one of my favorite books, it follows a technical writer embarking on a motorcycle journey through the backroads of America with his troubled son, both as a bonding exercise and to find some way to help him; rife with unreliable narrator tropes, as the father himself is unwell

this man is obsessed with the question of Quality, what it is, how to define it, how to systematize its identification; without giving too much away, this search drives him quite mad

I've undergone a similar journey myself, a sort of There and Back Again of the spirit

I encountered this book at a pivotal time in my life, when I had dropped out of college & was wandering the spiritual & epistemic wilds, trying to make sense of my experiences & the patterns I saw in the world; I deeply felt that I was onto something, but struggled to quantify it

this book served as both a warning sign and a handbook, cautioning me against the protagonists fate, while also handing me the concepts I needed to grapple with these difficult questions; not an exaggeration to say it was lifechanging.

his followup, Lila, helped systematize this

that sequel was more sober & dry, less a frenetic hero's journey & more a methodical contemplation of the same ideas; it was the chaser to the former's shot. together these two books shaped the way I think about transcendence & its mundane manifestation

but seeing it is not easy

to see Quality in the world requires one to be atypical in some way, bimodally; either deeply disturbed & far off the beaten path of sanity, or highly centered and in tune with the world-spirit. i highly recommend the latter, altho many take a journey thru the former to get there

the ability to channel the transcendent is vividness, and the ability to not get swept away by it is centeredness; should one want to burn bright but not be destroyed in the process, both are necessary.

many have one or the other, but much fewer are able to access both

my experiences with psychedelics and meditation opened me up to vividness, and I burned brightly for a while, burning myself in the process

eventually, I found a path to centeredness in the study of the Dao thru Tai Chi

this practice tempered my flame

---
RT @pee_zombie
having studied the Tao both as a spiritual practice, & as a physical one thru Tai Chi, I've found this form of monism to be not only broadly compatible w/ computation…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1407455291998879749

to be clear, I'm not claiming to be enlightened or anything of the sort, bc this is a much more mundane sort of transcendence; glimpsing the divine is available to anyone, should they just rotate their minds in the right way

for your mind is but a shape in computational space

while not w/o its pitfalls, the process of accessing vividness cracks one's mind open, letting the transcendent light shine thru, & the cultivation of centeredness uses that light to put the pieces back together, a spiritual kintsugi

you'll never be the same, but thats the point

---
RT @0x49fa98
@visakanv hate is not the opposite of love. the opposite of love is indifference.

the opposite of down bad is centered
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1478957451709861888