The way of thinking of our current era has given emphasis to self-involvement, self importance. For this reason we have given obeisance to religious and political leaders and credence to their human-based ideologies and causes. My inclination is to chuckle instead. It is not that the individual lacks value, but that the value is transcendent. The individual’s greatness is the greatness of the undying universe. Each human expresses that greatness in the range of his uniqueness and the breadth of humanity’s diversity. The essential is not mortal. We owe no allegiance to ideas, leaders, nations, causes, priests, religions or their gods. Yet we cannot do other than remain loyal to our essence, the consciousness expressed through us, so uniquely and diversely. In living, as well as in dying we give testimony to the unceasing unfoldment of the divine, like the endless back and forward movement of waves on the shore. It is due to the conviction of our own self-importance that we so easily fall under the spell of leaders and are willing to lay down our lives to fulfill their dreams. Let the foolish give credence to the foolish. We have better things to do with our time; to lay in the warm sun listening to grass hoppers, or watching ants carry grains of corn to their nests are more worthy pursuits than participating in building empires or defending them. If we are unable to serve our essential nature, in a generosity of spirit, what is the purpose of accruing time, money or goods? The fulfillment of such service (of the essential) is the dissolution of all consideration of I and mine. We take part in the manifestation, the upheaval, the outpouring of all life. We own this process; this greatness is our greatness. And whether the name and form by which we are known dies today or lives another hundred years is rather trivial. Life itself is trivial if we think only of ourselves, or serve surrogates for the true essential greatness at the heart of our lives.
2018
Our times
The 20th century may have been the last era when people were able to create innocently and non-imitatively while remaining true to the gradually constructed stack of human culture. It was still possible to believe in the myth of progress. Ideologies continued to offer hope. Affluence was still based on manufactured goods and hard labour. The earth still had a future. In the current century there is an imitative, phony atmosphere of excess. Creation is born of a cynical exploitation of past forms without inherent belief in them. Economically we have lost our gold standard, culturally there is a constant need to seek reassurance from the fake convictions of peers who are similarly deluded and obsessed. Only in the present era could leaders like Trump emerge, movements like ISIS emerge, socio-economic disparities grow so large, and mass delusion be so prevalent in the presence of available information. Meanwhile we are partying through the apocalypse, blissfully unaware: the decimation of our biosphere.
Creation, as a word is from an old Indo-European root meaning to act. In order to create innocently in the current era we need to stop re-acting, detach ourselves from our culture of imitation and violence, and free our minds from old forms. Our civilization has let us down. We are basing our lives on ways of thinking that have led to the current insanity, modes of behavior that we know to be destructive. Solutions are not to be found within the matrix that has created the problems. We need to free ourselves of the weight of human culture, reevaluate our place in the universe, taking as our measure the entire biosphere. We need to de-condition ourselves from learned thinking and behaviour.
#history
What happened when I walked into the world’s quietest place
My time in the anechoic chamber was a forceful reminder that most of the sounds we hear come to us indirectly; reflected into our ears by the things and people around us. Sound is a shared experience, formed as much by the environment we live in as it is by whatever happens to produce it in the first place. The anechoic chamber shows us what it would be like to live in a world that gives nothing back: a lonely world where sounds simply evaporate without returning.
Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us
The long read: Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us
TL;DR The G in Google stands for Government and the Os are its eyes
Adam Osborne and his computer
The first computer I owned was the Osborne 1, though the one I purchased was already several years old and a bit old fashioned by that time – probably it was in the late 1980s. I even bought a second model for parts.
The Osborne 1 was the world’s first truly portable computer. It was really innovative, in that the main unit and keyboard folded up together for easy carrying: folded up it had a similar weight to a portable sewing machine. It was invented in 1981 by Adam Osborne (1939-2003).
I have just learned that Adam was the son of Arthur Osborne (1906-1970) a British academic and writer who lived for a time in India and was a follower of Ramana Maharshi. His family home adjoins that of my friend in Tiruvannamalai, who I hope to visit again very soon.
According to Wikipedia, Adam wrote a bestselling book about his experiences together with John C. Dvorak, Hypergrowth: The Rise and Fall of the Osborne Computer Corporation. In later life, he returned to India, where he lived in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu.
genetic markers
It’s interesting to visit close family and observe that traits which one had taken to be individual are apparently in the blood. My lifelong dislike of garlic and its after-taste; dislike of crowds and feeling of being confused and overwhelmed by shopping malls, shared by my brother.
