someone's reading percy jackson. 

sora made this -

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youthat boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté.

Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

(the book that started the eternal confusion. it talks about zen but it means arete, but then the specific type of excellence of skill with mind, which brings us back to zen....)

Pirsig is underrated. He plumbs both zen and greek philosophy with ease and aplomb, adds a dash of tao and dharma, and wiz-bang - unifies all of them into one twisted loop whose inside is outside and the restaurant is at the end of the universe and all. Problem with reading Pirsig is that it sits in your deeps so that whatever you come across is just a replay of something you've already read in these pages, but haven't internalised-to-action yet, so _you_ stream across life surreally, instead of the other way round...

but wait, there's more ....

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. 

Robert A. Heinlein

 with all these hindu pushups 

and stormtrooper workouts

my heart seems to have found

 a voice

it would like to sing

until tears come

[toffler, mcluhan, drucker, jaredD, deleuze&guattari]

hunterer-gatherer ->

horses -> range + speed -> spread of civill.

weapons -> concentration of wealth to those with weapons -

[mcluhan]text  - linearisation - [standardisation, specialisation, centralisation, concentration] -> cities -> empires -> [drucker] management+training -> modern world

[mcluhan]text  - linearisation -  symbols -> philosophy -> logic -> math  -> ? 

                                                                      |_> rhizome

[jared diamond] agriculture -> population growth  ->  ? - growth economies ?  -> concentration of wealth with those who control those who wield weapons via symbolic logic

[graeber] debt -> ?

[mcluhan] man/women - centre/margin -> cities -> greece -> roads -> rome -> church -> Enlightenment -> empires -> industrialisation ->

[mcluhan] if greek civillisation had heroes and city states, the romans had roads and legions. nothing screams 'linearization' than roads and soldiers marching in rank and file  holding spears. ( I guess Rome created a snowball made of conscripts from conquered states marching down the road to conquer the next one, whose defeated citizens became conscripts for the next iteration in this, but linearisation yay!)

see illustration by 9gag

mass-consumption of  knowledge encoded in symbols ensured the spread of only a common minimum [toffler]

bonus content :  How to make men do evil

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal."

"The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them."

— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

        "There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be duplicated by                     a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do 

— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

1. the Pirate Loot Distribution Scheme

- make them wilfully agree to disproportionate return

2. the firing squad principle

- at least one blank allows the gang to believe i-didn't-do-it

3. abstractions . religious maps of the world. us vs them

- most effective way to dehumanise

 if you have a universal value system, you can do things by yourself

for the world , and have them stand for themselves

most of us work in organisations where we have a shared value systems

re gall - most universal values are not allowed within any orgs

after all is said and done, it's hard to look back on your life and see that you did what the boss said for 30 -40 years, hard to itemise or describe out of context, only common theme is boss said

all time awesome benefits of running - this is the most integrated wholistic piece of information structured as a talk 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7ga2jhlaus 

 if you're looking for one practise for prospering, 

this is it it fits the bill for meditation as defined as 'a deliberate doing nothing or something else or goal-less thing to rebel from the social pressure of always doigg something that is tangible and for others" *

 it helps to build different neurons and diversify your identity and self and build vo2 and stamina in the meanwhile, also free endo-cannabinoids 

 if you run for a month atleast, you can legitimately wear a goggins tee

 you will need to build 'calluses on the brain' , going past the 'i am not doing it i don't need it i can't do it' 

 it costs a month to see lowering of heart rate 

 narrator says you need to do this for 3 months to see more tangible benefits 

 also you're in good literary company - george sheehan and murakami 

 my goals are 

 1. run regularly - don't think I'll achieve this anytime soon, even walking daily brings a piercing in my knees. i plan to shuffle walk run until duration goes up 

 2. bring heart rates down from close-to-max rate to the 60 or 40 that sheehan mentions 

 3. get off the aflame-amygdala train 

 4. be able to take office out of my head and do other things

 i suppose calisthenics and pushups and core crunches will follow in eventually as rest of the body remains disharmoniously flabby and flappy as the lowers firm up 

 imma gonna chase heart points until i develop wind (like bruce lee said) - walking running/jogging skipping stairs etc 

 asana for recovery and evolution. goggins does 2 hrs. kareem abdul jabbar does it 

home cooking and meal planning as the way to get off snack-fat train and grow good tissue. 

 muscles are nice, yoga sutras by bks iyengar is nice, sarvapriyananda's raja yoga lecture is nice, but later 

 * mens sana in corpore sano *

your ambition for a project must be matched with your ignorance otherwise you are aiming low, fishing in your home pond crusading in your backyard you need to lose sight of the shore