Future anthropologists will find our pottery but not our E-mail.
“Buddhism is not so much a belief system as a path. It is more something we do than something we believe.” — Unknown
“I’m very intelligent. If you’re gonna give me hope you gotta do better than you’re doing.” — Melvin Udall