davebryand

Duality, for me, in the Catholic sense meant that there is "God" and then there is little old me. Non-duality is the realization that is available to all humans that we are not actually separate from the Tao, God, the Universe, or whatever label you care to place on the invisible power that governs the realm that we inhabit. You are an interconnected piece of life that through consciousness can impact future frames of life that are generated by the infinite universal computer that plays the movie in our mind. (Yes, you can come to have direct experience and knowledge that this power exists but it is a super-rational process that most of our left-brained peers, in our masculine, logic dominated society dismiss out of hand. This realization has been called Enlightenment, Awakening, Waking Up, etc)

Back to duality. We must remember that light and darkness are not opposites, they are the ends of a spectrum measuring the same thing: amount of light. Our western mindset has these placed as opposites, but they are not, they are the same thing. This is the principle of polarity in Hermeticism. The main insight is that these things are not different, they are the same thing in varying degrees (number of photons, in this case). Here is a decent overview (Look for Principle of Polarity, although the #1 point that the universe is a giant mind is the most important to me) https://medium.com/the-mission/the-hermetic-revival-7-ancien...

I'd highly recommend reading The Hermetica. It's not exactly an ancient source text, but it attempts to distill the wisdom of the body of knowledge called Hermeticism.

Your research is going to take you into works described as "occult". This bothered me at first, but then I realized it was my Catholic brainwashing about how occult is somehow related to satan or something. Occult simply means "hidden". These occult teachings, which every spiritual tradition possesses, are the pearls that were not to be cast before swine. This knowledge was typically reserved for initiates into a particular tradition. Basically, this means you had to be really committed and show your worth before you were taught this stuff. This is what many of the historical secret societies were protecting and teaching. This is what you learn when you reach the highest degrees of Freemasonry. Thankfully, the internet is blowing the lid off of this occulted information and people are waking up to the nature of reality at a great rate!

You are on a nondual Christian track reading the Gospel of Thomas. This Quora post sums it up nicely: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-teachings-of-nondual-Gnos...

Here are some ideas of what life looks like post realization of your nondual nature. #6 describes it well: https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/spiritual-awakening-si...

Best to you on your Path!

This was life-changing for me. I wanted to learn about spirituality through a different lens than the Catholic upbringing that constrained my mind and the rampant "spirituality is synonymous with Christianity" that I find in the U.S. I went out and read a handful of ancient religious texts from all of the world. This led me to see that throughout the course of human history, tribes from all over the world have espoused the same truths about the nature of reality (non-duality). I don't believe I could have reached this knowledge by reading derivative works alone.

Understanding and living his message (or any other non-dualist teacher) is the #1 to do if you want a successful startup.

(Really, it's the recipe for a successful life. In fact, when you've tasted what he's offering, you may find that stock options, sales funnels, and customer acquisition costs no longer excite you.)

You're right, I can't find that he actually said this. Guess I'll have to pretend that he did. :)

He's right. Humanity's problems are solved by humans solving themselves. Each one of us is a puzzle that gets solved in the same way--doing the inner work to quiet our mind and open our hearts. When enough of us are solved, humanity's problems will automatically solve themselves.

Sundar seems to have done the inner work and understands this Truth. His "Cockroach Theory" is enlightening:

I realized that, it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, but it's my inability to handle the disturbances caused by their shouting that disturbs me.

It's not the traffic jams on the road that disturbs me, but my inability to handle the disturbance caused by the traffic jam that disturbs me.

More than the problem, it's my reaction to the problem that creates chaos in my life.

Lessons learnt from the story:

I understood, I should not react in life. I should always respond.

The women reacted, whereas the waiter responded.

Reactions are always instinctive whereas responses are always well thought of.

A beautiful way to understand............LIFE.

Person who is HAPPY is not because Everything is RIGHT in his Life..

He is HAPPY because his Attitude towards Everything in his Life is Right..!!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cockroach-theory-beautiful-sp...

What's next? "Children's diet has little effect on their health, says study"?

How do they publish things like this with a straight face? This is not tied to the reality that I'm experiencing--you? We don't need peer-reviewed studies to tell us things that are easy to study empirically.

Please run an experiment on yourself and make up your mind.

Comes and goes, but it’s lovely when it’s happening.

Meditation and all forms of activity (contemplation, journaling, calligraphy, singing, drumming, guitar playing, painting, skateboarding, etc) that put me in a meditative state. My mind is primary to everything in my present and future experience and cleaning it up and keeping tidy has brought unimaginable (to me prior to experiencing it) joy and peace into my life.

Agree. After developing my ability to quiet my mind, closing my eyes feels like coming home to my favorite place.

"Lucid dreaming is a remarkable state of consciousness..."

