even though i am nowhere near being a fan of osho!, but then i do agree to the article below and its nicely written too ...
It Is Difficult To Stay In The Middle
Discourse: Osho
The most difficult thing, the almost impossible thing for the mind, is to remain in the middle, to remain balanced. And to move from one thing to its opposite is the easiest. To move from one polarity to another is the nature of the mind.
If you are balanced, mind disappears. Mind is like a disease: when you are imbalanced it is there, when you are balanced, it is not there. That is why it is easy for a person who overeats to go on a fast. It looks illogical, because we think that a person who is obsessed with food cannot go on a fast.
But you are wrong. Only a person who is obsessed with food can fast, because fasting is the same obsession in the opposite direction. You are not really changing yourself. You are still obsessed with food. Before you were overeating; now you are hungry — but the mind remains focused on food from the opposite extreme.
A man who has been overindulging in sex can become a celibate very easily. There is no problem. But it is difficult for the mind to come to the right diet, difficult for the mind to stay in the middle. It is just like a clock’s pendulum. The pendulum goes to the right, then it moves to the left, then again to the right, and again to the left; the clock’s working depends on this movement.
If the pendulum stays in the middle, the clock stops. And when the pendulum moves to the right, you think it is only going to the right, but at the same time it is gathering momentum to go to the left. The more it moves to the right, the more energy it gathers to move to the left, and vice versa.
Thinking means momentum. The mind starts arranging for the opposite. When you love a person you are gathering momentum to hate him. That’s why only friends can become enemies. You cannot suddenly become an enemy unless you have first become a friend. Only lovers can quarrel and fight, because unless you love, how can you hate? Unless you have moved far to the extreme left, how can you move to the right?
Modern research says that so-called love is a relationship of intimate enmity. Your wife is your intimate enemy, your husband is your intimate enemy — both intimate and inimical. They appear opposites, illogical, because we wonder how one who is intimate can be the enemy; one who is a friend, how can he also be the foe?
Logic is superficial, life goes deeper, and in life all opposites are joined together, they exist together. Remember this, because then meditation becomes balancing. Buddha taught eight disciplines, and with each discipline he used the word right. He said: Right effort, because it is very easy to move from action to inaction, from waking to sleep, but to remain in the middle is difficult.
When Buddha used the word right he was saying: Don’t move to the opposite, just stay in the middle. Right food — he never said to fast. Don’t indulge in too much eating and don’t indulge in fasting. He said: Right food. Right food means standing in the middle.
When you are standing in the middle you are not gathering any momentum. And this is the beauty of it — a man who is not gathering any momentum to move anywhere, can be at ease with himself, can be at home.
Excerpted from The Empty Boat. Courtesy: Osho International Foundation.
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Way We Think Now
after a really long time, i have found a really nice read! eloquently and intelligently written.
Have we all surrendered to the internet?
Andrew Sullivan
I didn’t know this: Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter. Many of those terse aphorisms and impenetrable reveries were banged out on an 1882 Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. And a friend of his at the time noticed a change in the German philosopher’s style as soon as he moved from longhand to type. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote. Nietzsche replied: “You are right. Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Gulp.
The technology writer Nicholas Carr, who pointed out this item of Nietzsche trivia in the new issue of The Atlantic, proceeded to make a more disturbing point. If a typewriter could do this to a mind as profound and powerful as Nietzsche’s, what on earth is Google now doing to us? Are we fast losing the capacity to think deeply, calmly and seriously? Have we all succumbed to internet attentiondeficit disorder?
The astonishing benefits of Google are barely worth repeating. I spend most of my day blogging — at a current rate of about 300 posts a week. I’m certainly not more stupid than before. I’m much, much better and more instantly informed. However, the way in which one now thinks and writes has subtly — or not so subtly — altered. I process information far more rapidly and seem able to absorb multiple sources of information simultaneously in ways that would have shocked my teenage self.
In researching a topic, or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another. The mental multitasking — a factoid here, a video there, a link over there, an e-mail, an instant message — is both mind-boggling when you look at it from a distance and yet perfectly natural when you’re in mid-blog.