Sites and blogs are mainly about buying and selling
There are a few altruistic souls who maintain websites as a service; a few persons that just like to write, but mostly what I see on the web is that it is being used for self-promotion. I suppose it’s understandable. People, if they enjoy writing at all, mostly write to their friends, and for that they don’t need websites. There is social media, messengers and what have you. So the open web becomes a marketplace.
Lately I have been growing bored with even my alternative social media. Sometimes it’s nice to feel that others are seeing one’s content; yet just as people are lazy about writing, they tend to be lazy about reading, or even viewing material produced by others. And this is understandable too.
Initially, or each time I return to social media, I tend to share more in the beginning, till gradually it peters off. Eventually I end up mainly commenting or sharing what others have shared. It gets a bit stale. I do enjoy the alternative social media as a source of new information.
Sometimes I’ve permitted Google and search engines to include my content, and at other periods I’ve used the noindex nofollow flags. But for the greater part of its existence, the blog has been private or undiscoverable.
So why, in fact, maintain a blog, other than for the perfectly legitimate purpose of self-promotion? I think a blog can be a place where one can broadcast, in a non-intrusive way, what one feels, thinks, believes in, is going through, has experienced, wishes to relate, etc. It is not “in your face” like social media. Indeed it is so far removed from being “in your face” that it is likely that no one ever sees it. But it’s out there none the less.
So, here is my blog, my stash of thoughts, ruminations, feelings and reminiscences. Boring or interesting, common or unusual, uniquely my own in their combination, whatever.
Setting up Dave Winer’s River5 RSS aggregator in MX Linux (Debian Stretch)
Setting up Dave Winer’s River5 RSS aggregator in MX Linux (Debian Stretch)
[summary]Setting up Dave Winer’s River5 RSS aggregator in MX Linux (Debian Stretch)[/summary]
git clone https://github.com/scripting/river5.git
get node and npm
followed instructions at https://linuxhint.com/install_npm_debian/
go to river5 directory
npm install
node river5.js
go to http://localhost:1337/
From his file FORPOETS.md :
Okay now you have River5 up and running, but it’s only reading the feeds I told it to read. Things get more interesting when you create your own list of feeds.
For this part you need a plain text editor, like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on the Mac.
- FInd the URL of a feed you want to subscribe to and copy it to the clipboard.
- Open your text editor and create a new file.
- Paste the URL into the text file at the beginning of the file.
- For each new URL add it on its own line.
- Save the file into the lists folder at the top level of the RIver5 app folder. Call the file myRiver.txt or something else that ends with .txt.
- Make sure River5 is running. At the top of the minute it will read the new file, along with all the others in the lists folder, and add it to the feeds it checks.
- There will be a new river named myRiver.js in the rivers folder.
Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri
English, the richest of the world’s languages in terms of its vast vocabulary, the number of journals, the number of articles, books, libraries, and many other measures, is poor on one point: because it is a modern language, it lacks original scriptural texts, or even many important mystical works. These are usually from translation. No matter which religion or mystical philosophy we subscribe to, we will usually find ourselves needing to read books in translation. And translation is not a great means of approach to the original thinking. There are any number of examples of this. Anyone who knows Hebrew can be amazed at the ways in which the Bible has been so woefully mistranslated into English, and oftentimes the mis-translations become axiomatic to the faith. There are similar problems with translations from Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Greek and other texts. The Muslims, in their wisdom, insisted that the Quran should be read in Arabic.
When I read Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem, it is with the appreciation that here is an inspired text that finally is written originally in English, by a master English-language poet, who had a fine understanding of classical Sanskrit texts. He was also an original thinker, a philosopher and a mystic. His poem is a piece of literature, a source of inspiration, and unique. It may be the most important book to be composed in the English language. It’s certainly one of its most ambitious poems.
The only reason that it goes unappreciated is that it is hard to read and understand. It’s hard even to understand the structure of the poem and its development. Besides, since this is a work of mystical philosophy, comprehension depends on being versant in the ideas that motivate the poem. One really needs a guide.
English has a few other rather impenetrable works that are regarded as classics and worthy of study. Savitri is valuable for the beauty of the language, for its deep inspirations, and for its mystical underpinnings.
Fortunately the internet has many resources to ease the approach to Savitri. I’m collecting some of these under the category “savitri” in my Hubzilla Cards system, and will add some texts in the books sections of my files.
Plan
The plan for the remaining years is to grow freer, lighter and less encumbered till eventually there is nothing left to weigh down the soul and it takes off into space, because it has grown lighter than the atmosphere. Isn’t this a worthier aspiration than being gradually pulled down into the earth by the deadweight of memories, knowledge, beliefs, allegiances, regrets and cares?