I ran an experiment where I collected noted across a week and published it at the end of it. It made interesting reading. Nothing much happens in a day worth writing about.

It's quite depressing when you can scribble for 16 years yet not turn out a book.

What's the role of feelings, taste and partialness in a thinking mind ? the same as the role of hunger and sleep in a thinking mind. They are just points on the map.

Special thanks to https://www.editpad.org/    to help fix the copy-pasta errors

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”


“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”


― Terence McKenna




Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.


For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.



― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running



"It's very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not

to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is

against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit."



The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.



― George Sheehan



Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.”

― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life




Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

if i don't know who you are, then i don't know who i am

- silicon valley

we overreact for the small stuff, coz the big stuff -the life that right job the good house the family and children - the joy is so pure and sublime that we know deep down that such beauty is not meant for the mud and dirt of the earth and our lives, and so we know deep down it was a gift , and so we don't cry too much for it, coz the only options are to break or move on.
so we never cry for the big stuff.
the small stuff ? that's different.


i realised something was wrong when ,even in my daydreams, i found myself crying

landscape

square

picasso'd dragons of crayon -1

do we miss pablo's ?

**

Dr. P: How many of you have self-help books? Okay, that's your first problem. You can't help yourself, because your *self* sucks!

**

You're quite good at this game, Mr. Green. I know because I'm quite good at this game.
- Revolver

**

Dunning–Kruger effect From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Part of a series on Psychology

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognise their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.[1]

**

"Looking by, over my shoulder, with an aching deep in my heart"
  - Mike and the Mechanics

**

You need a coach, a friend and a community.

You can learn all the katas alone, from books or videos, but weaving them together , and having a challenge that requires compound skills in a controlled environment that allows failure, review and retries is something you cannot do alone.

You can write something every day.  Reading a passage and then summarising in your own words is a known and recommended way of learning. It also helps concentration along with  knowledge of the  subject matter.
Written notes are the external memory of the human computer. 

The basic necessity list now consists of diet, sleep, exercise,   arts, friends, and do-nothing time.

I have attempted 5BX for a week now, and moved from Chart-1-B to Chart-1-B+. The stress on the body is tremendous. Seven days at each level is simply not enough.  The back also starts going for a toss. Not sure if this is sitting related, or due to the exercise.

The first thing in meditation practice is time and place. It's smoothest to sneak in a few minutes at the easiest time of the day.  I decided to ignore a full stomach and sat after lunch. The second thing would be to give up control to the timer. An app which rings a bell at the start and end of the session lets you offload all thought and action related to session management ,thereby removing all excuses to distract yourself on the basis of this.

‘Mathematics is the music of reason’ – James Joseph Sylvester



Logical thinkers suffer from Cartesian-itis. Or seeing straight lines where there are none. Extrapolate straight lines and you'll get planes, combine planes and you'll get surfaces and other compound objects that are the bread-and-butter (again a western affliction - we prefer rice-and-lentils) of our daily matrix. So seeing boxes or lines or balls or spheres or curves , is seeing abstractions, which by definition are unreal ( see Note1). The affected are many, namely, the large middle of the West - those who are unable to ,either transcend to the top, or are pushed to the bottom.  As Neo said, there is no spoon. There is no spoon of Job Satisfaction, nor Success, defined Cartesian-ically. Hence futile pursuits and trips to shrinks.

Or seeing ghosts . Pirsig goes on and on about Western ghosts. I'm reciting his words now, myself.

When I was in school, a fellow-book-reading-friend told me about ZMM, and that it would change lives. I assumed it'd be about motorcycles, and leather jackets, and that a reader would sort of give up on studiously studying and become 'cool' and ride around the country .
In college, I got a copy and read it. It was relaxing and bike-ridey.
On my first job, I wrangled a text-only copy and would read it, delved into the philosophy part of it.
Sometime later, I started noticing my brain throwing up sentences from the book to match unrelated real world I was thinking about. At some point, I started echoing sentences from the book which I'ld forgotten.

Note 1:
The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

—John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

... 

advice to random strangers on the interweb

i'm forty and haven't figured out anything.
that doesn't stop me from yakking.
so here's advice worth what you paid for it.
keep track of your personal standards. try and raise them regularly ( annually is fine).
if you are not motivated change the timeline of your goals. you might not be able to achieve a daily goal and end up wasting your time binge-watching/surfing,
whereas a monthly goal is something that can sit in your mind and might let you not waste time.
invest your life in diet and exercise. they will pay off forever.
work with faith that you'll make it . without too much frustration that you aren't there yet - sometimes the goose takes a few years to cook.
try to replace every negative emotion and bad feeling with constructive action - angry ? pushups - fear ?  do some work , sad ? go for a walk ,
bored ? explore or hobby-task ..
remember, most people who give advice know NOTHING about you, and their language might have the same words for same things as you, so you have to
measure and steer your life day to day as well on a yearly basis. develop the yardsticks for this
try not to be needy - if you think you are not good enough or too good - don't let that stop you from taking action. if you maintain a sense of
good-enough, you'll attract more things. finding the balance between satisfied-and-sitting-back and hungry-and-working-hard is a personal stewardship job.
practice the crafts whenever . writing painting singing cooking needlework whatever. the soul connects with the universe when you do it.

Orderliness and industriousness ,said Jordan Peterson

Deflation over currency devaluation

we peak in June ?

I see coupon ads

this is my mandala

art in boring times