Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .
Jhanas, breathwork, psychedelics, MDMA, etc are all tools to for inducing altered states, from which new insights can arise. None of the actual methods matter, so much as putting your brain into what I think of as “developer mode,” from which you can write new rules that govern your thoughts and behavior, then close things up and operate anew. (Some people call this [“neural annealing.”](https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/))
How to Do the Jhanas
Nadia Asparouhova
Lewis Hyde has made extensive studies of gift economies. He finds that "[[objects will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.::highlight]]" A gift relationship with nature is a "formal give-and-take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase. We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation. Gift exchange is the commerce of choice, for it is commerce that harmonizes with, or participates in, the process of [nature's] increase."
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
So when an artist creates a work that comes together by an unseen hand, and the process is later analyzed, what we get is more storytelling. This is art history. Art reality is forever unknown.
The Creative Act
Rick Rubin
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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