joshcarr
Monday’s fish has been around since Friday, under God knows what conditions. Illustration by Adrian Gill Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young…
There are many practices that have emerged in recent years to accelerate progress at work: daily stand-ups, weekly review meetings, and my favorite – sprints . In this context, a sprint is a set period of time that is dedicated to achieving a goal. Many tech companies have adopted this method in…
In 2006, inventor Ray Kurzweil released the book The Singularity Is Near , with a bold prediction that by the year 2049 we’d enter a “technological singularity.” Around that time, he argued, the pace of improvement in technology would become a runaway phenomenon that would transform all aspects of…
“It’s crazy at work.” How often have you heard that? Or said it yourself? Probably too often. For many, “it’s crazy at work” has become their normal. But why's that? At the root is an onslaught of physical and virtual real-time distractions slicing work days into a series of fleeting work moments.…
In the Meditating on Psychedelics podcast series my intention is to gain a deeper understanding of the relative merits and dangers of the mixing Buddhist contemplative practice and ritualized psychedelic use. In order to do this, I’ve found it necessary to first get clear on the scope of this…
How to meditate on psychedelics with Vincent Horn of Meditate.io May 17, 2018 | In Magazine | By “Meditators are psychonauts,” says Vincent Horn, a Buddhist teacher and podcaster who has lately explored the common threads in Buddhist and psychedelic communities and practices. “There is that general…
I’ve written about René Girard’s ideas once before , to try my hand at identifying mimetic crises in the world of George R. R. Martin. Today I’d like to apply Girard’s ideas to another world in which people are driven to conflict over small differences and personal slights. (Rather than attempting…
Bret Victor / July 3, 2013 Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain. Technology writers, in particular, tend to miss the point miserably, because they see everything as a technology problem. Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem,…
I want to tell you a story today. A sprawling epic mess of a story which began with two histories intersecting awkwardly just over a hundred years ago in a small tribal village nestled in the dense forests of one of the richest mining regions of the world. It is the kind of story that has multiple…
[Note: I have a nagging feeling I’ve spent a few thousand words spelling out something completely obvious. Still, I hope there’s value in actually spelling it out.] It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. —William Jefferson Clinton He was right, you know. A few months ago I argued in The…
It will soon be three months since the Metropolitan Museum of Art instituted its new admissions policy: pay what you wish for New Yorkers and tristate students, a discount for the elderly and groups, and twenty-five dollars for everybody else. From 1970 to 2018, the Met’s policy had been a more…
A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it. We already had the coup. It happened on…
The sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard are still inside my head. — Richard Rodgers We discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held – traceable, we concluded, to the uke’s all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords – single, timeless events apprehended all at once…
Today, the design consultancy Ideo announced that it has acquired Datascope , a Chicago-based data science company. The acquisition is meant to help Ideo, one of the country’s most prominent firms, respond to demand from AI-powered clients and can be read as a harbinger of where the design industry…
Glenn Harvey I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes/Thomson Reuters Foundation Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, part of greater Mexico City, 2016 Geoffrey West spent most of his life as a research scientist and administrator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, running programs concerned not with nuclear weapons but with peaceful…
The title is misleading. Kramer and Alstad started writing a book about problems in guru-disciple relationships. However, they realized two things: such problems are partly due to common “spiritual” misunderstandings of ; and guru-disciple power dynamics are similar to other relationships of…
Self-confidence is not a feeling of superiority, but ofindependence. —Lama Yeshe Because there is no cosmic plan,questions of ultimate value are meaningless. Because there is nocosmic plan, our futures are nevercertain. This opens the possibility of freedom. Our destiny is alwaysambiguous. Of…
Image courtesy graysnork We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. This is the last essay in a series on “ how to be a…
Image courtesy Inextremiss We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In “Eating the shadow,” I suggested five phases:…
Image courtesy TeaBeforeWar We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In “Eating the shadow,” I suggested five…
Image courtesy Inextremiss We can embrace our monstrosity while cultivating our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes. How? In 2010, I wrote a series of essays that tried…
