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Here’s my latest #author blog in the Reflections from my Writing Room series. I’ve written about my recent eye surgery and some famous writers who were blind or partially sighted. https://www.helenmatthewswriter.com/blog @bookstodon #crimewriters #mastodon
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"The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material." - Jennifer Egan
#writinglife #writingcommunity #writerscommunity #writing #storytelling #screenwriting #authorquotes #JenniferEgan #bookstodon
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Hi. I am originally from Georgia, lived on the West Coast for 21 years, and then moved to New York in August for my dream job. I'm struggling a lot with acclimation but I am managing. I am an avid #romance reader, love getting lost in #books that end happily, am learning more about #D&D and #tabletop and it would be cool to eventually play with others. I am #blind but have enough vision for #paintByNumber apps, love #karaoke, #music, #writing, and #gaming. I am also ridiculously fun.
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Wanna Stop Writing After This
“For a long time now, the role of the Brahmin has been outsourced to other countries, particularly Europe and the US. Why? Because we Indians have stopped thinking many centuries back.”
Neruda, I Feel Sadder Than You Tonight
No reason Neruda that I feel sad
You at least had your girl to blame
I have nothing and no one to blame
For how I feel now, just life itself
Galls me to no end, where I feel mocked
By life itself which demands it be understood
Am I supposed to love life and not the woman
But I do not know what life is nor how to live
Shall I just drink a Coke and open happiness
But Coke’s fizz lasts less time than morning dew
The sun is hot but it’s supposedly life-giver
But when I step out in the aft’noon it’s killing
So, I cannot trust the very so-called life-giver
Nothing in nature seems benign, not even society
And when night comes, cocooned here in my flat
I can’t see the stars, and moon interests me not
All I can look forward to now is slow deterioration
One by one the powers will desert me, from the teeth
To the knees to the memory to the interest
Time cares not to show anyone any compassion
The philosophy I know is even more problematic
In a way it gives me relief from these thoughts
And in a way it doubles the pain by showing
This whole life was a waste of time, no study
Nor emotion nor smile nor understanding
Takes you where you want to be, and these days
I am not even sure where I want to be, not even to be
I cannot even go back to where I came from
Nor can I know where I have to go, nor whether
Any journey is worth it at all, as now I understand
This flight from myself is the cause of all problems
And, when I look into myself, I find only wisdom
And that wisdom tells me I do not understand at all
Neither Truth nor Love, for wisdom tells me
If you think you understand Truth and Love
Why are you still undertaking many a journey.
“Everything in this world has a cause. And every effect becomes in turn a cause. Where there are causes and effects, there is change underway. Where there is change how can Truth be. And where there is no Truth how can love be.”
“Definition of a perfect love story: Going from aroused to erased.”
“Most human love arises out of fear, is sustained by fear, and ends a quiet death due to fear.”
“Life is a Russian roulette.”
“Perfect recipe for dissatisfaction in life: Wanting to be happy always all the time no matter what.”
“Some say God is Truth. Some say God is Love. Both are wrong. God is. Period.”
“Love is not an add-on to the other things in your life. Love is the life.”
“Love is the ultimate soporific which dullens the pain of existence.”
“We think there is life. That is the death of us.”
“We are all lost in our desires. Desires take us to the future. Inhabiting the future, we fail to live because life is happening in the present.”
Jagat (Sanskrit: जगत्) primarily means the world, universe, or earth. It is derived from the root gacchati (“that which moves”), signifying that the universe is in constant motion, ever-changing, and ephemeral.
Core Meanings & Contexts:
• The Moving World: It refers to all that is moving, animate, living, and changing, encompassing the entire material universe.
• Vedanta Philosophy: It is often described as mithya (dependent reality/illusion) in comparison to the absolute reality of Brahman, often referring to the subjective experience of the material world.
• Spiritual/Non-dualism: In some contexts, it is interpreted as the manifestation or “body” of the divine, completely dependent on the Supreme for existence.
• Common Usage: In Hindi and other Indian languages, it is used for “world” or “universe,” and sometimes implies a specific field or community (e.g., Nari Jagat – world of women).
Common Compound Words:
• Jagadish/Jagannath: Lord of the Universe (Vishnu or Shiva).
• Jagatmata: Mother of the World (Durga).
Jagat is also a common Indian name for boys, signifying the universe.
“Don’t wait for retirement or for that smile; be happy today, nay, right now.”
“Dare to be who you are.”
Give me some deeply philosophical quotes of Arthur Rimbaud.
Claude responded: Here are some deeply philosophical quotes from Arthur Rimbaud:
________________________________________
On the Self & Identity
“I is another.” — Letter to Georges Izambard, 1871
One of his most famous lines, suggesting the self is not a fixed entity but something foreign, observed from the outside — a radical idea that anticipated modern theories of subjectivity.
________________________________________
On Disorder & Vision
“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” — Letter to Paul Demeny (Lettre du Voyant), 1871
Rimbaud’s manifesto for poetry: to reach true vision, the poet must shatter ordinary perception and embrace suffering as a path to illumination.
________________________________________
On Life & the Absolute
“Real life is absent. We are not in the world.” — A Season in Hell
A haunting declaration of alienation — the sense that authentic existence lies forever beyond reach, and the world we inhabit is a kind of unreality.
________________________________________
On Suffering & Knowledge
“One must be absolutely modern.” — A Season in Hell
Deceptively simple, this is Rimbaud’s demand to break entirely with tradition — to find truth not in the past but in the raw, uncharted present.
________________________________________
On Love & Hell
“I have swallowed a famous mouthful of poison. Thrice blessed be the counsel that came to me! My bowels are on fire. The violence of the venom twists my limbs, deforms me, lays me low.” — A Season in Hell
A visceral metaphor for the self-destruction that comes with absolute passion — love, ambition, and vision as simultaneously poison and revelation.
________________________________________
On Eternity
“It has been found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun.” — Eternity
A mystical fragment — eternity not as abstraction but as a sensory, almost pantheist fusion of natural forces.
________________________________________
On Freedom
“Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.” — A Season in Hell
Rimbaud suggests that rational intellect alone cannot unlock the deepest truths — only a surrender to something greater can.
________________________________________
Rimbaud’s philosophy is essentially one of radical becoming — the self must be destroyed, perception unhinged, and comfort abandoned in order to glimpse something true. He abandoned poetry entirely at 19, which many see as the ultimate philosophical act: refusing to be captured even by his own genius.
“Vivekananda, when he was young, really young, went around asking everyone, ‘Have you seen God’. And when he posed the same question to Ramakrishna Paramahansa, RP replied, ‘Yes, only more clearly than I see you now.’ Now, the question that can be asked is was RP, like J. Krishnamurti always said he does, ‘Answering the questioner rather than the question.’ Otherwise, the correct answer is, ‘What a stupid question, Naren, all you have been seeing all your life is ONLY God but you have been thinking you are seeing the world’.”
Buddha’s Mistake
Sam’s First Noble Truth
I agree with Buddha’s First Noble Truth that “Life is suffering”.
Sam’s Second Noble Truth
I do not agree with Buddha’s Second Noble Truth that “Desire is the cause of suffering.”
My point is that once you have understood that “Life is suffering”, you should also understand the simple logic that “No life, no suffering.”
So, do not bother about desires and all such nonsense.
Do not get caught in such traps, traps which arise only if you are living.
Just end life and you are done.
Or, rather realise you were never born.
No Sex, No Salvation, No Sam
I do not want to get caught
In the vortex of these Fie-loss-oafers
And whatever theories they spin
About this world, existing only in imagination;
When I talk about myself Sam
Or about Sex and Salvation, I do so
Under Erasure, as that Algerian Jew would have it
Who set afire many an academic department in the US
And, I note with pleasure his association in 1966
With my alma mater Johns Hopkins, kickstarting
That peculiar school of philosophy, poststructuralism,
But, why dabble and grapple even dilettantishly
With these games that minds of philosophers play
I who have understood Kena Upanishad’s admonition
That if you think Truth is there for the taking by the mind
You poor thing how little you understand
And where is the mind but in this world
Or is the world in the mind
Now, now don’t confuse me
I refuse to play this game with these words
For I know too well that if I renounce words
Which is the only true Vairagya that is there
And not so-called Vairagya of Kamini-Kanchana
Then in that silence all doubts are quelled
All truths stand revealed, and I know
Whatever I knew till now was wrong
And I learn to let go of not only Socrates and Sartre
But also of Maharshi and Maharaj
For where do they all exist
Except in my fertile imagination
As do Sex, Salvation and Sam.
“The tree has to bend to every wind, but it cannot know why the wind is blowing.”
“In the autumn, it is foolish for the tree to try to hold on to the leaves.”
“There is no spot in the pot where there is no clay.”
“In every love story, there is something more than biology at play.”
“My Call”
Yes, Michael, it always was your call
To go solo or to go with the family
And also your call to spread love and light
To this world through your moves.
Music, moods, musings, and murmurings
And did you change the world?
Who knows? Maybe a few and here and there
When you were alive, and a few more might change
Long after you are gone as long as your music lives on
Surely, though, you yourself must have escaped
The suffering that the blind strivings of the Will
Imposes on one, if Schopenhauer is to be believed,
With your Dionysian spirit that Nietzsche championed.
Yet how I despair Michael, my call
Is that this world is condemned to its duality
Of light and darkness, good and bad, virtue and vice
Socrates, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus could not fix the world
So, Michael, you are forgiven, too, for failing
Though your critics would point out your own failings.
—
Maya (the cosmic creative/illusory power) is constituted by the three gunas — Sattva (clarity, harmony), Rajas (activity, passion, restlessness), and Tamas (inertia, darkness, ignorance). As long as manifestation exists — as long as anything is appearing — all three gunas are present in varying proportions. You can’t have Maya with only Sattva, because pure undifferentiated Sattva would dissolve back into Brahman. The tension and dynamism of Rajas and Tamas are what keep the world-appearance going.
So yes, suffering and evil are structurally baked into manifestation itself. Tamas produces ignorance, delusion, and stagnation; Rajas produces craving, conflict, and agitation — both are inexhaustible engines of suffering at the cosmic level.
This creates an important asymmetry:
At the individual level, liberation is possible — you can step out of identification with the gunas entirely, which is what Nisargadatta and Ramana point to. The Self is not a product of the gunas.
At the collective or historical level, you might get periods of greater Sattva, but Rajas and Tamas always reassert themselves — civilizations rise and fall in cycles (the yuga framework reflects exactly this).
At the cosmic/natural level, as long as Maya is operating, the interplay of gunas never ceases. Suffering doesn’t “end” — it’s part of the texture of manifestation.
This is also why Advaita doesn’t promise the world will get better or that evil will be eliminated — it says the world as such is the wrong level to seek resolution. The resolution is recognition of that which was never in the gunas to begin with. Nisargadatta’s typical move is precisely this — he doesn’t ask you to fix the dream, he asks you to wake up from it.
Universal liberation of the cosmos is a category error within this framework. The most Maya can do is oscillate; it cannot transcend its own constituents.
Two Ways to Retire Early
1. Earn as much as is 100% sufficient for your wants.
2. Pare down your wants (but NOT to the bare minimum) so that you can retire earlier than you can under Scenario 1.
I chose the latter option by becoming sort of a minimalist because I realized that happiness does not come from accumulating more and more, be it wealth or any other damn thing.
When did more and more wealth ever make anyone more and more happy.
And, if you need more and more money to become more and more happy, know that you are not going about it the right way.
Money cannot buy almost anything worthwhile.
Anyway, the best things in life are either damn cheap or totally free.
Don’t think so?
Well, my friend, good luck with that happiness you are chasing.
No, I forget, you are chasing money not happiness.
Let me know when you shift your rat race from pursuing money to pursuing happiness, then as Paul Simon sang, “I can be your long-lost pal.”
What about the work that needs to be done in this world that might suffer if you retire early?
Ha, ha, ha, as if you are working FOR the world. Get real.
Besides, there are enough unemployed people out there to fill the space that you vacate.
And, besides, if people thought like I am suggesting, then believe you me, far less work will be needed to be done in this world so that the world can get along by just fine.
Ha, ha, ha…how bad people are at thinking!!!
Well, well, I guess God knows what he is up to.
Homo Duplex
Homo duplex (“the double human”) is a theory by sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) proposing that humans possess a dual nature: part biological organism driven by selfish individual desires (“profane”), and part social being guided by morality, collective consciousness, and social constraints (“sacred”).
Key Components of Homo Duplex:
• The Profane (Individual): This side consists of personal appetites, instincts, selfishness, and bodily sensations.
• The Sacred (Social): This side comprises moral forces, social solidarity, shared values, and altruism, which are cultivated through societal interaction and collective rituals.
• The Tension: Durkheim argued that society requires a balance between these two sides to prevent individualism from leading to unhappiness, greed, or excessive anomie (social instability).
• Societal Role: Socialization, education, and religion play crucial roles in regulating the individual’s “animalistic” nature and nurturing their “moral” or “social” side.
This concept underscores the idea that humans find their highest potential not in isolation, but by participating in a larger social whole.
What Durkheim Was Really Saying
At its core, Homo Duplex is Durkheim’s answer to one of philosophy’s oldest
questions: what kind of creature is a human being? His answer was deliberately
paradoxical — we are simultaneously two things at once, and that tension is not a
flaw to be resolved, but the very engine of social and moral life.
This was a bold move in the late 19th century. Darwinian biology was pushing toward
the view that humans were essentially animals with sophisticated brains.
Enlightenment liberalism, on the other hand, celebrated the sovereign individual.
Durkheim rejected both as incomplete. He insisted you cannot understand a human
being by looking only at their biology or their individual rational mind — you must
look at what society does to and inside them.
Unpacking the Two Sides
The Profane (the animal self)
The word “profane” here doesn’t mean vulgar in the everyday sense — it means
outside the sacred, ordinary, earthly, bodily. This is the self that:
Hungers, lusts, fears, and competes
Acts in its own interest without reference to others
Exists in time and space as a finite, mortal organism
Durkheim didn’t moralize this side as evil — he saw it as simply pre-social. It is what
we are before society gets hold of us. Left entirely to this nature, humans would be,
in Hobbes’ famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The Sacred (the social self)
The “sacred” is what society implants into the individual. This is a profound and
somewhat unsettling idea: your moral conscience, your sense of duty, your empathy,
your values — these are not naturally yours. They were installed by the collective.
This side includes:
The capacity for self-sacrifice
Loyalty to groups, nations, ideals
Moral disgust and reverence
The ability to feel that something is bigger than yourself
Crucially, Durkheim believed this sacred dimension is genuinely real and genuinely
powerful — but its source is social, not divine or innate. When you feel moral awe,
you are, in his view, feeling the weight of society pressing on your consciousness.
The Tension: Why the Conflict is Necessary
Durkheim didn’t want the tension resolved — he wanted it managed. Here’s why:
Too much profane (pure individualism) leads to anomie — a condition where
social norms collapse, individuals feel unmoored, and rates of depression,
crime, and even suicide rise. His famous study Suicide (1897) showed that
societies with weak social bonds had higher suicide rates — a radical,
counterintuitive argument.
Too much sacred (total collective absorption) leads to fatalistic overregulation
— where individuals are crushed under the weight of social duty,
also producing misery and, paradoxically, suicide of a different kind (what he
called altruistic suicide, dying for the group).
The sweet spot is a productive friction — society strong enough to give life meaning
and structure, but not so totalizing that it erases the individual.
Socialization as the Civilizing Mechanism
When Durkheim says education, religion, and socialization regulate the individual’s
animalistic nature, he means something very specific: they transfer the sacred into
the individual so thoroughly that it feels like their own conscience. This is the
machinery of moral internalization.
Think of how a child is taught not to steal. At first, it’s external — “don’t do that or
you’ll be punished.” Eventually, the prohibition becomes internal — “I don’t want to
steal, it feels wrong.” For Durkheim, that feeling of wrongness is society speaking
through you. You have been successfully socialized. The collective has colonized
your inner life — and this is not manipulation, in his view; it is what makes you fully
human.
Religion, in particular, fascinated him because its rituals (collective gatherings, shared
symbols, emotional ceremonies) were the most powerful mechanisms for recharging
the social self — reminding individuals viscerally that they belong to something
beyond themselves.
Where Homo Duplex Connects to Bigger Ideas
Concept Connection to Homo Duplex
Freud’s Id/Superego
Strikingly parallel — the id (drives) vs. the superego
(internalized social rules). Both emerged around the same
era, independently.
Rousseau’s Noble
Savage
Durkheim inverts Rousseau — society doesn’t corrupt
natural goodness; it creates moral goodness in the first
place.
Nietzsche’s critique of
herd morality
Nietzsche saw society suppressing the individual as a
tragedy. Durkheim saw it as a necessity — even a gift.
Modern psychology
Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model echoes Homo
Duplex — moral feelings are social products, not individual
reason.
A Critical Perspective
Homo Duplex is elegant, but not without its critics:
It’s overly binary. Human nature resists clean splits into “animal vs. social.”
Much of what Durkheim calls “profane” (love, curiosity, creativity) is not
straightforwardly selfish.
It romanticizes the collective. Durkheim’s framework can justify social
conformity too easily. History shows that the “sacred social” can endorse
racism, nationalism, and genocide just as easily as altruism.
It underestimates individual agency. Humans don’t just receive society
passively — they also reshape it. The individual isn’t merely a battleground
between animal drives and social imprinting.
The Bottom Line
Homo Duplex is a powerful lens for understanding why humans are so
contradictory — capable of extraordinary selfishness and extraordinary sacrifice,
often in the same person, sometimes within the same hour. Durkheim’s lasting
insight is that this is not hypocrisy or moral failure. It is the structure of what we are:
biological creatures who can only realize their deepest potential by surrendering part
of themselves to something collective and larger. We are, as he saw it, always living
on the border between the animal and the social — and civilization is the ongoing,
never-finished negotiation between those two halves.
Kids? Just say no
You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation
https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral
No Words To Say What I Want To Say
Strange how sometimes you are at a loss for words
When you realize the words you used have not been understood
And using more words would only complicate the picture
Because the words have to go through the sieve
Of other minds and hearts, though mine they have navigated,
And this is not just my problem, just the human condition
And until we understand silence we cannot understand each other
But unfortunately, until then we have to keep using words
And thereby keep encountering battlefields of various sorts.
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” is a famous quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 2). Spoken by Hamlet, it means that a divine power or fate determines the ultimate outcome of our lives, regardless of how clumsily we plan them.
Key Details and Context:
Context in Play: Hamlet says this to Horatio while explaining how he survived
a plot to kill him, suggesting he has accepted fate.
Meaning: “Rough-hew” refers to shaping a rough block of wood. It suggests
humans make rough plans (“rough-hew”), but God or destiny refines the final
outcome (“shapes our ends”).
Theme: This reflects a shift in Hamlet from indecision to a fatalistic acceptance
of whatever happens, including the “special providence in the fall of a
sparrow”.
It shows a shift from a belief that mortals control their destiny to a belief that higher
forces are in control.
“There’s a Divinity That Shapes Our Ends” — Through the Lens of Advaita
Vedānta
And the Self Reveals Itself to Whom She Chooses
I. The Two Voices Speaking the Same Truth
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, standing at the threshold of death with a curious calm, utters
something that no purely Western philosophical framework can fully contain. He is
not simply expressing fatalism. He is not surrendering to an external God the way a
theist might. Something deeper is trembling in those words — something that
Advaita Vedānta, the non-dual philosophy of Śaṅkarācārya, can illuminate with
remarkable precision.
Advaita means not-two. Its central revelation is that Brahman — the infinite,
undivided, self-luminous Consciousness — is the only reality. What we call the
“individual self,” the jīva, is not a separate entity that Brahman controls from outside.
The jīva is Brahman, appearing individuated through the veil of avidyā (ignorance).
The drama of human life — the planning, the struggling, the winning and losing — is
līlā, the cosmic play of Consciousness with itself.
With this as our foundation, Hamlet’s line ceases to be merely about fate and
becomes a window into the nature of Reality itself.
II. “Rough-Hewing” — The Activity of the Ego-Self
“Rough-hew them how we will…”
In Advaita, the one who “rough-hews” is the ahaṃkāra — the ego, the sense of
being a separate, autonomous “I” that plans, decides, and acts. This ego-self believes
itself to be the kartā (the doer). It picks up the chisel, surveys the raw wood of
circumstance, and begins to hack away according to its desires, fears, and
calculations.
Hamlet spent four acts doing precisely this. He rough-hewed furiously:
- He devised the play-within-a-play to trap Claudius
- He calculated when to strike and when to hesitate
- He philosophized endlessly about whether to act at all
And what did all this rough-hewing produce? Chaos. Mistaken killing. Broken
relationships. Near-annihilation.
The Advaitic teaching here is precise: the ego is real as appearance but not as
substance. It is like a wave that believes it is generating the ocean’s movement. It
hews and carves, but its cuts are always rough — approximate, distorted, limited by
its own ignorance of the whole. The jīva cannot see the totality because it is the act
of pretending to be separate from the totality. You cannot see the whole painting
while believing yourself to be only one brushstroke.
This is not a moral failure. It is the nature of individuation itself. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad
says: “The Self is not attained by the weak.” The weakness referred to is not physical
— it is the weakness of clinging to the ego’s rough-hewing as if it were the final
word on reality.
III. “The Divinity That Shapes” — Brahman as the Immanent Sculptor
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends…”
Now we arrive at the heart of the Advaitic mystery. What is this “divinity” that
shapes?
It is not an external God standing above creation, adjusting outcomes like a cosmic
bureaucrat. That would be dvaita — duality, two-ness. In Advaita, the Divinity that
shapes is Brahman itself, operating as the innermost reality of everything that
appears to happen. It is not separate from the rough-hewing. It is the very ground
within which the rough-hewing occurs — and it is simultaneously the one who knows
that rough-hewing is never the final act.
Śaṅkara would say: Brahman is both the material cause and the efficient cause of the
universe. Like gold that becomes ornaments without ceasing to be gold — the
ornaments appear different, but gold alone is real. Every “end” that is shaped —
every outcome, every death, every transformation — is Brahman alone, crystallizing
into form from its own infinite freedom.
This is why the shaping is so effortless and inevitable. It does not struggle against the
rough-hewing. It uses it. Every awkward cut the ego makes, every miscalculation,
every tragedy — Brahman absorbs it and shapes it into exactly what was needed for
the whole. The sculptor does not fight the chisel marks. She works with the grain of
the wood, which she herself laid down before the carpenter arrived.
IV. The Self Reveals Herself to Whom She Chooses — Ātman Prasāda
Here we arrive at the most luminous, and most humbling, dimension of this teaching.
The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad declares:
“Nāyam ātmā pravacanena labhyo na medhayā na bahunā śrutena। Yam evaiṣa
vṛṇute tena labhyas tasyaiṣa ātmā vivṛṇute tanūṃ svām॥”
“This Self is not attained by instruction, nor by intellect, nor by much hearing. It is
attained only by the one whom the Self chooses — to that one, the Self reveals its own
nature.”
This is perhaps the most radical statement in all of Vedāntic philosophy. And it
reframes Hamlet’s entire journey.
Hamlet spent the whole play trying to know — trying to verify the Ghost’s truth,
trying to understand his duty, trying to calculate the right moment. He brought great
intellect, great sensitivity, great moral seriousness. And none of it worked in the way
he intended. The knowledge he needed did not come through his efforts. It came
through a sea voyage, a near-death encounter, a pirate attack — through
circumstances entirely outside his planning.
And then, at the beginning of Act 5, he simply knows. A calm descends. He speaks of
providence with the ease of one who has stopped arguing with reality. He is ready.
The Self has chosen him.
From the Advaitic lens, what happened? The jīva Hamlet had exhausted its roughhewing.
The ego’s strategies had all collapsed. And in that exhaustion, in that
surrender — not as a strategy, but as a genuine letting-go — avidyā thinned. The veil
grew transparent. Brahman, which had always been Hamlet’s own deepest nature,
turned toward itself through the instrument of Hamlet’s readied consciousness.
The Self does not reveal itself as a reward for correct behavior. It reveals itself when
the ego becomes sufficiently transparent. Grace — prasāda — is not earned. It is
received. And the receiving is only possible when the clenched fist of the ego-self
relaxes its grip on rough-hewing.
V. Why “She Chooses” — The Feminine Ground of Being
To speak of the Self as She is to invoke Śakti — the dynamic, creative power of
Consciousness. In the non-dual Śākta interpretation of Advaita, Brahman’s power of
self-revelation is understood as intrinsically feminine — not in the gendered human
sense, but in the sense of that which receives, gestates, and births reality from within
itself.
Māyā — the power that veils Brahman — is feminine. And Anugraha Śakti — the
power that removes the veil — is also feminine. The same divine Mother who wraps
the world in the dream of separateness is the one who, in her grace, tears the veil
away.
This means the Self’s self-concealment and self-revelation are not opposites. They
are two movements of the same creative freedom. Brahman chooses to hide in order
that the joy of rediscovery can be complete. The rough-hewing is part of the plan.
The chaos is choreographed. The tragedy is embraced.
The “divinity that shapes our ends” is not a cold determinism. She is a Mother who
allows her children to wander, to build, to destroy, to suffer — because she knows
what they are, even when they have forgotten. She shapes the ends not by
preventing the rough-hewing but by ensuring that every rough mark ultimately
reveals the beauty of the finished form.
VI. Hamlet’s Enlightenment — The Shift into Sākṣī
Hamlet’s final equanimity — “the readiness is all” — is, in Advaitic terms, a
spontaneous shift from identifying as the kartā (doer) to resting as the sākṣī
(witness). He no longer needs the outcome to be controlled. He no longer needs
certainty. He acts when action is called, rests when rest is called, and accepts death
when death arrives — without any of it disturbing the stillness beneath.
This is not stoic resignation. The Stoic still believes the ego is real and chooses nobly
to endure. Hamlet’s shift is subtler and deeper: the ego has become transparent to
itself. He sees through the rough-hewing to the shaping beneath. He does not
become passive — he kills Claudius, he orchestrates the final scene — but he does so
without the contracted, desperate quality of his earlier scheming. He acts as an
instrument of the Whole.
In Advaita, this is called Jīvanmukti — liberation while still living. The body-mind
continues to function. The drama of life continues. But the one who believed they
were only the rough-hewer has recognized themselves as also the Divinity that
shapes. Subject and sculptor are one.
VII. The Final Integration
Shakespeare could not have known Advaita Vedānta. And yet he wrote this line, and
it carries the full weight of the tradition as though it were distilled from it. This is not
coincidence. It is evidence that certain recognitions are not cultural — they are
structural. They arise whenever human consciousness is pressed to its limit and
breaks open into something larger than itself.
