Sudelbücher

“I need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade...

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:25:50 -0700

“I need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.” - Arvo Pärt

"The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in..."

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:51:29 -0700

“The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.”

- Amen to that. From Beyond Good and Evil, section 116, by Friedrich Nietzsche.

On Monogamy

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:46:50 -0700

Monogamy is the monopoly of love.

Video

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:09:18 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

"One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said,..."

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:56:05 -0700

“One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’ The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: ‘Which wolf wins?’ The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘The one you feed.’”

- via smilingpuppet

"We have no intention, however, of making a fetish of democracy. It may well be true that our..."

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:05:57 -0700

“We have no intention, however, of making a fetish of democracy. It may well be true that our generation talks and thinks too much of democracy and too little of the values which it serves. It cannot be said of democracy, as Lord Acton truly said of liberty, that it “is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.”
Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safe-guarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies - and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.”

- from The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, from the end of Chapter 5 “Planning and Democracy”.

That’s how you take music to market. (via Elektra Schmidt)

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 22:29:05 -0700

That’s how you take music to market.

(via Elektra Schmidt)

Objects, Values and Madness

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 01:08:43 -0700

There are similarities between perceiving objects and values. Thus, if you happen to live in a society where you don’t share its values, it is like not being able to see certain objects, or being able to see objects that others don’t; therefore, it is no coincidence that an individual with a different morality than that of his society, is considered by many to be like a madman who sees or responds to things that do not exist.

Ο Έλληνας

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:59:00 -0700

Ο Έλληνας πρέπει να είναι ορθόδοξος αλλα όχι Χριστιανός.

Translation: The Greek should be orthodox but not Christian.

If you can count

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:46:55 -0700

If you can count the times you’ve had sex you haven’t had enough.

Fashion

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:43:30 -0700

Wear the latest fashion you are called a fashion victim. Do not wear it, and you are called old-fashioned.

Childhood

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:08:49 -0700

Childhood is adulthood without pretension.

Four scenes

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 23:54:24 -0700

City center. People walking. Stores displaying their wares. Cars moving, honking.
A driver sighs in frustration.. Some pigeons flutter their wings as a passerby quickens his gait. “Can you spare some change?” intermingled with laughing teenagers on skateboards. Seeing people who talk to themselves and trying to determine their sanity by the presence of a bluetooth earpiece. Where are we going?

I forgot to breathe. Her eyes closed, surrendering to my index finger. Her head tilted to the right, mouth half open. We were moved – but weren’t going anywhere.

I slowly made way through the dense wheat stalks. I was drunk on summer sun. I lied on the earth. It smelled of crushed wheat. Happiness.

The large round pebbles had been in the sun for hours. Drops of sea made their way down my body as I emerged. I shivered, tasted my alkaline mouth. Then my heels touched the first warm stones.

Zen Stories: Across the River

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:51:27 -0700

Two traveling monks reached a river where they met a young woman. Wary of the current, she asked if they could carry her across. One of the monks hesitated, but the other quickly picked her up onto his shoulders, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other bank. She thanked him and departed.

As the monks continued on their way, the one was brooding and preoccupied. Unable to hold his silence, he spoke out: “Brother, our spiritual training teaches us to avoid any contact with women, but you picked that one up on your shoulders and carried her!” “Brother,” the second monk replied, ”I set her down on the other side, while you are still carrying her.”

Zen Stories: The Bicycle

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:38:47 -0700

A Zen teacher saw five of his students return from the market, riding their bicycles. When they had dismounted, the teacher asked the students, “Why are you riding your bicycles?”

The first student replied, “The bicycle is carrying this sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back! “The teacher praised the student, saying, “You are a smart boy. When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over, as I do.”

The second student replied, “I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path.” The teacher commended the student, “Your eyes are open and you see the world.”

The third student replied, “When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant, nam myoho renge kyo.” The teacher gave praise to the third student, “Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel.”

The fourth student answered, “Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all beings.”
The teacher was pleased and said, “You are riding on the golden path of non-harming.”

The fifth student replied, “I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle.” The teacher went and sat at the feet of the fifth student, and said, “I am your disciple.”

