“To know that you can do nothing is the beginning. Just watching, without purpose.”
My favorite excerpts (PDF) from Become What You Are (Alan Watts)
The Cobweb
“On the eve of Operation Desert Storm, the murder of an Arab exchange student at a local university puts Iowa deputy sheriff Clyde Banks on a collision course with both the CIA and Saddam Hussein. It seems the students are Iraqis conducting agricultural research on biological weapons in his midwestern town.” (Goodreads)
I really enjoyed this book. I tried the other book he co-authored with J. Frederick George (Interface) but couldn’t get past some of the long, wordy passages. This story really worked for me and I can highly recommend the book.
Quit social media?
“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)
No one can deliberately do it
“When (Zen) is itself, it is so uncontrived and subtle that it goes unnoticed, or it passes for luck or grace or some nameless equivalent. Like Taoism, it happens but few recognize it. And no one can deliberately do it.”
— The Tao of Zen by Ray Grigg
Surveillance Drone
The spring morning on the prairie was all the more beautiful for the comforting presence of the nearby surveillance drone.
Autumn Leaves
The difference between those who are enlightened and those who are not “is that you don’t know the difference until you realize yourself to be no better than others, then you are better than others. But if you think like this, you are not. Here is the paradox that rules the world.”
— R.H.Blyth (The Tao of Zen by Ray Grigg)
Dead Professional
Just stumbled across these guys on Apple Music. Reminds me of someone from the sixties but can’t think of who.
Prison Stairs
Melody Men Quartet
Radio: There will be no more new music formats
Mark Ramsey says the last successful new radio format was the Variety Hits format, “Jack.” I barely remember that format (now 15 years old). Mr. Ramsey says there as been no new youth-based format on the radio fail in generations… and there never will be “but because the tastes are so fractured among millennials that there is no popular thread of music that isn’t already absorbed sufficiently well by an existing format.”
I’m not sure who would care about this theory besides someone who programs a radio station. He offers some insight into who listens to which formats and why but it all seems a bit… academic to me. Like reflecting on Mayan culture.