The Divinity that shapes our ends is not other than us. It is the deepest stratum of
what we are — the Ātman, Brahman, the Self — appearing as destiny from outside,
because we forgot that we are inside it.
And She reveals Herself not when we have perfected our rough-hewing, but when we
love Her more than our own plans.
When the chisel drops — She speaks.
The Drama of Desire
A friend wrote, “Desire…
I realised drama we are all living in”,
Really, my friend, really you “realised?”,
But to realise is to realise that
There is no “We”.
Do you know where you’re going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to?
Do you know?
Do you get what you’re hoping for?
When you look behind you, there’s no open doors
What are you hoping for?
Do you know?
Now, looking back at all we’ve passed
We let so many dreams just slip through our hands
Why must we wait so long before we see
How sad the answers to those questions can be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuMBl1peAlo
This Dream, This Life
Aw, shucks, this dream
This life, oh so unnecessary
Yet we keep dreaming
We keep living
As if we have no choice
Do we have a choice,
And is the choice only death
Some say the choice is immortality
But if it indeed is immortality
Immortality can have no beginning
So, right now it surely must be the case
That I am indeed already immortal
And being immortal
‘Tis strange that a mere dream
A mere life
Bugs me to no end.
“This unreality, oh this unreality…where neither love is true, nor the truth is true…oh this unreality.”
“Ah, to disappear, be submerged…”
The Passion and the Intezaar
When passion for you
Is no longer a passion
When passion for you
Is no longer in fashion
Know that
The wait is almost over.
Lekin intezaar bhi kahi baar
Bahut meetha hota hai
Intezaar may dard bhi kyu na ho
Aur tumhaari zindagi may
Ye ittefaq bhi ho sakti hai
Ye taqdeer bhi ho sakti hai
Jis pal pe tumhari zindagi hai
Aakar rukhi hai, tehri hai
Ab tum aur kuch lumhe
Sirf intezaar may bitana hai
Aur iss ittefaq ko, iss taqdeer ko
Galay lagaanay ke siva
Aur koi raasta nahi hai
Aur agar koi waisa raasta hai
Tumhari taqdeer may nahi hai
Ki tum uss raastay pe chal sakogay.
“When I read some poets, I feel like it is high time I stopped writing poetry, and left that job to the poets.”
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’
“Mending Wall” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall) is
one of Frost’s most celebrated poems, and these lines are among the most analyzed
in American poetry. Here’s a deep commentary from multiple angles.
The Lines in Context
These lines come near the end of the poem, spoken by the narrator as a
counterpoint to his neighbor’s repeated mantra: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
The narrator is the questioner, the skeptic, the one who wonders why the wall exists
at all.
Line by Line
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out”
This is the poem’s central philosophical provocation. Frost draws on a binary that
cuts in two directions simultaneously:
Walling in — keeping something of yours contained, protected, defined.
Territory, identity, privacy, culture.
Walling out — excluding something foreign, threatening, or simply other.
The genius of phrasing it as a question is that the narrator admits he doesn’t always
know which is which. A wall built for protection can become a cage. A wall built for
exclusion can become a statement of fear. The act of building precedes the
understanding of the act — and Frost is warning against that.
There’s also a quiet confession here: the narrator says “I’d ask to know,” not “I’d
know.” He’s humble. He’s not claiming wisdom, only the willingness to pause and
question before acting.
“And to whom I was like to give offense”
This line introduces an ethical and social dimension. Walls don’t just affect the person
who builds them — they mean something to others. A wall is a message. It says: I
don’t trust you. You are not welcome here. This far, and no further.
The word “offense” is carefully chosen. It suggests that walls can wound — not
physically, but relationally and psychically. They can communicate contempt,
suspicion, or rejection without a word being spoken. Frost is nudging the reader to
think about walls not just as practical structures but as acts of communication, and
sometimes, acts of aggression.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.”
This is the poem’s most famous line, and it opens and echoes throughout the poem
like a refrain. Notice Frost refuses to name what that “something” is — and that
refusal is deliberate and profound.
Nature? Earlier in the poem, frozen groundswell heaves the boulders apart every
winter. Nature literally dismantles the wall year after year, as if the earth itself resists
the partition.
Human nature? There’s a deep instinct toward connection, curiosity, and openness
in people — children especially. We are social animals. Something in us chafes at
barriers.
The cosmic or spiritual? Some readers hear in “something” a quasi-divine force — a
universe that tends toward unity, entropy, dissolution of artificial categories.
The unconscious? The vagueness of “something” is psychologically astute. We often
can’t name the part of ourselves that resists conformity, convention, or inherited
thinking — but it’s there, eroding our certainties.
By ending with “That wants it down,” Frost gives the force a kind of desire — almost
personifying it. The wall isn’t just falling apart; something wants it gone. This is
subversive and tender at once.
Thematic Angles
The Paradox of Community
The poem never actually argues that walls are bad. The narrator helps rebuild the
wall every spring! He participates in the very ritual he questions. This is Frost’s
honesty: we simultaneously crave connection and separation. The wall-mending is
itself a form of connection — the two men meet, work together, talk. The wall
enables the relationship in a strange way. So the lines aren’t a simple anti-wall
polemic; they’re an admission of complexity.
Individual vs. Inherited Tradition
The neighbor repeats his father’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” He
thinks in proverbs; he doesn’t question. The narrator questions everything. These five
lines are essentially the voice of the Enlightenment — don’t build anything you can’t
justify rationally and ethically. The neighbor, by contrast, represents tradition,
continuity, inherited wisdom. Frost doesn’t entirely mock either. Both impulses are
human. Both have costs.
Political and Social Reading
Frost wrote this in 1914, but its political resonance never ages. Every era has its wall
debates — literal (border walls, ghetto walls, apartheid walls, the Berlin Wall) and
figurative (class walls, racial walls, cultural walls). The question “What I was walling in
or walling out?” is a haunting one for any nation or community grappling with
immigration, identity, or belonging. Who do we include? Who do we shut out? And
do we even know what we’re doing when we do it?
The Epistemological Angle
These lines are deeply concerned with knowledge before action — a Socratic impulse.
Don’t act on habit, tradition, or fear. Know what you’re doing and why. The narrator
doesn’t say walls are always wrong; he says building them without asking these
questions is reckless. This is a poem about the ethics of unreflective behaviour.
Frost’s Tone: Wry, Not Preachy
Crucially, Frost never lets the narrator become a moralist. He’s mischievous, a little
playful — he considers telling the neighbor that elves knocked the wall down, then
thinks better of it. The narrator’s wisdom is offered quietly, almost to himself. This
makes these lines feel like thinking aloud rather than lecturing, which is far more
persuasive and far more true to how genuine insight actually arrives.
In short, these five lines compress a whole philosophy: think before you divide,
consider who you hurt, and know that something in the world — in nature, in us — will
always push back against walls that exist without justification. That “something” is
never fully named because Frost understood that the best questions outlast their
answers.
“To attain Nirvana, now I need to do some juGod.”
“The very restlessness and attempting to become perfect is the imperfection.”
The Discovery
I have discovered the recipe for happiness
No, it is not owning the oil fields in Kuwait
Nor is it winning the John Bates Clark Medal
Nor the Merc parked in your driveway
Nor your byline in Sunday NYT
Simpler, far, far simpler than that
Just an evening at Roastery Coffee House in Banjara Hills
Sipping Cranberry Coffee and eating lasagna
What would double the happiness though
Is if a certain someone is in the opposite chair
Or we both in some other place
Else, it is just perfect, perfect.
“I have reached an age where if a girl smiles at me, I cannot read too many meanings in it.”
“Spending time with and understanding our children will make us understand philosophy faster than by reading any religious texts.”
“Love at first sight is a killing concept. But then dislike at first sight is a different kind of killing.”
“Just because you suspect you are wise; it does not mean your wisdom will be of a helluva lot useful when it comes to interpreting all the meanings in a smile. And, God’s photos and statues depict a smile on the face of the deity. Damn. It is hard enough interpreting the smile of a girl, now God is also smiling at us. Shit, we are screwed. No way we can know what life is all about.”
Think About These Things
One of the very few virtues that Ramana Maharshi extols is humility.
He says in his short book “Who Am I?”:
“To the extent we behave with humility, to that extent there will result good.”
Meanwhile, Nisargadatta Maharaj in his book “I Am That”, keeps saying repeatedly that the most important virtue is “earnestness”.
“When the mind is silent, any amount of speech and action do not vitiate that silence. Mind cannot be silent when there are desires in our being. Find out how to deal with desires.”
Betwixt Wise and Otherwise
Today’s morning comes
Like any other morning
It does not seem that different
Until I start thinking, feeling
Then, too, it does not seem that different
Unless I resist, protest, regret, wish for,
And why do I resists, protest, regret, wish for?
That seems to be the way things are
That seems to be our lot here on earth
Some may come and say things can be otherwise
Between this wise and otherwise I live my life.
“Sometimes, to be wise is to accept defeat. Why flow against the current of life?”
Suicidal Impulse
Today morning
I told a friend
“Come, let us go and commit suicide.”
“No,” the friend protested,
“I want to live and enjoy life.”
Now, I have to gather
The courage and wisdom
To travel alone
The journey cannot be given up
Just because
One’s companions want to rest.
“Duniya paison ke peeche baag rahi hai. Mai fursat ke peeche baag raha hoon. Paise bahut mushkil hai milna, mahnat karni padti hai. Fursat toh yoohee mil jaati hai, bina kuch kiye…kuch muth karo aur fursat pao…samjha karo kyunki ismay ek raaz chupi hai…lekin mai galat bhi ho sakta hoo…zindagi toh jua hai…aur judai bhi….”
“Truth divorced from love is no truth. Love divorced from truth is no love.”
“Don’t be an archaeologist. Don’t dig up the ruins of your past, otherwise you will be ruined.”
The Itch
The itch is
inside my heart.
But I am scratching the paper
with my pen.
“It was daffodils that flashed upon the inward eye of Wordsworth. On my inward eye, it is she who flashes.”
“To love someone truly is to give them the freedom to walk away from you without any guilt or regret should they want to.”
“Someone sang, the whole night your memory troubled me. My problem is far worse. Even the whole day her memory is troubling me.”
“Sitting here alone in this coffee shop, I am lost in thought, wondering what Donne meant.”
“Something shifted in me that day when she gave me that look and said, ‘Sam, I don’t see you nowadays’. Life is full of loose ends and some knots live on inside us.”
“I told her ye death ke baraay may zyada buk buk muth karo. Hum sab har raat aath ghante ke liye mar jaatay hai.”
“There seem to be different kinds of love. Oh, oh…just when thought you can stop going to the library.”
Cutting Out the Social Self
Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.”
But, also at the level at which Sartre is speaking, it is also true that “Heaven is other people.”
But, at this social-self level, one gets stuck in a certain level of living where the dialogue “chal daaroo peeyingay” plays out in its various shades and nuances.
And that daaroo is not the wine that Sufis would have us drink.
And, it is this social self that makes you earn more money than we need, etc.
From this social self, you need to reach inside to find your true self.
The moment you leave your social self behind, then your thinking and emotions also are less in play because most of them are in service of our social self.
“No, Kirshna, I will wage war with my love and not with bows and arrows. Jesus knew something you did not. Besides, it is not my job to wage war against injustice with bows and arrows. Isn’t that your job as the creator of this universe, which you anyway you say you are. Remember what you said about being the creator of the four castes. Then, why you are passing the buck to me. Besides, you yourself say, ‘sambhavami yuge yuge’. Deal with it, Krishna, deal with it. After all, this world is your baby. Don’t instruct me. Leave me alone to me and my love.”
“Zindagi koi jung nahi. Sirf junglee loga waisay sonchthe hai. Mai pyaar ko itna samajh chuka hoon ki pata lag gaya hai ki jung sirf woh mushkilay kada karthi hai jo pahlay nahi the, aur jo mushkilay pahlay the unka hul teek say nahi kar paatha.”
“Ye kya jung jung kahthay phir rahay ho. Mai zindagi ko tukhratha hoo, kyunki mujhe woh zindagi nahi chahiyay jahaan mujhe jung may haasil hona padtha. Jung nahi ladnay say zyada se zyada sirf meri zindagi mujhse cheen jaayegi. Cheen lo jitna chahiya utna ye meri zindagi. Mai todi poocha pehale naa ab pooch raha hoo mujhe paida karo aur zinda rakho.”
“The mind says, ‘Look, look, there are so many problems, stay focused and awake.’ Heart says, ‘Chill, I have the solution to every problem’.”
The Darkness in My Soul
For too long I have seen
The sun in me eclipsed
By something or the other that comes,
Some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming,
Between me and the truth that be
That light, that love, that beauty
Slowly I begin to see far too clearly
This flight outward that gnaws at my soul
That waits for the right consonance, right season
Waits and waits but waits in vain
Thwarted by some destiny that I cannot control
I learn to let go, knowing I can control
Neither my destiny nor that of others.
I thought I had left them all behind
That some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming
Back in the stormy days of my confused youth
Why are they coming back again to me
As if I am still accountable for I know not what.
Who was Arjuna?
Arjuna is anyone in this world who is NOT content to just keep the body alive but also seeks to keep the mind and heart alive.
Such a one finds himself having to fight many a battle on many a Kurukshetra.
Hence also such a one will keep needing the counsel of a Kirshna.
But the Arjuna who is content to keep just the body alive and lets go of the mind and heart, has no battles to fight nor has any need for any Krishna.
Understand this and not any other Gita, be that Gita of Kirshna or Ashtavakra.
