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

explore-exploit is rampant in nature, like, centrally

for eg, flowers have both male and female parts - the pistil and the stamen

why would the flower need 2 ? quite simply, nature prefers the flower to scatter the male seed across 

it's not a one-shot thing but a two-step process - variety is built in, and some of the various survive. without variety, lines might end

the pistil does the exploit, of the ground beneath - roots tapping the earth and the xylem and phloem taking care of the logistics, and the stamen, and the pollen taking care of the seeding, as well as the exploring

and while mcLuhan talked about centers and margins, and while he did refer to '...women as beasts of burden as men needed to be free to run interference' , I can't help draw the parallel that women are the first center and men as the first margin

to me, the parallel to women=exploit and men =explore seems obvious at this point. extending to humans, the women only has the X chromosomes, while the male has the XY chromosomes

this also explains why women age fast once their birthing years are over while men don't, and can create viable 'seed' well into their old age (not all, but enough)

looks like nature wants men to scatter their seed all around...

 everytime i open up to you

something big and meaningful 

dies within me

from ranprieur (the man is a treasure)

 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/oscar-wilde-the-soul-of-man-under-socialism

"The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody."

( here 'presses so hardly' means 'presses so hard' )

this is a line we've never departed from, all discussions about individuality happen in the context of the current econo-political scene, and is a reaction and adjustment to it, rather than a separate existence

sora made these

 

be realistic, plan for a miracle !

 religion, or rather, spirituality is that irrationality that forms the centre of our being

rationally there is no reason for existing

irrationally, there are many, varying from "you're here, might as well go on to the next one " all the way to "God put me here with purpose and ability and there's His work to be done, and tax rebates to be collected"

"i like it here" is somewhere in the middle

that irrationality is the  root from which many shoots of being stem ( yes, i know)

art, skill, will, achievements, arete, rationality .....

turtle trader approach sounds like the 'dhandho' mindset - limited downside, unlimited upside

also , it claims to be teachable, and also encode-able

 losses have physiological impact also

the book starts with hero worship and paenery for richard dennis. effusive praise disguised behind a matter-of-fact tone

 nobody cheated like parents of children 

past the cute stage

moments of life-defining joy

nature takes away a drop a day

until only in flashes the happy days

come visit you

and the husk is left

for the dust

 [spoiler alert] the manchurian candidate is not about what I expected..... don't watch it

 reading the calcutta chromosome

had read about amitav ghosh and had shortlisted the sea of poppies trilogy but didn't find it in om books and so chickened out. buying from amazon doesn't seem to be a real thing. neither does buying a new book from a name brand store... (my jack reacher book is coming via amazon... don't judge me... )

amitav ghosh is a history man first. a bengali before that. i love my history, only not... like .. my favorites are flashman, the tintins, the mummy, master li, interesting times, judge dee , noble house, shogun; hence my interest in ag

fate moved things so that i landed at a cousin's place by an unexpected twist - a derelict bank account had cash in it ,so after unnerving depressing scenarios of imagining the bank denying me access to it, i snuck into the bank one day,  on a tangent ( the normal NEVE works for me) - and learned with the greatest of joy and relief that it had an aunt's name on it - and part of getting the documentation to her via another uncle, i landed up at their house. i could've used any of the courier services of the day, masquerading behind taxi service and instant grocery deliveries, but i decided to drop in myself. and my cousin lent me calcutta chromosome

ag doing sf

calcutta chromosome has the feel of cory doctorow's toaster story... the same detached narration of the rapture of nerds ...

like slices of onion that one keeps eating, even though you know they are not chips, and only because you ate the previous one, ( i can do this with thin slices of garlic also. the tongue is insatiable for masala)  , i kept reading line after page after chapter

 i realised this book is a sandwich, the science , while superb, forms only the top one of dreary dry  bread slices.the history forms the bottom slice.  the mayonnaise, or the chipotle sauce, is the premise of the plot ( always a sucker for british bungalow life i am). the tomato the onion the lettuce the cheese slice -  are the people and streets of calcutta where the story flows into and eventually settles down into, and the meat (or veggie patty) of the sandwich is human nature. we read to read about ourselves, to meet ourselves, rest is all delivery mechanism and garnishing

like i said - bengali and history buff first

ps : murugan seems like the last name one would have , for a person who talks like that ( antar and the thai cafe )

did i mention how reading a book is helping rehabilitate my mobile-screen-worn eyes ?

pps : [spoiler] the ending doesn't weave together 

i don't like china mieville - his writing puts a dark desolate deserted feeling inside me - like a usual hanging place on small town on sunday - full of memories but foreboding and forbidding

 what do the messages of  Ajahn Brahm and Tony Robbins have in common ?

what  does the teachings of  Ajahn Brahm have in common with the forest of forgetfulness in Alice in Wonderland ?

 a man had a problem

he sat down with this wife to talk about it

now he had two problems

i wish there was 

a small part of this mess that i can call my own

real for me me yesterday, today, and tomorrow

noises, voices, nudges knocking me off the path

scaffolding for help when foundations totter

wishes, horses,  beggars riding out

still center dancing leaves swirling currents

no ice cream

ever

ride the li

 

 nature is fractal, so it follows the basic building block of intelligence is intelligence

this doesn't make sense, but the inverse explains some things

the difference in the corpus callosum structure across the sexes makes for some interesting hypothesis

first, the shorter, broader, fibre-optic speed one makes signals travel faster across the halves. so for the one group, signals are processsed and consumed, for the other , they are consumed then processed. let me explain -

when a signal jumps faster, it reaches the sense of self part of the brain at the same time as it does the mechanical physical part of it. so the social significance of the event is computed at the same time as the physical chronological import. hence, every event either adds or detracts from social status or not. and since this functions this way from ... i don't know when - probably teenage ? the amount of scientific content proportionally is less , compounding all the way to adulthood where it plays close to zero significance

hence each woman is the president of the world women's association. their weapons are long sharp needles which can be thrust in the back during a social hug, or poisons, or needles delivering poison, so that social persona is unchanged. this is also why you can lie to them and get a way, mostly, as long as social status is restored/boosted. memory of past events, chronology, is a lower priority, along with facts

when a signal jumps slower across the gap, it doesn't  reach the sense of self part of the brain first, it spends time at the physical chronological part of the brain first, calculations are completed, events are assimilated, models updated by the time it jumps across and reaches the I part. accumulating from ..? teenage-hood, this builds up a large store of fact before which the I has to submit.  

think of two organisations, in the first, external events are fed to the CEO first, in the other, they are fed to the CTO first. the other CXO gets to know of it only after a day