The ethical dialectic

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:30:13 -0700

First you care for yourself.

Then you care for others.

Then you care neither for yourself nor others.

The first is selfishness, The second altruism. The third? Selflessness.

Selflessness is when you do things for the things themselves irrespective of reference to selves.

Great creators create not so that they please themselves or others but because they follow some inexorable law of what needs to be born.

"The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for..."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:07:28 -0700

“The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined ‘neither by obedience, nor by hardness of labour but by the status of being a mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing’.”

- from One-Dimensional Man, p. 32-33, by Herbert Marcuse, Beacon Press, 1991. The last part of the quote is originally from François Perroux, vol.III, p.600, La Coexistence pacifique, Presses Universitaires, 1958.

Emergency: Ignite social wild fire & make idea love publicly

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:17:00 -0700

Repost from: Emergent Transformation: (Next Step to) ignite a social wild fire & make idea sex publicly :) with subjective modifications (the title, the suggested new name for the movement (hope it sticks!) via Pippin, and the blockquotes below):

Salut emergent fellows :)

I had an epiphany yesterday when I spoke to an influential German journalist who covers Silicon Valley, and realized that she was utterly clueless about how startups in Silicon Valley actually work, much less the big picture trends this group is trying to define.

I was “violently” reminded that it is our responsibility to enlighten society about the emergent ventures that are catalyzing this socioeconomic transformation that we’ve been discussing. We need to help mainstream society understand the implications of the opportunities that ventures like Kiva, oDesk, Asset map and Supercool School are creating for the world.

Therefore, the next step to further our discussion is to: make it public :)!

In the next few months we will ignite a social wild fire that brings to light the ventures that are helping to unleash latent human capacity. It’s important to constantly refer to the ventures that are actually manifesting and creating this transformation, thereby building momentum.

It is our goal to be the catalysts that initiate the transfer of awareness about the ventures that are driving this disruptive socioeconomic transformation from the edge to the center.

To achieve that we need 50 brief & energetic blogposts about the “emergent socioeconomic transformation” that we started discussing a couple of weeks ago.

How this will work?

Everybody writes one or more blog posts
+ refers to at least three other blog posts + three or more people from the google group
+ all of these blog posts will be posted on one central blog
@ http://www.emergenttransformation.com

We can also steal a term from this TED video and call this public idea sex :)!!

Or sublimate and call it public idea love - which aims to give birth to something in addition to being a pleasure.

Some questions to get you thinking about these blogposts:

THE CHANGE
- Why is this transformation happening and why is it an opportunity?
- What are the larger trends that are shaping this transformation? (i.e. global economic recession, interconnectivity via the web, new generation of people with a different ideologies/value systems taking positions of power/influence)
- What are the changing value systems that are enabling this trend?

WHO IS MAKING THIS HAPPEN
- Examples of people and companies who are making it happen right now.

HOW CAN YOU PARTICIPATE AND WHY
-Why and how are YOU contributing to this bigger picture trend?
- Why is it our responsibility to be the catalysts for this change?
- How can somebody else contribute to this global transformation?

HOW ARE/MIGHT WE REACT
- How will this transformation affect our current socio-economic structures? How can we make this transition smoother?
- What are the types of lifestyle choices that people are now making that show they want this ‘emergent socioeconomic transformation’ to happen? Or the choices people are already making to make it happen now?

Some keywords you may use:

- human capacity
- transformation
- access
- recources

… here are the first three blogposts:

- blogpost by Nathaniel
- blogpost by Alexandros
- blogpost by Nirav

Cheers,

Max, Venessa, Mathias, Fadi, Claudia, Dhaval, Alexandros, Bjoern & many more

PS: This was created in a crazy piratepad session … http://piratepad.net/Gnx1dOUDVl

Childhood, suffering and the meaning of life

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:53:02 -0700

To look back to the circumstances under which a question arises helps us in understanding a question better thus making it easier to answer it. Moreover, it can even point to the dissolution of the question altogether and make the answer unecessary or generate different, perhaps more interesting questions. The question regarding the meaning (or purpose, which is not exactly the same) of existence has a complicated origin, where many factors play a role and contribute to its emergence.

