Steven > Recent Status Updates

Really looking forward to the part of this book where the author gives advice about organizing. I've tried to organize a leftist reading group like 3 times in the past 7 or 8 years and every time it's failed to go beyond the planning stages. People just seem like they're either not interested enough or too busy to commit to meeting in person every once in a while

Shelving for now. I'm so sorry Sylvia I think you're a great writer but your journals are not interesting to me at this point in time

Starting this one halfway through because only one of the commentaries is pertinent to my practice. I just received this empowerment from my guru and he is giving teachings, so it should be a relatively short read. Christian missionaries to Tibet thought that Yamantaka was a demon because he was so terrifying. In reality, he serves to sever practitioners' obscurations and dispel all obstacles to practice

In typical Graeberian fashion, the last chapter of this book is the most interesting one, because it's where he ties everything together. I have critiques of this book, but I've also been reading through the critiques made by several other users on this website, and I don't feel any of them are justified, It's almost as though this site leans conservative in terms of readership

This is gonna be a long term reading project for sure. Sylvia Plath was an excellent writer, and it's interesting to get a glimpse into her life, but I'm not sure how compelled I feel to read volume after volume of her journals. We'll see how much longer I stick with it

It's infuriating that Sylvia's last journal was destroyed by Ted Hughes. Guy was a prick

Gonna give this one a go--It's long, so I might not stick with it. On the other hand, I really enjoyed The Bell Jar, and Sylvia Plath seems like an interesting figure. She was so young when she produced most of her work, but it was extremely impressive nonetheless. She was ahead of her time.

I think that a lot of points in this book are salient, but I'm not sure the authors fully fleshed out the idea about how gynocentric societies seem to be more flexible in trying certain non-coercive forms of government. It seems like they're drawing a connection between female labor and the labor of care, which is the labor that society runs on. So fine, but I don't think they made this super explicit in the text

Reading this novel is making me realize just how one-dimensional the eponymous Netflix movie is. There is so much more to this story than just fighting and dying at the front. The movie had so little character development that it almost isn't even the same story as the one presented in the book.

These next couple of pages would also be hard for a non-Buddhist to understand. Tsongkhapa here is refuting the idea of predestination--That something can exist ahead of its cause. Buddhists believe that causes and conditions create karma, but also that you have the ability to change previous karma by counteracting those causes and conditions with different behavior. The doctrine of karma is not based on fatalism.

FINALLY we're getting to the interesting stuff. Teotihuacán and pre-columbian Mesoamerican civilization is my thunderdome

Similarly, Tsongkhapa mentions that actions do not arise ultimately but only conditionally, because if actions could arise without conditions, they would simply appear out of nowhere. This is untenable because all action and non-action occurs in intertwined with our sensory interpretations of those actions and non-actions.

This next section would be practically incomprehensible to people who aren't familiar with Indian schools of philosophy. Tsongkhapa is arguing that consciousness is not the pre-existing basis of all phenomena--He instead argues that the consciousness is a mental deduction that comes from perceiving arising phenomena, because consciousness could not exist without conditions such as the various sense organs

It's corny that this is laid out in conversation format; nobody talks like this

Oh my stars! Homoeroticism in the form of a roast goose

According to Tsonkhapa, the efficient condition refers to the five aggregates, the objective condition refers to the perceptions of the six kinds of consciousness, the immediate condition refers to the cause that has just ceased, and the dominant condition refers to the six kinds of causes (facilitative cause, simultaneous cause, homogenous cause, psychological causes, ubiquitous causes, and ripening causes)

Before Tsongkhapa moves on to the next verse in the MMK, he mentions that "not arising from other" is not the same as arising from causes and conditions. This is because the Buddha taught the four conditions in abhidharma: The efficient condition, the objective condition, the immediate condition, and the dominant condition

Before moving on to his analysis of the next verse in the Mulamadhyamakakarika, Tsongkhapa mentions that ignorance exists only in conventional reality and not in the ultimate reality. This is to explain ignorance as the source of arising in the so-called 12 links of dependent arising as described in the Pali canon. The ultimate reality is both empty of ignorance and empty of emptiness.

I can already tell this novel is going to be devastating. It starts with the main character talking about how taking a shit with your comrades is the best part of war. I'm two chapters in and someone has already died. What fun!

He also asserts that a phenomenon arising from a cause not associated with its continuum (such as a creator God) would be a similarly ridiculous, because then anything could arise from anything else. A purple elephant could appear from a walnut under these circumstances, but conventionally speaking, everyone knows that it will never happen. All phenomena are products of a continuum of causes and effects.

Tsongkhapa establishes in these 10 pages that the notion of arising from an inherent substratum (as in Vedanta philosophy) is a ridiculous idea, because it leads to an infinite regress. If the substratum has already arisen, then it would be pointless for it to arise again, since it has already achieved its own status.