Joseph

Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world.

a rate of con-sumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that be-comes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info 1

Economic miracles stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but... See more

For us a "long time" can be almost anything- ten or twenty years, two or three months, a few weeks, or even a couple of days. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to th ink of a "long time" in terms of th ousands of years or even an endless period. A colleague once described their conceptualization of time as follows:... See more

“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,”

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous.