No more working out loud…to get validation and permission from others.
Time for creating silently…to fully trust the experience happening through me.
Category: Notes
There’s a space of groundlessness in front of me. In fact, I can see myself standing within it.
Yet I don’t know how to get from here to there. I don’t know how to step into something seemingly right in front of me that I already seem to be within.
Perhaps it’s because I’m already within this space and it’s not a question of how do I step forwards into it but about how do I stop stepping away from it.
As we become more conscious of our thoughts and emotions and look at them with kindhearted interest and curiosity, we begin to see how we armor ourselves against pain. And we see how that armor also cuts us off from the pain—and the beauty—of other people. But as we let go of our repetitive stories and fixed ideas about ourselves—particularly deep-seated feelings of “I’m not okay”—the armor starts to fall apart, and we open into the spaciousness of our true nature, into who we really are beyond our transitory thoughts and emotions. We see that our armor is made up of nothing more than habits and fears, and we begin to feel that we can let those go.
Pema Chödrön, Living Beautifully: With Uncertainty and Change
Every living being, accordingly, grows and reaches out into the environment along the sum of its paths. To find one’s way is to advance along a line of growth, in a world which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, and whose future configuration can never be fully known. Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways, far from being inscribed upon the surface of an inanimate world, are the very threads from which the living world is woven.
Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment
BTW another apparent benefit to Apple’s newer chips being AI powerhouses which we can use locally on our desktop for our own AI assistant needs is that if Apple can make Siri a powerful localized AI in turn in the future then this could dramatically reduce the need for Cloud AI centres and the dramatic environmental cost required to run them.
Don’t try to change what has already been done.
Just change going forwards.
Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.
And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth