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?

WP & Hubzilla cont’d

Spent a few hours uglifying adapting my blog to suit the (slightly modified) Pumpkin theme of my Hubzilla channel. In this way, the two CMSs look more suited to each other. The Weaver Xtreme theme is one of the best and most flexible that is available in WordPress, and is very well cared for, well-documented and regularly updated. There’s a premium version, but a simple blog site doesn’t need it. Weaver Xtreme could exactly duplicate the Hubzilla theme, but for for now it’s close enough. There may be need for a second round of modifications for comments or other features.

Hubzilla – WordPress integration

Eventually, rather than move my WordPress blog into Hubzilla’s Articles module, which is still not perfect, I’ve created a close integration between my Hubzilla Channel and WordPress, more or less duplicating the Hubzilla theme in WordPress, and adding the same menu in the WordPress site and the #Hubzilla channel. I’m not completely happy with the theme colors yet, but whatever changes I make in one, I will change in the other.

Suffering (II)

maiyannahmaiyannah wrote the following post:

I won’t suffer very long
It feels like it’s almost time

As for the rest of us, we can only be grateful that some of the best minds and creative people have been willing to suffer for so long in order to make our world better or richer in some way. We don’t deserve it. It often comes at a terrible cost. I have to ask myself whether or how much I would be willing to suffer in order to bring some benefit.

My role model has never been the Buddha, who struggled for so many years to understand the cause of suffering, and then invested even more time in helping to provide the remedy for it, through what’s referred to as his “therapeutic paradigm”. Buddha did more than any other person past or present to present a way of understanding and alleviate suffering.

But my role model is more the deformed imperfectionists of Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu, who evaded suffering and persecution by melting into the background scenery, avoiding contention and strife, being fiercely independent, honest through subterfuge; useless to the world, but true to the Tao. Ursula K. Le Guin thinks the Taoists were natural anarchists. The Tao te Ching is the most inspiring book I’ve read, and I first read it at the impressionable age of 16, alongside Omar Khayyam and the Hermann Hesse books.

I hope Maiyannah overcomes whatever it is that is causing her to suffer in this way. Etty Hillesum is another person I keep meaning to read more of. It seems to me that like the Buddha she understood that it’s mainly about perspective. Early in her book she speaks about a leftist professor who was so convinced that the Nazis would be around for a whole generation that he simply took his life rather than have to deal with that. She couldn’t have known he was wrong, but she herself found a way of seeing goodness and value in the world even on her train to the death camp. I keep thinking of the gap between these two perspectives. Sumud is the answer of the Palestinians. Somehow they retain their buoyancy, for the most part, even after 70 odd years of oppression.

Contemplating suffering

Life is a kind of school but not one in which the syllabus is specifically tailored for the student, I think. Suffering (as well as pleasure) is there in abundance, and we can learn important lessons from suffering. We can acquire the capacity for empathy and compassion, for example. But I don’t think, as I used to, that the pain level is necessarily turned up in conformity with our capacity to learn from it. Many people suffer terribly all their lives without learning a thing from it.

Suffering is a kind of rich loam from which one can evolve spiritually, just as a lotus can only grow from mud. But the same soil can also nurture bad seeds. Life presents us with circumstances and lets us do what we want with them. It doesn’t necessarily give us the right circumstances to suit our disposition. But if we are sensitive not just to the circumstances, but to the lessons they potentially carry for us, there will be an evolution in our ability to understand life. And it will seem to us that we have been given exactly what we need; and in fact for one who is capable of such learning, this is always true.

Meaning is not inherent to reality (i.e. pain may come to us at random and does not target us specifically). And wisdom is not a matter of investing life with meaning (i.e. we do not need to adopt the superstition that we are being kindly mentored by our reality, and therefore the circumstances themselves are meaningful). The scale of meaning is a kind of human measure. Actually the universe is neither meaningful nor meaningless. If we can look back at the universe with the same dispassionate eye with which it seemingly regards us, our perception and frame of reference will begin to change. The view that we are victims or beneficiaries of an agency that is external to us begins to change too.

India – the State of Independence

Colin Todhunter, Off-Guardian

India celebrates its independence from Britain on 15 August. However, the system of British colonial dominance has been replaced by a new hegemony based on the systemic rule of transnational capital, enforced by global institutions like the World Bank and WTO. At the same time, global agribusiness corporations are stepping into the boots of the former East India Company.