👍🏼 just the B and when the pot breaks you are one with the rest of the only consciousness.
Yes.
Even before the pot (B) breaks, what keeps the illusion that you are NOT right now one with the rest of the only consciousness is ONLY the mind and heart.
When the mind and heart are NOT in play, then the illusion of separation also does NOT exist.
Like in deep sleep
Yes.
Perfectly said.
That is why, Ramana Maharshi said, “What happened in sleep is your real nature.” (Talk 304)
In many places in his Talks book, the Maharshi says something to the effect of deep sleep is NOT ignorance but reality itself.
That is why he says, one has to be in the state of wakeful sleep or jagrat sushupti.
#Arjuna #Disillusionment #Enlightenment #faith #Gita #God #Happiness #Life #Love #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfLife #Poem #Poetry #QuotableQuotes #Quotes #Retirmeent #Sadness #Spirituality #Truth #WorkLife -
Wanna Stop Writing After This
“For a long time now, the role of the Brahmin has been outsourced to other countries, particularly Europe and the US. Why? Because we Indians have stopped thinking many centuries back.”
Neruda, I Feel Sadder Than You Tonight
No reason Neruda that I feel sad
You at least had your girl to blame
I have nothing and no one to blame
For how I feel now, just life itself
Galls me to no end, where I feel mocked
By life itself which demands it be understood
Am I supposed to love life and not the woman
But I do not know what life is nor how to live
Shall I just drink a Coke and open happiness
But Coke’s fizz lasts less time than morning dew
The sun is hot but it’s supposedly life-giver
But when I step out in the aft’noon it’s killing
So, I cannot trust the very so-called life-giver
Nothing in nature seems benign, not even society
And when night comes, cocooned here in my flat
I can’t see the stars, and moon interests me not
All I can look forward to now is slow deterioration
One by one the powers will desert me, from the teeth
To the knees to the memory to the interest
Time cares not to show anyone any compassion
The philosophy I know is even more problematic
In a way it gives me relief from these thoughts
And in a way it doubles the pain by showing
This whole life was a waste of time, no study
Nor emotion nor smile nor understanding
Takes you where you want to be, and these days
I am not even sure where I want to be, not even to be
I cannot even go back to where I came from
Nor can I know where I have to go, nor whether
Any journey is worth it at all, as now I understand
This flight from myself is the cause of all problems
And, when I look into myself, I find only wisdom
And that wisdom tells me I do not understand at all
Neither Truth nor Love, for wisdom tells me
If you think you understand Truth and Love
Why are you still undertaking many a journey.
“Everything in this world has a cause. And every effect becomes in turn a cause. Where there are causes and effects, there is change underway. Where there is change how can Truth be. And where there is no Truth how can love be.”
“Definition of a perfect love story: Going from aroused to erased.”
“Most human love arises out of fear, is sustained by fear, and ends a quiet death due to fear.”
“Life is a Russian roulette.”
“Perfect recipe for dissatisfaction in life: Wanting to be happy always all the time no matter what.”
“Some say God is Truth. Some say God is Love. Both are wrong. God is. Period.”
“Love is not an add-on to the other things in your life. Love is the life.”
“Love is the ultimate soporific which dullens the pain of existence.”
“We think there is life. That is the death of us.”
“We are all lost in our desires. Desires take us to the future. Inhabiting the future, we fail to live because life is happening in the present.”
Jagat (Sanskrit: जगत्) primarily means the world, universe, or earth. It is derived from the root gacchati (“that which moves”), signifying that the universe is in constant motion, ever-changing, and ephemeral.
Core Meanings & Contexts:
• The Moving World: It refers to all that is moving, animate, living, and changing, encompassing the entire material universe.
• Vedanta Philosophy: It is often described as mithya (dependent reality/illusion) in comparison to the absolute reality of Brahman, often referring to the subjective experience of the material world.
• Spiritual/Non-dualism: In some contexts, it is interpreted as the manifestation or “body” of the divine, completely dependent on the Supreme for existence.
• Common Usage: In Hindi and other Indian languages, it is used for “world” or “universe,” and sometimes implies a specific field or community (e.g., Nari Jagat – world of women).
Common Compound Words:
• Jagadish/Jagannath: Lord of the Universe (Vishnu or Shiva).
• Jagatmata: Mother of the World (Durga).
Jagat is also a common Indian name for boys, signifying the universe.
“Don’t wait for retirement or for that smile; be happy today, nay, right now.”
“Dare to be who you are.”
Give me some deeply philosophical quotes of Arthur Rimbaud.
Claude responded: Here are some deeply philosophical quotes from Arthur Rimbaud:
________________________________________
On the Self & Identity
“I is another.” — Letter to Georges Izambard, 1871
One of his most famous lines, suggesting the self is not a fixed entity but something foreign, observed from the outside — a radical idea that anticipated modern theories of subjectivity.
________________________________________
On Disorder & Vision
“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” — Letter to Paul Demeny (Lettre du Voyant), 1871
Rimbaud’s manifesto for poetry: to reach true vision, the poet must shatter ordinary perception and embrace suffering as a path to illumination.
________________________________________
On Life & the Absolute
“Real life is absent. We are not in the world.” — A Season in Hell
A haunting declaration of alienation — the sense that authentic existence lies forever beyond reach, and the world we inhabit is a kind of unreality.
________________________________________
On Suffering & Knowledge
“One must be absolutely modern.” — A Season in Hell
Deceptively simple, this is Rimbaud’s demand to break entirely with tradition — to find truth not in the past but in the raw, uncharted present.
________________________________________
On Love & Hell
“I have swallowed a famous mouthful of poison. Thrice blessed be the counsel that came to me! My bowels are on fire. The violence of the venom twists my limbs, deforms me, lays me low.” — A Season in Hell
A visceral metaphor for the self-destruction that comes with absolute passion — love, ambition, and vision as simultaneously poison and revelation.
________________________________________
On Eternity
“It has been found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun.” — Eternity
A mystical fragment — eternity not as abstraction but as a sensory, almost pantheist fusion of natural forces.
________________________________________
On Freedom
“Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.” — A Season in Hell
Rimbaud suggests that rational intellect alone cannot unlock the deepest truths — only a surrender to something greater can.
________________________________________
Rimbaud’s philosophy is essentially one of radical becoming — the self must be destroyed, perception unhinged, and comfort abandoned in order to glimpse something true. He abandoned poetry entirely at 19, which many see as the ultimate philosophical act: refusing to be captured even by his own genius.
“Vivekananda, when he was young, really young, went around asking everyone, ‘Have you seen God’. And when he posed the same question to Ramakrishna Paramahansa, RP replied, ‘Yes, only more clearly than I see you now.’ Now, the question that can be asked is was RP, like J. Krishnamurti always said he does, ‘Answering the questioner rather than the question.’ Otherwise, the correct answer is, ‘What a stupid question, Naren, all you have been seeing all your life is ONLY God but you have been thinking you are seeing the world’.”
Buddha’s Mistake
Sam’s First Noble Truth
I agree with Buddha’s First Noble Truth that “Life is suffering”.
Sam’s Second Noble Truth
I do not agree with Buddha’s Second Noble Truth that “Desire is the cause of suffering.”
My point is that once you have understood that “Life is suffering”, you should also understand the simple logic that “No life, no suffering.”
So, do not bother about desires and all such nonsense.
Do not get caught in such traps, traps which arise only if you are living.
Just end life and you are done.
Or, rather realise you were never born.
No Sex, No Salvation, No Sam
I do not want to get caught
In the vortex of these Fie-loss-oafers
And whatever theories they spin
About this world, existing only in imagination;
When I talk about myself Sam
Or about Sex and Salvation, I do so
Under Erasure, as that Algerian Jew would have it
Who set afire many an academic department in the US
And, I note with pleasure his association in 1966
With my alma mater Johns Hopkins, kickstarting
That peculiar school of philosophy, poststructuralism,
But, why dabble and grapple even dilettantishly
With these games that minds of philosophers play
I who have understood Kena Upanishad’s admonition
That if you think Truth is there for the taking by the mind
You poor thing how little you understand
And where is the mind but in this world
Or is the world in the mind
Now, now don’t confuse me
I refuse to play this game with these words
For I know too well that if I renounce words
Which is the only true Vairagya that is there
And not so-called Vairagya of Kamini-Kanchana
Then in that silence all doubts are quelled
All truths stand revealed, and I know
Whatever I knew till now was wrong
And I learn to let go of not only Socrates and Sartre
But also of Maharshi and Maharaj
For where do they all exist
Except in my fertile imagination
As do Sex, Salvation and Sam.
“The tree has to bend to every wind, but it cannot know why the wind is blowing.”
“In the autumn, it is foolish for the tree to try to hold on to the leaves.”
“There is no spot in the pot where there is no clay.”
“In every love story, there is something more than biology at play.”
“My Call”
Yes, Michael, it always was your call
To go solo or to go with the family
And also your call to spread love and light
To this world through your moves.
Music, moods, musings, and murmurings
And did you change the world?
Who knows? Maybe a few and here and there
When you were alive, and a few more might change
Long after you are gone as long as your music lives on
Surely, though, you yourself must have escaped
The suffering that the blind strivings of the Will
Imposes on one, if Schopenhauer is to be believed,
With your Dionysian spirit that Nietzsche championed.
Yet how I despair Michael, my call
Is that this world is condemned to its duality
Of light and darkness, good and bad, virtue and vice
Socrates, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus could not fix the world
So, Michael, you are forgiven, too, for failing
Though your critics would point out your own failings.
—
Maya (the cosmic creative/illusory power) is constituted by the three gunas — Sattva (clarity, harmony), Rajas (activity, passion, restlessness), and Tamas (inertia, darkness, ignorance). As long as manifestation exists — as long as anything is appearing — all three gunas are present in varying proportions. You can’t have Maya with only Sattva, because pure undifferentiated Sattva would dissolve back into Brahman. The tension and dynamism of Rajas and Tamas are what keep the world-appearance going.
So yes, suffering and evil are structurally baked into manifestation itself. Tamas produces ignorance, delusion, and stagnation; Rajas produces craving, conflict, and agitation — both are inexhaustible engines of suffering at the cosmic level.
This creates an important asymmetry:
At the individual level, liberation is possible — you can step out of identification with the gunas entirely, which is what Nisargadatta and Ramana point to. The Self is not a product of the gunas.
At the collective or historical level, you might get periods of greater Sattva, but Rajas and Tamas always reassert themselves — civilizations rise and fall in cycles (the yuga framework reflects exactly this).
At the cosmic/natural level, as long as Maya is operating, the interplay of gunas never ceases. Suffering doesn’t “end” — it’s part of the texture of manifestation.
This is also why Advaita doesn’t promise the world will get better or that evil will be eliminated — it says the world as such is the wrong level to seek resolution. The resolution is recognition of that which was never in the gunas to begin with. Nisargadatta’s typical move is precisely this — he doesn’t ask you to fix the dream, he asks you to wake up from it.
Universal liberation of the cosmos is a category error within this framework. The most Maya can do is oscillate; it cannot transcend its own constituents.
Two Ways to Retire Early
1. Earn as much as is 100% sufficient for your wants.
2. Pare down your wants (but NOT to the bare minimum) so that you can retire earlier than you can under Scenario 1.
I chose the latter option by becoming sort of a minimalist because I realized that happiness does not come from accumulating more and more, be it wealth or any other damn thing.
When did more and more wealth ever make anyone more and more happy.
And, if you need more and more money to become more and more happy, know that you are not going about it the right way.
Money cannot buy almost anything worthwhile.
Anyway, the best things in life are either damn cheap or totally free.
Don’t think so?
Well, my friend, good luck with that happiness you are chasing.
No, I forget, you are chasing money not happiness.
Let me know when you shift your rat race from pursuing money to pursuing happiness, then as Paul Simon sang, “I can be your long-lost pal.”
What about the work that needs to be done in this world that might suffer if you retire early?
Ha, ha, ha, as if you are working FOR the world. Get real.
Besides, there are enough unemployed people out there to fill the space that you vacate.
And, besides, if people thought like I am suggesting, then believe you me, far less work will be needed to be done in this world so that the world can get along by just fine.
Ha, ha, ha…how bad people are at thinking!!!
Well, well, I guess God knows what he is up to.
Homo Duplex
Homo duplex (“the double human”) is a theory by sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) proposing that humans possess a dual nature: part biological organism driven by selfish individual desires (“profane”), and part social being guided by morality, collective consciousness, and social constraints (“sacred”).
Key Components of Homo Duplex:
• The Profane (Individual): This side consists of personal appetites, instincts, selfishness, and bodily sensations.
• The Sacred (Social): This side comprises moral forces, social solidarity, shared values, and altruism, which are cultivated through societal interaction and collective rituals.
• The Tension: Durkheim argued that society requires a balance between these two sides to prevent individualism from leading to unhappiness, greed, or excessive anomie (social instability).
• Societal Role: Socialization, education, and religion play crucial roles in regulating the individual’s “animalistic” nature and nurturing their “moral” or “social” side.
This concept underscores the idea that humans find their highest potential not in isolation, but by participating in a larger social whole.
What Durkheim Was Really Saying
At its core, Homo Duplex is Durkheim’s answer to one of philosophy’s oldest
questions: what kind of creature is a human being? His answer was deliberately
paradoxical — we are simultaneously two things at once, and that tension is not a
flaw to be resolved, but the very engine of social and moral life.
This was a bold move in the late 19th century. Darwinian biology was pushing toward
the view that humans were essentially animals with sophisticated brains.
