“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
Manufactured Normalcy Field
I wouldn’t know how to begin to describe this piece, so I’ll just share a few nuggets. If you have any interest in things like past and present and reality, the full post is worth a read.
we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.
What is interesting is how this psychological pre-disposition to believe in an unchanging, normal present doesn’t kill us.
How, as a species, are we able to prepare for, create, and deal with, the future, while managing to effectively deny that it is happening at all?
a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat.
even though air travel is now a hundred years old, it hasn’t actually “arrived” psychologically. A full appreciation of what air travel is has been kept from the general population through manufactured normalcy.
we are all living, in user-experience terms, in some thoroughly mangled, overloaded, stretched and precarious version of the 15th century that is just good enough to withstand casual scrutiny.
Instead of a newspaper feeding us daily doses of a shared Field, we get a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses, all mixed in with pictures of cats doing improbable things.
We aren’t being hit by Future Shock. We are going to be hit by Future Nausea. You’re not going to be knocked out cold. You’re just going to throw up in some existential sense of the word.
Lawyers ditching Blackberry
According to the American Lawyer survey, 88 percent of the CIOs expect a net drop in the number of BlackBerry users at their law firms in the next 12 months. And firms that allow lawyers to bring their own devices to work are reporting benefits; the biggest one, according to 70 percent of the CIOs, is more cheerful users.
Technology Talent Gap
Among employees who work for Google, Mr. Obama received about $720,000 in itemized contributions this year, compared with only $25,000 for Mr. Romney. That means that Mr. Obama collected almost 97 percent of the money between the two major candidates. Apple employees gave 91 percent of their dollars to Mr. Obama. At eBay, Mr. Obama received 89 percent of the money from employees. Democrats had the support of 80 percent or 90 percent of the best and brightest minds in the information technology field.
FiveThirtyEight Blog
Behind Your Radio Dial
Before television took over the airwaves, Rockefeller Center was home to the National Broadcasting Company during the golden age of radio. This promotional film from around 1948 chronicles the rise of the media company from a small collection of 20 affiliated stations, formed in 1926, to more than 170 stations two decades later. The 24-minute documentary, courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, introduces the network and goes behind the scenes at Rockefeller Center, peeking into the mail room, sound recording studios, and music library.
The documentary closes with a look at the network’s budding television enterprise. “Adding sight to sound, [NBC] opened an electronic window” when it launched the first commercial television station in 1941, the narrator explains. “More than two decades of NBC radio have been dedicated to the spirit of public service. Now, in bringing television, network television, out of the laboratory and into your living room, NBC rededicates itself in this same spirit to provide the greatest medium of mass information and mass entertainment in the world.” Radio junkies and30 Rock fans alike will enjoy this journey back in time.
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.
Is the future of serious journalism in the hands of corporate media?
ZDNet’s Tom Foremski asks: “As the business models for serious journalism continue to erode where will we get the quality media we need as a society to make important decisions about our future?”
And warns: “Special interest groups will gladly pay for the media they want you to read, but you won’t pay for the media you need to read.”
Cisco has a large team of journalists producing articles about the tech industry for its online magazine “the network.” John Earnhardt said that the reporters have just two rules to follow: “Don’t write about competitors, and don’t write anything that could harm Cisco.”
At Nissan Motors, the company has built a full scale TV studio and produces a news program with veteran journalists from the BBC and elsewhere.
“Why does Nissan want to get into the business of serious news journalism? Why not sponsor an existing news show? His answer was surprising. “I don’t have the confidence that traditional news organizations will be able to survive the transition to the new business models. Why should I invest large amounts of money over the next few years in a failing enterprise?”
If there’s a take-away from this piece it’s probably this: “Media is a loss leader, you need something else to sell. If all you have is media to sell, then you will have losses.”
“Welcome to the team. Don’t fuck it up.”
This article in The Atlantic was one of the more interesting pieces I read about the 2012 campaign and election. A few excerpts:
“If you look like an asshole, you have to be really good.”
They didn’t have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours.
With Twitter, one of the company’s former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically target individual users with direct messages. “We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff.”
Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team’s Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon’s one-click purchases to political donations. “It’s the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online,”
They learned what it was like to have — and work with people who had — a higher purpose than building cool stuff.
They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded.
Advertising loses in a mudslide
Media observer Bob Garfield on what we learned about advertising from the recent campaigns:
“Nothing that comes out of the mouth of a brand or any other institution has remotely the influence of what comes from the mouths of 7 billion bystanders freely trading opinions online.”
“What matters is what the public has to say about you — based on who the public believes you really are. … If people don’t like you, they are no longer eager to do business with you. And in a socially mediated world, not to mention a world of enforced transparency wherein your every move is searchable on Google in perpetuity, you can no longer advertise your way into their wallets, much less their hearts.”
“We are now and forevermore in the Relationship Era. What the GOP proved, and what all marketers must at long last internalize, is that you can’t advertise yourself out of a bad relationship.”