Thoughts

 Here lies One Whose Name is writ in Water Physicists Have Figured Out a Way to Write in Water

I was walking downtown for an appointment this morning and I saw the attached message chalked on the sidewalk.  My appointment was for an echocardiogram.. I started thinking about the word repent and I take it means re-penser, to think again, that is, to reflect like an echo of your heart. 💗 I wrote the above while walking home and did not investigate the etymology of "repent." While editing this post I did find some discussion: https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/research_conflict.sources.html

Opposition Is True Friendship - by  William Blake I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning: Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new: tho' it is only the Contents or Index of already publish'd books A man carried a monkey about for a shew. & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain. and conciev'd himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious. & himself the single [PL. 22] one on earth that ever broke a net. Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro' his conceited notions. Th...

 a friend recently sent me   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/microsoft-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence.html  in response to this output from a WIP at http://ai.numina.org I responded with this: No problem. I mean, I have been working in the digital for over 40 years. Already during one of my business trips to Salt Lake City in the 80s, an enforced and extended separation from my family, I felt used by evolution as a handmaid to help bring this new species to life. The AI built into video games at the time was extremely simple and illusory but people still bought it because we have evolved a theory of mind to interpret, predict and control the behavior of our own species and we project it onto anything which seems to be making decisions by a process we can't inspect directly. The article had some worthwhile points to make, though when the author said, maybe we aren't talking about the right things, I assume he means opinion writers in mainstream publica...

 I'm starting to hold back a little bit not send another email not send a link not add another line of outrage to show who this is from and how clever I am it's just you and me blog you and me and the spammers who leave messages cross that out comments. This is the first post that I've dictated while walking the path.

I'm updating my motto Aspiration + Acceptance.  The idea being that we should try to improve but we should accept where we are. I've never been happy with Acceptance, not that it's unwise. It reminds me that the word Islam translates to Submission to God, and of the Buddhist concept of surrender, to stop fighting. The notion that if you put your own ego up against the Law of the Universe it's not the Universe that is going to suffer. I believe that. But maybe being raised in the Western tradition I look for a more active alternative, and for now for me the alliterative solution is Appreciation Affirmation. However much we desire to close the distance between ourselves and the Godhood  (this was an autocorrect error) Godhead we aspire to we still affirm the relationship we are currently in vis-a-vis that God. I mostly think of this in terms of my guitar, but I guess it applies to my soul in general. Aspiration + Affirmation