When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page printout, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. I’m ready for a new link after a paragraph. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on. I get antsy. I skim the footnotes for the quick info high that one’s used to. No good. I scan the acknowledgements, hoping for a name one can recognise. I start again. I reach for the laptop a few paragraphs later. It’s not that one cannot find the time for real reading, for a leisurely absorption of argument or narrative. It’s more that my mind has been conditioned to resist it.
Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for texting and social network messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes — and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives.
The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. I would carry a single book around with me for days when younger, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say — the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.
The white noise of the ever-faster information highway may, one fears, be preventing this. The still, small voice of calm that refreshes a civilisation may be in the process of being snuffed out by myriad distractions. I don’t want to be fatalistic here. As Carr points out, previous innovations — writing itself, printing, radio, television — have all shifted the tone of our civilisation without destroying it. And the capacity of the web to retrieve the old and ancient and make them new and accessible again is a small miracle.
Right now, we may be maximally overwhelmed by all this accessible information, but the time may come when our mastery of the new world allows us to gain more perspective on it. Here’s hoping. Shallowness, after all, does not necessarily preclude depth. We just have to find a new equilibrium between the two. We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them. It is inevitable this will take our always-evolving species and evermalleable brains a little time and the Google era in a mass form is not even a decade old. Some have suggested a web sabbath — a day or two in the week when we force ourselves not to read e-mails or post blogs or text messages; a break in order to think in the old way again: to look at human faces in the flesh rather than on a Facebook profile, to read a book rather than a blog, to pray rather than browse. I’ll start with Nietzsche at some point. But right now there’s a blog to fill.
Have we all surrendered to the internet?
Andrew Sullivan
I didn’t know this: Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter. Many of those terse aphorisms and impenetrable reveries were banged out on an 1882 Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. And a friend of his at the time noticed a change in the German philosopher’s style as soon as he moved from longhand to type. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote. Nietzsche replied: “You are right. Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Gulp.
The technology writer Nicholas Carr, who pointed out this item of Nietzsche trivia in the new issue of The Atlantic, proceeded to make a more disturbing point. If a typewriter could do this to a mind as profound and powerful as Nietzsche’s, what on earth is Google now doing to us? Are we fast losing the capacity to think deeply, calmly and seriously? Have we all succumbed to internet attentiondeficit disorder?
The astonishing benefits of Google are barely worth repeating. I spend most of my day blogging — at a current rate of about 300 posts a week. I’m certainly not more stupid than before. I’m much, much better and more instantly informed. However, the way in which one now thinks and writes has subtly — or not so subtly — altered. I process information far more rapidly and seem able to absorb multiple sources of information simultaneously in ways that would have shocked my teenage self.
In researching a topic, or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another. The mental multitasking — a factoid here, a video there, a link over there, an e-mail, an instant message — is both mind-boggling when you look at it from a distance and yet perfectly natural when you’re in mid-blog.
When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page printout, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. I’m ready for a new link after a paragraph. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on. I get antsy. I skim the footnotes for the quick info high that one’s used to. No good. I scan the acknowledgements, hoping for a name one can recognise. I start again. I reach for the laptop a few paragraphs later. It’s not that one cannot find the time for real reading, for a leisurely absorption of argument or narrative. It’s more that my mind has been conditioned to resist it.
Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for texting and social network messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes — and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives.
The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. I would carry a single book around with me for days when younger, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say — the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.
The white noise of the ever-faster information highway may, one fears, be preventing this. The still, small voice of calm that refreshes a civilisation may be in the process of being snuffed out by myriad distractions. I don’t want to be fatalistic here. As Carr points out, previous innovations — writing itself, printing, radio, television — have all shifted the tone of our civilisation without destroying it. And the capacity of the web to retrieve the old and ancient and make them new and accessible again is a small miracle.
Right now, we may be maximally overwhelmed by all this accessible information, but the time may come when our mastery of the new world allows us to gain more perspective on it. Here’s hoping. Shallowness, after all, does not necessarily preclude depth. We just have to find a new equilibrium between the two. We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them. It is inevitable this will take our always-evolving species and evermalleable brains a little time and the Google era in a mass form is not even a decade old. Some have suggested a web sabbath — a day or two in the week when we force ourselves not to read e-mails or post blogs or text messages; a break in order to think in the old way again: to look at human faces in the flesh rather than on a Facebook profile, to read a book rather than a blog, to pray rather than browse. I’ll start with Nietzsche at some point. But right now there’s a blog to fill.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Tiger Woods' white wife and mixed life
Well, its interesting and funny to read all the comments on this article in the link below!
