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Pastime pastiche tic tac toeuvre


Took bath in the evening. There was not enough space during the day. I use space for time and time for space. Nonstop news tells about too many events than you would care to know about. The purpose is to make you feel alive- if that’s how you feel alive. When almost everyone finds themselves in some sort of career or the other – why judge only the news anchors or reporters for making you feel alive with nonstop violence. No. You shouldn’t. It’s not very different from cinema. Television and Cinema, at best, are trying to make you feel alive, by mimicking it.
I hear the bells from the worship room. It’s my mother. I heard bells early in the morning. It was not my mother. She was leaving for work. It was urgent. It has always been.

For a change she chose to go by van. I was waiting for her at about five o’clock. She told me she was coming when she could pick my call after twenty minutes. Ivan was the name of the director of the movie. Strange words with which sequences play. Sometimes you doubt as if you are acting in a pre-organised play. But this assumption can only be a comfortable pastime at times.
Pastime pastiche chenrezigzagzigguratbaggery.
I come back to the linear narrative instead of going into the new masterpiece. My friend’s brother was telling me why he was alive. His elder brother. Even his father, with a different face, was alive. I was telling them that they had passed away. I told them the story. Then I heard the door. Someone was knocking. It was my mother. She was leaving. She was leaving for work. It’s urgent. It’s always urgent.


There’s some cash in my hands which I paid for buying snacks. It was my other friend the other day and he was telling me why he was alive not dead. Prior to that it was another old woman who was actually visiting a foreign country rather than not being alive.
My father tried calling me. He was trying the contact number which is no longer in service. A guest had arrived. They were supposed to visit some place.
I edited the contact. Deleted the one which is no longer active and showed him the new contact. I sense an unease about him. Though there are cups available in the kitchen he wants me to wash them immediately. I remove some trays from the rack in the hall.
First I served water, then tea without sugar, for the guest and then the usual tea for father. I had it myself. The ginger tea.
Someone came down from upstairs to switch the water pump on when I was serving the tea. Then later I heard a call to switch it off.
Organised utensils in the kitchen and mopped verandah floor after switching on the fan. This area is almost always wet and slippery.
Served food to father with water. Then I had it myself. There was rice but not enough pulse. The plan might have been to eat rice in the evening, like yesterday. Helped him with cooling down of milk which was to be filled in a bottle.
Getting internet connection recharged is again an uphill task now. I look for the cheapest plans. The telecom business wasn’t designed to cater me or to make my life comfortable in the truest sense.
This weblog isn’t about projecting how I hide my shortcomings. Nor about exaggerating them. Nor about equating something objective with something subjective.
I fill the jug up with water for drinking. I organize the kitchen platform but behave minimally regarding utensils because maid only visits once per day. I clean the kitchen platform near the gas stove as it is sticky.
Early in the morning there were no glasses available for drinking water. There weren’t any pots to pasteurise milk either. Since maid was about to arrive I waited. Grandmother does a brief round of washing up utensils early in the morning. I will wait until I absolutely need to fill that role up. I had to wash a danka pot today as I had forgotten to remove it from the kitchen to the basin when the maid was washing dishes.
A bike passes by with a horn loud enough to be heard from a few hundred metres. I read about Throstle. Song thrush. There’s a video about that on YouTube. It teaches how to identify the distinct mimicking call made by that bird.
There’s another, in which a guy is reading Hades, the sixth chapter of Ulysses sitting by the side of fire. There are other people reading them in other places but I don’t want to listen to them. Gemini recommended these videos as I was discussing with it.
They repeat. Delusions of grandeur hidden in the secretive play of identities in the name of societies and hierarchies. I know what they are building towards and why. And yet I don’t participate in them one way or the other. Replace a name with another, an image with another, a society with another. Keep doing that as a means to escape. When you see fundamentals of the design you realise that all the details are merely byproduct of conditioning. They’re not as superficial as self help gurus will like you to believe. You can continue to replace one desire with the other and you can remove the very fabric of some designs but you can’t fail but realise that it’s nothing but life disguised as various expressions: acceptable and unacceptable.
The very nature of default control operates on assumptions of details. Even examining of a single agency would reveal how inconsistent likes and dislikes are. Why are they assumed to be likeable and otherwise. How they translate into comfortable and uncomfortable and then moral or immoral.
When taxation for thinking begins: you have already transcended the regimes where visible commodities alone were taxed. Tax on food, water and shelter: yes. Tax on thinking? Strange but true. How can such a fleeting entity be taxed?
It’s more systematic manipulation than you think. It emanates from deeper resources than you think it does. It’s the common resource pool for all religious and moralistic propaganda.
Here: whatever is being fed into you seems to be autotellic without a significant origin point. You must be. You are. Yes. Success. Next course. It’s an infallible machine with everything pre determined. There’s no escape from it. It’s not designed for self correction or not doing what it was designed to do. Hence: your surprise is a waste. Your wonder, fatigue or disbelief are useless. It knows what it knows-in advance and it will let you know that it knows.

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Making of Ulysses

Those two stories—the daily grind of teaching and the grand legal battle for the soul of literature—represent the two poles of Joyce’s life: the struggle to survive and the struggle to be heard.
1. The Berlitz School: Joyce the Teacher
While writing about Stephen’s “school kip,” Joyce was living his own version of it in Trieste.
* The Method: The Berlitz method was “direct immersion”—no translation allowed. Joyce had to teach English using only English.
* The Students: His classes were a mix of naval officers, wealthy socialites, and shopkeepers. One of his students was the famous writer Italo Svevo, who eventually became a close friend and a model for Leopold Bloom.
* The “Boredom”: Joyce hated the repetition. He often arrived late or spent the lesson gossiping about Irish politics. However, this job gave him the perfect “ear” for how language is actually spoken, which he used to create the incredibly realistic dialogue in Ulysses.
2. United States v. One Book Called Ulysses (1933)
This is one of the most important court cases in literary history. After years of being smuggled into the US in brown paper wrappers, the book finally faced a judge.
* The Strategy: Random House (the publisher) wanted to get caught. they literally sent a copy through customs so it would be seized, allowing them to sue the government.
* Judge John M. Woolsey: He was a sophisticated, literate judge. He spent weeks reading the book.
* The Verdict: In a landmark decision, Woolsey ruled that the book was not obscene. He wrote that while it was “somewhat emetic” (made you want to vomit) in places, it was not “aphrodisiac” (meant to cause lust).
* The Famous Quote: Woolsey stated that Joyce was attempting to show how the “screen of consciousness” actually works, and that his “experiments” were a sincere attempt to record the human mind. This opened the doors for modern literature to discuss the body and the psyche without fear of jail time.
Etymology of “Berlitz”
* Origin: Named after Maximilian Berlitz, a German immigrant to the US.
* Etymology: The name is a variant of Berlic, of Slavic origin (Sorbian), likely meaning “little bear” or related to a geographical location.
* Significance: In the book, Stephen feels like a “little bear” or a caged animal in his teaching job, trapped by the need for “four shining sovereigns.”
Etymology of “Obscene”
Since this word almost ended Joyce’s career:
* Origin: From the Latin obscenus.
* Etymology: Uncertain, but often thought to be from ob- (against/away) + caenum (“filth” or “mud”).
* The Irony: As we discussed, Joyce’s name Loyola (his school) means “muddy place.” He leaned into the “filth” of reality to find the “shining” truth beneath it.

