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 ....