Category Archives: Quotable & Notes

Light

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“Like a hole in the paper is both in the paper and yet not of the paper, so is the supreme state in the very centre of consciousness, and yet beyond consciousness. It is an opening in the mind through which the mind is flooded with light. The opening is not even the light, it is just an opening.”

“When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace — immersed in the deep silence of reality.”

“There is only light and light is all. Everything else is but a picture made of light. Life and death, self and not-self — abandon all these ideas. They are of no use to you. See the light and disregard the picture.”

“In the immensity of consciousness a light appears, a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like a pen writing on paper. And the ink that leaves a trace is memory. You are that tiny point and by our movement the world is ever re-created. Stop moving, and there will be no world.”
— I Am That (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
— Ten Zen Questions (Susan Blackmore)

“You are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.”
–The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)

The smartphone is our era’s cigarette

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Ross Barkan writing in The Guardian:

“(The 2010s were) dominated, from start to finish, by a single piece of technology that has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interaction. The smartphone is to the 2010s what cigarettes were to much of the twentieth century, a ubiquitous and ruinous marker of the zeitgeist.”

“In the late 2000s, we allowed a few corporations to persuade us that this advanced, alien technology – assembled via de facto slave labor in Asia – was essential to human existence. We readily bought in, condensing our lives behind the sleek glass. The scroll hooked us like a drug, triggering the exact right loci in our brains; suddenly, we could never be bored again, doped by endless Facebook and Instagram feeds, retreating from unnecessary conversation or thought into an infinity of trivia. The internet never left us.”

Why the Brits don’t make computers

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Spotted a new leak on the truck and reached out to my friend (and Land Rover expert) John Middleton:

Common place for them to leak. Rear transfer case output shaft seal. May need a speedy sleeve on the the output flange. The flange nut also might be loose. Eventually you will get oil on the parking brake shoes. All of mine have leaked or still leak there. If it stops leaking it means the transfer case has run out of oil!

Very hard to find a Land Rover that does not drip some oil. As the tappet brothers proclaimed: “The British were not successful in the computer industry because they could not figure out how to make one that leaked oil.”

All I know for sure

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“All I know is that there is existence and there is awareness of existence. That’s all I know for sure. And I feel that life isn’t quite right. Instinctively I know that it should easier than it is. Why isn’t life quite right? Well, because there is an underlying fear of life – an underlying, constant unrightness. I don’t know this the way I know that there is existence and awareness of existence. But it makes sense to me. There is an underlying fear, a lie, a lens through which we live life.

— Beyond Kama (Kaushik)

How life happens

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“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

Viruses

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“Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses — viruses generated from within itself.” — Snow Crash

I’m stuck on the role of FB and Twitter as virus vectors. How naive of us to think the worst parts of humanity — racism and white supremacy — would not spread more rapidly than our better natures.

The franchise virus

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“The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.”

— Snow Crash

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this book but discover something new each time I pick it up. I like Stephenson’s female characters. Always smart and strong. Y.T. the skateboard courier in Snow Crash; Eliza in The Baroque Cycle; and Zula in REAMDE.

Same goes for William Gibson: Molly Millions (Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive); Angie Mitchell (Count Zero); Chevette Washington (Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties); Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition); Hollis Henry (Spook Country and Zero History); and Flynne Fisher (The Peripheral).

Masters of the Word

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Financial historian William J. Bernstein explores how communication tools shaped human history. Among the book’s many narratives:

  • How the first writing systems in Mesopotamia and Egypt, because they were so complex, could be mastered by only a privileged elite who used this unique skill of literacy to assemble large, despotic city states and the world’s first empires.
  • How the development of progressively simpler alphabetic systems in the Eastern Mediterranean region allowed ever larger percentages of ordinary people to learn them. The final result, the Greek alphabet, could be grasped so easily that it fostered the dawn of democracy in Greece.
  • How Gutenberg actually changed the world. He didn’t invent movable type, and he certainly didn’t invent the printing press. The technology he developed, rather, was yet more subtle and powerful.
  • How the Reformation was not effected by Luther the fiery preacher and brilliant theologian, but rather by Luther the publisher.
  • How the fall of the Soviet Union resulted, in large part, from a colossal error in radio production.
  • How the Internet isn’t destroying our children’s academic performance, rewiring our brains, making us stupid, destroying investigative journalism, and won’t produce democracy in the Arab world, but will  likely make genocide less frequent.

Below are some excerpts from the book: Continue reading →