Enlightenment liberalism, on the other hand, celebrated the sovereign individual.
Durkheim rejected both as incomplete. He insisted you cannot understand a human
being by looking only at their biology or their individual rational mind — you must
look at what society does to and inside them.
Unpacking the Two Sides
The Profane (the animal self)
The word “profane” here doesn’t mean vulgar in the everyday sense — it means
outside the sacred, ordinary, earthly, bodily. This is the self that:
Hungers, lusts, fears, and competes
Acts in its own interest without reference to others
Exists in time and space as a finite, mortal organism
Durkheim didn’t moralize this side as evil — he saw it as simply pre-social. It is what
we are before society gets hold of us. Left entirely to this nature, humans would be,
in Hobbes’ famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The Sacred (the social self)
The “sacred” is what society implants into the individual. This is a profound and
somewhat unsettling idea: your moral conscience, your sense of duty, your empathy,
your values — these are not naturally yours. They were installed by the collective.
This side includes:
The capacity for self-sacrifice
Loyalty to groups, nations, ideals
Moral disgust and reverence
The ability to feel that something is bigger than yourself
Crucially, Durkheim believed this sacred dimension is genuinely real and genuinely
powerful — but its source is social, not divine or innate. When you feel moral awe,
you are, in his view, feeling the weight of society pressing on your consciousness.
The Tension: Why the Conflict is Necessary
Durkheim didn’t want the tension resolved — he wanted it managed. Here’s why:
Too much profane (pure individualism) leads to anomie — a condition where
social norms collapse, individuals feel unmoored, and rates of depression,
crime, and even suicide rise. His famous study Suicide (1897) showed that
societies with weak social bonds had higher suicide rates — a radical,
counterintuitive argument.
Too much sacred (total collective absorption) leads to fatalistic overregulation
— where individuals are crushed under the weight of social duty,
also producing misery and, paradoxically, suicide of a different kind (what he
called altruistic suicide, dying for the group).
The sweet spot is a productive friction — society strong enough to give life meaning
and structure, but not so totalizing that it erases the individual.
Socialization as the Civilizing Mechanism
When Durkheim says education, religion, and socialization regulate the individual’s
animalistic nature, he means something very specific: they transfer the sacred into
the individual so thoroughly that it feels like their own conscience. This is the
machinery of moral internalization.
Think of how a child is taught not to steal. At first, it’s external — “don’t do that or
you’ll be punished.” Eventually, the prohibition becomes internal — “I don’t want to
steal, it feels wrong.” For Durkheim, that feeling of wrongness is society speaking
through you. You have been successfully socialized. The collective has colonized
your inner life — and this is not manipulation, in his view; it is what makes you fully
human.
Religion, in particular, fascinated him because its rituals (collective gatherings, shared
symbols, emotional ceremonies) were the most powerful mechanisms for recharging
the social self — reminding individuals viscerally that they belong to something
beyond themselves.
Where Homo Duplex Connects to Bigger Ideas
Concept Connection to Homo Duplex
Freud’s Id/Superego
Strikingly parallel — the id (drives) vs. the superego
(internalized social rules). Both emerged around the same
era, independently.
Rousseau’s Noble
Savage
Durkheim inverts Rousseau — society doesn’t corrupt
natural goodness; it creates moral goodness in the first
place.
Nietzsche’s critique of
herd morality
Nietzsche saw society suppressing the individual as a
tragedy. Durkheim saw it as a necessity — even a gift.
Modern psychology
Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model echoes Homo
Duplex — moral feelings are social products, not individual
reason.
A Critical Perspective
Homo Duplex is elegant, but not without its critics:
It’s overly binary. Human nature resists clean splits into “animal vs. social.”
Much of what Durkheim calls “profane” (love, curiosity, creativity) is not
straightforwardly selfish.
It romanticizes the collective. Durkheim’s framework can justify social
conformity too easily. History shows that the “sacred social” can endorse
racism, nationalism, and genocide just as easily as altruism.
It underestimates individual agency. Humans don’t just receive society
passively — they also reshape it. The individual isn’t merely a battleground
between animal drives and social imprinting.
The Bottom Line
Homo Duplex is a powerful lens for understanding why humans are so
contradictory — capable of extraordinary selfishness and extraordinary sacrifice,
often in the same person, sometimes within the same hour. Durkheim’s lasting
insight is that this is not hypocrisy or moral failure. It is the structure of what we are:
biological creatures who can only realize their deepest potential by surrendering part
of themselves to something collective and larger. We are, as he saw it, always living
on the border between the animal and the social — and civilization is the ongoing,
never-finished negotiation between those two halves.
Kids? Just say no
You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation
https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral
No Words To Say What I Want To Say
Strange how sometimes you are at a loss for words
When you realize the words you used have not been understood
And using more words would only complicate the picture
Because the words have to go through the sieve
Of other minds and hearts, though mine they have navigated,
And this is not just my problem, just the human condition
And until we understand silence we cannot understand each other
But unfortunately, until then we have to keep using words
And thereby keep encountering battlefields of various sorts.
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” is a famous quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 2). Spoken by Hamlet, it means that a divine power or fate determines the ultimate outcome of our lives, regardless of how clumsily we plan them.
Key Details and Context:
Context in Play: Hamlet says this to Horatio while explaining how he survived
a plot to kill him, suggesting he has accepted fate.
Meaning: “Rough-hew” refers to shaping a rough block of wood. It suggests
humans make rough plans (“rough-hew”), but God or destiny refines the final
outcome (“shapes our ends”).
Theme: This reflects a shift in Hamlet from indecision to a fatalistic acceptance
of whatever happens, including the “special providence in the fall of a
sparrow”.
It shows a shift from a belief that mortals control their destiny to a belief that higher
forces are in control.
“There’s a Divinity That Shapes Our Ends” — Through the Lens of Advaita
Vedānta
And the Self Reveals Itself to Whom She Chooses
I. The Two Voices Speaking the Same Truth
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, standing at the threshold of death with a curious calm, utters
something that no purely Western philosophical framework can fully contain. He is
not simply expressing fatalism. He is not surrendering to an external God the way a
theist might. Something deeper is trembling in those words — something that
Advaita Vedānta, the non-dual philosophy of Śaṅkarācārya, can illuminate with
remarkable precision.
Advaita means not-two. Its central revelation is that Brahman — the infinite,
undivided, self-luminous Consciousness — is the only reality. What we call the
“individual self,” the jīva, is not a separate entity that Brahman controls from outside.
The jīva is Brahman, appearing individuated through the veil of avidyā (ignorance).
The drama of human life — the planning, the struggling, the winning and losing — is
līlā, the cosmic play of Consciousness with itself.
With this as our foundation, Hamlet’s line ceases to be merely about fate and
becomes a window into the nature of Reality itself.
II. “Rough-Hewing” — The Activity of the Ego-Self
“Rough-hew them how we will…”
In Advaita, the one who “rough-hews” is the ahaṃkāra — the ego, the sense of
being a separate, autonomous “I” that plans, decides, and acts. This ego-self believes
itself to be the kartā (the doer). It picks up the chisel, surveys the raw wood of
circumstance, and begins to hack away according to its desires, fears, and
calculations.
Hamlet spent four acts doing precisely this. He rough-hewed furiously:
- He devised the play-within-a-play to trap Claudius
- He calculated when to strike and when to hesitate
- He philosophized endlessly about whether to act at all
And what did all this rough-hewing produce? Chaos. Mistaken killing. Broken
relationships. Near-annihilation.
The Advaitic teaching here is precise: the ego is real as appearance but not as
substance. It is like a wave that believes it is generating the ocean’s movement. It
hews and carves, but its cuts are always rough — approximate, distorted, limited by
its own ignorance of the whole. The jīva cannot see the totality because it is the act
of pretending to be separate from the totality. You cannot see the whole painting
while believing yourself to be only one brushstroke.
This is not a moral failure. It is the nature of individuation itself. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad
says: “The Self is not attained by the weak.” The weakness referred to is not physical
— it is the weakness of clinging to the ego’s rough-hewing as if it were the final
word on reality.
III. “The Divinity That Shapes” — Brahman as the Immanent Sculptor
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends…”
Now we arrive at the heart of the Advaitic mystery. What is this “divinity” that
shapes?
It is not an external God standing above creation, adjusting outcomes like a cosmic
bureaucrat. That would be dvaita — duality, two-ness. In Advaita, the Divinity that
shapes is Brahman itself, operating as the innermost reality of everything that
appears to happen. It is not separate from the rough-hewing. It is the very ground
within which the rough-hewing occurs — and it is simultaneously the one who knows
that rough-hewing is never the final act.
Śaṅkara would say: Brahman is both the material cause and the efficient cause of the
universe. Like gold that becomes ornaments without ceasing to be gold — the
ornaments appear different, but gold alone is real. Every “end” that is shaped —
every outcome, every death, every transformation — is Brahman alone, crystallizing
into form from its own infinite freedom.
This is why the shaping is so effortless and inevitable. It does not struggle against the
rough-hewing. It uses it. Every awkward cut the ego makes, every miscalculation,
every tragedy — Brahman absorbs it and shapes it into exactly what was needed for
the whole. The sculptor does not fight the chisel marks. She works with the grain of
the wood, which she herself laid down before the carpenter arrived.
IV. The Self Reveals Herself to Whom She Chooses — Ātman Prasāda
Here we arrive at the most luminous, and most humbling, dimension of this teaching.
The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad declares:
“Nāyam ātmā pravacanena labhyo na medhayā na bahunā śrutena। Yam evaiṣa
vṛṇute tena labhyas tasyaiṣa ātmā vivṛṇute tanūṃ svām॥”
“This Self is not attained by instruction, nor by intellect, nor by much hearing. It is
attained only by the one whom the Self chooses — to that one, the Self reveals its own
nature.”
This is perhaps the most radical statement in all of Vedāntic philosophy. And it
reframes Hamlet’s entire journey.
Hamlet spent the whole play trying to know — trying to verify the Ghost’s truth,
trying to understand his duty, trying to calculate the right moment. He brought great
intellect, great sensitivity, great moral seriousness. And none of it worked in the way
he intended. The knowledge he needed did not come through his efforts. It came
through a sea voyage, a near-death encounter, a pirate attack — through
circumstances entirely outside his planning.
And then, at the beginning of Act 5, he simply knows. A calm descends. He speaks of
providence with the ease of one who has stopped arguing with reality. He is ready.
The Self has chosen him.
From the Advaitic lens, what happened? The jīva Hamlet had exhausted its roughhewing.
The ego’s strategies had all collapsed. And in that exhaustion, in that
surrender — not as a strategy, but as a genuine letting-go — avidyā thinned. The veil
grew transparent. Brahman, which had always been Hamlet’s own deepest nature,
turned toward itself through the instrument of Hamlet’s readied consciousness.
The Self does not reveal itself as a reward for correct behavior. It reveals itself when
the ego becomes sufficiently transparent. Grace — prasāda — is not earned. It is
received. And the receiving is only possible when the clenched fist of the ego-self
relaxes its grip on rough-hewing.
V. Why “She Chooses” — The Feminine Ground of Being
To speak of the Self as She is to invoke Śakti — the dynamic, creative power of
Consciousness. In the non-dual Śākta interpretation of Advaita, Brahman’s power of
self-revelation is understood as intrinsically feminine — not in the gendered human
sense, but in the sense of that which receives, gestates, and births reality from within
itself.
Māyā — the power that veils Brahman — is feminine. And Anugraha Śakti — the
power that removes the veil — is also feminine. The same divine Mother who wraps
the world in the dream of separateness is the one who, in her grace, tears the veil
away.
This means the Self’s self-concealment and self-revelation are not opposites. They
are two movements of the same creative freedom. Brahman chooses to hide in order
that the joy of rediscovery can be complete. The rough-hewing is part of the plan.
The chaos is choreographed. The tragedy is embraced.
The “divinity that shapes our ends” is not a cold determinism. She is a Mother who
allows her children to wander, to build, to destroy, to suffer — because she knows
what they are, even when they have forgotten. She shapes the ends not by
preventing the rough-hewing but by ensuring that every rough mark ultimately
reveals the beauty of the finished form.
VI. Hamlet’s Enlightenment — The Shift into Sākṣī
Hamlet’s final equanimity — “the readiness is all” — is, in Advaitic terms, a
spontaneous shift from identifying as the kartā (doer) to resting as the sākṣī
(witness). He no longer needs the outcome to be controlled. He no longer needs
certainty. He acts when action is called, rests when rest is called, and accepts death
when death arrives — without any of it disturbing the stillness beneath.
This is not stoic resignation. The Stoic still believes the ego is real and chooses nobly
to endure. Hamlet’s shift is subtler and deeper: the ego has become transparent to
itself. He sees through the rough-hewing to the shaping beneath. He does not
become passive — he kills Claudius, he orchestrates the final scene — but he does so
without the contracted, desperate quality of his earlier scheming. He acts as an
instrument of the Whole.
In Advaita, this is called Jīvanmukti — liberation while still living. The body-mind
continues to function. The drama of life continues. But the one who believed they
were only the rough-hewer has recognized themselves as also the Divinity that
shapes. Subject and sculptor are one.
VII. The Final Integration
Shakespeare could not have known Advaita Vedānta. And yet he wrote this line, and
it carries the full weight of the tradition as though it were distilled from it. This is not
coincidence. It is evidence that certain recognitions are not cultural — they are
structural. They arise whenever human consciousness is pressed to its limit and
breaks open into something larger than itself.
