Tuesday, 31 December 2024
Don’t just eat. Dine. H Mecter
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“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don't have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”
― Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
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Trauma helps us to grow
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“For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”
― Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
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The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.”
― Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
― Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
There are better things ahead than any we leave behind." - C.S. Lewis
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AEROPLANE
on final approach—wheels down as a quarter of a million pounds of steel glides down at 130 miles per hour
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Psdelics as telescope to One Mind
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“The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”
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Monday, 30 December 2024
AB X MEMORY LOSS People who have the blood type AB could be more likely to suffer memory loss with age.
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নিজের মত প্রতিষ্ঠা করতে অন্যকে অসম্মান কেন?
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No overall plan No global telos. BK
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“The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
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Digital circus x Human condition
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Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir”
― The Kite Runner
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Sunday, 29 December 2024
All sorts make the world
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Catholic priest Thomas Keating points out that contemplation can’t get rid of suffering; it simply allows you to see it on a larger canvas, to put it in perspective. To remember that nothing lasts forever and that reality, sad to say, is seldom without setbacks and sorrows.- PI
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DMHC. K mama over O mama
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Society is itself an education in the extrovert values, and rarely has there been a society that has preached them so hard. No man is an island, but how John Donne would writhe to hear how often, and for what reasons, the thought is so tiresomely repeated. —WILLIAM WHYTE
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Saturday, 28 December 2024
MAL
The question of whether “Mind at Large” is equivalent to God depends on how one defines “God” and interprets Aldous Huxley’s concept. Here are a few perspectives to consider:
1. Theological and Mystical View
• If “God” is understood as a universal, infinite consciousness or a transcendent source of all being, then “Mind at Large” could align with such a concept.
• Mystical traditions (e.g., Sufism, Advaita Vedanta, and Christian mysticism) often describe experiences of unity with a divine presence that feels all-encompassing, much like the unfiltered awareness of “Mind at Large.”
• Huxley himself was influenced by the Perennial Philosophy, which posits that all religions point to the same ultimate truth. In this sense, “Mind at Large” could be a way to experience or connect with that divine reality.
2. Philosophical Perspective
• If “God” is seen as an abstract principle—like the ground of all being (à la Spinoza or Tillich)—then “Mind at Large” could be interpreted as the consciousness that connects all existence.
• Huxley’s description leans more toward a pantheistic or panentheistic idea of God, where the divine is present in everything and accessible through altered states or profound insight.
3. Huxley’s Interpretation
• Huxley stops short of explicitly equating “Mind at Large” with God in the traditional religious sense. Instead, he seems to describe it as a fundamental aspect of reality that can be accessed through the removal of mental filters. Whether this is divine depends on one’s personal belief system.
4. Scientific Interpretation
• Some might interpret “Mind at Large” not as a deity but as the collective or universal consciousness underlying all reality. This could align with certain non-theistic frameworks, such as those found in Buddhism or modern metaphysics.
5. Personal and Subjective Experience
• For those who have mystical or psychedelic experiences, the encounter with the “Mind at Large” often feels divine. Terms like “God,” “universe,” or “infinite love” are commonly used to describe the overwhelming sense of interconnectedness and transcendence.
Ultimately, whether “Mind at Large” is God depends on whether you view this universal consciousness as divine or simply as a profound aspect of reality.
Mind at Large
“Mind at Large” is a term popularized by Aldous Huxley in his seminal work The Doors of Perception (1954). It refers to a broader, expansive state of consciousness that transcends the ordinary, filtered perception of reality.
Huxley suggests that the brain, rather than being a generator of consciousness, acts as a “reducing valve” that filters out much of the overwhelming information from the world, allowing humans to focus on survival-related tasks. Psychedelic experiences, meditation, or other altered states can temporarily disable this filter, allowing individuals to access the “Mind at Large” — a more universal and unfiltered awareness.
