Life does not belong to the hermit, or to the sannyasi, or to the politician, or even to the saintly politician. Life, is something extraordinarily vast, immense, immeasurable. A petty mind cannot possibly understand it. A petty mind is essentially an ambitious mind, a greedy mind, an acquisitive mind. And the moment you cease to be ambitious in every form - even the ambition to find out God - the moment you have broken off from ambition, your brain becomes astonishingly quiet. The brain then is quiet without any movement of desire, because desire has been understood. When you have understood the imaginary visions, belonging to this and that, when all that has been set aside, forgotten, then you are no longer caught by the known. Most of us move from the known to the known; that is our daily activity. All your life is spent in the office or in some technical work, from the known to the known. Your mind thinks in terms of the known and therefore is never free from the known.
A meditative mind is free from the known - that means free from the word, the symbol, the idea, the belief, the dogma, the projections from the past. When the brain is free from the past, or rather when the brain is quiet, the totality of the whole consciousness becomes completely still - the totality of consciousness, not just one part - because it is completely alone, uninfluenced. It no longer belongs to any society, any group, any caste, any religion, any dogma; it has finished with all these. Therefore there is complete stillness of the mind; and in that stillness there is neither the observer nor the observed - because the observer, as I explained, is the result of the reaction of thought; the observer, the thinker, is the reaction of thought. You can yourself think all this out if you are interested, afterwards.
J. Krishnamurti
Public Talk 6 New Delhi, India - 07 February 1962
Man, the flesh sucks. I’m gonna abandon it for the machine.
Hey was anyone gonna telle that the machine is also subject to change? The nature of my decay is just different now. Shit sucks. I’m gonna abandon the machine for the divine.
Bad news about the divine
I don’t want to live in the kind of world where we don’t look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.
(Charles de Lint)
“I promise you, everything that’s happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it’s hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that’s also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google can proliferate unprofitable, unsustainable tech that takes water from the desert and strains our power grids to produce deeply mediocre outcomes based on incredibly vague promises and have their stock prices go up. The answer is simple: the customer, and by extension the service provided to the customer, is no longer the primary concern of a company. It’s all about shareholder value, and while this may seem a little obvious, it requires a little bit of a history lesson to really explain how profoundly damaging shareholder supremacy is.”
“The cult of Shareholder Supremacy (also referred to as shareholder primacy) is one disconnected from production, and I’d argue humanity itself, a continual shell game where companies do things not to produce an outcome in real life, but to manipulate investors and the markets themselves.”
“If Biden, his inner circle, and the Democratic Party refuse to cede to that most basic of demands, the ushering in of fascism will be on their hands in multiple ways. And yet, at the same time, we should not be holding our breath in any way; again no one is coming to save us. Every day that becomes clearer, and despite the painful way that so many people are arriving at this realization, the clarity it provides can be freeing. Our efforts should go towards organizing a working class so powerful that it cannot be stopped, so strong that capitalists and their attendant fascists can’t stand in the way of our economic and political power. This work is urgent, and at the same time it must be thoughtful and thorough. After all, we have a world to win. We have a world of real democracy, autonomy, and human flourishing to build and win, and there is no path to that world that does not involve the defeat of the forces of fascism and capitalism.”
“You all can convince yourself of what you want here, but Biden the weakest incumbent since at least Jimmy Carter. Even against Donald Trump, he is very likely to lose because no one thinks he can do the job. Me, I know the job is actually the advisors and appointees. I vote for the administration, not the person. But we have a public made up of people who think the president controls everything (which to be fair, includes the Supreme Court) and so Biden is responsible for Roe being overturned, the prices of eggs, and TNT losing the NBA.”
“ONE OF THE SADDEST FABLES people comforted themselves with over the past eight years was the one about the strength of American institutions: The voters could elevate an unfit, malevolent demagogue, but our checks and balances were robust; our institutions would prevent any serious damage.”
