if a ship, travelling from a port to another, makes many halts on the way, and at each halt, some part of the ship's equipment gets replaced by counterfeit versions, so that when the ship finally reaches its destination, no part of it that left the origin is present, does it have to pay the full tax on parts, or can the loss of originals be written off ?

 wisdom and compassion are skills

to be learnt like any other

and it's a typical mistake

to assume one can teach oneself

a skill one doesn't have competency in

dunning-kruger

semantic meditation

is refactoring events

into a rational model

extending, adapting, or even changing the model

to keep the surfboard that is ones' values 

afloat on the sea of signal

that is reality

 mind over matter

if you don't mind, it doesn't matter

if you do mind, it just isn't matter

it's just some un-yoked electrons 

running loose inside 

your head

zen meditation and yogic meditation are different in the sense that one cleans your mind and makes it fresh for new stuff, and the other just shutters the shop and takes you on a trip

while there will be overlap in anatomical changes and benefits, the other ,main,  benefits need to be analysed carefully before embarking on either path

 

intelligent & ambitious/driven

stupid & ambitious/driven

intelligent & lazy/not-driven

stupid & lazy/not-driven

stupid people will tell you to burn your books

*** sid warrier talk : link this one's a lot more even paced, lucid, and better explored  than the trs one, I feel. The lines on why meditation is needed is pure gold

***           in today's world meditation is an act of rebellion because the world is designed in a way that screams for our attention to get divided amongst a million things and to put it simply meditation is detachment of attention from the world 

***          even if you can achieve level one which is stop paying attention outwards that in itself is such a win /correct/ and from a neuroscience perspective why is it a win is because we don't realise how stressful the world is          every day every second there are so many things calling for our attention that we are forever dealing with a sense of being late or not doing something or failing at something all the time we are always afraid that we are failing at something we should have been here we should have done this we should have spoken to this person we should have been better even if we don't say it out loud              we are constantly dealing with that pressure and when I say we I mean our body so our body is constantly trying to deal with that sense of not having done something right /correct/    so we are living in a state of chronic stress the only way to get out of that state of chronic stress is to detach our attention from the outside world and allow our body to calm down /correct/.   

 so that is what meditation does at level one it starts calming down the stress

***. this is why ajahn brahm keeps saying "good enough" and "fault-finding mind"

*** after listening to this talk, it felt like the maslow pyramid corresponds almost exactly to our different 'brains' - like the reptilian, limbic, and pfc, with overlapping grays in between ....

 there are people who have been indulged so much that their text and reality are pretty much opposites

when dealing with literal people it's very simple, do what is said, say what is needed

the literal breed is rare. most of the world has integrated feedback into the first say itself, like thinking ahead in chess moves, so that the first say itself is off-centre, vague, or outright symbolic itself.

 used to be that machines did something real - moved things pressed things crushed things ...

now they just sit around and push symbols around on a silicon wafer

 we all imagine a house in a city where the rooms are more empty than full,  where the dust doesn't fall often, where the breeze blows through the windows down the hallways out the kitchen, where you can see the trees outside and step on the cool wet grass in the mornings , where the water is clean and air is pure....

where there are friends who talk to you, people who smile  

 all stress arises from the fact that life moves like a rhizome whereas the human mind is trained to have it move like a garden rhododendron - straight and up and not left right and around

 Sky facing stirling engines 

Imagine a program that eats its own debug logs 

 I DIDN'T KNOW THE EXCEL SOLVER (THE 3RD ONE) USED GENETIC ALGORITHMS

 about  building tools  :

- good - > prometheus

- bad -> bed of procrustes (-ing for the vast majority of the users)

all knowledge is only as useful as the problem it solves for man

therefore, all knowledge is only as useful as the tool it allows the birth of

and unlike Avalokiteshwara, our hands are few , therefore out tools must be multi-function

 In a world where everyone's mirroring and agreeing to everyone else, the ones who don't, will see themselves everywhere, and will run the risk of assuming the world and everyone is just as they see

 There is no logical rational reason to be alive, other than that dying's a chore and a bore, and usually a pain

Therefore, only the irrational and the flawed have a zest for increasing world population. And ,of course, our leaders , cos misery and poverty is the engine of a society where murder is outlawed.

