you need to practice until meditation is your day job, and life is everything else that is just noise, that happens in the gaps 

this is the meditation inversion

to begin with, one can aim for a physical/exercise inversion as a pre-step

zazen's method is 'just-sitting', and letting things come and go. there are tons of lectures but they are all of the 'while you inhale, you are actually exhaling, while you are sitting,  you are also standing up' kind. compared to this, ab is a more warm and fuzzy

the only structure zen imposes is form, and the very act of dropping everything in our busy minds and sititng vacantly seems daunting, and we impulsively flinch and back off ...

 ajahn brahm's thai forest method is a more elaborate in terms of literature but the core message is 'open the door of your heart' to the thing in front of you - whether it's an irritant or yourself - and be kind to it.

with this , almost everything opens up and simmers down, and all the literature - whether suttas or sermons -  is just gravy on top.

the meditation is mileston-ed with things like beautiful breath, nimittas, jhanas etc and provide a 'thing', while zen has nothing to hold on to

comparing the two, zen seems more 'intellectual' effort, to maintain the 'effort of no effort choice of no choice', eventually whittling our own effort to keep even this away to until it barely exists but doesn't not exist  (i suppose) whereas the ab method is to just turn towards and hug whatever is in front of the mind 

the third contender is vipassana. 10-day camp attendees have reported bliss on the third day from just eating and being outside. gemini puts it down to dopamine-fasting effects of 3 days of painful anapana practice and bland food. youtubers report that scientific studies show that 10 day course caused permanent or almost permanent structural change in the brain (intensity matters?)

shinzen young tells us that attention power is something that can increase by training and practice. one technique he suggests for dealign with strong emotion is to hold on to the emotion when it hits, and observe where in the body it shows up, what it feels like, and what is its flavour/texture etc

finally, buddhism seems like something someone would derive if they followed a common-sensical approach, though there's no guarantee that every one would end up follow the same path of enquiry, but i would expect to end up there eventually

 how about .. "we are but mechanisms to accumulate layers of matter so that a brain emerges. each brain tries to make sense of the universe, and this is a terribly attenuating thing,  so the brain wears out, rather, the material accumulation is not enough to keep the brain 'playing the latest version of the game', so the already accumulated material layers sanction a branch-off operation with lesser/different 'sense' so that the new brain can start where the old one left off ..,  parallely dialing down resource allocation to the existing piles of material"

 

 P.o.I first seasson is a peach. the ulrich kohl episode is gigantic. the man is a mirror of our man, slight differences. can't help love the suit/pinstripes/surgical technique ...

how do you know I would pull the trigger

you're a soldier like me ....

words which are red hot iron poured down the spine ...

quality falls to the level of  gas station tacos in later seasons ... and i hate the whole samaritan runaround ...

 people keep saying there is this consciousness that consciousness etc ... time is the only real organism in this universe, going through everywhere, carrying everything 

think of the speed of light, and how things change when one travels at speeds close to it- it's because light can't see beyond what time has not created yet ...

corollary : time travel is only possible to 'scenes' or realities you have been in already, the rest are not real for you, but within your timeline, time can remake things for you...

 one of these things is not like the other

I was reading Osborne  when I came upon Nietsche... ( how did the shift occur ? I remember Lisa Lisa in the bombardiers reading nietsche to help with the job, ( weird book - contrarian/non-standard perspective for that world but not really touching bedrock I felt ) , I have been using Power as my first Wordle attempt, maybe I googled 'will to power' or something... ) 

turns out, nietsche's philosophy is the wind right underneath Adler, Jung, Frankl, Sartre, Camus, Focault, Kafka, Hesse, Shaw, and also ....  Batman .... and of course, the life is difficult theme in our recent resort - Scott Peck....

Gemini has given a four book reading list, will to power not on it.

Will to power starts with an observation that .....the distinguishing feature of our nineteenth century is not the triumph of science, but the triumph of the scientific method over science.

btw, Sherlock Holmes was a 'scientific-method'-ist first,  a detective later , the method amplified his talents and if you remember , if he weren't to be a detective, he'd have been a thief ( the tv series say pirate) , and while Doyle's stories are more pulp , The Philosophy of Sherlock Holmes identifies Victorian thought as the ground which gives rise to the bloom that resides at 221b... the squarest of the squares (hence the sener at women). A similar model was put forth by Jules Verne in Around the world in 80 days , a man who can plan a project so big ( a trip around the world) in precise steps and times ..... 

 cartesian abstraction as the source of square-ism, wholism was lost/ignored ( his-story/leviathan), deleuze - the latest knight of the method ?

 religion and alcohol , descartes and god, afterlife as opium, Deida's superior man advise about naked unadorned life (no scrolling on the pot) .... eastern religions help you go into the pain, western religions avoid

there is the thread of suffering tht runs through all the works of men

Puff the fractal dragon caught the error and Grew from naught again. Can you turn shit to sugar ? Or will you brood and get depressed at the unfairness of life, can turn your sorrows into wind of your sails ..