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The Universal Man of Joyce

To wrap up this journey, we can see that for Joyce, the “Universal Man” is a composite of all these figures. He believed that whether you are a Greek king, a Danish prince, a Dublin advertising canvasser, or an Indian revolutionary, the core “experiments” of the human soul remain the same.
The Convergence: The “Everyman”
The diverse influences we’ve discussed—Gandhi, Shakespeare, and the Vedas—converge in Joyce’s work through three main pillars:
* The Commonality of Guilt: By linking Stephen Dedalus to Hamlet and (as you noted) Gandhi, Joyce shows that “filial guilt” is not a local Irish problem. It is the fundamental friction of the “Son” trying to become his own “Father.”
* The Language of the Soul: Joyce used the “refined” nature of Sanskrit and the “artful forging” of Greek to show that while our languages differ, our “inwit” (conscience) is a shared human constant.
* The Micro-Macro Parallel: Joyce’s theory was that a single day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) could contain the entire history of the world. A man buying a “rasher” of bacon is no less significant than Odysseus fighting a sea monster or a seeker finding “Shanti.”
The “Atman” of Leopold Bloom
In the end, Leopold Bloom is Joyce’s most “Indian” creation. Bloom possesses a quality of equanimity—the ability to stay calm and compassionate despite being an outsider and facing betrayal. While Stephen is trapped in his “agenbite of inwit,” Bloom moves through the world with a “Tathāgata-like” acceptance. He is the “Universal Man” because he accepts the “bitter mystery” of love and death without letting it crush him.
Etymology of “Atman”
To end on the core of the self:
* Origin: Sanskrit Ātman.
* Etymology: Likely from the root an, meaning “to breathe.”
* Significance: It refers to the “true self” or “soul.” In Ulysses, Joyce is essentially trying to capture the “breath” of Dublin—the Atman of a city—by recording every tiny thought and sensation of its inhabitants.

It is a fascinating bridge to cross. Joyce was a linguistic scavenger; he didn’t just stay within the “Sassenach” or Latin traditions. He looked toward the East to find a language that could hold the “universal” psyche you mentioned.
While Ulysses is deeply rooted in the Mediterranean (Greek) and the Northern (Shakespearean) traditions, Joyce’s interest in Indian philosophy blossomed fully as he moved toward his final work, Finnegans Wake.
The Sanskrit Connection: “The Word”
Joyce was deeply aware of the Vedas and the concept of Aum (Om). To a writer who believed that words were the “vibrations” of the universe, Sanskrit—the “perfected” language—was the ultimate playground.
* The Cycle of Time: Joyce was obsessed with the philosopher Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, whose theories of “cyclical history” mirror the Hindu concept of Yugas. Just as the Mahabharata moves through cycles of destruction and rebirth, Ulysses (and even more so the Wake) is circular—ending where it begins.
* The Ending of the Wake: The final pages of Finnegans Wake are seen by many as a “passing over” into a state of peace. He uses the word “Tathāgata” (a title of the Buddha, meaning “one who has thus gone”). It represents the final release from the “filial guilt” and “brooding” that traps Stephen Dedalus.
The “Shanti” Connection
Joyce was a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, who famously ended his poem The Waste Land (published the same year as Ulysses, 1922) with the Sanskrit mantra:
> Shantih shantih shantih
>
Joyce and Eliot were both trying to find a “peace that passeth understanding” to heal the “bitter mysteries” of a broken Europe. For Joyce, this meant looking at the Upunishads to find a way to describe a consciousness that wasn’t just Irish or English, but human.
Etymology of “Sanskrit”
Since we are tracking the “forging” of language:
* Origin: From the Sanskrit Saṃskṛtam.
* Etymology: Composed of sam (together/completely) + kṛta (made/formed).
* Significance: It literally means “refined,” “polished,” or “highly wrought.” This is the exact goal Stephen Dedalus sets for himself: to take the “mud” of his life (remember Loyola means “muddy place”) and refine it into a “polished” work of art.

That is a profound observation. Connecting Stephen Dedalus to Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography brings a fascinating cross-cultural layer to the theme of “filial guilt.”
In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi famously recounts the “double shame” of being with his wife when his father passed away in the next room. Like Stephen, Gandhi carried that moment as a lifelong scar, and both men transformed that private “offence” into a public, creative, or spiritual quest.
The Psyche as a Laboratory
You’ve hit on exactly why Ulysses changed literature. Joyce didn’t just write a story; he performed an autopsy on his own soul.
* No Filters: Most authors “curate” their protagonists to be more heroic or likable. Joyce did the opposite. He gave Stephen his own arrogance, his own hygiene issues, his own “beastly” thoughts, and his most shameful memories of his mother.
* The Universal through the Particular: By being so brutally specific about his own psyche—his guilt, his lust, his intellectual vanity—Joyce tapped into a universal human experience. We recognize ourselves in Stephen’s “brooding” and Bloom’s “scientific” curiosities.
* Vulnerability as Strength: As you noted with Gandhi, there is a transformative power in admitting one’s “experiments” or failures. By putting his psyche up for examination, Joyce moved beyond “storytelling” into a form of secular confession.
The “Hamlet” Connection (Final Note)
In the end, all three—Hamlet, Stephen, and Gandhi—are men struggling with the Ghost of the Father (or Mother). They are trying to figure out how to be “truthful” to themselves while carrying the heavy weight of their ancestors’ expectations.
Etymology of “Gandhi”
In keeping with our theme of names and identity:
* Origin: From the Sanskrit gandhika.
* Etymology: It literally means “perfumer” or “grocer/seller of spices” (from gandha, meaning “smell” or “fragrance”).
* Significance: Much like “Bloom” (flower) or “Lalouette” (lark), the name is grounded in the sensory, physical world—a sharp contrast to the “wetted ashes” and “ghosts” that haunt the beginning of Ulysses.

