Pope John Paul II
I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made.I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. Linguistic thought is indispensable to us. It is the basis for planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the substance of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with the flow of thought — that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as transient appearances in consciousness — is a primary source of human suffering and confusion.Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox, in fact. When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill. But we all talk to ourselves continuously — we just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. Our lives in the present can scarcely be glimpsed through the veil of our discursivity: We tell ourselves what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, and what might yet happen. We ceaselessly reiterate our hopes and fears about the future. Rather than simply exist as ourselves, we seem to presume a relationship with ourselves. It's as though we are having a conversation with an imaginary friend possessed of infinite patience. Who are we talking to?While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging "center of narrative gravity" (to use Daniel Dennett's phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord's Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc.Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.
New to me. Looks cool. Patronage tech. Interesting idea.
1. You need to give to get
All Flattr users are part of the social payment ecosystem so at least 2 Euros per month must be used to flattr others. You must be willing to give to get.2. Means and revenue
Your Flattr account has two balances, “Means” and “Revenue.” Means is what you give to others, revenue is what you get from others. You pre-pay to “Means” and then use as much as you want from that each month.
3. How much to give each monthYou decide how much to give to others each month. This is then automatically withdrawn from "Means" at the end of each month. If you don’t flattr anything that month's money will go to charity.4. Get flattred
Submit your thing and add buttons to your web page to get flattred, all accounts can both give and get. When you receive money you keep 90% as we need some to keep the systems afloat.
1) It’s asymmetrical. (I think that’s the right word.) You can follow (and unfollow) whoever you like. The people you follow don’t need to pay any attention to you and vice versa. That’s the fundamental difference between Facebook connections and Twitter connections (w/ regard to people, not Facebook pages). Not better, necessarily, just a fundamental difference.
2) For most people, the value of Twitter isn’t what you put into it, it’s what you pull out – the listening aspect. I manage lists of some of my favorite designers, planners/strategists, typographers, nerds, etc – people who find and tweet about the coolest stuff they find – most who I wouldn’t/couldn’t be friends with on Facebook. So it’s an easy way to filter the web for awesomeness from your POV – and share/re-share if you want. But you don’t need followers. You just need to follow well. 3) It’s a great example of a simple, open system (API) producing a really complex, sophisticated network of relationships, information, apps, etc. And it only gets richer, more interesting as time goes by.