“ ‘One day when they were of age, the two remaining brothersdetermined to set out on a Quest, to seek their fortune in the wideworld. For they were brave and handsome and clever—or at leastthe older brother was—and their village seemed too small forthem. Their father pleaded with them not to go, for…
Dakinis were fearsome witches who ate human flesh. They were also the enlightened goddesses who made tantric Buddhism available to humankind. “Where did Buddhist Tantra come from?” is a question that fascinates me. Understanding the origins of a cultural system often helps make sense what it has…
Intuition and logic; chaos and pattern – how do these words relate to romance? What significance do they have to ‘falling in love’? How do these word-pairs reflect the dance of relationship between men and women? The energy of these word pairs permeates every aspect of our lives: randomness and…
The method of intensification Nigel Tufnel, guitarist in the decreasingly-fictional heavy metal band Spinal Tap , explained that they could play louder than anyone else because their amplifiers went to eleven . Tantra has a similar approach. It is not the polite Middle Way between extremes. It is…
Almost every culture, religion, ideology, or world-view holdssome things as sacred, pure, holy, or unquestionably true—and others asprofane, unclean, or taboo. Among the few exceptions are Zen and Dzogchen. They holdthat there is nothing that is inherently sacred. (This ought to be an…
I mean “energy” in an everyday, non-spiritual sense. I mean “energy” in the way you speak of: Having a low-energy day because you’re tired or bored The electric energy of a club on Saturday night The tense energy in your office just before job cuts are announced The chaotic energy of waves in a…
Everyone you meet is a Buddha. All the world is a sacred paradise. That is the tantric practice of “pure vision.” Like charnel ground , it is a “practice of view,” which means developing the habit of interpreting the world in a particular way. There are technical methods for developing this “divine…
“You know what we need, Hobbes? We need an attitude .” —Calvin & Hobbes What I find most valuable in Buddhist tantra is an attitude . It’s the attitude I’ll call “spacious passion.” Over the next dozen pages, I’ll explain that attitude, with its applications and implications. But here, even before…
What we want from religion is guarantees. The mundane world is chaotic, risky, arbitrary and confusing. Efforts that should work fail. The good suffer and wrong-doers prosper. Life does not make sense. What we want is an assurance that all this is an illusion. We want to hear that the real world,…
Is tantra different? Everything I have said so far may sound familiar. It may sound like common sense. It may sound just like other brands of Buddhism you know. So what’s the big deal? The short answer is that passionate, active connection was rejected by most traditional Buddhisms. However, it’s so…
Nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world. That is tantra’s main claim about the nature of reality. Maybe it sounds like good news: “Cool, man! Everything is great! No problem! Don’t worry, be happy!” But that is not believable; and it is not the attitude of tantra. There are problems, and…
Thangtong Gyalpo’s bridge over the Tsangpo A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,…
number eight: emptiness Buddhist Tantra begins where Sutrayana ends: at emptiness. Tantra concerns the realms beyond emptiness , about which mainstream Buddhism (Sutrayana) has nothing to say. Few Buddhist systems go beyond emptiness . This post is a humorous sketch of the differences among three:…
are based on collections of simple : fundamental attitudes toward . Some stances (addressing different of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most systems align with one of three common combinations. These combinations are: : everything is given a definite meaning by something separate…
Party at Eric’s House Last Weekend, or Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. A year ago I was in the audience at a gathering of designers in San Francisco. There were four designers on stage, and two of them worked for me. I was there to support them. The topic of design responsibility…
Robert Kegan’s model of adult development has profoundly influenced my understanding of ethics, relationships, society, and thought. This page summarizes his theory. Earlier, I’ve mentioned Lawrence Kohlberg’s related model of moral development. He pointed out a series of increasingly sophisticated…
TL;DR: Much of my time for the past year has been spent navigating the medical maze on behalf of my mother, who has dementia. I observe that American health care organizations can no longer operate systematically, so participants are forced to act in the communal mode, as if in the pre-modern world.…
In traditional meditative practices, "letting go" (also called non-attachment) means coming to terms with the fact that both good things and bad things are a constant in our lives. Life is an accumulation of experiences, causes and conditions which are always shifting and changing forms. After all,…
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