“There is no rest of life. Life is one. Without beginning, without middle, without ending. The concept: beginning middle and meaning comes from a sense of self which separates itself from what it considers to be the rest of life. But this attitude is untenable unless one insists on stopping life and bringing it to an end. That thought is in itself an attempt to stop life, for life goes on, indifferent to the deaths that are part of its no beginning, no middle, no meaning. How much better to simply get behind and push!” — John Cage
Category Archives: Quotable & Notes
I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Excerpts from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
All your problems are your body’s problems. All these lose their meaning the moment you realize that you may not be a mere body. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable.#
Memory creates the illusion of continuity.
Time, space, causation are mental categories, arising and subsiding with the mind.
Nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.
The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.
Be As You Are by Sri Ramana Maharshi
Excerpts from The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (Edited by David Godman)
There is a single immanent reality, directly experienced by everyone, which is simultaneously the source, the substance and the real nature of everything that exists.
The Self is not an experience of individuality but a non-personal, all-inclusive awareness.
Sri Ramana’s God is not a personal God, he is the formless being which ustains the universe. He is not the creator of the univers, the universe is merely a manifestation of his inherent power; he is inseparable from it.
The mind turned inward is the Self; turned outwards, it becomes the ego and all the world.
The thoughts are the content of the mind and they shape the universe.
To make room, it is enough that objects be removed. Room is not brought in from elsewhere.
Bliss is not added to your nature, it merely revealed as your true natural state.
Trouble and pleasure are only for the ego.
The state free from thoughts is the only real state.
It is the mind that veils our happiness.
Self-realisation could be brought about merely by giving up the idea that there is an individual self which functions through the body and the mind.
The aim of self-enquiry is to discover, by direct experience, that the mind is non-existent.
The mind and the ego are one and the same.
When the mind unceasingly investigates its own nature, it transpires that there is no such thing as mind. The mind is merely thoughts. The mind is only they thought ‘I’
The ego functions as the knot between the Self which is pure consciousness and the physical body which is inert and insentient.
The essence of mind is only awareness or consciousness. When the ego, however, dominates it, it functions as the reasoning, thinking or sensing faculty.
Realisation is nothing new to be acquired. It is already there, but obstructed by a screen of thoughts.
Reality is simply the loss of ego.
As the practice develops the thought ‘I’ gives way to a subjectively experienced feeling of ‘I’, and when this feeling ceases to connect and identify with thoughts and objects, it completely vanishes. What remains is an experience of being in which the sense of individuality has temporarily ceased to operate.
It is not an exercise in concentration, nor does it aim at suppressing thoughts; it merely invokes awareness of the source from which the mind springs. … From then on it is more a process of being than doing, of effortless being rather than an effort to be. … Ultimately, the Self is not discovered as a result of doing anything, but only by being.
If you are vigilant and make a stern effort to reject every thought when it arises you will soon find that you are going deeper and deeper into your own inner self.
You have to ask yourself question “Who am I?’ This investigation will lead in the end to the discovery of something within you which is behind the mind. Solve that great problem and you will solve all other problems.
One must be completely free of the idea that there is an individual person who is capable of acting independently of God.
(The) final destruction of the ‘I’ takes place only if the self-surrender has been completely motiveless.
If one surrenders oneself there will be no one to ask questions or to be thought of.
You must be satisfied with whatever God gives you and that means having no desires of your own. You can have no likes or dislikes after your surrender.
It is the higher power that does everything, and man is only a tool.
The Self does not move, the world moves in it.
Pleasure or pain are aspects of the mind only. Our essential nature is happiness. But we have forgotten the Self and imagine that the body or the mind is the Self.
So long as there is thought there will be fear. #
The ego is the source of thought. #
Because you identify yourself with the body, you think that work is done by you.
We must play our parts on the stage of life, but we must not identify ourselves with those parts. #
Many a man would be only too glad to be rid of his diseased body and all the problems and inconveniences it creates for him if continued awareness were vouchsafed to him. It is the awareness, the consciousness, and not the body, he fears to lose.
One first creates out of one’s mind and then sees what one’s mind itself has created.
Clearly the world is your thought. Thoughts are your projections. The ‘I’ is first created and then the world. The world is created by the ‘I’ which in its turn rises up from the Self. (We) must admit that the world is (our) own imagination.
The universe is real if perceived as the Self.
You do not know what you were before birth, yet you want to know what you will be after death. Do you know what you are now?
Experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists. Even the present is mere imagination, for the sense of time is purely mental. Space is similarly mental. Therefore birth and rebirth, which take place in time and space, cannot be other than imagination. Real rebirth is dying from the ego into the spirit.