I will start with the simplest, and one that has been experienced by all. When we were children, we asked questions about everything. When children ask the question “What is that?” they do not merely want to know the name of something which captures their curiosity. They want to know what it does and what it is for. We categorize external objects not only by what they look like but also by what they do and what they are for. This mode of questioning is then transposed on whatever the child needs to know. When parents shout or beat their children, most of them make sure the child knows why this happens so the child won’t do it again. The child feels it was responsible for the parents reaction. So children associate certain behaviors and the subsequent pain or reward (be it physical or emotional) with a reason, and it doesn’t take much time to generalize (the tendency for children to generalize is well documented [1]) this to most internal states: anger, envy, jealousy, fear. Their experience with their parents being the most intimate and most frequent, their initial model for explaining their internal states is that an external agent causes internal states (e.g. Parent causing pain to the child or child making the parent angry). Thus, they mostly seek external causes for what happens within them.

Let us summarize the above insights in order to connect them with later ones. Children are heavily assisted in learning the meaning and purpose of things from an external authority figure. He/She symbolizes their source of knowledge. They are made to feel responsible for their parents reactions. They are punished and rewarded by the same persons and during those processes they associate external causes with internal states.

Having said the above, it is now not difficult to be in the position to understand the Freudian point [2] regarding Christianity. God, as the benevolent father with supreme authority, is the agent who teaches us the meaning and purpose of things. The Father who can answer what our father couldn’t because he’s omniscient. The Father who punishes and rewards and make us feel responsible for our sins. Where our sins explain the pain and evil in the world, like our bad behavior explained the punishment our parents inflicted on us.

Thus, unwanted internal states, are moralized from the beginning. Even if the child is not brought up in a Christian environment the punishment he receives is given a moral justification: “You did something wrong.” Thus, the moral interpretation of natural phenomena has haunted mankind for thousands of years. Earthquakes and floods were seen as punishments and good harvests and fertile wives as rewards.

Children, as well as adults, can withstand meaningful suffering because they can change it by their future behavior. The child can ‘behave’ and the adult can be a good Christian or a good citizen. But pointless suffering seems unendurable exactly because we cannot do something to change it.

Thus, the usual emergence of the question regarding the meaning of life comes from the experience of pointless suffering. “Why?” is the incessant question of a suffering mankind. If only we knew why we suffered, we could do something about it, and hence avoid suffering. It is this quest that has given birth to all religions. The Buddhists answered it by claiming that the root of suffering is desire. Hence if I eliminate desire, I eliminate suffering. The Christians thought mankind was suffering because it had a sinful nature, inherited from its parents Adam and Eve. If you’re a Christian or a Muslim there is a meaning in suffering but there is no escape – at least not in this life. Virtually every philosophy addresses the issue of suffering and why it is present. Some Stoics claimed that we suffer because we don’t live according to nature. The Epicureans because we do not prudently choose which pleasures to indulge in and which to avoid. Epictetus claimed we suffer because we care about things which are not in our power to change. Were we to concentrate on the ones that are truly within our power, then suffering would largely diminish and a happy, peaceful life would be possible. The list is endless but the point remains the same. We want to know why we suffer – in order to do something about it.

Notes:

[1] See A. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, p.70-71, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[2] See for instance, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion. In my opinion you’re probably better off getting a volume that contains both and more, like the excellent vol.12 of the Penguin Freud Library.

An emerging movement

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:46:00 -0700

On July 7th 2010 at NASA Ames Research Center, I was part of a group of people who met in one of the buildings assigned to Singularity University.

We came from different backgrounds and countries but all of us could feel that something momentous is happening.

Never in the history of the world has there been so many daily attempts across different time zones to overcome the barriers from an idea to reality. Never has it been easier to do something that you consider valuable. Never has it been easier to share what you know and work with others.

We feel that it is time to name and acknowledge a movement under which companies and individuals would accelerate the overcoming of barriers to value creation in innovative ways through sharing best practices and resources.

Here’s a diagrammatic summary (click to enlarge):