Benji
@benji
Benji
• When we’re using technology, other practitioners or psychedelics we urgently need to consider the impact on our free will.
• Who is doing the work? When Jung was asked about psychedelics he warned us to “beware unearned wisdom.”
• Then afterwards, who is interpreting the results for you?
• How embodied and integrated is the wisdom received?
• The distractive potential of tech is well understood.
• But as we move into an era of increasingly advanced consciousness tech, the risk is that we accidentally outsource the development of our souls.
• Conventionally, right speech means you pay attention to your speech, noticing if there are occasions where you are not exactly being truthful, you’re being harsh, or what you’re saying is divisive. Or maybe it’s just idle small talk, not amounting to much.
• My teacher said, “This is all good. But what will help you most of all is to taste silence.” I asked him why. He said, “When you learn how to live in even a little bit of silence and feel the beauty of it, the sacredness of it, then as soon as you open your mouth, you realize you’re wrong. No matter what you say, even if you use the most refined speech, it’s a crude instrument for expressing the deep experiences of being alive.”
• The more you listen and become sensitive to your speech, the more you taste silence. And the more you drink and taste the beauty of silence—real stillness—sometimes you don’t even want to speak. If you do speak, you want to say something that, in a sense, doesn’t sully the silence. Put another way, you hear when your speech is off, when there are false notes. You become more sensitive both in noticing what is not true and in being vulnerable, fragile
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.—
James Joyce • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (AmazonClassics Edition)
quit brainrot. unfollow trolls. read essays. go down rabbit holes. have a calendar. maintain a todo list. read old books. watch old movies. turn on dnd. walk with intent. eat without youtube. chew more. train without music. plan for 15 mins. execute. organise your desk. take something seriously. read ancient scripts. act fast. find bread. eat... See more
gaurav • Tweet
We start out knowing nothing on the left, learn a lot from books and move to the middle, and then learn enough from experience, if we’re lucky, to end up on the right.
From intuition due to lack of alternatives, to reason, to intuition backed by knowledge.
I think that's where we are: moving past the stranglehold of the dogmatic rational materialist... See more
From intuition due to lack of alternatives, to reason, to intuition backed by knowledge.
I think that's where we are: moving past the stranglehold of the dogmatic rational materialist... See more
Packy McCormick • The Return of Magic
One last thought about Heinlein’s “dying culture” claim: Is it true that our culture is dying, given all the rudeness? And if so, are we too far gone to turn it around? On many days, things do look bleak, as online nastiness seems to become the dominant style. But my personal defense mechanism also aims to act as a countercultural force: I see... See more