41–50 of 239 posts
Zen saying: "Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water" . Some more from Ram Dass: “Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code.” "If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, "Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!" it catches you back int…
"To understand is to forgive." -Blaise Pascal Now, go chop wood and carry water.
I would never have attributed that quote to Pascal as he mostly is depicted as quite judgmental. Or perhaps he thought he only needed to forgive himself? Well, after enlightenment you clearly know that you need to chop wood and carry water on your own volition. Ok, technically very likely not for yourself, but still. "You do it for yourself" is the same lie we tell children when they need to go to school after all.
This article is what yall want on the front page? The author submitted and probably vote-manipulated to get it there. It's a content-less article, it has nothing to do with hacker values or software or entrepreneurship. Please vote responsibly, everyone!
It's a lot more entertaining than another presentation of the javascript framework in fashion this hour...
“Minimalist” CSS frameworks eschewing JS though, whew.
"But a question nags at you: why can’t the world already know what you know?" The state in which such a question arises is contradictory to the state of enlightenment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would never have attributed that quote to Pascal as he mostly is depicted as quite judgmental. Or perhaps he thought he only needed to forgive himself? Well, after enlightenment you clearly know that you need to chop wood and carry water on your own volition. Ok, technically very likely not for yourself, but still. "You do it for yourself" is the same lie we tell children when they need to go to school after all.
Similarly, in Ted Chiang's story of a rivalry between two super-intelligences, the way that one ultimately prevails is by challenging the other to do just this. The idea is that the path to understanding anything is necessarily through developing the ability to forgive, (which is the seed and the foundation for many religions) is at the same time ridiculously difficult, yet within the grasp of literally every person…
Which leads to another interesting question:
Which of these alternatives makes you to be the owner of your own destiny in this universe?
But seariously: many forget that the goal of spiritual practices is the ability to DO (instead of react)
There's the spiritual sense, which might be described as fully understanding and accepting the impermanence of the world and the "artificiality" of meaning.
Separately, there's "getting" something in a knowledge area. E.g. you finally understood how pointers work in C.
The author seems to start with the first... but then immediately goes wrong. He assumes if you're enlightened then you want to spread it -- but this is the exact opposite of enlightenment, so the author has it 100% backwards.
Then he eventually veers into "But what do you know about education and foreign policy, ecology and immigration, tax reform and monetary policy?" Which is the second sense of enlightenment, but has nothing to do with the first.
Spiritual enlightment has nothing to do with applied knowledge in any of those.
This is... really just a bad article. The author doesn't seem to understand what enlightenment is at all, and is trying to satirize/criticize it because of that. It's kind of sad, in a way.
You're Enlightened implies an "I am Enlightened". Now, you're somebody special. This very realization takes you out of Enlightenment. Impossible to define Enlightenment, we can only point to what it is not.
The article does describe someone who is either not enlightened or has been taken out of enlightenment. Maybe they experienced it, maybe they didn't, but now they are concerned with what to do with their enlightenment. It's gone, if it ever was there.
But Enlightenment does not imply Clarity, which may come from more contemplation and perhaps some guidance.
Some people never experienced Bliss.
Some people experience Bliss all the time.
Some people can experience Bliss whenever they like, or need to.
Bliss is not Enlightenment.
So just because someone tasted ice-cream, doesn't mean they should eat it all the time, or that tasting good is all ice is good for.
This article is what yall want on the front page? The author submitted and probably vote-manipulated to get it there. It's a content-less article, it has nothing to do with hacker values or software or entrepreneurship. Please vote responsibly, everyone!