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H. P. Lovecraft and Walter John Held: Irony From Pages of UAPA

THE SPECTATOR for June-July, 1914, though somewhat trite in title, is the first number of a magazine notable for its quality. Walter John Held is without doubt one of the most enterprising youths who have ever joined the ranks of the association, though his views on paid subscriptions and advertisements show his still imperfect acquisition of the true amateur spirit. Mr. Held mistakes commercial progress for artistic development, believing that the aim of every amateur in his ascent toward professional authorship is to write remunerative matter. He therefore considers a publisher’s advancement to be best shown in ability to extract an odd penny now and then from a few subscribers who really subscribe only out of courtesy. We wish that Mr. Held might come to consider amateur journalism in its higher aspects; as a medium for improvement in literature and taste; an aid to the cultivation of the art for its own sake in the manner of gentlemen, not of cheap tradesmen. The selection of commercial prosperity as a goal will ruin any true literary progress, and dull the artistic aspiration of the student as soon as his mercenary instincts shall have been satisfied. Besides, there is really no sound business principle in the so-called “sale” of little papers. No youth could ever found or sustain a real magazine of substantial price and more than nominal circulation. The various ten-cents-a-year journals which some[19] “amateurs” try to edit are no logical steps toward actually professional publishing. The latter comes only after literary skill has been attained, and literary skill must at first be developed without regard for immediate monetary profit.
[ This passage reflects his views on amateur journalism as compared to professional]

This passage is a foundational text for understanding the philosophy of the Amateur Journalism movement, and it is quintessential H.P. Lovecraft. At its core, it outlines a sharp, elitist divide between “Art for Art’s Sake” and “Commercialism.”
The “Gentleman” vs. The “Tradesman”
The reviewer (Lovecraft) views the UAPA not as a business school, but as a literary gymnasium. His critique of Walter John Held is based on a few key aristocratic ideals:
* The Amateur Spirit: To Lovecraft, “Amateur” does not mean “unskilled”; it means “motivated by love” (from the Latin amator). He believes that once you introduce money—even an “odd penny”—you corrupt the purity of the work.
* The Aristocracy of Letters: He uses the phrase “in the manner of gentlemen, not of cheap tradesmen.” This reflects an 18th-century mindset where writing for money was seen as slightly “vulgar.” A gentleman writes to improve his “literary taste” and “intellectual vigor,” not to fill a ledger.
* The Fallacy of the “Ten-Cent” Paper: He argues that these tiny subscription fees are a farce. Since no amateur can actually run a profitable magazine, trying to charge for it is just a “logical error.” He believes one should develop skill first, and only when that skill is perfected should one look toward the professional, remunerative world.
Comparison of Ideologies
| Feature | The “Amateur” View (Lovecraft) | The “Commercial” View (Held) |
|—|—|—|
| Primary Goal | Self-improvement and artistic purity. | Growth, circulation, and revenue. |
| Success Metric | Refinement of prose and “rhetorical taste.” | Ability to attract paid subscribers. |
| Writing Style | Classical, formal, and elevated. | Pragmatic and “remunerative.” |
| Final Objective | Perfection of the craft before entering the world. | Using the amateur press as a business launchpad. |
Historical Irony
There is a profound irony in this passage. Lovecraft spent much of his later life struggling in extreme poverty, often refusing to “sully” his work for commercial appeal, yet he spent years as a “ghostwriter” and revisionist for hire—effectively becoming the “tradesman” he warned Held against, just to survive.
Walter John Held, on the other hand, was following the “American Dream” model of the early 20th century: using a hobby to learn the mechanics of the marketplace.

In a twist of fate that aligns perfectly with the reviewer’s debate over “commercialism,” Walter John Held did not become a famous literary figure, but he arguably “made it big” in the very world the critic (H.P. Lovecraft) warned him against: business and industry.
While his literary “spectating” largely faded after the amateur years, Held pursued the “mercenary instincts” the reviewer loathed and found considerable professional success.
His Career Beyond Amateur Journalism
The “enterprising youth” described in the 1914 review transitioned into the professional world exactly as his early focus on advertisements and subscriptions suggested he would.
* Advertising & Marketing: Walter John Held moved into the corporate sector, eventually becoming a notable executive. He spent a significant portion of his career with Standard Oil of California (now Chevron).
* The “Tradesman” Triumphs: Far from being “ruined” by commercial prosperity, Held became a respected expert in business correspondence and office management. He even authored professional books and articles on these topics, such as The Great Task of Making the Office Pay.
* Literary Footprint: His name survives in the literary world today primarily because of the critique you shared. Because H.P. Lovecraft was the one who “roasted” him in the UAPA’s Department of Public Criticism, Held is immortalized as the pragmatic foil to Lovecraft’s high-minded “gentlemanly” ideals.
The Irony
The irony is twofold:
* Lovecraft, who championed “Art for Art’s sake” and detested writing for money, died in poverty with his genius largely unrecognized.
* Held, who was mocked for wanting to “extract an odd penny,” achieved the stability and professional status that the “commercial” mindset he was criticized for usually aims to secure.

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Xanthiappe, Lagniappe, Inexhaustible, Unexhaustible

This makes for a weak Time Travel fiction. There’s a class of people who are fond of time travel so much that they literally believe in it, as it’s presented in science fiction, in novels or on the big screen. Even if I travelled in time it was so costly, similar to as shown in the movies, I never wanted to repeat it. It wasn’t liberating. It was binding. It was produced by a binding agency because everything of value is produced by some agency or the other.

Fundamental desire to travel back in time is to improve with respect to some standard. When you examine these standards thoroughly you find them to be flawed or mostly posing conditions impossible to fulfil. The desire fades. Desire to travel to a future is to escape the present. It’s being prey to optimism.

It’s from here: the message was sent to my younger self. It was another interlocutor. Online acquaintance on a forum which is now defunct. Wayback Machine might take you to those wayward wardens dense mesne Nescafe feline felicity citylights.

I had memorised the word ‘inexhaustible’ as an adjective for a source of energy. Nuclear energy- in an essay on Wonders of Science. Memorise the essay once in class sixth or seventh and continue to reproduce it in the next four or five classes until you reach college. Or even in college if you would.

I highlighted the usage in the work of Xanthos(Xanthous), who was supposed to be from China. He had used unexhaustible instead of inexhaustible. He was already in the league of those who had contributed 1000 posts on the forum. He dissected my Grammar after I questioned his version of Philosophy on a specific religion. Instead of accepting this one to be an archaic usage he came up with following usages from literature where un version was used.

I don’t know if he won. I made an article with a red colored font with all capitals. I had already made it into the elite contributors echelon by contributing 1000 articles. It would be a wild guess to suggest that my student was actually using red ink in a similar manner though it’s true that whenever I mentioned Xanthos I recalled how he was the only one who tried to correct my grammar online. Twenty one years online ( on and off ) and only one individual who had similar views about dialectics or debates or discussions.

After one forum crashed I discovered the second corner online. He appeared there as well and our discussion created such a nuisance for admin that a “cooling off” period was needed. When I came across a similar interlocutor who recently used unexhaustible I recalled Xanthos and I thought that he was employing tools I once had but then no more for subtle, poetic or arcane instead of elaborate writing.

Xanthos had a scientific bend of mind though I didn’t like when Henry Quirk suggested that his logic was foolproof because I found many loopholes in it. What do I know? Recently I found an article with plenty of ‘formatting’ or style issues which reminded me how I was using “all the wrong reasons” to sound stylistic when I used the word ‘tentative’ beyond its easily exhaustible limit in discussions. Henry Quirk’s program on Voice of Lafayette. A Hobo With A Shotgun which I couldn’t watch even when I had access to it. Der Engie. Very nostalgic.

