Just listened: Bill Frisell live at The Joint in 1986 🎵
I love weirdo guitar music, of which Bill is in the royal court. 🎸
Twang, clang, skrang
Just listened: Bill Frisell live at The Joint in 1986 🎵
I love weirdo guitar music, of which Bill is in the royal court. 🎸
Twang, clang, skrang
Finished reading: Snow Bones by Masaya Saito đź“š
I love haiku collections that expand the form. Here, narrative in verse.
Finished reading: Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips đź“š
Finished listening: Stephan Wolfram on AI on The Reason Interview podcast 🎧
Really enjoyed this episode.
Lots of thoughts started đź’
Finished listening: The Strange Case by Derek Kolstad 🎧
A post-Bourne reimagining of the source material.
I liked this version better.
Finished reading: The Daily Laws by Robert Greene đź“š
Finished reading: A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy đź“š
Finished reading: 365 Days of Meditations from Diogenes the Cynic and Aristippus the Cyrenaic by Frances Roseuvir đź“š
Finished reading: The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher đź“š
Finished reading: Reap3r by Eliot Peper đź“š
Another great Peper novel, really loving these.
Don’t Believe Everything You Think (Expanded Edition) by Joseph Nguyen đź“š
If you’ve kicked the tires on the mindfulness space before nothing in this book is likely to feel fresh and new. But it is a great all-in-one, no fluff read to remind you.
It boils down to: thoughts are great, thinking is where you get into trouble.
Or, as Joseph writes in the book: “Thoughts create. Thinking destroys.”
There are a lot of parallels to Steven Pressfield’s Resistance.
He recommends a “five-step process to help you let go of your thinking, which you’ll notice conveniently spells out the acronym PAUSE.”
Suffering comes not from our emotions but from the thinking we attach to the emotions.
There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation.
Thoughts lead to goals rooted in inspiration.
Thinking leads to goals rooted in desperation.
The value of a daily practice towards your goals is the daily part:
What matters is not how long you are doing it each day but that you are doing it to some capacity every day.
One step forward every day.
A question to guide your goal setting:
If I had infinite money, had no fear, and didn’t feel the need to receive any recognition, what would I do or create?
or
What are some of your favorite ways to express your creativity?
Allow your true dreams to reveal themselves without shutting them down. To a mind without the limits of thinking, anything is possible.
Philosopher Sydney Banks once said, “Thought is not reality, yet it is through thought that our realities are created."
The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking.
the moment we stop thinking is when our happiness begins.
Our mind’s duty is to keep us alive. Our consciousness’s duty is to help us feel fulfilled
Your mind’s job is to anticipate threats. Your body’s job is to regulate the resulting emotions
the path to self-actualization
isn’t to try to improve ourselves
because we think we’re not enough
but to let go of the illusion
that we’re not already enough as we are
Positive emotions are not a byproduct of thinking but the organic result of being fully in the present moment and connected to life rather than thinking about it.
Only in the present moment can the truth be found
Space has the illusion of emptiness on the surface. It is not empty but filled with infinite possibilities for us to choose a new experience of life.
Instead of looking for right or wrong, good or bad, look for truth without judgment
What you obtain externally can always be lost, but what you find within yourself can never be taken away.
Nothing that grows can stay the same—especially you.
It’s not what we have but how we feel inside that is the true measure of success, joy, and fulfillment.
We have the gift of imagination, which means our creative potential is limitless, but we create stress for ourselves when we think we need to figure out “the how” to make it happen
Judgment closes the mind, while questions open it.
what we do not question
controls us
what we question
frees us
Living life through non-thinking is accepting reality as it is instead of what we think it should be.
Your mind is the greatest salesperson and knows exactly what to say to lure you back into its vicious cycle of destructive thinking
When we let go of needing reasons to love one another, there is no end to how much love we can discover.
“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.” —Louis L’Amour
truth is not something you think but something you know and feel deep in your sou
Although our fear will tell us that we are afraid of external things, such as a negative event, really what we fear is how we imagine we’ll feel if an undesired outcome happens. Fear is internal, not external.
To overcome fear, you must question what it is you are truly afraid of and then see the truth behind this fear—that it is an illusion designed to keep us in our comfort zones and nothing more
Finished reading: Don’t Believe Everything You Think (Expanded Edition) by Joseph Nguyen đź“š
For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
via Kyla Scanlon
Finished reading: Wonder Woman Vol. 2 by Tom King đź“š
Poetry tends to abolish time and present experience as dense and compressed. Prose is society’s enabler, it collaborates with it in its linearity. A poem sends you back into itself repeatedly, a story leads you on.
Finished reading: Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Outlaw by Tom King đź“š
Shelved: Mind’s Eye by Douglas E. Richards đź“š
I got bogged down by exposition and had to put this aside, but not before making a highlight.
the mind is the last bastion of privacy we have. If this is ever breached, society self-destructs,
Finished reading: Foundry by Eliot Peper đź“š
This one was a lot of fun.
Finished playing: Monument Valley 2 🎮
Soothing puzzling, if you find Escher soothing.
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh đź“š
Found this book via Ryan Holiday and it reminded me of the Pearl Protocol.
the curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.
Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego. Perhaps one can shed at this stage in life as one sheds in beach-living; one’s pride, one’s false ambitions, one’s mask, one’s armor.
We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, overreaching and overstraining ourselves in the unnatural effort.
It has a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. It has an easy unforced rhythm.
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules.
One must accept the security of the wingèd life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.
each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.
For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.
And when I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.
usually select the known, seldom the strange.
Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding
Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world.
what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?
Finished reading: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh đź“š
Finished playing: Paper Trail 🎮
Played on iOS via Netflix Games