adric | Capturing a moment?

It's been an eventful time of late for me and my family. Just in the last few weeks I have done most of these things: took a vacation, taught a week long class, quit a good job at a mixed-up place, popped off to Las Vegas for a couple of days, started a new job, and spent a couple days learning at conferences. There's another conference and a class to take with that late this month, just before the holidays.

I also just finished listening to a pretty interesting book on Western Buddhism and am trying to process some of the ideas from it and the connections they fired in my brain. There's some suspiciously powerful alignment between the author's explanation of various points of Buddhist teachings about the nature of the mind and feelings and some of the formative ideas I more or less started with. Of course, those came from and have been shaped further by science fiction as much as by my own meager experiments.

If the Bene Gesserit definition of humanity from Chapter One of Dune is taken literally then the training that Paul received (prana bindu?) that gave him control over his body and mind equipped him with practical, measureable skills and abilities to pass the test. That's (brilliant) science fiction, but the meditation book lays out some straight on science research as well as some personal accounts of the author on achieving small victories through meditation. Which he and other authors he cites admit they are not good at and greatly struggle with ... This is compelling.

Maya, the Buddhist principle I had previously understood as "the world is an illusion" and taken as a spiritual , mythological statement about the true nature of reality is more subtle and has many overlaps with not just the neurological research the author cites, but things I know pretty well about the ~~tricks~~ optimisations done by eyes and optic nerves. It is not that the world doesn't exist, but that what you (I) see isn't the real world but a distorted picture. That, once slotted into proper position finally is an exact match to the truth of the best advice anyone ever gave me:

... that my perceptions about some situations were not just a little off to one side or the other by off by 180° (τ / 2)

She also tried to teach me to meditate and how to use the practice to work directly on specific problems through visualisation. That was a long time ago and made a tremendous difference in my life. I should have long ago looked her up and thanked her, and now I'm not sure if she's on the Earth.

And Peter Watts on whose novels I can cite the idea that sentience might just not be the greatest development of a species ... if it even exists.

So, lots of little flashes and bangs in my neural network as Wright's arguments collide with ideas from Herbert, Heinlein, Peter Watts, weird hacker lore (The Ghost Not), and of course my own experiences ( foremost maybe is a year of almost constant political struggle at $job.prev() ) ... and I'm still trying to find a solution to the problem proposed but not solved in the first story in Stephenson's new novel Fall as I think we are going to need it in this temporal locality in a very short time indeed.

Anyway, how is anyone else doing? Read anything lately that broke your head wide open?