Reading on the aftermath of WW2 in Asia

This book.

Eckhart Tolle on awakening to your life’s purpose, part 2

Excerpts from the book “A New Earth”.

…

• When you are still, you are who you are beyond your temporal existence: counsciousness-unconditioned, formless, eternal.
• Your inner purpose is to awaken.
• What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.
• Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them.
• If helping others gives meaning to your life, you depend on others being worse off than yourself so that your life can continue to be meaningful and you can feel good about yourself.
• We are not speaking of clock time, but of psychological time, which is the mind’s deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.
• But why did anxiety, stress, or negativity arise? Because you turned away from the present moment. And why did you do that? You thought something else was more important. You forgot your main purpose. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
• Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself…
• When you meet with people, at work or wherever it may be, give them your fullest attention… The field of awareness that arises between you becomes the primary purpose for the interaction.
• Whereas the notion of purpose before was always associated with future, there is now a deeper purpose that can only be found in the present, through the denial of time.
• Seen from beyond the limitations of thinking and therefore incomprehensible to the human mind, everything is happening now. All that ever has been or will be is now, outside of time, which is a mental construct.

Recent reads

Japanese language

Tanizaki Junichirou

In ei rai san
Chijin no ai
Yukiguni

Natsume Souseki

Kokoro

Kawabata Yasunari

Yama no oto

Sakaguchi Ango

Darakuron

Akutagawa Ryuunosuke

Rashoumon
Torokko
To Shishun
Hana
etc. short stories

Yu Miri

Kazoku Cinema (Family Cinema)

Oooka Shouhei

Nobi (Field Fires)

Murakami Haruki

Norway no mori (Norwegian Wood)
Dance Dance Dance
Hitsuji wo meguru bouken (Sheep Adventure)
Sekai no owari to hardboiled wonderland (The End of the World and the Hardboiled Wonderland)
1973 nen no natsu no pinball (Pinball of Summer 1973)
Kaze no uta wo kike (Listen to the Wind’s Song)

Ooe Kensaburou

Hiroshima nooto (Hiroshima Notes)
Shisha no ogori

Dazai Osamu

Shayou
Ningen Shikkaku

German language

Max Frisch

Homo Faber
Stiller

Hermann Hesse

Siddharta
Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game)
Steppenwolf

French language

Albert Camus

L’etranger

Russian literature (translated)

Dostoyevsky

Crime and Punishment

English language

John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men

J.D.Salinger

Catcher in the Rye

Shakespeare

Macbeth

Norman Mailer

The Naked and the Dead
Executioner’s Song

Eckhart Tolle on how to live in the present

Read “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle.

I surely don’t buy all that spiritual level speculation, but there are still plenty of good ideas in the book. Here some excerpts (including some of the spiritual stuff which I find hard to agree with, and some observations which I do find good. Decide for yourself which parts to agree with…)

• …our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it?
• … our state of consciousness creates our world…
• On our planet, the human ego represents the final stage of universal sleep, the identification of consciousness with form. It was a necessary stage in the evolution of consciousness.
• The brain does not create consciousness, but consciousness created the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression.
• The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.
• If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do – stop.
• You don’t have to wait for something “meaningful” to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need.
• Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world from deep within you.
• Here is a spiritual practice that will bring empowerment and creative expansion into your life…activities that you may consider uninteresting, boring, tedious, irritating, or stressful. But don’t include anything that you hate or detest doing… whenever you are engaged in those activities, let them be a vehicle for alertness. Be absolutely present in what you do and sense the alert, alive stillness within you in the background of the activity. You will soon find that what you do in such a state of heightened awareness, instead of being stressful, tedious, or irritating, is actually becoming enjoyable… This is finding the joy of Being in what you are doing.
• The ego’s wanting always tries to take from something or someone; enthusiasm gives out of its own abundance.
• Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor and writer and so on, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others. Feel yourself being an opening through which energy flows from the unmanifested Source of all life through you for the benefit of all.
• At the core of all utopian visions lies one of the main structural dysfyunctions of the old consciousness: looking to the future for salvation. The only existence the future actually has is as a thought form in your mind, so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation. You are trapped in form, and that is ego.
• Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening. Awakening as a future event has no meaning because awakening is the realization of Presence.
• ”Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”… The meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in all “others”, all life-forms. They live in the surrendered state and so feel their oneness with the whole and the Source.

Random recent readings on airplane

MIT Technology Review, August 2008

1) Personal genomics services: have your DNA analysed! Service providers available, from cheap to expensive: Genographic Project ($99.95), DeCode, 23andMe, Navigenics, DNA Direct, Knome ($350,000)

2) Transoceanic cables.

3) Article by Bryant Urstadt: “Social Networking Is Not a Business* But It Might Be Soon“.

10 web startups to watch
Pinger
Pownce
Qik
Dash Navigation
Ushahidi
QTech (couldn’t find the website quickly)
33Across
Peer39
Anagran
Mashery

Upcoming tech event: 23-25 September: www.technologyreview.com/emtech

-21st Century Business Herald on Nokia & Qualcomm patent agreement and Nokia’s Symbian response to Google Android.

-Scientific American MIND magazine:

1) Some stuff on synesthesia, e.g. someone can “hear colors” or “taste shapes” (I have been interested in this weird phenomenon for a long time)

2) 14-17 August there will be the American Psychological Association’s 116th Annual Convention. Malcom Gladwell will give the keynote address.

3) An article on easing depression through manual tasks like cooking, washing etc.

4) Installation by James Auger: “smell blind date” at NY MOMA.

5) 2007 chocolate sniffing experiment at UC Berkeley.

6) Androstenone, Androstadienone, substances.

7) Storytelling theories of “literary Darwinists”: they propose that stories from around the world have universal themes reflecting our common underlying biology.

8 ) Wolfgang Köhler chimp experiment at University of Muenster in Germany: the chimp devised strategies for solving mazes.

9) Feng Shui. It has been experimentally proven that “spatial priming” affects peoples’ response to subsequent situations. Experiment by Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bargh at Yale.

10) www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman

Harper’s Magazine, August 2008

-Findings:

1) A 380-million year old fossil of fish giving live birth has been found.

2) A Welsh geobiologist has discovered populations of prokaryotic cells which may individually be more than 100 million years old, living a mile beneath the ocean floor. The buried cells are possible equal in biomass to all plant life on the earth’s surface.

-It has been revealed that the earth once had 3 moons. The 2 lost ones may have crashed into the surviving moon, sucked into the sun, of flung out of the solar system.

-There is evidence of time before the Big Bang.

-Website www.harpers.org

Newsweek, August 4th 2008

Several articles on US and the world, but also of a couple in their fifties both starting their third marriage.. “It’s not about the flatware”.

Obama’s church & Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

NASA research: northern lights’ movement are magnetic explosions between the moon and earth.

Randy Pausch, “Last Lecture” about making the most of each day.

China & olympics article by Orville Schell: “China’s agony of defeat”.

Sharon Begley: ” Who’ll stop the rain” on rain control technologies.