Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
From an interview between David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace in 1996.
DFW: Oh—the reason why I think you oughta do a book about TV, is this problem is not gonna go away. I don’t know about you, but in ten or fifteen years, we’re gonna have virtual reality pornography. Now, if I don’t develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure
... See more
We all come to practice with questions, perhaps the most basic of which is “Why am I suffering?” We also come to practice with our private answers to that question, answers that involve blaming ourselves or others, or which catch us in endless cycles of hope and disappointment. These answers lie buried within our minds as grim unconscious beliefs,
... See moreBarry Magid • Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide
I have been studying this work for the past thirteen years with them and consider it the root of everything I do. It is the way I fine-tune my attention to hold more, to expand my capacity to hold more grief, more news, more information, more joy.
In the studio, we practiced saying yes—not passively, but actively—yes to complexity, to contradiction,
... See moreA regular sitting practice makes all those aspects of life, of our body and mind, all the things that we keep ordinarily at arm’s length, increasingly unavoidable. It’s not what we might have had in mind when we first signed up, but it’s what we get.
Barry Magid • Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide
His work is one of the great literary accounts of the psychic costs of reification, of what he calls “a peculiar malign abstractness” within the culture of mid-twentieth-century capitalism.
Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
What Murdoch took from this “admirable Platonist” was the conviction that seeing well is tantamount to doing well. Discerning the Good—the way the world truly is—whittles down our range of choices to just one.
Robert Zaretsky • The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
The dark night of the soul may have a bardo quality. This is the state mentioned in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that is a liminal period between the old life and rebirth. One of the many instructions in the book for preparing for your new life reads: “Meditate for a long time on your special guiding spirit, as if it were a vision without any real
... See more