Nor again will I pretend that, as Bacon asserts, “the pleasure and delight of knowledge and learning far surpasseth all other in nature.” This is too much the language of a salesman crying his own wares. The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections; and therefore, especially in the season of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is likely enough to be neglected and lightly esteemed in comparison with other pursuits offering much stronger immediate attractions. But the pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time.
Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life
A collection of notes on Wisdom.
The end of the cycle is that of the independent, clear-minded, all-seeing Child. That is the level known as wisdom.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.
There are two wisdoms: the first inclines to action, the second to inaction.Stanislaw Lem, Cyberiada
five rings
- Think of what is right and true.
- Practice and cultivate the sciences.
- Become acquainted with the arts.
- Know the principles of the crafts.
- Understand the harm and benefit in every thing.
- Work to see every thing clearly.
- Pay attention to subtleties.
- Be careful even in small matters.
- Don't do anything useless.
Gurdjieff's self-remembering
Put simply, one is to remember themselves as much as possible. A portion of your conscious action should be of being conscious of being conscious of being. Self-remembering and being-present are not the same, though abstractly they serve the same purpose. When one becomes overly emotional, overly attached, or identified with some idea of brand to the extent of a personal automatism, they have lost their self - they have forgotten themselves.
When the Hyperpresent begins to attend to your reality, begins to barrage you with the minute and incessant comings-and-goings of modernity, do not let your self be pulled by that which you never asked for in the first place. Remember to self-remember. Remember yourself, focus on being. Whether or not there is an emotion, a thought, a presence, an analysis, there is still something observing, and that which is observing you should turn your attention towards.
A collection of notes in regard to Inaction.
Silence, it has been said by one writer, is a virtue which renders us agreeable to our fellow-creatures. Wu Wei means without doing, causing, or making. It flows like water, reflects like a mirror, and responds like an echo.
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.Tolstoy
What is joy? Joy is the feeling of passing from a lesser to a greater perfection. Joy is the feeling that we are advancing towards happiness. What is happiness? Happiness is the state of the soul that feels itself free of all outside servitudes and feels itself in perfect accord with itself.
- Establishment of an always perfect tolerance, irrespective of the actions and words of others towards oneself.
- Truthfulness (to say only what is right).
- Rejection of hatred and worship. Not to follow any particular idea. Maintaining the mind in equanimity.
Many people are afraid of Emptiness,
because it reminds them of Loneliness.
They suppose Hesiod as knowing most, who indeed did not recognize that day and night were one.
If you feel like everyone hates you, you need to sleep. If you feel like you hate everyone else, you need to eat.
health knowledge
- Eat varied foods, biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields.
- Pay more for foods grown or raised less intensively and with more care, eat less.
- Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Cook, and if you can, plant a garden.
- Avoid food products with unpronounceable ingredients, or more than five in number.
- Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
Because when an organ is working properly, you don't feel it. If you see your eye, you've got cataract. If you hear your ears, you've got singing in your ears, you know, getting in the way of hearing. When you are fully functioning, you are unaware of the organ. When you're thinking clearly, your brain isn't getting in your way.Alan Watts
Tummo is a combination of breathing and visualization techniques, used to enter into a state of meditation that is used to increase a person’s inner heat.
Box Breathing
- Expel all of the air from your lungs.
- Keep them empty for four seconds.
- Inhale through your nose for four seconds.
- Hold for four four seconds, don’t clamp down or create pressure.
Sitali Breathing
Roll your tongue, curling the sides in towards the center to form a tube (or a taco shape). Stick the end of the tongue out between your pursed lips. If you can’t roll your tongue, purse your lips instead, making a small “o” shape with your mouth. In this case, keep your tongue against the back side of your bottom teeth so that the air you are drawing in passes over it. Or, place your tongue on the roof of the mouth by sliding it back to rest on the ridge behind your top teeth.
Inhale slowly through the tube formed by your tongue as if you were sipping air through a straw. Let the breath expand your chest and fill your belly. If your lips are pursed in an "o" shape, channel the air through that opening. Close your mouth and exhale slowly through your nose.
Tummo Meditation
Use stress to go to a higher state of consciousness, not a relaxed state of mind.
Involves systematic physical exercises and techniques of concentration, visualization, breath practice and meditation. The breathing, which in tummo practice is forceful and involves abdominal and pelvic muscle contractions allows people to increase their core body temperature to a certain point. In tummo meditation, practitioners conjure intense visualization and mental images, such as flames, and imagine sensations of intense heat. This visualization allows practitioners to override the body's automatic cooling response, allowing them to push past their typical threshold.
A collection of notes in regard to Action.
Ahimsa, or Cause no injury, do no harm, is a Buddhist concept referred to as nonviolence, and it applies to all living beings — including all animals. Also, the limits of non-violence.
- Control of actions and speech to avoid unwholesome actions.
- Effort to work as much as possible for the good of others, even at the risk of one's life.
- Decision to devote oneself to beneficial actions and to remain steadfast on it.
- Maintaining a state of mind turned to the happiness of others, to practise love for all beings without exception.
- Development of knowledge and understanding through study and analytical reflection. To teach knowledge to others. To use one's wisdom for a maximum of benefits.
- You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors.
