Saud Omar

weareallstarstuff: Eye For An Eye

Sun, 12 May 2013 19:55:20 -0600

Eye For An Eye

"In my experience, the greatest successes don’t come from grandiose scenarios of good intentions..."

Sat, 04 May 2013 23:20:00 -0600

“In my experience, the greatest successes don’t come from grandiose scenarios of good intentions engendered by temporarily pumped-up motivation. Rather, the most lasting and significant positive effects result from small things, done consistently, in strategic places.”

- David Allen

"If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should..."

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:14:04 -0600

“If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?”

- Sam Harris

#stress #mindfulness

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:15:52 -0600

#stress #mindfulness

On Nothingness

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:03:10 -0600

On Nothingness

"Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The..."

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:58:55 -0600

“Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”

- Eric Hoffer

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no..."

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:49:00 -0600

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

- Wendell Berry

"You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes."

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:16:37 -0600

“You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.”

- Alan Watts

"For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some..."

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 23:47:00 -0600

“For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time to still be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”

- Alfred Souza

The Fundamental Ultimate Mystery

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 04:30:12 -0600

“Really, the fundamental ultimate mystery - the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets, is this: that for outside there is an inside, and for inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together. There is in other words a secret conspiracy, between ALL insides and ALL outsides, and the conspiracy is this: to look as different as possible, and yet underneath, to be identical. Because you don’t find one without the other. Like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee agreed to have a battle. So there is a secret. What is esoteric, what is profound and what is deep, is what we will call the ‘implicit.’ What is obvious and on the open is what we will call the ‘explicit.’ And I, and my environment, you, and your environment, are explicitly as different, as different could be. But implicitly, you go together. And this is discovered by the scientist when he tries, as the whole art of science is to describe what happens exactly, and when he describes exactly what you do, he finds out that you, your behavior, is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you. He realizes then, that you are something that the whole world is doing. Just as when the sea has waves on it - well alright, the sea, the ocean, is waving. So each one of us is a ‘waving’ of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is! And with each one of us it is waving and saying,’YOOHOO! Here I am!’ Only it does it differently each time, because variety is the spice of life.” ~Alan Watts

الوهج الأخضر

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 04:04:00 -0600

“انتظر حتى ترى الوهج الأخضر يتراقص …

قطًر كل روائح الكون .. قطًر عبق السراخس في المستنفعات التي خطت فيها الديناصورات منذ ملايين السنين .. قطًر رائحة عبق كليوباترا ودماء يوليوس قيصر .. قطًر البخور الذي أشعله الدراويش في ليالي القاهرة الفاطمية .. قطًر النيران التي التهمت القاهرة فيما حكوا لنا, وقطًر عبق كل غانيات باريس راقصات “الكان كان” .. قطًر كل روائح حيتان العنبر وكل أنفاس النمور الأسيوية التي تتسلل في ظلام الأحراش .. قطًر الأحراش ذاتها .. قطًر روائح البانسية والنرجس والليلاك والزنابق .. قطًر كل هذه الروائح معاً ثم … ثم ماذا؟ … نسيت …

الآن أنت لم تعد هنا .. الآن أنت سيد المكان والزمان والكون ذاته .. الأن كل ما حلمت به موجود هنا معك .. يمكنك أن تشرب الأفكار في كئوس, وتصب الخمر في دهاليز عقلك .. يمكنك أن تلتهم الروائح وتراها .. يمكنك أن تشم الضوء .. كل ما خشيته رحل إلى غير رجعة .. أفكار عبقرية تخطر لك لكنك تنساها عندما تتمعن فيها .. عبارات مزح ظريفة جدا تتبخر قبل أن تخرج من فمك … لكنك تقدر أنهم سمعوها .. لهذا تضحك .. لهذا يضحكون .. بعد قليل يأتي الذهول وتشخص عيناك .. هذه هي اللحظة .. إنه النفق الذي لن تخرج منه إلا بعد ساعات …”

من رواية يوتوبيا, أحمد خالد توفيق

The Optimal Experience

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 03:39:00 -0600

“In sum, optimal experience, and the psychological conditions that make it possible, seem to be the same the world over. As our studies have suggested, the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.”

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow:The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Image: Yoga Pratama

"Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in..."

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 04:57:02 -0600

“

Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it—the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus—fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system were remotely drawn to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away……

Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts, but the system doesn’t end there. In fact, it isn’t even close to ending there. We won’t get to the solar system’s edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won’t reach the Oort cloud for another [at voyager speeds, which we currently cannot replicate] – I’m so sorry about this – ten thousand years. Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way…

Based on what we know now and can reasonable imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our solar system-ever. It is just too far. As it is, even with the Hubble telescope, we can’t see even into the Oort cloud, so we don’t actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.

”

- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Photo

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:03:02 -0600

"It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled..."

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:23:49 -0600

““It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.””

- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

"Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of..."

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 21:10:18 -0600

“Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, “Lighthouses” as the poet said “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain...

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 06:43:32 -0600

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain - Bob Marley

185 Billion Bits

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 01:33:14 -0600

At this point in our scientific knowledge we are on the verge of being able to estimate how much information the central nervous system is capable of processing. It seems we can manage at most seven bits of information—such as differentiated sounds, or visual stimuli, or recognizable nuances of emotion or thought—at any one time, and that the shortest time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second. By using these figures one concludes that it is possible to process at most 126 bits of information per second, or 7,560 per minute, or almost half a million per hour. Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come—every thought, memory, feeling, or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

“This is a world where everybody’s gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this...

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:43:00 -0600

“This is a world where everybody’s gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody’s gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that … Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don’t wanna do. All the things that I don’t wanna be. Places I don’t wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned, save the whale, all that, I don’t understand that …” - Barfly, 1987

The Meaning of Life (3)

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 22:50:02 -0600