I write and publish here thoughts that are half-baked, unrefined, and spontaneous. Hence thoughts out of season. For more careful and polished writing, refer...
There is a level of honesty that I can achieve in writing that I cannot elsewhere. I can write about my deepest feelings and my most hidden insecurities in a way that those who know me personally would be surprised by. I think it is mainly for three reasons: I am not a famous writer. What I write is read by no more than 20 people. This allows me to be more honest because, for all intents and…
The way I write, and perhaps think, is something like this: I get an idea, a phrase, a rough shape of something that I think is decently profound and then, I try to make my way to that thought. As an experience, it is almost like someone showing me a glimpse of a treasure somewhere - the path to which I do not clearly know. Everything I do afterwards is towards finding my way to that treasure; so…
Integration Status 1 : Minimal Consider a proposition P. You can substitute any propositions of your liking for it. Let me initiate by providing a proposition of my own: P1: I exist What are the positions we can take in relation to P, that fully exhausts the space of possibilities? The most obvious is P itself; I exist . The second most obvious is the former's negation; Not P. I do not exist . The…
Yesterday, I was talking with some friends. It was late in the night; with weariness mixed in, we became sentimental and started speaking about each other. It became quite clear to me that, put on the spot, I was limited in how I could describe the people around me. Only after a bit of thinking, I could articulate in myself some description of them that didn't seem one-dimensional. This…
I was talking with a friend of mine just now. He had come back from his trip to Ladakh, a beautiful land in Northern India that touches into Tibet. I have never been to Ladakh but if pictures are able to capture a sliver of the majesty that land possesses, I am remiss that I have never been able to see it. I told him that I was jealous that he got to visit and live in such a place for a…
Throughout my life, I have been meditating on and off. I have meditated long enough to feel like I have a general shape of what meditation, as is taught in the buddhist tradition, is getting at. Of course, I am still very much a beginner and have no profound realization. I am starting anew my meditation practice and I am starting with the Samatha practice, or calm-abiding meditation, or zhi gne in…
I am reading and studying Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamikakarika (Root Stanzas of Middle Way ) using Jay Garfield's book The Fundamental Wisdom of Middle Way . Growing up as a Tibetan, reverence for Nagarjuna and the profound wisdom of Middle way he propounded comes naturally. But reading and engaging with his works is done almost never. I am not a practicing buddhist anymore but I still value a good…
I skipped the writing for yesterday and the day before. I realize that's not a good look. After all, I talked up a storm in the few notes gone by; almost as if it was just me in the world who had discovered how crucial writing is. Nonetheless, the only thing worse than breaking a habit (I have painfully learnt) is stopping it wholesale. So here I write and continue again. The day before yesterday,…
Learning in public is advised by many; more so in this AI age where built things are cheap(er) but true understanding is hard(er) to come by. Consider the excellent advice in Vlad's blogpost on how to break into Frontier labs and one of them is to outwardly signal that you truly understand the things that you need to. To make sure of that is to learn publicly, show your trials and tribulations…
I am reminded that I write these to summarize some form of daily learnings. I consume a whole heap of information and experientially, I feel like I have learnt a lot. But I realize in these active session of really sitting down and asking what I learnt today, that it's not an incredibly obvious question. (Maybe I am weighting what is a learning to be super high and that is something I have to…