Some of the funny ones ...
Let's see...Tiger is mixed with black and Asian...but pretty much "denies" his blackness...probably for the all mighty dollar...he married a white girl...so now the kid is mixed with...black...white...Asian...and who knows what else...*sigh*...why couldn't this brotha just marry a good black woman?...oh...never mind...he's a black man who hit it big...got a lot of money...so...u know...I guess it's an unwritten rule that when that happens...u gotta marry a white woman...cause well...ain't no sistas out there good enough for u when u become rich...they are only good enough for u when u r struggling in the hood!!!Oh well...everyone knows Tiger is whiteboy at heart...anyways!!!-Anyways...eventhough he will not admit it...he is still a brotha...so what kinda brotha would i be if i didn't congratulate him on his new baby girl...Congratulations Brotha Tiger
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so blacks should only marry blacks? TW is part asian. shouldn't he have married an asian woman instead?yes!!!! because i'm a racist asian, who believes asians should only marry asians.oh wait!!!! he's half asian, half black. so maybe he should have married someone who's also half asian and half black.and don't get me started on that bitch condi. she seems to have this "hard-on" for dubya.
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That's the first time I have ever heard of someone who is part Asian and part Black be accused of being too white.
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and the funniest one .... who says i live in a caste/creed/religion divided country!
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Cranky_Old_Batt...W-H-A-T-E-V-E-R!!!...listen...if ur mixed with black...ur black...cause black is the "dominant" race...even the whiteman admitted that by proclaiming that if u r 10% black...ur black...PERIOD!!!...that's how "strong" black is...all it takes is 10%!!!As for Tiger Woods (that's his black name)...but in Asian countries he is known as...Tiger Woo...Tiger Woo...as for Tiger Woods/Tiger Woo(don't wanna leave out Cranky_Old_Batt in this discussion) marrying white...that's a Uncle Tom move...straight Uncle Tom...that goes for a lot of other famous/rich black men who do this...it's "disgusting" and "disrespectful"...to sistas everywhere. Black women have been through soooo much and continue to struggle mightily...but the black race has survived...not on the backs of black men...but on the backs of black women...so...when a black man finally makes it big...I feel he has a duty...an obligation...to take a sista along for the ride...cause that's who was with him when he was stuggling...a sista...not a white girl...a sista...the white girl is the one who clinched her purse and crossed the street when she saw him coming...there is no real difference between a white woman and a black woman...sure...a lot of white women have more pleasant "attitudes" than a lot of black women...but that's because they have not had to struggle and go through the sh!t a lot of black women have had to go through...just like a lot of white men have a more pleasant "demeanor" (which in a lot of cases...is "very" deceptive)...than a lot of black men...for the same reasons...but...a good black woman...is better than any woman of any race!!!...and it's sad that whenever a black man reaches the top...he would rather have a white woman there with him...than one of his sistas...who "deserve" to be there...it's "disgusting" and "disrespectful"...and everytime these brothas take a picture with some white girl on their arm or marries a white girl...it's a slap in the face to every black woman in the struggle...cause believe me...if u white women think u got sh!t hard...imagine how much harder it is for a black woman!!!...anyways...saying this stuff on a article about Tiger Woods is probably not the best place, since...he won't even acknowledge he is black..."that" is a slap in the face of every black person...but hey...if that's how he feels...that's on him!!!...he represents a growing trend among a lot of successful blacks...in order to maintain their success...they have to give up their roots...they have to walk around and act like they are not black...after 100's of years of being told that u r nothing because u r black...now when u become successful...u can't "acknowledge" u r black...for fear that the white folks won't like u anymore (as in Tiger's case)...Tiger Woods has pretty much turned his back on his race...anyways...as much as I do not respect it...on some levels I understand it...cause if he "ever" acknowledges he has an identity as a black man...his fame will crash and burn overnight!!!...he will go from being the greatest golfer in the world...to being the subject of "Whatever happened to Tiger Woods?"!!!...anyways...I don't wanna sound like I hate the guy...cause I don't...he's just doing what he's gotta do I guess (except for marrying a white woman...he didn't have to do that...but I guess u gotta go with ur heart...and it's "obvious"...Tiger Woods has a white heart!!!).