All religion IS alcohol,opium... especially meditation, because, done wrong, only a detached self can lop off human heads for something asnabtruse as 'honor ', and be unaffected..

Enlightment,like money, amplifies. 

Just as all humans have assholes, there is an asshole in everybody. Without the seatbelts that are the trainings of compassion and kindness, enlightenment amplifies this too,  until people around you cant stand it

Theee are trainings not lessons and cannot be done without continuous guidance of a guru.

the purpose of religion is to numb, but as per mcluhan, tools can do the same too

 problem with confucian straight line universe is that at some point you will need more straight line agents than can be sustained by their output alone

in the world of business, an elephant is made by acquiring four pillars one big snake one small two long teeth, and then paying a consultant and a vendor a fortune for the rest

agents which make straight-lines their identity both submit to, and enforce straight-lines. for eg, they surrender their own freedom, and restrict others' too

 the best part of the holiday is leaving bangalore and arriving at the destination airport

of this, the snack and coffee, and optionally, book purchased is the bestest 

once landed, it starts going down, plateauing for a bit before diving down and coming back to okay-ish-different-from-normal

 my sign is the archer and so my ruling planet is jupiter, said uncle, as he farted 

verily a gas giant !! exclaimed the other

the dogs on the floor, doing their best rug imitation

 all human, and all networked-agent systems in general, adhere to the 80/20 law, as in, to the victor the spoils, and winner takes all. over multiple iterations, those who survive and gather more resources, tend to be have increased luck in surviving further iterations, and climbing the Maslow pyramid.

once some reach the top, and consolidate their power, that geo-social unit stratifies, and everyone gets frozen into their level in the pyramid.  those who can leave, do so.

some at the top, if 'progressive', keep going up and raising their followers. overall everyone benefits, but ...

the engine of change is the lowest level of the pyramid. it provides labor, through which all things are done. it is driven by fear of death by violence, starvation, or now and then - disease. to sweeten the deal, a little bit of happiness in the form of occasional reward, family etc is used

hence, constant destruction of social units elsewhere to provide souls for the bottom layer, is required. In this, modern Maslow hierarchy resembles a galley

until we get matter-compilers and nano-factories and ai driven robots, as Gibson said "the end of economics" , all progress will continue to be a non-zero sum thing

it wasn't until i watched judge dee fighting it out in the gobi desert frontier that i realised the power of a high ground - your arrows can go or fall down and kill, their arrows cannot cannot reach up that high to kill, so just build a tower, and you can sit in and kill enemies all day long as long as you have arrows. i saw this in age-of-empires too (thanks keyurJ)  but never connected.  a tower placed in the middle of a ground or forest has no more of an edge than a colonel blotto fort, ie, their edge is based on relative concentration of power (arrows/soldiers/armor)  , counting on the fact that , at base-rates, the populace wouldn't have so much disposable military power (arrows/lives/armor) to throw at the towers. classic stock-flow buffer implementation .

i love the judge Dee series, but every now and then scenes slow down and move like molasses,  and people look strained, to show emotional content... what i love is the system of the old times, so sophisticated and ... symbolic ... ( symbolic has a special place in the heart for those who know something of lisp) the series lacks the crisp crunchy movement and colorful characters of the movie (phantom flame) and drags now and then, but the landscape, the  buildings, costumes, swords (!), settings, the city/state/country infrastructure, bureaucracy, institutions , are just superb. the fight scenes blend opera and action in the wrong proportions**, and i am not sure accurately

** crouching tiger hidden dragon did this very well, ie, all action scenes were actually operatic/choreographed, and didn't break the emotional narrative with the physical interplay even during fights

the episode involving the judge trying to stop the vigilante and villagers from killing the murderous silver mine owner , so that he may be brought to justice, visiting frontier towns and forts and fighting hordes etc , and killing the charismatic and talented vigilante,  - was very hard to connect with - given we have enough problem with rich folk raping and road-killing and getting away with it in the country itself

an idealogy is a perspective , combined equal parts rationalisation and belief. the beauty of a successful one is, like a virtual machine - there is one set of r&b for each substrate -ie agent ie human , yet the larger perspective is maintained. the system suffers individual failures now and then, but sails through on the majority retaining intact their lenses.

 what if the toxic confounding element is WITHIN your boundary

 dynamic, fluid, time-based boundaries or something