Traditions invented

Read an interesting book on the topic. “Many practices which are considered traditional are in fact quite recent inventions, often deliberately constructed to serve particular ideological ends.”

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.

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.

Books read and books in progress. Anyone who read or is interested in reading these, do comment!

In progress of reading:

• Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Freud)
• 万葉集　Manyôshû (old Japanese poetry collection) 
• Hamlet (Shakespeare) 
• Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium (New Art Media Limited, 2000) 
• Investment in China – Opportunities in Private Equity and Venture Capital (Tsinghua University Press, 2003) 
• Les Plus Belles Formules Mathématiques (Salem, Testard & Salem) 
• 血卡门（黄碧云） Blood Carmen (Huang Biyun)
• 道德经探玄（培真著）  Dao De Jing – In Search of the Mystery (Pei Zhen)
• L’étranger (Albert Camus)
• Winning with Software: An Exective Strategy (Watts S. Humphrey)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas S. Kuhn)
• En Verve, mots propos aphorismes. A collection of Boris Vian citations, Pierre Horay editeur 1970, 2002, Paris.
• Paroles. A collection of poems by Jacques Prévert, Éditions Gallimard, 1949, France.
• 奥の細道　Oku no hosomichi. Original haikus bu Bashô, as well as elaborations on the poems and the poet by Kadokawa Bunko, Heisei year 13, Japan.

Recent reads:

• 白痴　二流の人　Hakuchi. Niryuu no hito. (collection of short stories by Sakaguchi Ango; published by Kadokawa Bunko)
• Imperial Ambitions (Noam Chomsky)
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Prahalad)
• Essays by Georg Simmel : sociology of modern life, esthetics, cities as works of art, feelings etc.
• Understanding Power (Noam Chomsky)
• Journal d’un génie (diary of Salvador Dali)
• From Alchemy to IPO (a book on biotech by Robbins-Roth)

What to do on a crazy busy day

… to make it more effective & get rid of the accumulating stress!?!

1. GET OFF WORK ON TIME!
2. Get sleep when sleepy after work.
3. Go to gym when recovered enough.
4. Sleep early.
5. Repeat.

Words of advice for entrepreneurs & startups

How not to become Dot-Bomb 2.0

Cool tech and gadgets

Water-powered mobile phones www.cellular-news.com/story/18289.php 

Underwater MP3 player Listen while swimming! www.waterproofmusic.com/swimp3.html

Open source biotechnology www.tropicaldisease.org www.thesynapticleap.org/malaria www.cambia.org

Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI) http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/bbci/index_en.html

DNA Computer http://www.quantumbiocommunication.com/projects/the-smallest-biological-computing-device-ever-constructed.html

MAXFACTOR illume collagening water: cream or gel that turns into water when you rub it http://www.illume.com/ja_JP/index.html

Teleportation http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3811785.stm  http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/  http://www.its.caltech.edu/~qoptics/teleport.html

Near-infrared detector: recognizes a person by the veins in his or her palm http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/download/download/new-technologies/PalmSecure.pdf

Cleaning by supercritical CO2: non-toxic dry cleaning of clothes and a technique for next generation semiconductor industry (1) http://www.pprc.org/pubs/techreviews/co2/co2intro.html (2) http://www.reed-electronics.com/semiconductor/article/CA271877?pubdate=2%2F1%2F2003 Patented! http://www.bocedwards.com/r.cfm?a=news/nws_detail_5.cfm?article=207

Fuel cell car, for example GM AUTOnomy, Hy-wire and Sequel. Wired.com wrote of AUTOnomy ”It dispenses with just about everything that makes a car a car, such as the engine, transmission, steering wheel, and gas tank. Rather than spitting out carbon monoxide and other smog-causing gases, it emits nothing but water because it runs on hydrogen. With few moving parts, it will last for decades. It will generate more electricity than it uses and be equipped to apply the surplus to power the owner’s house.”  The steering system is wireless. Each wheel has its own fuel cell and can be controlled separately, which enables driving sideways… For a list of vehicles, see here http://www.gm.com/company/gmability/adv_tech/400_fcv/fact_sheets.html

Robots. Not my favourite subject until someone comes up with modular systems so you can assemble your own! Lego has… but still at toy level… unless the fall 2006 release of Mindstorms changes things http://mindstorms.lego.com/ What is needed are comprehensive and interoperable control interfaces, and programmability. Here one more robot, from KDDI http://www.pinktentacle.com/2006/03/pirkus-r-the-bluetooth-bot/ And here the new Pleo dinosaur robot http://www.robots-dreams.com/2006/02/pleo_robot_dino.html  Robotic design http://www.brotron.com/

Federico Garcia Lorca

Was reading Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo (Andalusian Spanish for “deep song” or “grand song”) and Romancero gitano while sipping beer with a light lunch on Sunday. Great way to spend an afternoon Lorca bases his writings on Andalucia, its places and culture (region in southern Spain on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean)

I was thinking, these poems have been written in the 1920’s and by 2020’s a hundred years have passed. Right now, in the beginning of the new century, 1920’s is still no so far away and it is still possible to identify with what went down 80 years ago in Andalucia. The feelings, sounds, passions, lives… I felt sad at the passing of time which carries the past inevitably further and further away… in 2030 the Andalucia of 1920’s will perhaps be something exotic, a remote footnote of history such as the Great Goldrush or the Congress of Vienna? Too far apart for feeling…

“El ROMANCERO GITANO (1928) es, con justicia, uno de los libros más célebres de la poesía en lengua española.”

