"Along a less-traveled route, meditation remains what it long was: a deeply transformative pursuit, a devoted metamorphosis of the mind toward increasingly enlightened states."
This pretty much lines up with what meditation has done for me. However, the pursuit of "states" can be a trap in of itself.
As my practice has gotten deeper, I've started to reframe meditation for myself as the process of unrelenting inquiry in the search for base truth. In that pursuit, the practice becomes a process of subtraction of core beliefs and ideas that simply aren't true - or can't be known to be true. As these beliefs disappeared, much of my own personal suffering did as well as so many of the things that were sources of conflict in my mind were predicated on false beliefs.
With this framing meditation can take many forms. Ramana Maharshi famously asked his devotees to start with the question of "Who am I?" and just keep inquiring.
From my perspective as an outsider, I have always been amazed by the use of papers in academic research as a means of communicating findings to the wider world. I find it problematic that these papers are often formatted in a way that makes them highly unreadable, with two columns and compressed text. In my opinion, adopting more modern methods of publishing research could greatly enhance the overall quality of research by making papers more accessible and increasing the likelihood of them being read.
Imagine a scenario where there is a standardized format for academic papers, where the conclusion is explicitly derived from specific data and accompanied by confidence intervals. This standardized schema would enable easier referencing of other papers and easy incorporation of additional data through features like autocomplete. Implementing such a system could potentially reverse the trend of academic papers that use excessive and unnecessary language to appear more intellectually rigorous, even when the actual information being conveyed is limited.
By embracing these changes, we could create a more transparent and efficient research environment that promotes clearer communication and enhances the impact of academic findings.
I'm sorry you're going through a difficult time right now. It's very admirable to that you're looking to help yourself to better be there for your child.
I found myself in a similar situation 2 years ago, when it felt like the world was collapsing around me and the narrative of my life falling to pieces was the dominant soundtrack in my mind.
There was no easy fix, but I do believe that taking up a mindfulness/meditation practice was what helped me to become what I believe is the happiest I've been ever in my life for well over a year now.
The biggest change for me was the weakening of the feeling of the self as a distinct concept and the narrative attached to it. When that dropped away it was incredible how many habits that improved my quality of life just started happening. My sleep routine became fixed, I started exercising almost every day, and my friendships blossomed.
It's hard to describe - but these changes seemingly arose out of observation rather than an act of will.
Just one suggestion out of many, but I hope you find yourself feeling less stuck in the near future.
“We worked with the Safari team to ensure that some of the things that weren't there are there, and that allowed us to kind of get to where we are today,” Luna head of engineering and technology George Tsipolitis said.
I don't know if these APIs are secret, so much as didn't exist before. I assume that Google and Microsoft are free to leverage these as well now.
And fair enough, I haven't been a part of larger enterprise deals in my career so far.
From what I've been reading, Apple specifically worked with Amazon to tweak Safari to support Luna. Definitely opens up questions of anticompetitive similar to how Prime Video has a special deal with Apple to not pay the full 30% App store fee.
I use Stadia pretty regularly as my sole gaming platform, and so far its been pretty amazing for games like Assassin's Creed and even FPS games like Destiny 2. I encounter noticeable stutters a couple of times every hour or so, but for the most part its as if I'm playing on actual local hardware. Also, the loading speeds are blazing fast - its made me very optimistic about how the gaming experience can improve in the years to come due to the underlying compute being elastic instead of limited to your own box. I'm someone who held off on buying a console for years due to the cost, so for me Stadia has been an absolute blessing.
My first instinct was to agree with this, but from my experience it's extremely difficult to properly communicate failure modes 100% of the time across different teams in very large organizations. Dependencies that are fuzzy arise for example when a service A proxies data for client service B from some other service C. It doesn't help that the organization of teams in a company often severs lines of communication between teams who explicitly don't have dependencies but implicitly do. As a result, information gets lost in the process. Having a last line of defense in the form of a "chaos engineering" team may actually be the natural response of large organizations to counter the inherent messiness that is produced as a result of bureaucracy.
I would check out game streaming services if you have decent internet. I’ve been playing on Google Stadia over the last few months, and it’s rekindled my love for gaming after years of not being able to play the latest games on my Mac. The age of hardware not being the limiting factor in your selection of games is close upon us.
This pretty much lines up with what meditation has done for me. However, the pursuit of "states" can be a trap in of itself.
As my practice has gotten deeper, I've started to reframe meditation for myself as the process of unrelenting inquiry in the search for base truth. In that pursuit, the practice becomes a process of subtraction of core beliefs and ideas that simply aren't true - or can't be known to be true. As these beliefs disappeared, much of my own personal suffering did as well as so many of the things that were sources of conflict in my mind were predicated on false beliefs.
With this framing meditation can take many forms. Ramana Maharshi famously asked his devotees to start with the question of "Who am I?" and just keep inquiring.