- The creatures who act as though they belong to the world follow the peace-keeping law, they give the creatures around them a chance to grow toward watever it's possible for them to become. That's how man came into being, the australopithecus didn't imagine that the world belonged to them, so they let him live and grow.
- You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.
Be mindful of impermanence.
Be careful of idleness.
What I tell my students, when they feel singularly unfortunate to be born in this moment, is this is your moment, the moment your soul showed up incarnate. In this world. It is an astonishing moment to be alive. You could have been born into a lull — instead you were born into a tipping point. It’s your one life and you’ve entered it at a flexion point — a point when everything you do matters. How often in history does a soul get to live in such an era? Don’t waste it. Show up for it. With everything you’ve got.
Some will invent, some will organize, some will witness, some will grieve, some will console. Live this life now. Even if in fury and grief, live it. You don’t want to die not having lived. It’s incredibly easy to find a way around experience rather than through it. But you will have cheated yourself out of your only possession: your life. You are here now. Now is the time to live fully, not hide, not escape.
Jorie Graham- Deliberate practice: Focused, consistent and goal-oriented training. It favours quality over quantity. It knows not all practice is created equal.
- Perfect Duty: Perfect duties are duties that are blameworthy if not met, as they are a basic required duty for a human being.
- Maxim: A concise expression of a fundamental moral rule or principle.
- Surrogate Activity: An activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward.
- Wabisabi: Acknowledgement that nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and that nothing is perfect.
Types of Fun
Into which category a given experience falls, of course, is highly subjective and highly subject to shifts (particularly from III to II) born of the rosy reflections afforded us by the passage of time. Which is probably a good thing. After all, as alpinists and mothers both know: It doesn’t have to be “fun” to be fun.
- Type I fun: Type 1 fun is enjoyable while it’s happening. Also known as, simply, fun. Good food, powder skiing, margaritas.
- Type II fun: is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect. It usually begins with the best intentions, and then things get carried away. Riding your bicycle across the country. Doing an ultramarathon. Working out till you puke, and, usually, ice and alpine climbing.
- Type III fun: is not fun at all. Not even in retrospect. Afterward, you think, “What in the hell was I doing? If I ever come up with another idea that stupid, somebody slap some sense into me.” Many alpine climbs. Failed relationships that lacked Type I fun. Offwidths. Writing a book.
When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create.Why the Lucky Stiff
One must first place oneself from the point of view of Epicurus and distinguish natural from imaginary needs. When we are able to despise in practice all that is unnecessary to life, when we will disdain luxury and comfort, when we will savor the physical pleasure that come from simple food and drink.
The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.
Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.'
Said Diogenes, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king'
You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today's. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.
Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction.
design knowledge
- Good design makes a product useful.
- Good design makes a product understandable.
- Good design is unobtrusive.
- Good design is honest.
- Good design is long-lasting.
- Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
- Good design is environmentally friendly.
- Good design is as little design as possible.
design pragnanz
- The mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point.
- The mind perceives objects that are near, or proximate to each other, to be grouped together.
- The mind can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory, on average.
- The mind has a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
- The mind remembers uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.
- The mind will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible.
- The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
- The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters
writing knowledge
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign or scientific word, if you can think of an English equivalent.
- Never use a figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
programming practices
- Prototype before polishing. Get it working before optimizing it.
- Separate policy from mechanism, separate interfaces from engines.
- Write simple modular parts connected by clean interfaces.
- Design programs to be connected to other programs.
- Write programs to write programs when you can.
- Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.
- In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
- When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
- When a program must fail, it should fail noisily and as soon as possible.
- Write big programs only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
- Consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new.
A collection of notes on Work.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.Parkinson's law
The fisherman replied, "Oh, just a short while."
"Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?" The businessman was astonished.
"This is enough to feed my whole family," the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, "So, what do you do for the rest of the day?"
The fisherman replied, "Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night."
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
"I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches."
The fisherman continues, "And after that?"
The businessman laughs heartily, "After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich."
The fisherman asks, "And after that?"
The businessman says, "After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!"
The fisherman was puzzled, "Isn’t that what I am doing now?"
/classic Brazilian story
work knowledge
- Find your passion and figure out how to get paid for it.
- Do whatever you want to do, but be the best at it.
- Strive for simplicity and competence, but embrace the messiness along the way.
- Under-promise and over-deliver, and own up to your screw-ups.
- Doing what everybody else is doing feels like the safest thing to do, making it the most competitive, and thus the riskiest.
- No one is on their deathbed is wishing they spent more time at work.
- Never stop learning.
work habits
- Doing the right tasks is more important than doing your tasks efficiently.
- Write down your goals. Break them down into manageable tasks.
- Tackle one task at a time, and group similar tasks together.
- You're more attentive in the morning, tackle hard stuff then.
- If you can't do it in 8 hours, you can't do it in 10.
- Don't forget to stretch, and drink plenty of water.
- Keep a record of your time use.
work charisma
- Always look a person in the eye when you talk to them.
- Always stand up to shake someone's hand.
- Be conscious of your body language.
- Ask more than you answer.
- First impressions matter.
- When you walk, look straight ahead, not at your feet.
- Never hit anyone unless they are an immediate threat.
- No matter their job or status, everyone deserves your respect.
incoming: action