The Divinity that shapes our ends is not other than us. It is the deepest stratum of
what we are — the Ātman, Brahman, the Self — appearing as destiny from outside,
because we forgot that we are inside it.
And She reveals Herself not when we have perfected our rough-hewing, but when we
love Her more than our own plans.
When the chisel drops — She speaks.
The Drama of Desire
A friend wrote, “Desire…
I realised drama we are all living in”,
Really, my friend, really you “realised?”,
But to realise is to realise that
There is no “We”.
Do you know where you’re going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to?
Do you know?
Do you get what you’re hoping for?
When you look behind you, there’s no open doors
What are you hoping for?
Do you know?
Now, looking back at all we’ve passed
We let so many dreams just slip through our hands
Why must we wait so long before we see
How sad the answers to those questions can be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuMBl1peAlo
This Dream, This Life
Aw, shucks, this dream
This life, oh so unnecessary
Yet we keep dreaming
We keep living
As if we have no choice
Do we have a choice,
And is the choice only death
Some say the choice is immortality
But if it indeed is immortality
Immortality can have no beginning
So, right now it surely must be the case
That I am indeed already immortal
And being immortal
‘Tis strange that a mere dream
A mere life
Bugs me to no end.
“This unreality, oh this unreality…where neither love is true, nor the truth is true…oh this unreality.”
“Ah, to disappear, be submerged…”
The Passion and the Intezaar
When passion for you
Is no longer a passion
When passion for you
Is no longer in fashion
Know that
The wait is almost over.
Lekin intezaar bhi kahi baar
Bahut meetha hota hai
Intezaar may dard bhi kyu na ho
Aur tumhaari zindagi may
Ye ittefaq bhi ho sakti hai
Ye taqdeer bhi ho sakti hai
Jis pal pe tumhari zindagi hai
Aakar rukhi hai, tehri hai
Ab tum aur kuch lumhe
Sirf intezaar may bitana hai
Aur iss ittefaq ko, iss taqdeer ko
Galay lagaanay ke siva
Aur koi raasta nahi hai
Aur agar koi waisa raasta hai
Tumhari taqdeer may nahi hai
Ki tum uss raastay pe chal sakogay.
“When I read some poets, I feel like it is high time I stopped writing poetry, and left that job to the poets.”
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’
“Mending Wall” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall) is
one of Frost’s most celebrated poems, and these lines are among the most analyzed
in American poetry. Here’s a deep commentary from multiple angles.
The Lines in Context
These lines come near the end of the poem, spoken by the narrator as a
counterpoint to his neighbor’s repeated mantra: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
The narrator is the questioner, the skeptic, the one who wonders why the wall exists
at all.
Line by Line
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out”
This is the poem’s central philosophical provocation. Frost draws on a binary that
cuts in two directions simultaneously:
Walling in — keeping something of yours contained, protected, defined.
Territory, identity, privacy, culture.
Walling out — excluding something foreign, threatening, or simply other.
The genius of phrasing it as a question is that the narrator admits he doesn’t always
know which is which. A wall built for protection can become a cage. A wall built for
exclusion can become a statement of fear. The act of building precedes the
understanding of the act — and Frost is warning against that.
There’s also a quiet confession here: the narrator says “I’d ask to know,” not “I’d
know.” He’s humble. He’s not claiming wisdom, only the willingness to pause and
question before acting.
“And to whom I was like to give offense”
This line introduces an ethical and social dimension. Walls don’t just affect the person
who builds them — they mean something to others. A wall is a message. It says: I
don’t trust you. You are not welcome here. This far, and no further.
The word “offense” is carefully chosen. It suggests that walls can wound — not
physically, but relationally and psychically. They can communicate contempt,
suspicion, or rejection without a word being spoken. Frost is nudging the reader to
think about walls not just as practical structures but as acts of communication, and
sometimes, acts of aggression.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That wants it down.”
This is the poem’s most famous line, and it opens and echoes throughout the poem
like a refrain. Notice Frost refuses to name what that “something” is — and that
refusal is deliberate and profound.
Nature? Earlier in the poem, frozen groundswell heaves the boulders apart every
winter. Nature literally dismantles the wall year after year, as if the earth itself resists
the partition.
Human nature? There’s a deep instinct toward connection, curiosity, and openness
in people — children especially. We are social animals. Something in us chafes at
barriers.
The cosmic or spiritual? Some readers hear in “something” a quasi-divine force — a
universe that tends toward unity, entropy, dissolution of artificial categories.
The unconscious? The vagueness of “something” is psychologically astute. We often
can’t name the part of ourselves that resists conformity, convention, or inherited
thinking — but it’s there, eroding our certainties.
By ending with “That wants it down,” Frost gives the force a kind of desire — almost
personifying it. The wall isn’t just falling apart; something wants it gone. This is
subversive and tender at once.
Thematic Angles
The Paradox of Community
The poem never actually argues that walls are bad. The narrator helps rebuild the
wall every spring! He participates in the very ritual he questions. This is Frost’s
honesty: we simultaneously crave connection and separation. The wall-mending is
itself a form of connection — the two men meet, work together, talk. The wall
enables the relationship in a strange way. So the lines aren’t a simple anti-wall
polemic; they’re an admission of complexity.
Individual vs. Inherited Tradition
The neighbor repeats his father’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” He
thinks in proverbs; he doesn’t question. The narrator questions everything. These five
lines are essentially the voice of the Enlightenment — don’t build anything you can’t
justify rationally and ethically. The neighbor, by contrast, represents tradition,
continuity, inherited wisdom. Frost doesn’t entirely mock either. Both impulses are
human. Both have costs.
Political and Social Reading
Frost wrote this in 1914, but its political resonance never ages. Every era has its wall
debates — literal (border walls, ghetto walls, apartheid walls, the Berlin Wall) and
figurative (class walls, racial walls, cultural walls). The question “What I was walling in
or walling out?” is a haunting one for any nation or community grappling with
immigration, identity, or belonging. Who do we include? Who do we shut out? And
do we even know what we’re doing when we do it?
The Epistemological Angle
These lines are deeply concerned with knowledge before action — a Socratic impulse.
Don’t act on habit, tradition, or fear. Know what you’re doing and why. The narrator
doesn’t say walls are always wrong; he says building them without asking these
questions is reckless. This is a poem about the ethics of unreflective behaviour.
Frost’s Tone: Wry, Not Preachy
Crucially, Frost never lets the narrator become a moralist. He’s mischievous, a little
playful — he considers telling the neighbor that elves knocked the wall down, then
thinks better of it. The narrator’s wisdom is offered quietly, almost to himself. This
makes these lines feel like thinking aloud rather than lecturing, which is far more
persuasive and far more true to how genuine insight actually arrives.
In short, these five lines compress a whole philosophy: think before you divide,
consider who you hurt, and know that something in the world — in nature, in us — will
always push back against walls that exist without justification. That “something” is
never fully named because Frost understood that the best questions outlast their
answers.
“To attain Nirvana, now I need to do some juGod.”
“The very restlessness and attempting to become perfect is the imperfection.”
The Discovery
I have discovered the recipe for happiness
No, it is not owning the oil fields in Kuwait
Nor is it winning the John Bates Clark Medal
Nor the Merc parked in your driveway
Nor your byline in Sunday NYT
Simpler, far, far simpler than that
Just an evening at Roastery Coffee House in Banjara Hills
Sipping Cranberry Coffee and eating lasagna
What would double the happiness though
Is if a certain someone is in the opposite chair
Or we both in some other place
Else, it is just perfect, perfect.
“I have reached an age where if a girl smiles at me, I cannot read too many meanings in it.”
“Spending time with and understanding our children will make us understand philosophy faster than by reading any religious texts.”
“Love at first sight is a killing concept. But then dislike at first sight is a different kind of killing.”
“Just because you suspect you are wise; it does not mean your wisdom will be of a helluva lot useful when it comes to interpreting all the meanings in a smile. And, God’s photos and statues depict a smile on the face of the deity. Damn. It is hard enough interpreting the smile of a girl, now God is also smiling at us. Shit, we are screwed. No way we can know what life is all about.”
Think About These Things
One of the very few virtues that Ramana Maharshi extols is humility.
He says in his short book “Who Am I?”:
“To the extent we behave with humility, to that extent there will result good.”
Meanwhile, Nisargadatta Maharaj in his book “I Am That”, keeps saying repeatedly that the most important virtue is “earnestness”.
“When the mind is silent, any amount of speech and action do not vitiate that silence. Mind cannot be silent when there are desires in our being. Find out how to deal with desires.”
Betwixt Wise and Otherwise
Today’s morning comes
Like any other morning
It does not seem that different
Until I start thinking, feeling
Then, too, it does not seem that different
Unless I resist, protest, regret, wish for,
And why do I resists, protest, regret, wish for?
That seems to be the way things are
That seems to be our lot here on earth
Some may come and say things can be otherwise
Between this wise and otherwise I live my life.
“Sometimes, to be wise is to accept defeat. Why flow against the current of life?”
Suicidal Impulse
Today morning
I told a friend
“Come, let us go and commit suicide.”
“No,” the friend protested,
“I want to live and enjoy life.”
Now, I have to gather
The courage and wisdom
To travel alone
The journey cannot be given up
Just because
One’s companions want to rest.
“Duniya paison ke peeche baag rahi hai. Mai fursat ke peeche baag raha hoon. Paise bahut mushkil hai milna, mahnat karni padti hai. Fursat toh yoohee mil jaati hai, bina kuch kiye…kuch muth karo aur fursat pao…samjha karo kyunki ismay ek raaz chupi hai…lekin mai galat bhi ho sakta hoo…zindagi toh jua hai…aur judai bhi….”
“Truth divorced from love is no truth. Love divorced from truth is no love.”
“Don’t be an archaeologist. Don’t dig up the ruins of your past, otherwise you will be ruined.”
The Itch
The itch is
inside my heart.
But I am scratching the paper
with my pen.
“It was daffodils that flashed upon the inward eye of Wordsworth. On my inward eye, it is she who flashes.”
“To love someone truly is to give them the freedom to walk away from you without any guilt or regret should they want to.”
“Someone sang, the whole night your memory troubled me. My problem is far worse. Even the whole day her memory is troubling me.”
“Sitting here alone in this coffee shop, I am lost in thought, wondering what Donne meant.”
“Something shifted in me that day when she gave me that look and said, ‘Sam, I don’t see you nowadays’. Life is full of loose ends and some knots live on inside us.”
“I told her ye death ke baraay may zyada buk buk muth karo. Hum sab har raat aath ghante ke liye mar jaatay hai.”
“There seem to be different kinds of love. Oh, oh…just when thought you can stop going to the library.”
Cutting Out the Social Self
Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.”
But, also at the level at which Sartre is speaking, it is also true that “Heaven is other people.”
But, at this social-self level, one gets stuck in a certain level of living where the dialogue “chal daaroo peeyingay” plays out in its various shades and nuances.
And that daaroo is not the wine that Sufis would have us drink.
And, it is this social self that makes you earn more money than we need, etc.
From this social self, you need to reach inside to find your true self.
The moment you leave your social self behind, then your thinking and emotions also are less in play because most of them are in service of our social self.
“No, Kirshna, I will wage war with my love and not with bows and arrows. Jesus knew something you did not. Besides, it is not my job to wage war against injustice with bows and arrows. Isn’t that your job as the creator of this universe, which you anyway you say you are. Remember what you said about being the creator of the four castes. Then, why you are passing the buck to me. Besides, you yourself say, ‘sambhavami yuge yuge’. Deal with it, Krishna, deal with it. After all, this world is your baby. Don’t instruct me. Leave me alone to me and my love.”
“Zindagi koi jung nahi. Sirf junglee loga waisay sonchthe hai. Mai pyaar ko itna samajh chuka hoon ki pata lag gaya hai ki jung sirf woh mushkilay kada karthi hai jo pahlay nahi the, aur jo mushkilay pahlay the unka hul teek say nahi kar paatha.”
“Ye kya jung jung kahthay phir rahay ho. Mai zindagi ko tukhratha hoo, kyunki mujhe woh zindagi nahi chahiyay jahaan mujhe jung may haasil hona padtha. Jung nahi ladnay say zyada se zyada sirf meri zindagi mujhse cheen jaayegi. Cheen lo jitna chahiya utna ye meri zindagi. Mai todi poocha pehale naa ab pooch raha hoo mujhe paida karo aur zinda rakho.”
“The mind says, ‘Look, look, there are so many problems, stay focused and awake.’ Heart says, ‘Chill, I have the solution to every problem’.”
The Darkness in My Soul
For too long I have seen
The sun in me eclipsed
By something or the other that comes,
Some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming,
Between me and the truth that be
That light, that love, that beauty
Slowly I begin to see far too clearly
This flight outward that gnaws at my soul
That waits for the right consonance, right season
Waits and waits but waits in vain
Thwarted by some destiny that I cannot control
I learn to let go, knowing I can control
Neither my destiny nor that of others.
I thought I had left them all behind
That some emotion, some yearning, some dreaming
Back in the stormy days of my confused youth
Why are they coming back again to me
As if I am still accountable for I know not what.
Who was Arjuna?
Arjuna is anyone in this world who is NOT content to just keep the body alive but also seeks to keep the mind and heart alive.
Such a one finds himself having to fight many a battle on many a Kurukshetra.
Hence also such a one will keep needing the counsel of a Kirshna.
But the Arjuna who is content to keep just the body alive and lets go of the mind and heart, has no battles to fight nor has any need for any Krishna.