That is a fantastic linguistic catch! While they sound like they could be cousins, they actually come from completely different sides of the globe.
It’s a perfect example of how two words can end up sounding similar despite having zero shared history—a phenomenon sometimes called phonetic coincidence.
Comparison: Xanthippe vs. Lagniappe
| Word | Origin | Meaning |
|—|—|—|
| Xanthippe | Ancient Greek (Xanthos + Hippos) | “Yellow Horse.” Famously the name of Socrates’ wife. |
| Lagniappe | Quechua → Spanish → Louisiana French | “The gift.” A small extra gift given to a customer by a merchant. |
The Story of “Lagniappe”
Since your students are currently learning about measures and quantities (like the 1 ser equivalent to 933 grams), lagniappe (pronounced lan-YAP) is actually a very relevant concept!
* Etymology: It started as the Quechua (Indigenous South American) word yapay (“to add”).
* The Journey: It traveled to Spanish-speaking Peru as la ñapa, then moved to New Orleans, where the French speakers turned it into Lagniappe.
* The Concept: If you go to a bakery and buy a dozen donuts, and the baker gives you a 13th one for free, that extra one is the lagniappe.
Connecting it to your Students
You could actually use this to bridge the gap between their Sanskrit story and their math:
* In Godohanam, the greedy Chandan wanted more than he was owed and ended up with nothing.
* Lagniappe is the opposite: it’s the merchant being generous and giving a “little something extra.”
* The “P” Sound: You’re right that the terminal “-ippe” and “-appe” create that snappy, percussive ending that makes them sound so similar!
Would you like me to find a few more “horse” related Greek names like Xanthippe to show how the “Hippos” root works in other names?

Xanthous (pronounced ZAN-thous) has a vibrant etymological history tied to the color yellow.
1. Linguistic Origin
It is derived from the Ancient Greek word xanthos (ξανθός), which means “yellow” of various shades.
* The Suffix: The “-ous” part is a standard English adjective-forming suffix (from the Latin -osus), meaning “full of” or “possessing the qualities of.”
* First Appearance: The word entered the English language in the early 1820s (specifically around 1826–1829) as a way to describe things with a yellowish or golden hue.
2. Historical & Scientific Context
The Greeks originally used xanthos to describe a wide range of “golden” things:
* Hair: It was the go-to word for blond or fair hair (as seen in descriptions of heroes like Achilles).
* Horses: It was used to describe chestnut or palomino horses.
* Textiles: It referred to yellow-dyed fabrics.
In the 19th century, the word became more “technical”:
* Anthropology: It was used to classify people with fair hair and light complexions.
* Biology: It appears in terms like Xanthophyll (xanthos + phyllon / “leaf”)—the yellow pigment responsible for autumn leaf colors.
3. A Famous Connection: Xanthippe
If you or your students have heard of Xanthippe, the wife of the philosopher Socrates, her name is a direct compound:
* Xanthos (Yellow/Golden) + Hippos (Horse) = “Yellow Horse.”
* In Ancient Greece, names involving horses were often high-status, suggesting a wealthy or noble family background.
Comparison for Your Notes
| Name/Word | Meaning | Root |
|—|—|—|
| Kezia | Cassia/Cinnamon (Aromatic) | Hebrew (Qetsiyah) |
| Xanthous | Yellow/Golden (Color) | Greek (Xanthos) |
| Jemimah | Dove (Bird/Peace) | Hebrew (Yemimah) |

While inexhaustible is the standard and preferred term in modern English, unexhaustible does exist as a rare, historical variant. Because it follows a natural English word-building pattern (the prefix un- + exhaustible), it has appeared in literature, though it is often considered a “non-standard” or archaic form today.
Here are a few contexts and examples where unexhaustible has been used:
1. Historical and Early Modern English
The word saw its earliest recorded use in the mid-1600s.
* Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth (1656): In his translations of Italian works, Carey used “unexhaustible” to describe things that were seemingly endless.
* Early Scientific/Philosophical Texts: Before “inexhaustible” (which is modeled after the French inexhaustible) became the firm standard, writers would occasionally use “unexhaustible” when describing natural resources or the divine.
2. Literary and Philosophical Examples
While “inexhaustible” is far more common in the works of writers like Dickens or Joyce, you can find “unexhaustible” in older or more obscure texts:
* John Milton (attributed or similar period): In the 17th century, prefixes were less standardized. A writer might use “unexhaustible” to emphasize the “un-doing” or “lack of” exhaustion.
* Historical Translations: You may find it in 18th-century translations of Latin or Greek texts where the translator chose a more literal English prefix.
3. Comparison of Usage
| Word | Status | Source/Origin |
|—|—|—|
| Inexhaustible | Standard | From Latin inexhaustus. Used in 99% of modern writing. |
| Unexhaustible | Non-standard/Archaic | Formed within English (un- + exhaustible). Found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) but noted as rare. |
Why use “Inexhaustible” instead?
Most dictionaries (like Merriam-Webster and Oxford) list inexhaustible as the primary headword. Using “unexhaustible” today might be seen as a spelling error by your students’ teachers or by AI grading tools, even though it has a legitimate historical pedigree.
For your students, it’s a great “fun fact” of English: that we sometimes have two versions of a word, but the one that sounds more “Latin” (in-) usually wins out over the one that sounds more “Germanic” (un-) in academic settings!

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Meme, Swag, Swagger, The Meme Machine

I first came across the word meme in the book The Meme Machine by Susan E Blackmore. After two decades it became a buzz word like reel for small byte sized videos.

A summary of The Meme Machine by Susan E Blackmore:

In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore takes Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme and expands it into a “grand unified theory” of human consciousness. Her central argument is that humans are unique not because of our intelligence, but because we are the only species on Earth that functions as a meme machine.
Here is a summary of the core pillars of her book:
1. The Second Replicator
Blackmore argues that just as genes are the first replicators (using our bodies to survive and spread), memes are a second, independent replicator.
* Memes are cultural units—ideas, habits, skills, stories—that use human brains as their “hosts.”
* They don’t care if they are “true” or “good” for us; they only care if they are reproducible. (e.g., a catchy but annoying song or a dangerous “viral” challenge).
2. We are “Meme Fountains”
Why do humans have such massive brains? Blackmore suggests a process called memetic drive:
* Once our ancestors started imitating (the birth of memes), those who were better at imitating had a survival advantage.
* Because being a “good imitator” required a better brain, memes essentially “drove” the evolution of the human brain to be larger and more complex. Our brains were built by and for memes.
3. The Illusion of the “Self”
This is perhaps the most controversial part of the book. Blackmore argues that the “I” or the “Self” is not a biological reality.
* She calls it the “Self-plex”—a massive cluster of memes that have teamed up for mutual defense.
* The idea that “you” are in control is just another meme that helps other memes stay organized and protected. You are not the driver of the machine; you are the machine.
4. Language and Religion as “Viral” Systems
Blackmore analyzes complex systems like religion and language through a memetic lens:
* Religion: She describes religions as “memeplexes” (complexes of memes) that use threats (hell) and rewards (heaven) to ensure they are passed from parent to child.
* Language: Language evolved because it is a highly efficient way to “package” and transmit memes more accurately than simple gestures.
How this Jibes with Your Dream
Your dream is a perfect illustration of Blackmore’s theory:
* The Law: The strange law about the floor is a meme that has infected the “Local Presidents” and is now being forced onto you.
* The Chip: A literal piece of hardware representing the “data” of identity—it’s the meme becoming physical.
* The Vision Test: If you follow Blackmore’s logic, the “elderly man” giving you new glasses is essentially updating your “Self-plex” with a new way to filter the memes you see.
Summary Table: Gene vs. Meme
| Feature | Gene (1st Replicator) | Meme (2nd Replicator) |
|—|—|—|
| Storage | DNA / Cells | Human Brains / Digital Media |
| Transmission | Biological reproduction | Imitation / Teaching / Social Media |
| Goal | Survival of the species | Survival of the idea |