Like anything else, it's only remarkable until you've understood and experienced it. I look forward to the time when this is considered a normal state of consciousness and is just something people do to enhance their life experience.

We in the west have a pretty weak relationship to the limits of consciousness. It's great to see this changing with studies like this popping up more frequently.

That said, I've only achieved mixed results with my lucid dreaming experiments as I found the training to hamper my energy the next day. I'm going to give galantamine a try and see if I can get some more consistent results.

Awesome, thanks! dave@davebryand.com

Love this idea. I've thought about doing something similar, but as a graph, so we could see books that many people have recommended in common.

I like to think of my role as "dad" is to prepare my kids as opposed to protecting them. Life is going to happen, we can't protect them from everything. What we can do is help our kids create themselves in such a way that "emotional chaos" is not part of their experience.

When you're in YC they tell you that a huge part of being a successful founder is "managing your psychology." I wish they would elevate that to a first-class concept in their startup education.

Here are a few that I love:

3 Blue 1 Brown: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

VSauce: https://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce

Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile

This is awesome! I'd love if you could do things like help upgrade library versions that have breaking changes--say something like generate a PR to go from React 16 to React 17, for instance.

It would also be cool if this could help generate code in the best-practice style defined by third-party libraries. For instance, if the Redux team defined the canonical way to define a selector, it would be handy to be able to have Optic use that information to generate selectors for me. This would take something like create-react-app and break down the best practices into more bite sized chunks.

Really excited about this!

> "Thanks to both the Marketplace's growth and the success of Fortnite, Epic now conducts a huge volume of digital commerce," Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said in a statement. "The resulting economies of scale enable us to pass the savings along to the Unreal Engine Marketplace community, while also making a healthy profit for Epic."

Capitalism done right.

Off topic, but I just learned about Actor-network theory, and his work, earlier tonight. I love frameworks or models that put their attention on the edges instead of the nodes. Interesting stuff to check out if you're interesting in graphs/networks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory

Good point. The "price" one would be willing to exchange for their integrity might be acquisition of power, fame or some other five-sense "prize".

This is a statement as produced by a consciousness that believes that ALL humans are willing to violate their values for money. This is common in materialist paradigms or people stuck in Spiral Dynamics Red Level.

This is, of course not "Truth", nor is it true for many people who have evolved out of these earlier levels. Those stuck in early stages of psychological evolution often trot it around to influence others by asking them to subvert their true path for money.

This tends to resonate with people that are also stuck on earlier levels of psychological evolution. Those that have evolved past that and have a clear understanding that true happiness comes from serving their values and not their egotistical or fearful desire for Federal Reserve Notes will reject this out of hand.

Meditation can help you get meta on the process so that you can watch yourself getting worried and recognize it as something that is of the mind. As you start to see the patterns on how worry develops in your mind, you can start to choose your response. Once you can choose your response, you can decide if you want to take action or if you want to let them go.

Once you are outside of the worry spiral and see it for what it is, you may find that not only do you not have to worry about these hypothetical situations, but that there is nothing at all to worry about in this single iteration that you're taking through the simulation.

EDIT: Highly recommend Transcendental Meditation. Here is some info on their anxiety results: https://www.tm.org/reduced-stress-and-anxiety

Transcendental meditation has been really powerful for me.

It would be nice if the body of the whole article was:

"Just be yourself."

This is not a good sign.

I'm curious in what characteristics Elon saw in these individuals. Solving a problem once is great, but Elon clearly saw something deeper in them. I wonder if he sees what Nikola Tesla called the "finer fibers"...

“But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.” Nikola Tesla

I think he was positing that they couldn't inflate in a future world of a GovCoin.

There is actually an interesting nugget in the Obama idea. The "trillion dollar coin" thing completely misunderstands market dynamics, but the idea of the Executive taking power back from The Federal Reserve is interesting.

"The US government could decide to treat USDC as a second legal currency, which would be hugely powerful."

I'd love for Sam to dig deeply into The Federal Reserve System and write about this topic with that knowledge.

[EDIT]: The more I think about this the more surprised I find myself. Sam assumes that the United States just can spin up a competitive currency to the Federal Reserve Note. This completely misunderstands the nature of the matrix and its power structure. For any seekers out there, following this rabbit hole is a fun romp on the way to spiritual awakening.

Yes: dissolution of ego.

I'd like us to start using the term "enlightenment" for these types of discussions. This is the whole goal of introspection, self-help, self-finding, etc. When you start to search around for ways to enlightenment, the doors are blown open with the number of paths that one can take to introspect yourself.

I can't wait until Sam "gets" meditation. It will be fun to watch how these tips and preferences change. It's a privilege for us to watch the thoughts of an individual destined for enlightenment as they do the work.