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=17772
Some of the funny ones ...
Let's see...Tiger is mixed with black and Asian...but pretty much "denies" his blackness...probably for the all mighty dollar...he married a white girl...so now the kid is mixed with...black...white...Asian...and who knows what else...*sigh*...why couldn't this brotha just marry a good black woman?...oh...never mind...he's a black man who hit it big...got a lot of money...so...u know...I guess it's an unwritten rule that when that happens...u gotta marry a white woman...cause well...ain't no sistas out there good enough for u when u become rich...they are only good enough for u when u r struggling in the hood!!!Oh well...everyone knows Tiger is whiteboy at heart...anyways!!!-Anyways...eventhough he will not admit it...he is still a brotha...so what kinda brotha would i be if i didn't congratulate him on his new baby girl...Congratulations Brotha Tiger
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
so blacks should only marry blacks? TW is part asian. shouldn't he have married an asian woman instead?yes!!!! because i'm a racist asian, who believes asians should only marry asians.oh wait!!!! he's half asian, half black. so maybe he should have married someone who's also half asian and half black.and don't get me started on that bitch condi. she seems to have this "hard-on" for dubya.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That's the first time I have ever heard of someone who is part Asian and part Black be accused of being too white.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and the funniest one .... who says i live in a caste/creed/religion divided country!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cranky_Old_Batt...W-H-A-T-E-V-E-R!!!...listen...if ur mixed with black...ur black...cause black is the "dominant" race...even the whiteman admitted that by proclaiming that if u r 10% black...ur black...PERIOD!!!...that's how "strong" black is...all it takes is 10%!!!As for Tiger Woods (that's his black name)...but in Asian countries he is known as...Tiger Woo...Tiger Woo...as for Tiger Woods/Tiger Woo(don't wanna leave out Cranky_Old_Batt in this discussion) marrying white...that's a Uncle Tom move...straight Uncle Tom...that goes for a lot of other famous/rich black men who do this...it's "disgusting" and "disrespectful"...to sistas everywhere. Black women have been through soooo much and continue to struggle mightily...but the black race has survived...not on the backs of black men...but on the backs of black women...so...when a black man finally makes it big...I feel he has a duty...an obligation...to take a sista along for the ride...cause that's who was with him when he was stuggling...a sista...not a white girl...a sista...the white girl is the one who clinched her purse and crossed the street when she saw him coming...there is no real difference between a white woman and a black woman...sure...a lot of white women have more pleasant "attitudes" than a lot of black women...but that's because they have not had to struggle and go through the sh!t a lot of black women have had to go through...just like a lot of white men have a more pleasant "demeanor" (which in a lot of cases...is "very" deceptive)...than a lot of black men...for the same reasons...but...a good black woman...is better than any woman of any race!!!...and it's sad that whenever a black man reaches the top...he would rather have a white woman there with him...than one of his sistas...who "deserve" to be there...it's "disgusting" and "disrespectful"...and everytime these brothas take a picture with some white girl on their arm or marries a white girl...it's a slap in the face to every black woman in the struggle...cause believe me...if u white women think u got sh!t hard...imagine how much harder it is for a black woman!!!...anyways...saying this stuff on a article about Tiger Woods is probably not the best place, since...he won't even acknowledge he is black..."that" is a slap in the face of every black person...but hey...if that's how he feels...that's on him!!!...he represents a growing trend among a lot of successful blacks...in order to maintain their success...they have to give up their roots...they have to walk around and act like they are not black...after 100's of years of being told that u r nothing because u r black...now when u become successful...u can't "acknowledge" u r black...for fear that the white folks won't like u anymore (as in Tiger's case)...Tiger Woods has pretty much turned his back on his race...anyways...as much as I do not respect it...on some levels I understand it...cause if he "ever" acknowledges he has an identity as a black man...his fame will crash and burn overnight!!!...he will go from being the greatest golfer in the world...to being the subject of "Whatever happened to Tiger Woods?"!!!...anyways...I don't wanna sound like I hate the guy...cause I don't...he's just doing what he's gotta do I guess (except for marrying a white woman...he didn't have to do that...but I guess u gotta go with ur heart...and it's "obvious"...Tiger Woods has a white heart!!!).
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=7&entry_id=17772
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