For the sake of understanding, try to drop any preconceived metaphysical or theoretical ideas of how reality is. Focus purely on your direct sensuous awareness of reality, your conscious experience.
“I know you.” Consider, in the context of your direct conscious experience, the meaning of that sentence. What you are really saying is “I know what I think of you, my thought of you, my image of you.” So in terms of sheer intuitive understanding, who you know, or perhaps what you know, is an expression of yourself–you know your own interpretation/compartmentalization of your conscious experience.
How could I, the image that exists in your mind, possibly exist without you? I am a projection of your mind, a projection of you. So who are you? You’re essentially who everyone tells you who you are. And the circle continues by realizing that everyone who told you who you are is simply a projection of your own consciousness, your own self–this is the ultimate self that Hinduism boils down to, and this is the relationship between all beings.
So when you go ahead and say “I know you are separate from me.” What you are saying is “I know my idea of my own conscious experience is separate from me.” So you truly cannot love yourself, and likewise know true peace, unless you love everything as yourself because every “thing” is just another image you’ve created of your own conscious being. You’ve created everything and are everything, eternally."
An den Tagen, an denen wir beisammen waren, gab es keinen Schimmer von Dunkel am Himmel. Wir würden uns am späten Nachmittag treffen, so spät, dass wir keinen Kaffee mehr trinken konnten, aber so früh, dass wir uns noch nicht nach dem Abendbrot sehnten. Meistens waren wir zu viert oder zu fünft. Es gab keinen harten Kern, jeder der einmal bei uns war, würde ein andermal fragen, was er verpasst hatte.
Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn’t matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.
This doesn’t map well onto human experience of memory, which is fuzzy. We don’t remember anything with perfect fidelity, but we’re also not at risk of waking up having forgotten our own name. Memories tend to fade with time, and we remember only the more salient events.
Last year I started reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. While I was reading it, I was struck at how many of the entries were just simple reminders to himself. Don’t get mad at people unnecessarily. Remember that you are just one of many. Don’t get distracted.
He was making the same mistakes over and over, just like I was.
I thought that writing down what I learned would help it stick. Every time I wanted to add a new tidbit, I would review all of them. It worked much better than I thought it would: it brought issues to the forefront of my mind that I wasn’t considering. This was especially helpful when I was in a rush or under stress. […]
This reminds me a lot of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”.
In the first chapter he talks about how successful people often sit once or twice a week and write down the mistakes they made in order that they might make them less in the future.
We must not mistake the “computer revolution” for anything like a political revolution as various leftist traditions have understood it. The only way to achieve the political ends we pursue is to be absolutely clear about what those ends are. Putting the technological means for achieving them ahead of clear consideration of the ends is not merely putting the cart before the horse; it is trusting in a technological determinism that has never been and will never be conducive to the pursuit of true human freedom.