 There is only one treasure, and that is the self, from/to which all joys flow 

Saturn -  discipline, persistence, blue-collar-y

 Person Of Interest is Matrix meets Enemy of the State

And jn 2026,  it hasn't aged at all ... 

 was reading osborne's book on the maharishi's teachings. there's a dialogue with  a jesuit , who asks questions like 'i am finite, god is infinite.... how can i know god' , and then it hit where I had heard this before... 

 DAVID
		What was your idea Elijah?

Beat.

				 ELIJAH(soft)
		If there is someone like me
		in the world, and I'm at one
		end of the spectrum...
		Couldn't there be someone
		the opposite of me, at the
		other end?
			(beat)
		A person who can't be hurt
		like the rest of us. A kind
		of person they were talking
		about in those stories.

Elijah points at the framed comic sketches.

				 ELIJAH(soft)
		A person they believed was
		put here to protect the rest
		of us. Guard us.

and then I remembered what this sounded like ... this is actually just a rehash of Descartes' argument for the existence of God ...

so it looks like armies have been , since forever, carrying these arguments in their arsenal, persuading millions into membership by the simple device of looking decent, claiming to be holy, and presenting logical arguments ....

can you spot the fallacy in this ? would you be immune ?


 

 the human is like the hand

what he grasps he becomes

the hand that can let go

can grasp anything

 become anything 

it chooses

 pro-tip while meditating - since one needs to suppress the fault-finding mind, we just need to remember when we do meditation wrong, for eg, no zafu, no mudra, no 10 min -  so that it automatically becomes a full valid session !

 If you jump up fast enough and turn around, would you be able to see yourself in the past moment ? Youll have to whip faster than the speed of light though ... and become momentsrily infinitely heavy so that all yomama jokes suddenly become about you....

I think of light (or the speed of it ) as a primal consciousness; speeding it up causes time to slow down, ask any meditator ....

Meditation doesnt reverse ageing, a meditator has moved less through time, hence has aged less...

Similarly i think of the Huayen jewel net as  where each jewel is a shard of consciousness reflecting imperfectly.... as they 'purify' they becme clearer and clearer , and eventually turn invisible then insubstantial, dissolving into the substrate which turns out to be ..... more consciousness itself until everything collapses into a single point of itness.the world as we know it ,not being percieved anymore,  disappears snap,  like an old.memory...

Now reading intro to mahamudra (tibetan)

 The journey is the destination 

Therefore the ticket price is the integral of infinite sub journeys to each point in the journey, limit tending to zero and all that, yknow, and thanks to Zeno, we'll never arrive. Therefore, to arrive wt a destination is to never have travelled....

1 . god is infinite.

2. infinity contains the back of your head

3. you cannot see the back of your head

 hence, you can only know infinity minus the back of your head, which is mathematically, still infinity

therefore, when you do transcend, you can leave the back of your head behind

corollary : the back of your head is irrelevant

lemma : a person or conscious entity, when made entirely of backs of human heads, cannot achieve enlightenment

 buddhist sankaras are but yoga's samksaras

ability to compartmentalise mind space, and work in that mind space is a hard skill, especially if the compartment is to survive environment changes , like , beyond a room or office ... once this ability develops, the ability to de-compartmentalise gains importance ...

buddhism is therapy disguised as a religion ?

if doctors sold health, they would test insulin levels, but since they sell only cures, they test for sugar levels, something that justifies a prescribing

 oh no

the size of the playlist decides the amount of whisky that goes in ....

 i terribly regret the vast range of music i sampled in college, the sheer number of bands i am not unfamiliar with....

whisky me is such an awesome guy ... who'd have thought ...

in whisky veritas

i'm 16 again, letting the sounds of a new album flow in into my head.... what you'd call 'vibin'...

 What is the smallest thing that knows anything ? Everything knows something, like, even a table k ows where a plate is kept on it, and pushes it up...

What is the smallest thing that kmows it knows ...?

 Power comes from working at atleast  one level below that of the reality in front of us. 

Creativity, then, is misleading. A creative is just one who has more admin rights than you 

 i read matt might on gaining strength ( after reading matt might on weight loss), then i read sivers' summary on rippetoe  . But originally, I read some of Steve Maxwell's posts on this site, during a Singapore visit I'm sure ( or Kodai ? same as Jason Fung - something about these visits unlock a deep running current ...) and was impressed greatly by the combination of strength training, chi/prana, and minimalism as a way of life...

then i watched some baron videos on soviet training and diet 

now started doing dumbell bicep curls (5) whenever bored, or short on time and ideas for a workout...

yoga is the keystone habit and practice that makes all this possible, allowing for some level of strength and moving me beyond the man with body of clay  

after yoga, one is able to do some skipping in the morning. Usually in the mornings  (not mondays), the body is so stiff, that one needs a routine to un-stiff it. I wanted Shubananda's original starter 4 to fill this spot but too stiff. Now I do 3 sets of skipping -50,50,100, then wushu arm rotations, then if I remember, leg stretches, then Indian squats. These set the tone for the morning, and then dumbells become easily possible.

 what if you could indulge in your curiosity unlimited , day after day ?