Bryan

Posts

Top 10 Books I read in 2018 2018-12-25
Committing to Meditation 2018-12-22
Redecentralize 2018-12-07
The Clock, Part 4: Interstice 2018-12-03
Through a Glass Darkly 2018-11-24
The Clock, Part 3: Graveyard Shift 2018-11-19
The Clock, Part 2: Matineé 2018-11-03
The Clock, Part 1: Introduction 2018-10-17
The Elephant in the Brain 2018-08-16
The Reivers 2018-08-14

My other blog

The Axial Age
Carl Sagan, in Cosmos (1983), introduced me to the notion of the Axial Age, a period of “pivoting” in human history:The sixth century B.C…
Gaia House Retreat
Last week I did a five-day home meditation retreat in the Sŏn (Korean Zen) tradition. It was taught by Martine and Stephen Batchelor.This…
Space & Originality
So lacking am I in originality that I set out to write against it today, and in the process found out that I had already done so, and…
Trillions dead for one to live
I was reading about Welwitschia this week, a strange plant found in Namibia and Angola. Its strap-like leaves grow slowly but continuously…
You can't know in advance
In Foreknowledge I proposed that you can’t know in advance what you’ll learn before you set out. If you could, you wouldn’t need to learn it…
Writing as Cooking
Today I’ve been thinking about writing as cooking. If we don’t quite control the output, then at least we control the initial conditions…
Output
If we cannot control much of what we take in, then at least, surely, we can control what we put out? We control what we say and write, don’t…
Foreknowledge
There is a further problem, though, with inputs, and that is that you do not and really cannot control inputs either.You set out to read a…
Inputs
If method matters more than we commonly think with respect to output, then what of input? If how you do a thing matters as much as what you…
Infinite Knowledge
The Taoist Zhuangzi writes, in Burton Watson’s translation of the ancient Chinese:Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use…