Birth pertains to the ego, which is an illusion of the mind.
God never acts, he just is. He has neither will nor desire. … The totality of all lthings and beings constitutes God.
Whatever this body is to do and whatever experiences it is to pass through was already decided when it came into existance.
As long as individuality lasts there is free will. … Only the ego is bound by destiny and not the Self.
Surrender can never be regarded as complete so long as the devotee wants this or than from the Lord.
William Gibson Wired interview
In the old days, if you wanted to become insanely knowledgeable about something like that, you basically had to be insane — you had to travel around the world, finding other people who were sufficiently crazy to know everything there was to know about that. That would have been so hard to do, dependent on sheer luck, that it kept the numbers of those people down.
But now you can be a kid in a town in the backwoods of Brazil, and you can wake up one morning and say, “I want to know everything about stainless steel sports watches from the 1950s,” and if you really applied yourself, to the internet, at the end of the year you would have the equivalent of a master’s degree in this tiny pointless field. I’ve totally met lots of people who have the equivalent of that degree.
I never wanted to be a collector of anything; I just wanted to pointlessly know really a lot about one thing
My friend Doug Coupland recently tweeted something to the effect that he was once again trying to get into Facebook but he said, “It’s like Twitter but with mandatory homework.” That might be another good way to describe it. With Twitter you’re just there; everybody else is just there. And its appeal to me is the lack of structure and the lack of — there’s this kind of democratization that I think is absent with more structured forms of social media.
Now, last week, 30 years ago? What’s the difference? What does it matter? It’s all there on YouTube. And so I find myself discovering things like a decade late, or I discover things before very many people have found them. It’s atemporal. It’s just all over the long calendar, and that’s going to make things different. But that’s been going on for a long time.
Full interview
Race Against The Machine
Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, by Erik Brynjolfsson
“Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of the electronics manufacturer Foxconn, announced this year a plan to purchase 1 million robots over the next three years to replace much of his workforce. The robots will mke over routine jobs like spraying paint, welding, and basic assembly. Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots, with 300,000 expected to be in place by next year.”
“If technology exists for a single seller to cheaply replicate his or her services, then the top-quality provider can capture most—or all—of the market. The next-best provider might be almost as good yet get only a tiny fraction of the revenue.”
“…the top 0.01% of households in the United States—that is, the 14,588 families with income above $11,477,000 — saw their share of national income double from 3% to 6% between 1995 and 2007.”
“About 90% of Americans worked in agriculture in 1800; by 1900 it was 41%, and by 2000 it was just 2%.”
Thoughts without a thinker
“This is why, for Buddhism, the point is not to discover one’s “true Self,” but to accept that there is no such thing, that the “Self ” as such is an illusion, an imposture. In more psychoanalytic terms: not only should one analyze resistances, but, ultimately, “there is really nothing but resistance to be analyzed; there is no true self waiting in the wings to be released.” The self is a disruptive, false, and, as such, unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing: when we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is a flow of “thoughts without a thinker.”
One’s True Self (Slavoj Žižek)
700 Club
“We had unwritten policies in place at The 700 Club, for example, that denied access to overweight people. We required people who wrote to us to report a “miracle” to include a photograph, so that we could filter people out based on how they looked. We wanted youngish, intelligent, attractive and articulate people to counter the view that Christians are all stupid Bible-thumpers. We very rarely, if ever, invited guests on the show that were overweight or fit the stereotypes discovered in the Gallup study. When crowd shots were taken in the studio, the camera operators were advised to zoom in on the most attractive people in the audience. None of this was written down, of course; it was just understood.”
Terry Heaton was a producer for the 700 Club in 1981
The Intention Economy
I’m only about one-third of the way into the book but finding no shortage of notable and quotable nuggets. In no particular order:
“Likewise, rather than guessing what might get the attention of consumers —or what might “drive” them like cattle—vendors will respond to actual intentions of customers. Once customers’ expressions of intent become abundant and clear, the range of economic interplay between supply and demand will widen, and its sum will increase. The result we will call the Intention Economy.”
“This new economy will outperform the Attention Economy that has shaped marketing and sales since the dawn of advertising. Customer intentions, well expressed and understood, will improve marketing and sales, because both will work with better information, and both will be spared the cost and effort wasted on guesses about what customers might want, flooding media with messages that miss their marks. Advertising will also improve.”
“The volume, variety, and relevance of information coming from customers in the Intention Economy will strip the gears of systems built for controlling customer behavior or for limiting customer input. The quality of that information will also obsolete or repurpose the guesswork mills of marketing, fed by crumb trails of data shed by customers’ mobile gear and Web browsers. “Mining” of customer data will still be useful to vendors, though less so than intention-based data provided directly by customers.” — Page 2
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“It’s an eyeball bubble. Investments in tracking-based advertising assume impossibly high values for customers attention.” — Pg 41
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“Now imagine you’re back in 1982. Somebody tells you that in twelve years, the world will adopt a new communications system that nobody owns, everybody can use, and anybody can improve. The system will be all-digita and will provide ways for anybody ro communicate with anybody, anywhere in the world, and to copy and share anything that can be digitized—including mail, print publications, music, radio streams, TV programs, and movies at costs that approach zero. Would you believe it?” — Page 94
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“Like the universe, there are no other examples of it (the Internet), and all our understandings of it are incomplete.” – pg 96
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“To become totally personal, advertising needs to cross an existential bridge, to become a different corporate function. It must become sales – without the human sound or the human touch.” — pg 41
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“We can’t ignore the huge numbers of people who live within our on the shores of the fast money river that flows through advertising, especially online. And it won’t stop until the bubble pops.” -pg 39
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It’s easy to forget that the term branding was borrowed from the cattle industry. The idea was to burn the name of a company or product on to the brains of potential customers.”
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“In the United States, the typical hour-long American TV drama runs forty-two minutes. The remaining eighteen minutes are for advertising. Half-hour shows are twenty-one minutes long, with nine left for advertising. That’s 30 percent in each case. The European Union sets a limit of twelve minutes per hour for advertising on TV, which comes to 20 percent. Ireland holds broadcasters to ten minutes per hour, or 16.7 percent.”
…
“Unpredictable Freedom and Sweetness of Chaos”
“Embrace not knowing what will happen. This is the ultimate freedom. You don’t know what you’re going to do today, nor what will come up. You are locked into nothing. You are completely free to do anything, to pursue any creative pursuit, to try new things as they come up, to be open to meeting new people. It can be scary at first, but if you smile when you think of not knowing, you’ll soon realize it’s a joyous thing.”
“When you’re not focused on one outcome, you open the possibility for many outcomes. Most people are focused on specific goals (outcomes), and relentlessly pursue that outcome. They then dismiss other possibilities as distractions. But what if you have no predetermined outcome? What if you say that anywhere you end up could be good? You now open an infinite amount of possibilities, and you’re much more likely to learn something than if you only try to do the things and learn the things that support your predetermined outcome.”
The Wisdom of Scott Adams
Common sense isn’t a real thing. And its ugly cousin, fairness, is a concept invented so dumb people could participate in arguments. Fairness isn’t a natural part of the universe. It’s purely subjective.
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My idea is that the United States, China, and Russia – the three biggest nuclear powers – sign a joint agreement that goes like this: The three powers agree that if any country in the world, excluding the big three nuclear powers, uses nuclear weapons, the offending country will be denied military and economic aid for the next hundred years. In return for this agreement of non-support from the big three nuclear powers, both Israel and Iran would be asked to agree to nuclear inspections. Israel’s inspections would be handled by the United States military. Iran’s inspections would be handled by an international team of inspectors excluding the United States and Israel. That’s the fake deal.
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I see life as a process, not a goal. If my goal had been to create world-changing ideas that worked right away, I would be a complete failure. But I don’t have that goal. Instead, I have a process that involves seeding the universe with ideas and waiting for the strongest to evolve and make a difference. The worst case scenario is that my ideas cause the eventual best ideas to compete harder and evolve to even better forms. When you use a process that makes sense, even the unanticipated outcomes are good.
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If you want a president who promotes freedom of religion, choose a non-believer such as me. Think of it like a eunuch guarding a harem. I won’t try to convert you to my belief system because I don’t have one. Some of the people I respect the most are believers of one sort or another. I’m in favor of whatever works in your personal life. But I prefer science over belief when it comes to government.
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My plan for shrinking government is to freeze total federal spending immediately and forever, and let inflation eliminate the bureaucracy by chewing into its budget over a few generations. That way, the government can unwind at a leisurely pace, allowing technology, competition, and better ideas to deliver natural cost reductions over time. With my plan of gradual government shrinkage, there’s no shock to the system, and no outsized risk.
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Someday, technology will make it possible for governments to shrink down to nearly nothing. Well-informed citizens, connected by the Internet, could accomplish almost all that government does for us today, including much of foreign policy. But that day is not today. I think the best path to smaller government involves the government transitioning into an information clearinghouse.”
“In the long, long term, I see governments as being nothing but intelligent managers of information. That’s a few hundred years from now.”