“In this global pandemic, we’re in an era of isolation, retreat. We’re also in an era of heightened uncertainty. This can be a terrible thing, and drive us to loneliness and distraction … or it can be a time of practice, reflection, and deepening.”
“It’s hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speelycaptor (video recorder) at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.”
— ANATHEM (Neal Stephenson)
My first blog post back in 2002 was a quote from Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case. I’m rereading the book for the umpteenth time and came across the following which… resonates.
“Early on I made up my mind not to die of anything but old age. Stopped smoking because I was afraid of the cancer. Swore off booze because I was scared of driving my car into a tree. Gave up hunting because I was scared of blowing my own head off. Quit chasing trim because I was afraid of being murdered by a jealous husband. Shaved the odds, is what I set out to do. Missed out on a ton of fun, but that’s all right. All my friends are planted in the ground and here I am!”
“The playfulness and joy of a dog, its unconditional love and readiness to celebrate life at any moment, often contrast sharply with the inner state of the dog’s owner — depressed, anxious, burdened by problems, lost in thought, not present in the only place and only time there is: Here and Now. One wonders: living with this person, how does the dog manage to remain so sane, so joyous?”
— Eckhart Tolle
The following quote is from Steven Levy’s new book, Facebook: The Inside Story.
“We’ve actually built an AI that’s more powerful than the human mind and we hid it from all of society by calling it something else,” Harris says. “By calling it the Facebook News Feed, no one noticed that we’d actually built an AI that’s completely run loose and out of control.” Harris says that using the News Feed is like fighting an unbeatable computer chess player—it knows your weaknesses and beats you every time.”
— Tristan Harris (former Google interface engineer)
“In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. It is beyond the mental categories of good and bad. You cannot understand it through thought, but you can sense it when you let go of thought, become still and alert, and don’t try to understand or explain. Only then can you be aware of the sacredness of the forest. As soon as you sense that hidden harmony, that sacredness, you realize you are not separate from it, and when you realize that, you become a conscious participant in it. In this way, nature can help you become realigned with the wholeness of life.”
— Eckhart Tolle
The word/concept “light” comes up frequently in my reading and contemplation. So I asked Google Drive to search my notes for any document containing the word. It pleases me that I can do this. It seems that each time I stumble across one of these excerpts, it’s fresh and newly relevant for where/what I am.
As long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace — immersed in the deep silence of reality.#
There is only light and light is all. Everything else is but a picture made of light. Life and death, self and not-self — abandon all these ideas
Just as light destroys darkness by its very presence, so does the absolute destroy imagination.
In the immensity of consciousness a light appears, a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like a pen writing on paper. And the ink that leaves a trace is memory. You are that tiny point and by our movement the world is ever re-created. Stop moving, and there will be no world.
The light of consciousness passes through the film of memory and throws pictures on your brain. Because of the deficient and disordered state of your brain, what you perceive is distorted and coloured by feelings of like and dislike.
— I Am That (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)
“If you look up at the faint smudge in the night sky that is really the distant, huge Andromeda galaxy, you might see light that, from your point of view, took two million years to traverse hat vast intergalactic distance before it was absorbed in your retina and registered as an image. For a beam of light itself, however, things look different. Instead of radiating from some star in the Andromeda galaxy and racing through space for two million years, every single photon sees itself, metaphorically speaking, as born and instantaneously absorbed in your eye. It is one simple jump that takes no time at all, according to the theory of special relativity. That’s because, in the reference frame of a particle traveling at the speed of light, all distances shrink to zero and all time collapses to nothing. From its own perspective, the photon of light leaps instantaneously from there to here because distance has no place in its existence. We can almost say that the photon was created because it had someplace to land and, in an instant, it jumped from there to here, even across two million light years of space from our perspective.”
— The God Theory (Bernard Haisch)
“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.”
— Ten Zen Questions (Susan Blackmore)
“(Your mind) is like having some maniac walk through the front door of your house and follow you from room to room and refuse to stop talking. And this happens every day of your life.”
— Sam Harris
“Journalism is partisan now. Can’t help it. Just being ethical and educated is now a partisan position. We weren’t raised to believe that, but it’s the new reality.”
— Dave Winer
Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. Does the following excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s novel, Cryptonomicon (punished in 1999) sound familiar?
“Here’s how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It’s about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place—they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself, and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It’s highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.”