No one saw that coming, least of all me!
You are not a project that needs to be brought to fruition. Leave yourself alone, sit back and watch the spontaneous blossoming unfold.
Post by @mattypenny
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides.” I like this quote. It’s from Tony Schwartz, who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal. He regrets that now.
Good afternoon.
Reading Orient by David Hinton 📚 is a vivid reminder of why I have always been fascinated by and drawn to deserts, even from a very young age.
My own crude articulation of the nature of mind – ‘there is a there there, but when you’re there there’s nothing there’ - could equally refer to my experience of deserts.
“Letting go of our images of who we are is a way of letting go of the known, which is our prison.”
— Pema Chödrön
“Empty desert, empty ruins: this open emptiness erases all the meaning we want to invest in things, all the pattern and coherence, depth and purpose and value. It’s exquisite how a place so empty and inhospitable could offer the possibility of dwelling. Here at the edge of the human, the world simply is what it is: occurring, essencing, breathing. And whatever I am prior to the usefulness of experience and definition, the meaningfulness that story conjures, that too simply is what it is—mirror-deep and dwelling, occurring, orienting.”
— Orient by David Hinton 📚
Having a peaceful mind doesn’t mean the absence of pain and problems. It just means they are felt and dealt with directly instead of being mediated through spurious ideas, concepts, beliefs and opinions.
Good morning.
A lone voice
All the current hysteria, both positive and negative, around AI/ LLMs reminds of the early days of the web when, as now, we were either entering the promised land or the end of days.
It was ever thus. Take any point in human history and see that we were both making huge progressive strides while simultaneously going to hell in a hand-cart.
The reality is neither. And both. It is multifaceted and nuanced and usually grey and mostly indeterminate as the present absorbs the future in ways that are impossible to predict.
I read very little coverage of AI except for a single lone voice which stands aside from the hysteria and calmly looks at AI from a truly human perspective. Sensitively, psychologically and, dare I say, spiritually.
Robert Saltzman writes regularly on Substack and has written two books on AI (Understanding Claude and The 21st Century Self) and deals with not just the techlogical implications but, and perhaps more importantly, questions concerning what it means to be human in a world shared with LLMs.
He ignores the polarisation of most AI commentary and exposes our all too human behaviour in the face of such a consequential technological development.
Reading him leaves one neither optimistic nor pessimistic but merely melancholic in the best possible way – when we recognise something deeply truthful about us that contradicts the stories we tell about ourselves.
There’s no path, no journey, no story. Just the present moment changing, changing, changing…
“Without emptiness, where would all this vanishing go, this vanishing that opens the exquisite possibility of whatever occurs next.”
— Orient by David Hinton 📚
Good morning.
Good evening.
So my team are back in the Premier League after an eight season absence.
While we’ve made some decent and essential signings I think we’ll struggle to stay up, my predictions being either relegation or survival by the skin of our teeth.
“To see wholly, mirror-deep and sincere: to see is to forget the names of things.”
Orient by David Hinton 📚
Caffeine needed to be iced today.
“The truth is: you won’t fix the world. You won’t fix them. You won’t fix yourself. And once you stop trying, you may notice that nothing is broken—not in the way you thought. There is only this aching, flickering moment, alive and dying at once. If you can stand in it—no answers, no rescues, no ground—you may glimpse something softer than resolution. You may glimpse the freedom not to know. And that, finally, is compassion.”
— Robert Saltzman, The 21st Century Self
“No one warns you that love, in its rawest form, is not a balm but a breaking.”
— Robert Saltzman, The 21st Century Self