“Shake the tree,” my mom advised. “You never know what will fall out.” Put another way: It never hurts to ask. I shook the tree this year and some great things came about: a new mentor, a penalty waived for a late submission, a free plate of zeppoles. — Jennifer Suzukawa-Tseng
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1600 MATERIALISM REDUCTIONISM
But the change encompassed much more than just cosmology. Magical thinking was on the decline, mechanistic thinking was on the rise, science was becoming grounded in mathematics, and the first dedicated “scientific societies” would soon be flourishing in London and Paris. It is instructive to look at the year 1600: As it happens, the year was something of a transitional year for Shakespeare; it is the year of Hamlet, the work that marks the end of the playwright’s learning curve, and his coming of age as the leading dramatist of his day. It was also a big year (or at least, the start of a big decade) for science. In his book It Started with Copernicus, Howard Margolis lists some of the discoveries that came to light in, or close to, 1600: The distinction between electricity and magnetism; the law of free fall; the law of inertia; the idea of the Earth as a magnet; the theory of lenses; the laws of planetary motion; Galileo’s telescopic discoveries; the law of hydrostatic pressure; the law of the swing of the pendulum. That is quite a list. Revolution or not, something big does seem to have been going on.*
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Even one step a day gets you 365 steps farther in a year. — Andie Daniels,
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With anything young and tender the most important part of the task is the beginning of it; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression more readily taken. —PLATO, THE REPUBLIC
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GOP X CBMO X AVOID B2A X VF FREE TO CHOOSE ATTITUDE FTCA
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HAMLET
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause
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undisputed lords of the Brahmaputra for 600 years, undefeated in 17 attacks from the Mughal empire, the last of which was an epic river battle between the Ahom general Lachit Borphukan fighting in the army of the Ahom king Udayaditya Singha and the Amber Kachwaha Rajput general raja Ram Singh I under the banner of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb. The Battle of Saraighat sealed the fate of the Mughal empire in Ahom territory; the Ahoms could not be defeated. One of the big missing links in our strategic pedagogy is lack of research on war strategies in Indian history. We keep looking at the Peloponnissian War. Maybe we would be better off understanding the war strategies of the Ahoms versus the Mughals rather than Athens versus Sparta.
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Friday, 27 December 2024
A. Professional. Abhyas x Vairagya
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“There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”
― Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
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“I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas. It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They're valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.”
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B. Emptiness
Knowing that everything is empty is only half the battle.
Essentially Madhyamika says that there are two truths. There is the ultimate truth of emptiness, which is essentially ontological ambiguity, or interconnectedness in the positive sense. Then there is the conventional or provisional truth. This truth is your existence as a person or being.
So you don't dispense of one or the other. If you dispense of emptiness and focus on the provisional you fall into eternalism. If you dispense of the provisional and focus on the ultimate you fall into nihilism. This is why the Madhyamika literally means middle or center.
So how do you come to the middle? It is because both truths are valid at the exact same time as one complete truth.
Be careful not to impose on Madhyamika theories of the yogacara school/philosophical tradition. Madhyamika does not say that things do not exist, outside the mind or otherwise. When the madhyamika tradition says things are real or unreal it means in relation to an inherent, eternal self. It does not mean that you don't exist, or that the world is a hologram.
I think you are stuck with emptiness, which is one of the big warnings philosophers like Nagarjuna warned people to avoid.
Tiantai and Tendai thought goes one step further to posit a Center or Middle that unified all this together into a beautiful doctrine.
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“When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”
― Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
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“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.”
― Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
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Pearl S Buck. One faces the future with one's past.
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Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again. —ANAÏS NIN
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Lyf. Perfectly imperfect
Nothing is permanent, everything stays with us for a reason.
2. Life never goes without facing problems.
3. In most of the cases, you will have to suffer from heartbreak.
4.With each passing year you are becoming older.
5.No one can love you more than your parents.
6.Difficulties increases as we grow older.
7.Each one have to die one day so live your life to the fullest.
8.You can’t keep happy to each and every person who are in your life.
