Meditation and science are two of the things I value most. It’s hard to know when too much “this can be extremely bad” publicity becomes counter-productive. Both can be extremely good.
It’s seems we’re close to the point where every reasonably clueful lay person understands science is in trouble. Then tweeting more of that will be counter-productive.
We’re still a long way from every reasonably clueful lay person understanding that meditation can kill you.
I'm never quite cynical *enough*. The only part of the report I didn't anticipate was their putting machine learning in there. In retrospect: of course they did, how could they have passed up that opportunity?
The UFO report certainly tried to be as vague as possible, in order to allow people to continue believing what they like.
My reading was “Yeah, we haven’t got anything, but if you give us LOTS more money, it’s imaginable that we’ll find something.”
🎙࿇ @joffe_p on tantric Buddhist sex (“karmamudra”). He and his teacher Dr Nida Chenagtsang have been the first to teach this openly, after centuries of Tibetans making a big fuss about how secret it is, for dumb political reasons. Hooray!
@joffe_p ࿇ Tantric sex is one approach to tantric energy practice (“tsa lung”). For dumb political reasons, the Tibetan mainstream narrowed tsa lung to a single system, the Six Yogas, rigidly applied. The Six Yogas are good mostly only for teenage boys.
@joffe_p ࿇ A much broader range of energy practices survived on the margins of Tibet, where the oppressive monastic hegemony of Lhasa barely reached.
Historical research within Tibetan texts turns up many more, and there are similar practices in Shaivism, Taoism, and elsewhere.
.@vgr’s essay ends with what I’ve called “wizardry.” When you understand the inseparability of pattern and nebulosity, you can weave the flow of energy around and beneath islands of interpretability. Your effective action will appear incomprehensible. breakingsmart.substack.com/p/good-people-…
@vgr Morality suffices to navigate well-defined ethical domains. It fails, and may be worse than useless, when facing “wicked problems”—nebulous ones, in my terminology.
“Being a good person” is the essence of the culture war. Y’all should stop that. It’s profoundly destructive.
@vgr Strong analogy: both ethics and technical rationality fail in the face of nebulosity.