Quite Busy

7 minutes

I am quite busy at the moment. I have contract work to be getting on with. This Wednesday I fly to Lisbon for 3 nights to attend a summit on Autonomous Blockchain Worlds where I’m giving a talk. 8th of June is the first meeting of Season 1 of the writing group I’m running with Wassim Z. Alsindi. My new Centre Talk on Writing the Impossible Object later in the summer is peaking over the horizon and the initial idea for that sprung into my mind this morning and before i knew it I had 1000 words of notes. I have an idea for the first proper Youtube video I want to make. I have another bit of writing called ‘Rules of Engagement’ I want to write. I need to finish ‘Mother of All Chains’ essay on Bitcoin being a living machine, I need to finish my novella, I need, I need, I want, I want.

Need to do the doing, when it needs getting done.


You know this week (other than Zelda), I’ve been thinking about ‘where we are’ with meditation in culture. 11 years ago when I began my practice it was seen as a bit of a kooky thing to be doing. Something I was dedicating time to for no apparent benefit.

I’m not a big fan of mindfulness tho, well, not as it has been deployed and understood by culture. Especially when mindfulness is pitched as some sort of HR afternoon off work. “It’ll make you work harder and feel less stressed” they tell you. Bullshit, more time of and better pay will do that too.

For those people close enough to me to have been shared a copy of my ‘On Meditation’ PDF that I’ve been writing on and off since 2015 will know I say the following about mindfulness:

Mindfulness can be dangerous. Mandatory mindfulness training mandated by an employer is the equivalent of giving someone a loaded gun & saying “here you go, have fun!” as you push them out the door.
‘Psychological problems’ from meditation as ‘The West’ understands them are the result of the practice working as intended.

Mindfulness as its understood by wider culture is almost the only kind of meditation there is, which is a bit annoying. It’s like people are going around believing the Rose is the only kind of Flower.

The biggest upshot of mindfulness’ ambient spread though culture is its now socially acceptable to say you meditate in polite company. But what said polite company isn’t prepared for is a conversation in the context of 11 years and ~5000 hours of having done it. We actually sorely lack a language to speak about the purely subjective experience of what happens in the mind. I mean I have no visual images at all.

Meditation (and prayer) is actually a kind of science. We have these texts, some of which are 1000’s of years old which say: If you do X a lot, for an extend period of time, then Y will happen.

The Yoga Sutras, or Christian mystical writings are sort of road maps, documentation of personal journeys peoples souls have taken. You too may walk similar paths and find these things helpful. The yoga sutras are also instruction manual. Almost everything you need to know about the experience of deep contemplation is in that text.

Anyways.

What remains in culture I find – because mind-fullness is so easily understood and accessible – is a deep scepticism about what’s next. What happens if you do more. This is crazy tho. No one is skeptical of the reality of a musician’s playing ability. In my opinion the best way of finding out if people who have done a lot of meditation are talking complete shit or not is to do a bunch of it and find out for yourself.

I bring this up as someone recently mentioned my recent show on Machine Touch and asked if I’d gone crazy.


Permanently Moved

Tears of the Kingdom

I fully expect to see Succession get more words published about it on the front pages of online media outlets in the coming weeks than the new Zelda will.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2023/05/13/301-2317-dial-m-for-metaverse/

Support the show! 
Subscribe to the zine
Watch on Youtube

£5 a Month

Support the Show 💪
Receive My Zine ✉️

Like paying £1.15 a week but only once a month

£100 a Year

Support the Show 💪
Receive My Zine ✉️

Like paying £1.90 a week but only once a year

Photo 365

230/365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

  • Calls
  • Prep before I head off to Lisbon next week for a conference
  • Finished slide deck for research for a client
  • Finished editing a 1h20min interview for my new podcast/show
  • Book planning

Weird that i’m really busy, and i’m getting MORE done each day so I can play Zelda before bed. So motivating LOL

Terminal Access

ARB and GVN has their fully on chain game ‘Eat Drain Arson‘ written about in Wired magazine this week.

JDO is back blogging over on Broken River. He’s been off social media for a few months now, feels like his return to blogging is an exploration of what his social should be in the new post Web2 environment.

AI and Virtual production tutorial queen Prompt Muse recently interviewed AI film and music video makers Sagans. Super good.

Dipping the Stacks

It’s a Mud, Mud, Mud, Mud World – Techgnosis | Techgnosis

As Sherry Turkle wrote, in MUDs, “the self is not only decentered but
multiplied without limit.”

The Imperfectionist: Rules to live by

there’s the strategy I sometimes employ for multi-step projects, which involves figuring out the milestone you’d like to hit each day, starting a few days from now… then diving into the first one today instead, so that rather than struggling to keep up with the schedule, you’re way out in front of it.

Essays the size of cathedrals – by Henrik Karlsson

When the budgets writers have at their disposal increase, and the cost to iterate on code and visualizations drop, there is an opportunity. The code-augmented essays we’ve seen so far have been one-off experiments. But it feels like you could now, realistically, set out to do ten pieces like this a year, maybe twenty.

You should consider yourself exceptional – by Gonzalo Nuñez

The default state of your world, from a subjective point of view, is motionless. Or even worse, everything moves in only one direction and that direction is backwards. Sit still and do nothing, thinking nothing in particular about yourself or even in some cases just taking what others may think of yourself as objectively true, and not only will literally nothi…

This is an interesting point. Tho I do think sitting still and meditating reveals the worlds momentum. You don’t go backwards

The Origins of Creativity | The New Yorker

“creativity,” as the name for a personal attribute or a mental faculty, is a recent phenomenon.

Reading

I finished Cal Newports’ Digital Minimalism.
Despite all the books and my endless attempts at dealing with attention – even writing that zine about it I still have my own problems. Newports advice was really helpful in rearranging some of the mental terrain. Things that I was trying hard at doing and exhausting myself, suddenly becoming easy. My phone usage / screen on time is down over 1.5hs a day.

The other day it was just 1h20mins for the whole day – most of that podcast listening. Happy

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Swing Low – Miharu Koshi & Haruomi Hosono

Still in Japanese pop music world over here at Jaymo industries. This week’s album reccomendation is Swing Low. A 1996 album from the mind of Haruomi Hosono with Miharu Kosji. Whilst it really DOES sound like the mid 90’s it also is a truely global album. Mixing American Blues, Rock and Roll, French Jazz, Surf Rock, and of course Japanese Pop. All the styles aren’t divorced from on another from track to track tho. The album is coherent throughout. Its so good.

Review of the new Sleep Token LP coming next week! I know it’s out, but I’m saving it for a plane journey. I’m just going to sit there and listen to it in full from start to finish.

Remember Kids:

Prefer Email? 📨

Subscribe to receive new posts straight to your inbox!

Or subscribe to my physical mailing list from £5 a month


Leave a Comment 💬

Click to Expand