Ideas Of The Week #002 — Awareness Meditation, Four Tet, Singularity & Joaquin Phoenix At The Oscars
I started a new series on my Substack publication Light Years, wherein I curate handpicked content from around the web in byte-sized bullet points. Here’s week #002 for you to check out (You can subscribe to my Substack newsletter below).
Coming to this week’s piece. It’s the 1st week of August & it’s still raining intermittently in Mumbai. It’s been a productive week in the embers of July & now into August. But back to business, this week’s curation has some eye-opening & intriguing takes & perspectives.
As always, I bring you the freshest & most thought-provoking concepts striding the highways of the myriad fields of human ideas that explore what it means to live in this consciousness & human experience we call ‘life’. Here’s week #002 of selections from the good old web……
- My week started with listening to a lovely anecdotal talk on the technique of mediation using awareness. I covered a bit about awareness meditation & the difference between thoughts & thinking & meditation with the body in an old post based on a book by Joseph Nguyen which helped me a lot. This TED talk by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche further explored the meditation technique, centered around awareness. I’d seen a video of Rinpoche some years ago, where he talks about quietening the ‘monkey mind’. But in this talk, along with some funny takes, stories & explanations, Rinpoche outlines three major facets of awareness meditation that helped him achieve peace. It’s a great talk that outlines this different form of meditation that isn’t like regular conventional meditation so to speak & could help you on your journey to finding peace of mind.
2. “People need to listen to way more music…To listen to music… and explore it and study it… Everything’s there.” Being an upcoming musician, I find that there are a lot of apprehensions you go through in your process. But this brilliant podcast featuring electronica pioneer Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, was such a great listen. Hebden is someone I have huge admiration for considering his body of work & sound. Him ruminating on his journey in music, his process exploring a lot of things musicians face throughout their careers looking from the lens of present to past, & in general, his humble nature was exactly what I needed to hear. He also urges people to spend more time listening to music, like the quote in the beginning, he adds, “Listen to music with that level of detail in a really deep way… I get a level of knowledge and inspiration simultaneously that serve me so well in everything else I do.” The podcast is on Tape Notes where Hebden talks about his life as a musician, the importance & effect of listening to a lot of diverse kinds of music & his latest release called “Three”. It’s an essential listen.
3. I found this (somewhat) rare collision of poetry, physics & film on writer/blogger Maria Popova’s blog the Marginalian (formerly called Brain Pickings). This short film, based on a poem by Marie Howe written sometime after the death of Stephen Hawking was a beautiful reminder that everything, everyone, & everything that ever was, is, or will be was once one, what Hawking described as a singularity.
4. When it comes to making difficult choices or the general uncertainty that lies ahead of a decision, these two quotes reminded me that a) we should choose ourselves & our own innate passions, pursuits & health b) the unknown is where growth is & so we must open up towards it.
I explored the ideal way to make hard choices in an old article linked below which also reiterates the quotes above. It should help if you’re making a big decision or if you’re feeling a bit lost.
5. I’d heard about legendary director Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal but this video explaining it was a great way to understand & summarise the film, its philosophical underpinnings & meaning. The video essay links the film to Albert Camus’ philosophy of ‘life’ being, as he put it, “absurd”. As Camus writes, “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Further explaining, “It is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none” & that “Life is not a problem to be solved, it is a reality to be experienced.” While Alan Watts’ philosophy of work as play is a more positive take on living & doing work by thinking it is play, with great examples (I’ve linked Watts below & the video essay above).
6. We’re seeing the evolution of the traditional search engine now shifting to the AI search engine. I always kinda like articles on The Atlantic, and this one exploring the “AI Search Wars” was an informative piece foretelling things to come. This included digital media companies paying AI-chat-search companies to use their content if it shows up in people’s chat queries. I guess a lot of AI companies are web crawling for free, and that could change in the future. “The search war is an attempt to change how people navigate the internet, the system through which the contemporary world organizes and disseminates knowledge. But the underlying terrain has not changed: Knowledge, no matter its organization, remains the sum of writing, art, and thinking from humanity, not from a bot.”
7. As a child, I used to struggle a lot with nightmares & to some extent I still do. There’s just something about how vivid they feel when I’m dreaming so when I wake up I have to talk to someone or have a cup of coffee (the coffee is irrespective of nightmares). This micro-short film that’s just 1-minute long titled “Upstay” which explores the topic, is a brilliant one that I had to share.
8. Thievery Corporation are a band my younger sister & I like a lot. Having listened to their entire discography extensively I’m always on the lookout for Thievery’s live performances. Their KEXP set is a brilliant one that’s an essential listen, but I guess this one at Red Rocks Trail is the latest one that’s just so smooth, truly encapsulating their global sound.
9. Joaquin Phoenix is a highly decorated actor. While his recent film Napoleon was quite underwhelming; he generally puts in critically acclaimed performances in most of his roles. In his Oscar acceptance speech after winning the 2020 Academy Award for his role in Joker, Phoenix delivered one of the most memorable & heartwarming acceptance speeches ever. “I’ve been a scoundrel.. I’ve been selfish.. I’ve been cruel at times.. hard to work with and ungrateful but so many of you in this room have given me a second chance and I think that’s when we’re at our best when we support each other not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes but when we help each other to grow, when we educate each other when we guide each other towards redemption that is the best of humanity.” Followed by an anecdote by his late brother who passed away in 1993 that states “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow”.
10. Finally, my latest Electronica EP ‘Reaching’ went live on streaming platforms on the 31st of July. The name of the album is a throwback to my debut EP ‘Transit’ & my ambient EP ‘Music For Motion’ in that I’m ‘reaching’ towards my final destination, which is closer to my final sound. It’s a short 3-track EP that’s the latest evolution in my music production. Give it a spin!
You can find week #001 here:
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