Understand this and not any other Gita, be that Gita of Kirshna or Ashtavakra.
👍🏼 just the B and when the pot breaks you are one with the rest of the only consciousness.
Yes.
Even before the pot (B) breaks, what keeps the illusion that you are NOT right now one with the rest of the only consciousness is ONLY the mind and heart.
When the mind and heart are NOT in play, then the illusion of separation also does NOT exist.
Like in deep sleep
Yes.
Perfectly said.
That is why, Ramana Maharshi said, “What happened in sleep is your real nature.” (Talk 304)
In many places in his Talks book, the Maharshi says something to the effect of deep sleep is NOT ignorance but reality itself.
That is why he says, one has to be in the state of wakeful sleep or jagrat sushupti.
#Arjuna #Disillusionment #Enlightenment #faith #Gita #God #Happiness #Life #Love #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfLife #Poem #Poetry #QuotableQuotes #Quotes #Retirmeent #Sadness #Spirituality #Truth #WorkLife -
With a Keyboard Mostly
😂🤣😂 I’m a smart-ass I know…
Daily writing prompt How do you use social media? View all responsesI used to spend too much time on Farcebook just blindly scrolling and hoping not to catch a virus. Those days are behind me now.
I have accounts with Tik Tok and YouTube that I rarely get on. I never really learnt the ends and outs of Tik Tok so it sits idle. As for YouTube, I had been making videos but have removed most of them and now it also sits idle.
WordPress. My social media platform that has become a lifeline to keep in touch with some fantastic friends I have made since joining in 24′. I became a secluded self imposed hermit after the vid and slowly opened up to this wonderful world of engagement. I have found a family of courteous and like minded souls that can handle my rants and sometimes enjoy my silliness and off the wall thoughts.
It’s a welcome part of my life and my friends here encourage me to continue on my journey that started with not knowing what to say to publishing two books to my new endeavor of making music with the help of AI.
Does email count as social media? I use it to contact lost friends from here once in a while, to reach out and see if they are doing okay but that is rare too as I don’t want to pressure them into answering me, they left for a reason.
I have a cuz that follows me on here and that is our only contact as we live many miles apart and life gets in our way but I love hearing from him, ‘hey cuz, ROCK ON!’
So that’s about it for this prompt today, no pics or images, no major rants, just me and my roasted black bean syrup.
https://youtu.be/JKlSVNxLB-A?si=WMiVyk4vAo9oSC6h
A2026 “420” ©peaceful-threads.com
#AI #caffeine #Challenges #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1914 #family #friends #journey #life #love #socialMedia #writing -
With a Keyboard Mostly
😂🤣😂 I’m a smart-ass I know…
Daily writing prompt How do you use social media? View all responsesI used to spend too much time on Farcebook just blindly scrolling and hoping not to catch a virus. Those days are behind me now.
I have accounts with Tik Tok and YouTube that I rarely get on. I never really learnt the ends and outs of Tik Tok so it sits idle. As for YouTube, I had been making videos but have removed most of them and now it also sits idle.
WordPress. My social media platform that has become a lifeline to keep in touch with some fantastic friends I have made since joining in 24′. I became a secluded self imposed hermit after the vid and slowly opened up to this wonderful world of engagement. I have found a family of courteous and like minded souls that can handle my rants and sometimes enjoy my silliness and off the wall thoughts.
It’s a welcome part of my life and my friends here encourage me to continue on my journey that started with not knowing what to say to publishing two books to my new endeavor of making music with the help of AI.
Does email count as social media? I use it to contact lost friends from here once in a while, to reach out and see if they are doing okay but that is rare too as I don’t want to pressure them into answering me, they left for a reason.
I have a cuz that follows me on here and that is our only contact as we live many miles apart and life gets in our way but I love hearing from him, ‘hey cuz, ROCK ON!’
So that’s about it for this prompt today, no pics or images, no major rants, just me and my roasted black bean syrup.
https://youtu.be/JKlSVNxLB-A?si=WMiVyk4vAo9oSC6h
A2026 “420” ©peaceful-threads.com
#AI #caffeine #Challenges #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1914 #family #friends #journey #life #love #socialMedia #writing -
With a Keyboard Mostly
😂🤣😂 I’m a smart-ass I know…
Daily writing prompt How do you use social media? View all responsesI used to spend too much time on Farcebook just blindly scrolling and hoping not to catch a virus. Those days are behind me now.
I have accounts with Tik Tok and YouTube that I rarely get on. I never really learnt the ends and outs of Tik Tok so it sits idle. As for YouTube, I had been making videos but have removed most of them and now it also sits idle.
WordPress. My social media platform that has become a lifeline to keep in touch with some fantastic friends I have made since joining in 24′. I became a secluded self imposed hermit after the vid and slowly opened up to this wonderful world of engagement. I have found a family of courteous and like minded souls that can handle my rants and sometimes enjoy my silliness and off the wall thoughts.
It’s a welcome part of my life and my friends here encourage me to continue on my journey that started with not knowing what to say to publishing two books to my new endeavor of making music with the help of AI.
Does email count as social media? I use it to contact lost friends from here once in a while, to reach out and see if they are doing okay but that is rare too as I don’t want to pressure them into answering me, they left for a reason.
I have a cuz that follows me on here and that is our only contact as we live many miles apart and life gets in our way but I love hearing from him, ‘hey cuz, ROCK ON!’
So that’s about it for this prompt today, no pics or images, no major rants, just me and my roasted black bean syrup.
https://youtu.be/JKlSVNxLB-A?si=WMiVyk4vAo9oSC6h
A2026 “420” ©peaceful-threads.com
#AI #caffeine #Challenges #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1914 #family #friends #journey #life #love #socialMedia #writing -
With a Keyboard Mostly
😂🤣😂 I’m a smart-ass I know…
Daily writing prompt How do you use social media? View all responsesI used to spend too much time on Farcebook just blindly scrolling and hoping not to catch a virus. Those days are behind me now.
I have accounts with Tik Tok and YouTube that I rarely get on. I never really learnt the ends and outs of Tik Tok so it sits idle. As for YouTube, I had been making videos but have removed most of them and now it also sits idle.
WordPress. My social media platform that has become a lifeline to keep in touch with some fantastic friends I have made since joining in 24′. I became a secluded self imposed hermit after the vid and slowly opened up to this wonderful world of engagement. I have found a family of courteous and like minded souls that can handle my rants and sometimes enjoy my silliness and off the wall thoughts.
It’s a welcome part of my life and my friends here encourage me to continue on my journey that started with not knowing what to say to publishing two books to my new endeavor of making music with the help of AI.
Does email count as social media? I use it to contact lost friends from here once in a while, to reach out and see if they are doing okay but that is rare too as I don’t want to pressure them into answering me, they left for a reason.
I have a cuz that follows me on here and that is our only contact as we live many miles apart and life gets in our way but I love hearing from him, ‘hey cuz, ROCK ON!’
So that’s about it for this prompt today, no pics or images, no major rants, just me and my roasted black bean syrup.
https://youtu.be/JKlSVNxLB-A?si=WMiVyk4vAo9oSC6h
A2026 “420” ©peaceful-threads.com
#AI #caffeine #Challenges #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1914 #family #friends #journey #life #love #socialMedia #writing -
CW: intro post, long
IPA: /ɾau/ ([ɾˈau̯])
Mid-20s, blind, brown, broke-ass anarchist in the South Pacific.
Making various strange sounds with computers and searching for work to do with either strange sounds or computers.
We're a small AuDHD system of weird avians and synths, with a few other creature forms just for fun. We'll do a separate post to introduce some specific birds, but this is a recent development from just being a therian, so we're still figuring some of that out. If you end up following us, you'll probably get to watch lol
We're back after a break and we've already messed up our account format, we do plan to split some topics out here soon but for now it's a mix. Music, art, gaming, writing, programming, linguistics, math, politics, activism, shitposts, porn, gay animal noises. Many of the gay animal noises. In multiple languages.
We use content notes liberally and accept requests to do so. We try to boost posts which respect the content rules of our instance and the warning preferences of our followers, apologies if we get it wrong. That apology just sort of generally applies, we're gonna get stuff wrong sometimes, we'll try to do better but mistakes will surely be made. Please try to be kind.
Interaction with our posts is very welcome, no matter your age. We're here to hang out. On the lewd side, so long as you're over 18 and just flirting for fun, that's cool. So's teasing if we have a little rapport.
We only boost images with descriptions, and usually only those with some detail. This is not punitive, it's just not going on our timeline if we're not sure of what it is.
This account is actively unfriendly toward generative AI and its uncritical advocates. Slop will be blocked on sight. This doesn't apply to constructs and other such synthetic creatures, of course ^v^
ok sorry i seriously suck at this i have to stop now lmao
~ crow#intro #introPost #introduction #introductions #introductionPost
-
CW: intro post, long
IPA: /ɾau/ ([ɾˈau̯])
Mid-20s, blind, brown, broke-ass anarchist in the South Pacific.
Making various strange sounds with computers and searching for work to do with either strange sounds or computers.
We're a small AuDHD system of weird avians and synths, with a few other creature forms just for fun. We'll do a separate post to introduce some specific birds, but this is a recent development from just being a therian, so we're still figuring some of that out. If you end up following us, you'll probably get to watch lol
We're back after a break and we've already messed up our account format, we do plan to split some topics out here soon but for now it's a mix. Music, art, gaming, writing, programming, linguistics, math, politics, activism, shitposts, porn, gay animal noises. Many of the gay animal noises. In multiple languages.
We use content notes liberally and accept requests to do so. We try to boost posts which respect the content rules of our instance and the warning preferences of our followers, apologies if we get it wrong. That apology just sort of generally applies, we're gonna get stuff wrong sometimes, we'll try to do better but mistakes will surely be made. Please try to be kind.
Interaction with our posts is very welcome, no matter your age. We're here to hang out. On the lewd side, so long as you're over 18 and just flirting for fun, that's cool. So's teasing if we have a little rapport.
We only boost images with descriptions, and usually only those with some detail. This is not punitive, it's just not going on our timeline if we're not sure of what it is.
This account is actively unfriendly toward generative AI and its uncritical advocates. Slop will be blocked on sight. This doesn't apply to constructs and other such synthetic creatures, of course ^v^
ok sorry i seriously suck at this i have to stop now lmao
~ crow#intro #introPost #introduction #introductions #introductionPost
-
CW: intro post, long
IPA: /ɾau/ ([ɾˈau̯])
Mid-20s, blind, brown, broke-ass anarchist in the South Pacific.
Making various strange sounds with computers and searching for work to do with either strange sounds or computers.
We're a small AuDHD system of weird avians and synths, with a few other creature forms just for fun. We'll do a separate post to introduce some specific birds, but this is a recent development from just being a therian, so we're still figuring some of that out. If you end up following us, you'll probably get to watch lol
We're back after a break and we've already messed up our account format, we do plan to split some topics out here soon but for now it's a mix. Music, art, gaming, writing, programming, linguistics, math, politics, activism, shitposts, porn, gay animal noises. Many of the gay animal noises. In multiple languages.
We use content notes liberally and accept requests to do so. We try to boost posts which respect the content rules of our instance and the warning preferences of our followers, apologies if we get it wrong. That apology just sort of generally applies, we're gonna get stuff wrong sometimes, we'll try to do better but mistakes will surely be made. Please try to be kind.
Interaction with our posts is very welcome, no matter your age. We're here to hang out. On the lewd side, so long as you're over 18 and just flirting for fun, that's cool. So's teasing if we have a little rapport.
We only boost images with descriptions, and usually only those with some detail. This is not punitive, it's just not going on our timeline if we're not sure of what it is.
This account is actively unfriendly toward generative AI and its uncritical advocates. Slop will be blocked on sight. This doesn't apply to constructs and other such synthetic creatures, of course ^v^
ok sorry i seriously suck at this i have to stop now lmao
~ crow#intro #introPost #introduction #introductions #introductionPost
-
CW: intro post, long
IPA: /ɾau/ ([ɾˈau̯])
Mid-20s, blind, brown, broke-ass anarchist in the South Pacific.
Making various strange sounds with computers and searching for work to do with either strange sounds or computers.
We're a small AuDHD system of weird avians and synths, with a few other creature forms just for fun. We'll do a separate post to introduce some specific birds, but this is a recent development from just being a therian, so we're still figuring some of that out. If you end up following us, you'll probably get to watch lol
We're back after a break and we've already messed up our account format, we do plan to split some topics out here soon but for now it's a mix. Music, art, gaming, writing, programming, linguistics, math, politics, activism, shitposts, porn, gay animal noises. Many of the gay animal noises. In multiple languages.
We use content notes liberally and accept requests to do so. We try to boost posts which respect the content rules of our instance and the warning preferences of our followers, apologies if we get it wrong. That apology just sort of generally applies, we're gonna get stuff wrong sometimes, we'll try to do better but mistakes will surely be made. Please try to be kind.
Interaction with our posts is very welcome, no matter your age. We're here to hang out. On the lewd side, so long as you're over 18 and just flirting for fun, that's cool. So's teasing if we have a little rapport.
We only boost images with descriptions, and usually only those with some detail. This is not punitive, it's just not going on our timeline if we're not sure of what it is.
This account is actively unfriendly toward generative AI and its uncritical advocates. Slop will be blocked on sight. This doesn't apply to constructs and other such synthetic creatures, of course ^v^
ok sorry i seriously suck at this i have to stop now lmao
~ crow#intro #introPost #introduction #introductions #introductionPost
-
CW: intro post, long
IPA: /ɾau/ ([ɾˈau̯])
Mid-20s, blind, brown, broke-ass anarchist in the South Pacific.
