Join 📚 Christian Champ's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Christian's read, .
In sum: you can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success is conventionally defined. If this sounds unbearably paradoxical, maybe you should quit reading here, because this won’t be the last time we find paradox in Buddhist practice or Buddhist teachings. Then again, there’s paradoxical stuff in modern physics (an electron is both a particle and a wave), and modern physics works fine. So you might as well keep reading.
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
My own success has been in observing objects in daily use which, it was always assumed, could not be improved. By lateral thinking the 'Edisonian approach'- it is possible to arrive, empirically, at an advance. Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners. After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology.
My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape (like some grotesque Blue Peter spaceship), long before I understood how it worked. After that initial 'Eureka!' it was a long haul to the Dual Cyclone-so called because an outer cyclone rotating at 200 m.p.h. removes large debris and most of the dust, while an inner cyclone rotating at 924 m.p.h. creates huge gravitational force and drives the finest dust, even particles of cigarette smoke, out of the air.
Against the Odds
James Dyson
“Burning Man really has given me this incredible social framework — it has showed me by example how people should interact in a perfect world. I’m now selective about who I hang out with — only with people who are creative and fun. When I was in high school and college, I went to parties, and no one was doing anything. People were just all bored, drinking and looking for something to do. Burning Man is full of people who need to be doing something all the time, obsessive-compulsive creative people with this hyperactivity.” And that, saith Megavolt, makes for a party worth attending.
This Is Burning Man
Brian Doherty
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