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I think God exists in the minds of men, and nowhere else, while the Universe is a different thing altogether. "God is all, and all is God," is just a human attempt to expand a concept, but it is still just a concept. However, the Universe is real and powerful (dare I say "omnipotent? "), and therefore much more worthy of reverence than a mere "concept.
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Thursday, 26 December 2024
ROAD 2 ELSEWHERE
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AJ
A young woman, wearing a gown, little disturbed with pain, yet happy, walked out of the hospital gate, holding her husband's hands.
Followed by an aged couple, holding their little baby, not more than a few days old, sleeping comfortably in the hands of his grand mother.
They were smiling, laughing and celebrating.
They bowed their heads in front of the small temple near the gate, and thanked God for the priceless gift of new life.
A few hours later, a dissapointed middle aged woman walked out of the same gate.
Her eyes had tears, face was wrinkled and head was down.
Looked silent and hopeless.
Then followed a dead body of her husband, wrapped in a white cloth, lying peacefully on a stretcher.
She held his hands tight for the final time before the body was loaded in the ambulance.
Before leaving, she bowed down in front of the same temple and a few tears rolled down her eyes.
Amidst all this, a security guard was watching this picture of life and death, again and again, on a loop, every single day.
After working for a few years, he realised that life is just a big illusionary Zero.
We start the journey with a loud cry and a heartiest welcome.
Slowly create a temporary Identity called “me”.
Knit it with everything else in the world.
And then try to make it bigger than everything else.
We believe that we are moving straight on a road which would never end.
But in reality all we do is to cover the circumference of the big circle.
And irrespective of whatever we achieve or lose, whoever we love or hate, whatever we experience.
One day, we simply reach back at square one, and everything becomes a big zero again.
A few tears fall on the ground, and soon life forgets us like an old used wrapper.
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MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY
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“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift.” |
| — Albert Einstein A A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. —WILLIAM JAMES A |
MASK IF COUGH X DTH ETRNL OBLVN DEO
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Barry you are absolutely right I’m am a recently retired ex NHS employee who was the infection control lead for a community base in North London. If we all wore a mask when we have a cough, sneezing, generally feeling rough when we are out and about plus using hand gel and washing our hands regularly and thoroughly there would be a lot less sickness. I think it is partly due to apathy because people think they will get over it but what they don’t realise is that flu kills and kills normal healthy people, The other part is the I can’t be bothered attitude what they don’t realise that the young healthy person who is coughing and sneezing can infect the elderly person who is beside them and has lowered immunity. I have severe respiratory disease which will one day end my life but having spent time in intensive care there is nothing like it realising that potentially your life is going to end. I think a hard hitting NHS public campaign might help,
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n east Asia you will see people wearing masks when they are not well more civilized system
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As much as I want to tell you there is an afterlife, it is my firm belief that all we face after death is eternal oblivion, and as much I want to believe my recently deceased Father still exists in some form, I must be realistic and accept he's lost to us forever…..Once Brain death occurs, all we were on life is extinguished forever…. We are a part of the cycle of life, we live, we die, just as our Sun and planet Earth will do in the very distant future…. Nothing in this Universe is eternal, so no heaven, no afterlife and no loved ones awaiting us on the other side…. Why have a physical body that withers and dies, leaving behind grieving loved ones if we can exist in a spiritual realm… .That would be cruel and make no sense whatsoever….I really do wish I am mistaken, but I just don't see how consciousness can possibly exist outside the Brain, and seen no concrete evidence to suggest I'm wrong in my belief…. NDE’s are just as the name suggests, NEAR, not actual death….. A person who is truly Brain dead cannot be brought back as Brain death is irreversible, so death sadly is game over… I fully understand why there are those who believe there's 'more' after we die as it brings them comfort…. I guess I'll know the truth when I die, except I won't because I'll be dead and unaware…. If by some miracle I'm shown concrete proof there is an afterlife, I will be the first to admit I was wrong, but I don't see that ever happening as much as I would like it to…
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