Making various strange sounds with computers and searching for work to do with either strange sounds or computers.
We're a small AuDHD system of weird avians and synths, with a few other creature forms just for fun. We'll do a separate post to introduce some specific birds, but this is a recent development from just being a therian, so we're still figuring some of that out. If you end up following us, you'll probably get to watch lol
We're back after a break and we've already messed up our account format, we do plan to split some topics out here soon but for now it's a mix. Music, art, gaming, writing, programming, linguistics, math, politics, activism, shitposts, porn, gay animal noises. Many of the gay animal noises. In multiple languages.
We use content notes liberally and accept requests to do so. We try to boost posts which respect the content rules of our instance and the warning preferences of our followers, apologies if we get it wrong. That apology just sort of generally applies, we're gonna get stuff wrong sometimes, we'll try to do better but mistakes will surely be made. Please try to be kind.
Interaction with our posts is very welcome, no matter your age. We're here to hang out. On the lewd side, so long as you're over 18 and just flirting for fun, that's cool. So's teasing if we have a little rapport.
We only boost images with descriptions, and usually only those with some detail. This is not punitive, it's just not going on our timeline if we're not sure of what it is.
This account is actively unfriendly toward generative AI and its uncritical advocates. Slop will be blocked on sight. This doesn't apply to constructs and other such synthetic creatures, of course ^v^
ok sorry i seriously suck at this i have to stop now lmao
~ crow#intro #introPost #introduction #introductions #introductionPost
-
Guess what!
🎙️✨ AUDIO SIGNALS IS BACK ✨🎙️
After a few months of hiatus, I couldn't stay away.
My passion for storytellers and storytelling cannot be tamed—and I'm thrilled to return with a conversation that reminds me why this podcast matters.
Meet Bradley W. Buchanan —retired English professor, two-time blood cancer survivor, and debut novelist who just released Spy's Mate, a gripping chess thriller set in Cold War Soviet Union.Why This Episode Matters:
Brad is what's medically called a "chimera"—his DNA was literally altered by a stem cell transplant. He was blind for a year and a half. He nearly died multiple times. Through it all, he had chess dreams where the pieces hunted him across the board.His novel isn't just a spy thriller. It's a deeply personal story about Yasha, an Armenian chess prodigy who promises his dying mother he'll become world chess champion—a promise that drives him through a world where the KGB manipulates tournaments and chess prowess equals communist superiority.
Brad wrote this after his own mother died. He cried writing the final pages, giving his protagonist the closure he couldn't have in real life.
What We Explored: ♟️ How the KGB used psychological warfare in chess tournaments ♟️ Writing a novel that works as both myth and historical thriller ♟️ The personal cost of storytelling and processing grief through fiction ♟️ Why he wrote this like a screenplay (calling Netflix!) ♟️ Surviving cancer and finding new purpose as a full-time writer ♟️ The hero's journey through 64 squares
This is storytelling at its most human—where personal trauma transforms into universal narrative, where a game becomes life and death, where a son's promise to his mother echoes through pages of Cold War intrigue.
Links in the comments 🤫
We are all made of stories. Some of us write them. Some of us tell them. All of us need them.
🎧 Watch/Listen: https://youtu.be/ib36bVcYbmw
🎙️ If you like to go for the Audio Podcast here is Audio Signals Podcast: https://www.audiosignalspodcast.com/
🌐 Learn more about my work: https://marcociappelli.comWelcome back to Audio Signals. 🎙️
#Storytelling #AudioSignals #Podcast #Chess #SpysMate #ColdWar #Author #DebutNovel #WritingCommunity #BookRecommendation #BradleyBuchanan #HistoricalFiction #SpyThriller #CancerSurvivor #MarcoCiappelli #ITSPmagazine #books #writers #readers #writing #reading
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Autumn Tears – Crown of the Clairvoyant Review
One of the interesting things about writing for a heavy metal blog is the quantity—and quality—of non-metal recommendations…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Music #2025 #3.0 #Ataraxia #AutumnTears #BlindGuardianTwilightOrchestra #CrownoftheClairvoyant #Darkwave #Entertainment #InternationalMetal #Neoclassical #Nightwish #review #reviews #Sep25 #TheCircleMusic
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/174176/ -
Autumn Tears – Crown of the Clairvoyant Review
One of the interesting things about writing for a heavy metal blog is the quantity—and quality—of non-metal recommendations…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Music #2025 #3.0 #Ataraxia #AutumnTears #BlindGuardianTwilightOrchestra #CrownoftheClairvoyant #Darkwave #Entertainment #InternationalMetal #Neoclassical #Nightwish #review #reviews #Sep25 #TheCircleMusic
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/174176/ -
I burn down your cities, how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say, 'How blessed are we?'
You all must be crazy to put your faith in Me
That's why I love mankindA human writing a song from the viewpoint of an omnipotent deity is fairly extreme.
#JukeboxFridayNight #Extremes #MusicRandy Newman - God's Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwC1HDaw6s8&list=LLUwhfey9MublWMilUTVvxBQ&index=10 -
#OnThisDay Birth Anniversary of Louis Braille (1809) - French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the #Blind or visually impaired. Today is observed as World #BrailleDay.
Birth Anniversary of Floyd Patterson (1935) - One of the greatest #Boxers. He was the youngest boxer in history to win the #Heavyweight championship.
#Sputnik 1, first artificial Earth satellite, falls to Earth from orbit (1958).
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I know that I hung on that windswept tree, with all the worlds in its branches. Nine days and nine nights I wore the deadman’s collar. Nine days and nine nights I bled from a spear-wound in my side.
A wound I put there. An offering of self to self.
The hubris.
I swung, lashed by storm and chafed by rope, bound and blinded. Nine days. Nine nights.
No one came looking for me. No one came to help me. I cried out from hunger, from thirst, before the end.
There was no answer.
Then at last I came unto the edge of the Abyss that is Death, and there at the precipice of an eternal night so dark I felt only my own soul reflected back into me and nearly went mad (again) with the effort of holding my own gaze at last I saw-
THE RUNES
and they burned so bright before my eyes I raised my hands to shield them, to seize them, and I took them up screaming-
and I awoke, soaked through and bloody, tangled in the branches of Yggdrasil, the runes burnt into my skin and my memory,
the noose still hanging limply around my neck.
(My spin on Odin's discovery of the runes, did my best to do the original justice)
#MythologyMonday #trees #yggdrasil #WorldTree #Odin #runes #NorseMythology #mythology #writing #original
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CW: Addendum on my accessibility advice, refining it based on feedback/questions
After answering many questions on #accessibility and #screenreaders used by #blind, #LowVision, #PartiallySighted, #VisuallyImpaired people, I think it would be good to summarise them in their refined forms in one spot for easy reference.
1. Writing well as a general advice stands, however, I wrote my post in English and naturally included some points specific to English. Screen readers are programmed to work best with languages according to their spelling conventions regarding capitalisation, punctuation, and symbol usage; covering anything from casual to academic writing styles. Substituting letters with symbols/numbers falls outside of such conventions, meaning words will not read correctly.
2. #AltText, and the time it takes to write them, is very much appreciated, regardless of length or level of detail. However, the more detail you can put in the more we can appreciate the image and your reasons for sharing it.
3. Multi-word hashtags in CamelCase, yes: #ThisIsWhatAnAccessibleHashtagLooksLike. It does not matter where you place them; either in the post's text or at the end. The best analogy for screen reader users being able to deal with hashtags in text is that we've become used to them in the same way we're used to people saying "uh", "ummm", or other extraneous vocalisations when talking.
Bonus: By all means, use emojis for that extra bit of expression, but in moderation.
Final thoughts: Screen readers can be customised by the user to make it work best for them, including minimising any annoyances. The above points will help loads regarding shared content. Assume that a screen reader user has optimised their settings to deal with the rest.
Once again, thanks for reading! 😘
#FediTips #Mastodon #ScreenReaderUsers #inclusivity #community -
What’s Left To Do?
Are you finally wrapping up that book and tying up all the loose ends? I know for me, right now, it’s checking pages to make sure they match the subject. Double-checking paragraphs, spelling, punctuation and page count. While subjugating all of these projects simultaneously here is a last-minute list for finishing the book…Good luck with that!
Before you hit publish or send your manuscript off to print, take one more slow read-through. Not a rushed skim, but an honest final pass. This is usually where small mistakes start flailing their arms for attention. A missing quotation mark, a repeated sentence, a character name spelled two different ways. Don’t forget— it’s the tiny details that matter more than we think.
Make sure chapter titles are consistent, fonts match throughout the manuscript, and spacing looks clean and professional. Readers may not notice good formatting, but they absolutely notice bad formatting. If your book includes page numbers, a table of contents, references, or images, now is the time to verify every single one.
Don’t forget the cover and back-cover description either. Sometimes we spend months or years writing the story and only a few hours creating the sales pitch. That short summary on the back of the book, or blurb, as it is often called–is the first impression readers get, so make it count. Keep it clear, engaging, and spoiler-free.
Another important part of this process is reading portions aloud. It may sound a little crazy, but hearing the words helps catch awkward phrasing and overly long sentences. Your ears often notice what your eyes skip over. That always seems to amaze me—Don’t ask!
If possible, ask someone else, who enjoys reading, to give the manuscript one final look over. A fresh pair of eyes can uncover mistakes you’ve become blind to after staring at the same pages for so long. Even one trusted reader can make a huge difference.
And finally, exhale. Finishing a book is an accomplishment many people dream about but never complete. Whether this is your first project or your tenth, reaching the final stage deserves recognition. The editing, revising, second-guessing, coffee-fueled nights, and endless corrections are all part of the process.
At some point, you’ll just have to let the book go. It will never feel one hundred percent perfect, and that’s okay. Done is sometimes better than endless delays. Celebrate the finish line, learn from the experience, and then start thinking about the next story waiting to be written.
Now that it’s time to party…Hit those keys more hardy! Thank you for your continued readership and support. Have a blessed new week!
© Rhema International 2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Rhema Internation
#CreativeWriting #TipsForWriters #WritingFormulas #WritingInspirations #academicWriting #Books #ChristianAuthors #Editing #education #fiction #Hamlet #publishing #WhatSLeftToDo #Writer #WriterSTips #writers #Writing #WritingTips -
Feh. Starting another week or two of being blind in one eye. Every now and then one of 'em goes foom.
Fortunately it's almost never both at once. Only one time so far!
But I often get more writing done like this, so there's that at least.
Hey there's no eye-patch emoji. 😮
-
Craft Notes For Writers
Craft notes for people who write are like quiet conversations between one writer and another—small, focused observations about how writing actually works. Unlike big, abstract rules (“show, don’t tell”), craft notes zoom in on specific choices: how a sentence moves, why a detail matters, or what makes dialogue feel real. They’re practical, often brief, and rooted in experience rather than theory.
One of the most useful aspects of craft notes is their attention to detail. A writer might point out how changing a single verb can sharpen an image, or how rearranging a sentence can shift its emphasis. These insights remind us that writing isn’t just about ideas—it’s about execution. The difference between a flat paragraph and a vivid one often comes down to rhythm, word choice, and structure.
Craft notes also help writers become better readers. When you learn to notice how a scene is built or how tension is maintained, you start to see writing as a series of deliberate decisions. This awareness can be empowering. Instead of feeling stuck or blocked, you can diagnose problems more clearly: maybe the pacing is off, the point of view is inconsistent, or the stakes aren’t clear.
Another key feature of craft notes is their flexibility. They don’t demand strict adherence; instead, they offer possibilities. A note about cutting unnecessary adverbs isn’t a rule to follow blindly—it’s an invitation to question whether each word earns its place. This mindset encourages experimentation and growth rather than perfection.
Importantly, craft notes often reflect the individuality of the writer sharing them. What works for one person may not work for another, and that’s okay. The goal isn’t to imitate but to adapt—to take what resonates and leave what doesn’t.
For people who write, craft notes are both tools and companions. They provide guidance without rigidity, helping writers refine their voice while staying open to discovery. Over time, these small lessons accumulate, shaping not just better writing, but a deeper understanding of the craft itself.
Thank you so much for your support and your continued readership. Have a blessed new week!
© Rhema International 2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Rhema International
#WritingFormulas #WritingInspirations #Books #ChristianAuthors #CraftNotesForWriters #Editing #fiction #publishing #reativeWriting #TipsForWriters #Writer #WriterSTips #writers #Writing #WritingTips -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Bestial Human Weasel
Hand drawn Ink art by William McAusland, writing by Colin ChapmanBloodthirsty and insatiable, bestial human weasels and stoats are swift carnivores with a reputation for viciousness out of all proportion to their size. They act with blinding speed (+2 initiative), and can divide their bite and two rear-claw attacks up to make three separate strike attempts on three separate foes (SV +10/ DMG 1d8+1 each) or combine all into a single flurry against one victim (SV +20/ DMG 3d8+4).
Stoat- and weasel-men are stealthy hunters (add 1d3+2 in the stealth skill), and their fur turns white in winter, a time when they can also endure twice the cold a human can, even without winter clothing.Watch a video intro of this new book at RPG Overviews on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmR1zStcU38
#weasel #weaselman #predator #carnivore #beast #bestial #manimal #RPG #ttrpg #mammal #bestialhuman #characters #noaiart #mutantepoch #apocalyptic #expansionrules #postapocalyptic #themutantepoch #outlandsystem