All spiritual growth passes through amway on the way down to rock bottom, before starting to build oneself again

 the other day i received a phone call. there was no voice at the other end, just a medley of unconnected piano notes being played gently..... then they hung up.

 Imagine a large ocean of molasses like goo swirling and dancing its way around the heart of the universe. For the record , it is composed of energy. In some places it is thick, in so thin that it is bare possibility , a hint of goo, and light runs right through it ( light is just good from which all but potential has been stripped out of, which is why nothing can travel faster than the speed of light ) . The swirl is so enormous that different parts of the swirl swirl furiously enough to not allow any other part of the swirl to disrupt their furious swirling. Some of these swirls bump into each other through thin areas of the swirl without breaking or joining, and come back and say "ugh ,that other swirl , sooo lame !!!"

 i suppose some ancient chinese philosopher would've been inspired by noodles the way apples inspired newton, and would've made great advances in string theory using noodles, and his meetings would've been popular, if only the noodle-models were available as snacks at the end .... i suppose the great demonstration before the emperor (or a much lower magistrate) would've been a fiasco cos the noodle models make would've mysteriously disappeared overnight and the magistrate would've called it an elaborate prank and ordered the scholar's  execution or banishment as punishment, which would've been recorded into history by office peons who had suspicious sauce stains on his  tunic .... 

 if the ego world is all you've known

why would one break out ?

like neo in the matrix, from a perfectly normal (looking) world

into a pod of goo and wires ?

Jed McKenna whispers "to go Further,  as always"

 how would one measure ones' incompetence ? how would one rate their vision in comparison to others ? 

it's given that dunning-kruger works against one in this endeavour. to begin with, let's assume there's no way to measure and assign a static number to this quality of ourself. 

guy-ritchie-jason-statham throws us a bone here - you get better by playing a better opponent[1] 

so unless your playing, and getting better, it's not possible to know how incompetent you are . and this information is very limited. it only tells you how bad you are compared to the last game you lost, it shows you only the next hill to climb, not the whole range . 

most of us begin by seeing a tiny slope that hides the foothills of the Himalayas, then, climbing up and down a staircase in our house, we are assured that we can climb that hill, and therefore master the skill soon, maybe tomorrow. leaving home and testing ourselves only brings pain at first. 

Having climbed a few hills and having reached a mental state where one does not panic after seeing the full range laid out in front of us, is the best steady state one can aim for - the plateau of skill that one keeps trudging - content that what lies ahead is not a given defeat, and that our past victories are not trivially achieved by others ...

[1] Revolver

 when i first read pirsig, i assumes romantic and classical are terms he invented to help him say  what he was saying. later, much later, much much later, thanks to youtube's infinite well of content, and also having lucked out with people around me who helped me acquire grown up stuff and gently initiated me into the world of grown-up angst, existential dread, and suffering ( not the when-will-my-new-toy-come but what-are-we-doing-this-for and when-will-it-end) ,  i had sampled enough material that i needed categories to refer to them.  it then suddenly[1] struck me that these terms had existed forever (a century tops) and they referred to things in art - beethoven and mozart's music,  for eg, is supposedly following cerebral, hard-logical rules, while debussy saunters by with delightful, feely-goody stuff ( mozart wouldn't work in the final fountain scene of ocean's eleven...)(beethoven wandered around in a pasture but only in straight lines). this then segues into some chatter about the motorcycle - the logic and precision of the internal workings vs the good feelings that come out of all the rides. the book is structured that way too - interesting biking narrative interspersed with dissecting and analysing the 'motorcylce' that feels the feels - ie -you. but.... is it really you ? 

these two terms ( romantic and classic) form the heart of the argument. hard logic and rules, and feel-good. this dichotomy quickly moves towards  reliable vs good-looking-but-without-substance, hard-working and wastrel , ant and grasshopper.... it would be nice if we can prove this a false dichotomy 

we'd like to drive around in a classically designed car or a train,  and not a romantically designed one. but we'd rather have romantic type satisfaction when looking at life . it's one thing to be working hard on all the parameters and feel like sh!t , and another to lie on the fat eating cake and binge-watching tv shows (or even reading) - but aren't these like two extremes ?  ....

pirsig says "ultimately the motorcycle you work on is yourselves" - at a very high level you adjust the romantic and classic quality definitions in your head until the reality works for you. what is it that I really want - am i liking the romantic quality of this experience, or the classical quality ? for example, am i liking the black on white and clack-clack of writing this blog ? or do i like the fact that writing creates content in my name which will survive long after my thoughts have moved on, so that i can come back ot this page and converse with myself from the past (in the future), or that writing trains the brain, or that writing attracts like minded people which ,as scott adams will tell, is a luck attractor .... which of these is making me write this ? ( wjames says it's habit (chapter 10 of his book))

buddhism goes the other way. by developing attention, and seeing the hindrances, tells us what causes us to 'take' sorrow, sadness, grief, suffering, or even joy, as opposed to being tranquil and eventually blissful. the first milestone comes when one realises that these things are 'taken' by the self, and not 'happening' to one. from that point on it's all exploration and experimentation.

-\0o=p[l'

w2qQ!`    ```````` [2]

[1] wow, it's been only, what, 26 years since i started reading the book that i now know enough to click the pieces together

 [2] coincidentally my smallicule aka Smallington banged these out in passing. I'm keeping it.

 Familiarity breeds boredom and contempt

This sets the stage for exploration

Exploration discovers variations or intricacies

Now the thing is no more a thing but a complex

Thus it dies

Hence symbolic systems must be renewed perennially 

 if it sounds crazy or stupid, it's probably good for you

if it's super scary, it's probably something you need badly

word of the week, from last week's travels  : containment, containment zones

 

 i'm in this train

the seats were better 

i haven't gotten down, 

am still on it

i don't know where it's

going

 something tells me this is the era in which the ideas in 'revolutionary wealth' have become the norm. Alvin Tofler was working towards this and was calling it just when the web was taking off. The coda of the second wave, in the third wave book, was epiphanic, enlightening at the time I was a struggling first-jobber sharing an apartment suffering commute and office hierarchies and wondering why do all this

 rushkoff's concept of the current generation coming into what was exclusive eclectic and almost a crime for commoners in the previous era, is coming to a boil now

 living in the city in a big apartment has a lot of advantages.

you can't keep your windows open coz some sub-humanite meat-popsicle is smoking and the cigarette smoke is filtering through your house and your kids are breathing it. so you can't have any cross ventilation. 

this practice of keeping the windows closed comes in handy because soon bulldozers and jcbs are gonna tear through the grounds under your window and then the city is going to build a road for the next ten years, and all you're gonna get is smoke and concrete dust and also the good old organic dust...

you might even feel good about that, that you are rubbing shoulders with the elitest losers in literature - arthur dent himself.... 

wait, did i say advantages ? yes yes I did. and I did mean the kind of advantage which forces you to overcome adversity and develop strength of character and pass all of God's tests and that kind of stuff. 

 The great thing about vacations is the rooms we stay in - the hostel like ones or the two star ones (the good ones, where the floors are mosaic and  beds are clean and the place has a garden or lawn of its own ) - with these we get a glimpse of what our life could be if we didn't have stuff, but somehow, had rooms that were empty, floors unlittered ,surfaces uncrowded, and cupboards bare. What it would be like to wake up, and get out and go look for fun.