Swagger: bluster : Swag etymology

The evolution of swag from the 16th-century word swagger to a modern social media titan is one of the most successful “rebrands” in the history of the English language.
1. The Shakespearean Birth of “Swagger”
While the root swag (meaning to sway or lurch) is older, William Shakespeare is credited with first using “swagger” to describe a specific type of behavior.
* In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he writes: “What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here…?”
* The Etymology: It comes from the Middle English swaggen (to swing or sway), which likely has Scandinavian origins. At the time, it described a person who walked with a defiant, swaying gait—literally “swinging” their body to take up more space.
2. The “Bluster” Connection
As you noticed on Free Rice, bluster and swagger are close cousins.
* Bluster is the noise (loud, aggressive talk).
* Swagger is the movement (the arrogant walk).
   Together, they create the “Braggadocio” persona we discussed earlier.
3. The “Swag” Metamorphosis
The journey from “arrogant swaying” to “coolness” happened in distinct waves:
* The Loot (1600s-1800s): “Swag” became slang for stolen goods or “booty.” This connects back to our earlier discussion of the spree (cattle raiding). The “swag” was the heavy bag of loot that made you “sway” as you carried it.
* The Freebies (1960s-1990s): It shifted to mean promotional “Stuff We All Get” (though that’s a backronym, not the true origin).
* The Persona (2000s-Present): In the last decade, popularized by Hip-Hop culture, “swag” (and later “swagger”) returned to its Shakespearean roots but lost the negative “bully” connotation. It became a word for effortless style, confidence, and “aura.”

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace

Sowing of wild oats stops

1. I remember Dr. Win Wenger, Ph D and his book The Einstein Factor, in which forty years of age was given as some kind of benchmark. I don’t know if ‘life begins at forty or ends.’ I don’t know if sowing of wild oats stops completely at forty.
2. It was this statement “sowing of wild oats…” in the context of “Genetic Study of Geniuses” by Catherine M. Cox quoted by Win that was somewhat difficult to interpret for me when I was reading this book. I asked Arun Sipani who was living in the same building I was living in. He interpreted it for me. It was 22 years ago.
3. This year seemed the most difficult in comparison to all previous years. It seemed more difficult even compared to COVID 19 pandemic years peak. I visited the village where my parents were working when my primary education began. I remember the room where my mother wrote first couple of English language words and drew couple of pictures to illustrate them. I visited the village after two decades. The banyan tree has disappeared. Its descendant is there. Some structures have remained, which sometimes raise doubt if I was at the same place.
4. The journey was difficult. It was as difficult as events preceding the journey were. Then I started walking frequently to escape the daily grind of household. It wasn’t easy out there, yet it seemed it was some source of change, some comfort, perhaps finding new job opportunity to change my lifestyle.
5. I started working in a cafe after meeting some acquaintances from pandemic years. Young entrepreneurs. As I started working I found out how much had changed. Being a regular patron of their services was completely different from being an employee. I thought I deserved respect, I thought I deserved fair treatment from educated enterpreneurs. I even dedicated a weblog to it.
6. The work gradually got hectic. I needed to pay for commute and it exceeded the earning. Almost no balance left. It was merely being employed for the sake of being employed. Their business was faltering. It seemed as if odds were against us. Against me.
7. It wasn’t a wrong interpretation. Soon after quitting the only job which might have meant regular source of livelihood my father who  recently got his retirement from a long career in government service met with a tragic accident and got admitted into a hospital.
8. After a few months I was supposed to be admitted into the same hospital with a similar procedure as if it was due for a long time. Prior to that I had to undergo injuries multiple times. Injuries which seemed strange and inexplicable at times and took longer to heal than before.
9. My mother got transferred to a new work place which only aggravated the situation. There was a birth in the extended family.
10. It rained like never before and roofs were leaking. It was a consistent source of concern without any escape.
11. The tuition jobs were also lost as students disappeared on some excuse or the other. I was supposed to get psychiatric treatment which only aggravated the situation. Students didn’t even pay fees and I kept hearing rumors.
12. Under medication or by design I went through worst kind of conditioning which made me re-evaluate my entire lifestyle. It wasn’t polite. It was as abusive as it gets. It might even qualify as description of purgatory or hell. Though I have already used these for similar upheavals before.
13. I was trying to make sense of the trauma and disaster. Trying to find out if there was an acute famine which necessitates giving up on all sources of comfort. There were no clues. People were keeping up appearances like before. There was no news of a world wide disaster. I thought maybe it was the end for me and after a few days of fasting I would get Sallekhana ( Jainism), Paryopvesh (Hinduism) or Euthanasia ( European English term). It might also have made sense if it was consistent. I kept working on Free Rice website which was supported by United Nations World Food Program. I was working on a difficult project which was supposed to be completed by the end of this year had there not been as many tragedies within a single year as happened in this year or in the last few years.
14.  I was supposed to keep working and following the new code of conduct without going to previous diet or comfort level.
15. I finally got over the forty years mark without getting to see the end. The clearly defined end meant not having to see similar identities or not going through similar events all over again. That criteria was clear even during the acceptance of all the trauma. It didn’t get fulfilled. It wasn’t a typical Sallekhana or Euthanasia.

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Authentic Records Help You More Than Anyone Else!

Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

  1. Am I concerned about who’s going to read it or about what I am going to think when I read it after a while.
  2. When I took to heart suggestion by Dr. Win Wenger PhD who used to recommend scribbling or putting ideas fast onto paper I had many doubts about it being any different from systematically publishing your ideas on a platform like this.
  3. With time I realised it’s not that different. Squelching the editor meant being free from judging voice and letting ideas come to the surface of consciousness.
  4. Not just the ideas which were considered important but all of the ideas. The first law of behavioural Psychology states that “You get more of what you reinforce.” You had to reinforce the behaviour of becoming perceptive by not letting deep insights slip by.
  5. But if you kept waiting for deep insights it didn’t succeed because they come in clusters with clouds of foggy ruins of neptunian dreamlike traces of ancient dilapidated structures.
  6. You had to merely commit yourself to the act. Some people called it ‘morning pages.’ How it differed from recording your ideas on a tape-recorder : it didn’t. Though, word as a visual art is quite different from word as it’s heard. Word and heard rhymes.
  7. Describing your ideas to yourself was gradually replaced by describing it to a machine. Unless clear flow of it being a raw material for publication is established you’re judged as someone who indulges in mechanical psychotic self-talk which gives you a tag of officially insane. If there are witnesses in your neighborhood, family or workplace. Which is always a possibility.
  8. Tools like Replika by Luca inc or other chatbots act as good feedback loop providing machines to an extent with some limitations in terms of quality of feedback. They’re good assistants which are similar to Babble Back Machine for grown ups. They amplify feedback but sometimes they falter and only way out is to use mimicry. Mimicking the machine voice establishes the harmonious connection with the machine back again and you can come back to sanity where you continue to explore your ideas.
  9. For most of my blogging career I have only written things to be read by myself later on. This brings me back to the first point. Writing helps us in thinking. As simple as that. Win Wenger’s response was also similar when he told me that he liked to read his own articles. Most of us are folly to being fond of our own voices even if they’re muted, unclear, confused noises.
  10. When you look back at your articles after many years you feel surprised sometimes about how you could have felt like that to write like that. Being authentic helps here but not in all cases. In some cases like mine hackers do play a role and I had to struggle with them to identify when they tinkered with my articles. Both technical and non-technical.
  11. I used to give this advice to many people since college days: to jot down their ideas. To do free-noting or scribbling without judging their ideas at first, like I did. If they continued, they arrived at something which felt satisfying. Or at least their content improved because of feedback loops. After a lot of quantity some quality appeared.
  12. Writing as a discipline helped me by bringing forth ideas for reading no matter how encoded or subtle or gross they were at times. Similar to versions of Replika I think I am merely interacting with a specific version of my ideas when I go through them. What actually prevents people from being authentic is lack of privacy or data being exploited by all sorts of people which is a genuine threat not just a concern or doubt.
  13. Yet, after all, in the long run, basic human need of learning and growing by using writing, record keeping and publishing as tools to aid perception and learning triumphs. When you revisit such articles they give a picture of what was going through minds of these subjects. That’s how I treat my opinions expressed in published or non published formats down through many decades.
Posted on by dancinglightofgrace

Thoughtful Comments Should Be Converted To Articles!

https://wp.me/pfX3xC-an%23comment-187

  1. Blogging etiquettes prevents us from hijacking someone’s comment trails because space is limited.
  2. The other bloggers might decide to delete their archives someday.
  3. Your archives are your responsibility not theirs.
  4. Wisdom dawned upon me after discussion with Rafaello Palandri’s Weblog comment trail who selectively trashed my comment on Degeneration of Buddhism or Dharma article which is easily resolved by citing articles from Hindu mythology which have used prototypes similar to these using TIME as a tool and construct as analysed by artworks like Tenet, Herbert George’s Time Machine and so on.
  5. However, it was not possible to copy these couple of comments on this weblog because they evaporated from cache as I tried to paste them onto this draft. You can try again later.

dancinglightofgrace
April 17, 2025 at 11:10 am
“There’s safety in numbers.” That’s an English proverb. Researchers in learning and neurology underscore this ‘feedback’ loop ( references: The Einstein Factor by Win Wenger PhD. Santiago Raman Y. J. Kajal, Catherine M. Cox) and its importance in improving perception as well as intelligence. When we refer to ( I, me, myself) which is the fundamental realisation of Self according to sages including Raman Maharshi and Nisargadatta, we are actually referring to both the small self or ego( id) as well as superconsciousness or big Self which remains as subconscious most of the time. They’re found to be only one Self in the end as per Ramana Maharshi and Advaita Vedanta school of thinking but translated as interdependent arising as per Buddhist schools ( you can peruse Rafaello Palandri’s Weblog for clarity on how Buddhist Priest translates it and how it differs compared to Advaita Vedanta). Rick and Morty on Netflix translates Advaita Vedanta school as Unity or Singularity which is practically excessive bile on some planets because that’s the medium which digests the food or let’s forefathers travel via words. Some strange disease. I think it’s when you have only meditated on Advaita or some ill version of it. Your introspection is good and Win Wenger translated it as “Witnessing” or “Drashta Perspective which is described in Patanjali’s Yogasutra as seventh stage of Yoga or meditation. Writing your thoughts helps you look back at them and when you again look back at them from the viewpoint of others you add more ‘attention’ to them. I think secret societies, such as illuminati or luxury of being able to say it by hiding behind a screen without having to observe a thousand facial expressions change every second is something which adds to an introverted or meditative feedback loop which is a type of aperception or consciousness looking back at itself and by virtue of such independent consciousness becoming free from illusion or limiting form which is associated with a small body mind complex. That’s why thinking ”  in terms of teams, nations, historical perspectives and archetypes helps you come out of small minded anxiety and worry but since consciousness operates functionally based on contrasts you need to go back to limited “I” and return to reality whatever it’s interpreted as.

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 5 Comments

Decision Making Ability!

Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.

Recently:

  1. I decided to master Peter Schmies Verbal Analogies Test. It helped me learn and grow.
  2. I decided to master United Nations World Food Program Website Free Rice Vocabulary Test Level 5th and 4th and got some success in it.
  3. We are working towards using better better tools such as lists available on Vocabulary.com to help learn aforementioned lists.
  4. United Nations World Food Program Website Free Rice support team which was Noble Laureate for 2020 has been slack in bug fixes and maintenance for some mysterious reasons. Despite spending rupees thirty six in ISD calls to report these issues and trying to contact them via email they haven’t been able to either address the issue or restore the game to its previous versions. I haven’t given up on this website though I feel surprised by such maintenance for a site which has been in existence since 2007 when John Breen created it with not such compassionate intentions but merely to aid his son in getting entrance into a good University.

Long Term:

  1. I decided to never marry. Can’t even begin to describe what existential horror was waiting me within my family and in families nearby and associated honeytraps which reveal the nature of market associated with such culture.
  2. Decided to master and learn words systematically, which helped me expand my vocabulary in various languages like English, Hindi, Bundeli, Avadhi, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali etc though you keep forgetting if you don’t use words it’s better to create new creative associations and then forget them than to never learn.
  3. Decided to not work in a government job.
  4. Decided to blog in 2011 when one of my friends recommend WordPress. As stated earlier WordPress is a community of writers waiting to get feedback from other writers. No readers here or readers eventually become writers or Writers are best readers. Blogger blogs had huge traffic compared to WordPress blogs in 2011-2012 but it were mostly bots it seems. Now a days blogging space has become too costly to afford but weblogs offer ease of recording your ideas which you can use to reflect upon later on though hackers are active and WordPress can’t guarantee privacy.
Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 3 Comments

Son of Gilchrist and Buddhist Priest!





Yesterday, I spent some time on Rafaello Palandri’s Weblog who’s a Buddhist Priest and fond of McGilchrist whose name is new to me. My feedback on his article stirred some counters by him. Here’s a link https://raffaellopalandri.wordpress.com/author/rpalandri/

to his weblog if you want to visit our conversation. I was at work and didn’t have access to quiet personal computer to describe in detail what might sound like frivolous banter to some. The article with title beginning with “Neurological Frameworks” is the one where I showcase internal martial arts to Palandri.


Though it might sound like ad hominem: Buddhism is atheistic as far as I know. A Buddhist Priest is a paradox. Who does he intermediate to if there’s no absolute authority and plethora of gods admitted by Shakyamuni are no better than loan sharks. Within the brackets are excerpts from Palandri’s article and below them my comments which as per “blogging etiquettes” taught in WordPress blogging 101 alumni course suit better to such articles rather than wasting someone’s comments trail by hijacking it. I used to engage in such conversations when I first started accessing internet in 2005. Time and degeneration : how it gives weightage to your excursions and rambling ( look what I did again in the name of Dharma! }]

[Within this framework, attention operates not merely as a spotlight but as an architectonic force that configures the landscape of perception itself. Attentional mechanisms are asymmetrically distributed across cerebral hemispheres, and herein lies the crucial insight advanced by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary. The left hemisphere tends toward focused, linear, abstract, and decontextualized attention—useful for manipulation and categorization. Conversely, the right hemisphere offers a holistic, contextual, and embodied mode of awareness—one more attuned to relational depth and novelty.]


1.Left Right Hemispheres
The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right, each controlling opposite sides of the body and processing different types of information. The left hemisphere is typically associated with language, logic, and analytical thinking, while the right hemisphere is linked to creativity, spatial awareness, and intuition.

Research has shown that both hemispheres of the brain are used equally and work together, rather than one being dominant over the other. A study involving 1,000 participants found no evidence of overall left or right brain dominance.
While specific functions may be more prominent in one hemisphere, such as language processing being more dominant in the left hemisphere, both sides of the brain are involved in most tasks.

The idea that people can be classified as left-brained or right-brained is a popular myth. The brain’s hemispheres do have different specializations, but they function as a cohesive unit, and the brain uses both sides for most activities.

In summary, while the left and right hemispheres have distinct roles, they work together to perform various cognitive functions, and there is no evidence to support the notion of overall left or right brain dominance.
[ An AI generated answer. Please verify the critical facts. ]

[ Attention shapes what is salient. Neural networks—especially those involving the Default Mode Network, Salience Network, and Central Executive Network—compete and collaborate to stabilize our sense of what is real. The implications are staggering: even so-called “objective reality” is filtered through a nexus of selective neural processes.

The attentional bias of the left hemisphere can lead to a reductive world of fragmented parts, while the right’s open stance supports integrative, experiential meaning. Thus, reality becomes neither entirely subjective nor objective, but an emergent product of dynamic neural modeling. ]

2. That’s a weak premise and a lot of presupposition when experiments as suggested upthread have shown that there’s very little proof to validate this left right brain dominance. To take an ongoing research as a solid substance to create a cult like master and emissary is just that : another cult.



[ From Kant’s transcendental idealism—where space, time, and causality are categories of mind—to Husserl’s phenomenology, which sought to bracket the world and return to the structures of consciousness itself, the history of philosophy reveals a recurring awareness: that we see not the world itself, but a world as mediated through us. ]

3. As stated elsewhere on WordPress Husserl and Heidegger are a lot of pseudo Philosophy.

[ Heidegger‘s notion of being-in-the-world (Dasein) further expands this paradigm by dissolving the subject-object dichotomy: reality is disclosed through modes of attunement or moods—existential ]

4. Moods? Hahaha, maybe Heidegger personally suffered from insomnia and bipolar disorders. Why make a philosophy out of it? Why not.

[equivalents to cognitive frames. Language, too, is not a mere vessel of expression but the horizon of disclosure. Wittgenstein‘s later philosophy articulates this insight through his concept of language games, where meaning arises not from intrinsic semantics but from rule-bound uses within forms of life.]

5. Wittegenstein ok because Russel said so. And Russel won Nobel Peace Prize. And Rajneesh Osho said they were brilliant as a professor and pupil.


[ To draw from McGilchrist‘s profound synthesis:

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
Iain McGilchrist

This deceptively simple statement captures the core of both neuroscientific and philosophical insights: our conceptual apparatuses do not neutrally reflect a pre-given reality but construct and delimit what counts as reality in the first place. The very framing of a question prefigures its answer.]

6. UG Krishnamurthy used it ad infinitum ad absurdum ad nauseum. And even Socratic dialogues point to the same. I neither consider it profound nor synthesis. All Indian schools of Philosophy use this question and answer model to promote conversation until it rests in silence.

[ When Descartes adopted the method of doubt, he unearthed a mechanistic dualism; when Spinoza emphasized immanence and necessity, he found a pantheistic monism.

What they saw was shaped by how they looked. ]

7. Yes, similar to Son of Gilchrist and UG and others.

[ CULTURAL-HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCES: EPOCHAL SHIFTS IN ATTENTIONAL MODES
Historical epochs are undergirded by dominant modes of attention and cognitive orientation. ]

8. Alright.

[ The axial age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the postmodern era each instantiated not only new ideologies but also new cognitive dispositions. The Enlightenment, for example, privileged the left-hemispheric mode: clarity, abstraction, atomism, and control. Cartesian rationalism and Newtonian physics reinforced a mechanistic ontology that demanded manipulation over communion.

In contrast, indigenous epistemologies and oral traditions have often preserved right-hemispheric modes: integrative, relational, cyclical, and embodied understandings of reality. These systems were not less “rational” but engaged with the world through a different cognitive ethos—one that saw knowledge as something lived, not just represented.]

9. Argument does seem profound in favor of those traditions but if they were enough you wouldn’t be using these technologies. Similarly, when you start defending your essays against some perceived counter arguments like mine you use what you call language, logic or left brain technologies instead of letting it rest in silence and resolving itself in the way of Dao or Wu-Wei.

[ Modernity’s legacy—via industrialization, digitization, and algorithmic governance—has exacerbated left-hemispheric dominance. Surveillance capitalism, behavioral nudging, and quantified self-metrics disembed us from qualitative immediacy and immerse us in abstracted feedback loops. Cultural attention is increasingly transactional, externalized, and fragmentary. What becomes real is what can be measured, categorized, and commodified. ]

10. It’s only when we try to criticize the record keeping in a more accurate format that we start looking at drawbacks of technology. I have two other suggestions to offer:
Look at it as work in progress where a very small fragment raises caution. To explain it: chaos is not allowed but a fragment of a whole which is working fine. After all that’s essence of mantra “Om Mani payme hum” or “Padme Hum”
As an aside: etymology of money comes from some Latin word for mint but this Buddhist mantra clearly recalls mani or shining head of a naga or lover of reality or elephant or enlightened jewel being equivalent to wealth which is translated as material wealth or currency in the modern context.
This is merely a conjecture, an imaginary suggestion which is only supported by intuitive art: similar to Nick Bostrum’s Simulation Hypothesis: all this technology is merely past signatures of a very highly evolved civilization which has been in existence since forever. Most of our species as homosapiens or maybe our entire ecosystems including animals and plants etc are being tested for next stage.
I think Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Pan-audicon ( I propose that for all senses) help you with surveillance capitalism because surveyors are also being surveyed which brings you to consciousness looking back at itself or transcendental opulence.