Baladilla de los tres ríos

El rió Guadalquivir
va entre naranjos y olivos.
Los dos ríos de Granada
bajan de la nieve al trigo.
 
¡Ay, amor
que se fue y no vino!
 
El río Guadalquivir
tiene las barbas granates.
Los dos ríos de Granada,
uno llanto y otro sangre.

¡Ay, amor
que se fue por el aire!
 
Para los barcos de vela
Sevilla tiene un camino;
por el agua de Granada
solo reman los suspiros.

¡Ay, amor
que se fue y no vino!

Guadalquivir, alta torre
y viento en los naranjales.
Dauro y Genil, torrecillas
muertas sobre los estanques.

¡Ay, amor
que se fue por el aire!

¡Quién dirá que el agua lleva
un fuego fatuo de gritos!

¡Ay, amor
que se fue y no vino!

Lleva azahar, lleva olivas,
Andalucía, a tus mares.

¡Ay, amor
que se fue por el aire!

Andalucian terrain… the Sierra Morena mountains to the north and the Bética ranges to the south. The Guadalquivir with its tributary, the Genil River, physically define Andalucia. The Sierra de Cazorla. The south-west marshlands of Doñana National Park. “Fifty percent of the Andalusian territory is mountainous, one-third is found at an altitude above 600 metres, including an extensive high plateau and 46 peaks higher than 1,000 metres. For its altitude – Mulhacén and Veleta both measure over 3,400 metres high – the Sierra Nevada, in the heart of the Penibética Range, rises as queen of the heights.”

Andalusia is divided into eight provinces named after the capital cities of these provinces: Sevilla, Granada, Córdoba, Cadiz, Málaga, Huelva, Jaén, Almería.

Andalucía: Tema y visión (from Poema del Cante Jondo – Romancero gitano, Edición de Allen Josephs y Juan Caballero, CATEDRA Letras Hispánicas, 2004)

Es indispensable distinguir aqui entre la Andalucía que Lorca ve, descubre y emplea, y aquella otra pseudo-romántica Andalucía de macetas y elementos “populares”. Quizá en esa misma palabra “popular” sea donde resida gran parte del problema de distinguir entre la Andalucía verdadera y la falsa de “pandereta”, de la “españolada”, de la época de Bizet, esa Andalucía zarzuelera que ha ejercido influencia hasta dentro de Andalucía, y que, fuera de ella y fuera de España, ha creado un estereotipo lamentable.

It is indispensable to distinguish between the Andalusia that Lorca sees, discovers and employs, and the other pseudo-romantic Andalusia of flowerpots and “popular” elements. Perhaps in that same word “popular” it is where a great part of the problem resides to distinguish between true Andalusia and the false one of “tambourines”, of “españolada”, of the time of Bizet, that “zarzuelised” Andalusia that has exerted influence even within Andalusia itself, and which, outside of Andalusia and Spain, has created a lamentable stereotype.

Ortega lo apuntó bien en abril de 1927, en el artículo que todavía hoy se discute, “Teoría de Andalucía”, al afirmar: “Lo admirable, lo misterioso, lo profundo de Andalucía está más allá de esa farsa multicolor que sus habitantes ponen ante los ojos de los turistas”.

Ortega – hombre del norte, como él mismo dice, y filósofo – enfoca con originalidad este “problema” de identidad andaluza, tan necesitado de aclaración para nuestros fines. Aunque no estamos de acuerdo con la segunda parte del artículo donde enuncia su “ideal vegetativo”, sí creemos que en la primera parte – la historia – ha acertado al señalar la autoconciencia andaluza y lo que ella puede significar.

Ortega pointed it out well in April 1927 in his article “Theory of Andalusia”, which is discussed still today, affirming: “the admirable, the mysterious, the profound of Andalusia is beyond that multicoloured farce that their inhabitants put before the eyes of the tourists”.

Ortega – a man of the north, as he himself says, and a philosopher – views this “problem” of Andalusian identity with originality, a needed clarification for our purposes. Although we are not in agreement with the second part of the article where it enunciates the “vegetative ideal”, yes we think that in the first part – the history - it has guessed right when indicating the Andalusian self-awareness and what it can signify.