Bawa

“To live is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday is not to feel—it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost. To erase everything from the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each

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Another thing to consider when trying to become perceptive is that the way you learn in school—where the material is sequenced in a curriculum so that you are first exposed to simple examples and later to more complex ones—tends to make you less perceptive. Following a curriculum, you build mental models by processing simple examples, and then... See more

the whole notion of science is not that we attain states of intellectual consensus, but that we have a true reflection of the phenomena. So then here’s a case where this becomes more important: the speed of light. The speed of light in the general and special theory of relativity is specified to be a constant. So, since 1908, the speed of light has... See more

The hard part about table selection IRL is that choosing easier tables feels like admitting weakness. There's more social status in losing at the hard table than winning at the easy one. How many people stay at McKinsey getting absolutely crushed when they could be the star player at a mid-size company?

It makes me think of the quote by Vladimir Horowitz: "If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip practice for three days, the world notices."

So habit, rather than law, has the curious effect of invigorating the universe and making it not something static, like a piece of furniture—or as Newton imagined it: a divine clock; a machine built by God and then set going to the last tick of eternity. But if habit is to replace law, then the universe is more like an organism. It’s more like a... See more

Culture is a closed system of thinking and values, of the sort I am denouncing. And the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency, is your culture. And I realize with joy that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness, because everyone is running around saying, you know, “Recapture your roots, get in touch with... See more