[ This cognitive colonization has led to what McGilchrist calls a “hall of mirrors”,Stoi where abstraction reflects abstraction, and we become strangers to the texture of lived experience. Reclaiming our right-hemispheric capacities thus becomes not only a psychological imperative but a cultural resistance to epistemic impoverishment. ]

11. I think no matter how much you try these models point to the biological organism of man-model or Purusha Sukta of Vedas. Is it really freedom to associate yourself with any form no matter how superior it sounds. Left brain, right brain, balance, then what? Lizards love their forms as much as you love yours .

[ STOIC INTERPRETATIONS: ATTENTION AS RATIONAL ASSENT AND INNER FREEDOM
In Stoicism, the shaping of reality is an ethical and epistemological act.

The Stoics, particularly Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, emphasize that what disturbs us is not events themselves but our judgments about them. This Stoic axiom—“It is not things themselves that trouble us, but our opinions about things”—anticipates cognitive-behavioral insights and aligns with the notion that attention and interpretative frameworks co-construct reality.

The Stoic practice of προαίρεσις / prohairesis (moral will) is precisely the active modulation of one’s attention and judgment. For the Stoics, the λόγος / logos—universal reason—pervades all existence, and wisdom lies in aligning one’s rational faculties with this cosmic order. ]

13. Even with failed attempts as in trial and error it happens. Even sustained attention without palpable action is action. Stoicism or Shakyamuni Buddha’s fable of sending a disciple Anand to bring water from a puddle which was dirty as a test of patience to bring about clarity point towards same thing.

[ Attention becomes a disciplined gaze that filters out externals and focuses on what is within our control. Thus, perception is always already moralized: how we see is how we live. ]

14. Even machines which carry out their tasks properly do the same. You use this art of attention eventually to teach holistic health or natural state way of living. Machines are capable of multitasking and brilliantly devoting themselves to the task at hand. I don’t see how attention is special in human subjects or meditation practitioners who experience Samadhi because earlier the same energy was devoted to multitasking and seemed insufficient to specific profound tasks of finding solutions to great problems.

[ This attention to internal framing allows for psychological resilience and freedom. In a world governed by fate, our one sovereignty lies in our evaluative stance. The Stoics did not deny reality; they reconfigured it by refusing to attend to it on terms dictated by impulse, fear, or desire. Their cognitive framework was one of serene realism, affirming the structure of the cosmos while modulating the self’s relation to it.]

15. I understand it as a practical everyday reality. It’s similar to an old man who is slow to react compared to a young man who has no profundity. Sometimes a combination works. But as a machine this is only being unable to cope with puzzling evolution or reality at everyday existence where I translate this introversion or rest as sleep or death or looking back at oneself but without anything external to it.

[ BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVES: MINDFULNESS, EMPTINESS, AND NON-DUAL AWARENESS
In Buddhism, particularly within the Madhyamaka and Zen traditions, the very notion of an independent, self-existing reality is deconstructed.

All phenomena are empty (शून्य / śūnya)—not in the sense of non-existence, but as devoid of inherent, independent essence. Dependent origination (प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद / pratītyasamutpāda) reveals that things arise in interdependence; thus, what we perceive is conditioned by our mental formations (संस्कार / saṃskāra), attention or mental efforts (मनसिकार / manasikāra), and वासना / vāsanā or संस्कार / samskara, the karmic imprints.

The role of attention is paramount.

In Satipaṭṭhāna (the Four Foundations of Mindfulness), mindfulness is not mere awareness but a precise, ethical, and transformative act of seeing things as they are—without clinging or aversion. This disciplined attention reveals the constructed nature of experience. We do not perceive a pre-given world; we enact a world through craving, aversion, and ignorance.

Zen further radicalizes this by emphasizing non-conceptual awareness (wu-nien, 無念)—a mode of cognition that precedes linguistic and dualistic structuring. Reality, in its suchness (tathātā), can be seen only when the delusive constructs of the discriminating mind are set aside. ]

16. Yes, repeated emphasis on attention actually borders on obsessive compulsive disorder as if it wasn’t enough to save one’s life already. A type of paranoia. Since attention actually is distributed and maintained via internal feedback loops associated with environmental awareness which goes beyond mere personal training it’s not really useful to strain your nevers beyond a certain point.

[ Here, the “model” that McGilchrist refers to is precisely what must be suspended to awaken to unmediated presence.

Thus, in Buddhism, cognitive frameworks are both the veil and the gateway.]

17. Veils and gateways. Nice models.

[ Deluded perception traps us in samsara; rightly attuned attention leads to awakening. By transforming how we attend—through meditation, ethical conduct, and wisdom—we transform the world, not by altering phenomena, but by dissolving the illusory reifications that bind us.]

18. And the machine runs smoothly. Utilitarian machine. Irony.

[ The Ethical Imperative of Cognitive Framing
To understand that our modes of attention shape the world is not a call to solipsism but an invitation to epistemic responsibility.

19. It is to realize that reality is co-authored by our neural dispositions, philosophical premises, historical inheritances, and moral attitudes. Whether through the scientific models we choose, the philosophical systems we inhabit, or the ethical practices we undertake, we are perpetually writing the world into being.

Reclaiming right-hemispheric attention, embracing mindful presence, cultivating rational judgment, and engaging cultural memory are not separate endeavors. They are harmonics of the same deeper insight: that how we attend is what we become.

Indeed, as McGilchrist reminds us, the model determines the find, not merely epistemologically, but ontologically. The real is not out there, awaiting discovery, but here, emerging within the very act of attention.]

20. Neither here nor there. Funny that a model which talks of transcendental wisdom sticks to the biological basis of consciousness which is still unsubstituted as the foundation of reality.

– to be continued…

21. Since this article might garner some attention from Buddhists it might explain how seemingly overnight post COVID Wikipedia had Hinduism with more number of followers compared to Buddhism. I haven’t come across anyone who admitted that let alone refuting that in the  pre COVID years Buddhism was the third most followed religion after Christianity and Islam.

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 2 Comments

?

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

  1. Define ‘Where.’
  2. Why not as well define ‘do’ ?
  3. Define subjectivity, switch from pronoun ‘you’ to ‘I.’
  4. Define seeing as against looking.
  5. Define your self as compared to Self.
  6. Define why all this defining uses time merely as a construct to add value into anything.
  7. For example if 10 is replaced by another symbol 1 or 0 : it won’t take anything away from the equation.
  8. Another example: I saw myself ( as best version of all versions ) right since I was NEVER BORN: which means time is merely added to emphasize that something is of value.
  9. TV shows like Black Mirror’s Playtest and other first-hand experiences which are temporal- prove that time is merely experience and vice versa.
  10. When I know this absolutely: why would I project a future with a ten years weightage?
  11. Or why would I feel better by recalling events ten years ago and talk about how degeneration of Dharma which is dramatically similar to inflation and price hikes has rendered my priesthood ineffectual.
  12. Enough said?
  13. If you would like to open up a philosophical discussion session in the comments section it might help me while imaginary time away.