Buddhist roots and contemporary science

The meaning of ku, which is a part of the Buddhist concept of Three Truths (Ke, Ku and Chu)

Ke/temporary existence- Can be thought of as life's manifestations and earthly phenomena.

Ku is that which can not be perceived with the senses but exists as pure potential. Non substantiality. Ku is used to describe the state we are in after we die. "Ku is entirely different from non-existence. It is the potential-void combining the three views of existence: Ketai, Kutai and Chutai."

Chu/The Middle Way The way which both transcends and unites dualities such as life and death.The realization of the unchanging essence of the universe. This concept is so difficult to grasp, it has been explained by saying what it is not; in the Eightfold Negations: 'neither birth nor death, neither cessation nor permanence, neither identity nor difference, neither coming nor going.'

Ideas (ku) become realized as tangible changes or actions (ke). The nature (ku) of these actions will be influenced by Chu. Chu is the permeating life force of the universe; it may be compared to our essence, which in turn is shaped by our dominant life state.

The concepept of ku, has been translated as latency, non-substantiality, emptiness and void. The first articulations of this idea comes from Nagarjuna. He believed that the state of "neither existence nor nonexistence" described in this concept expressed the true nature of all things. The paradoxical nature of this idea, however, makes it somewhat foreign to Western dualist logic. Ku, however, is down-to-earth, and in fact consistent with the findings of contemporary science.

Modern physics, in attempting to discover the essence of matter, has arrived at a description of the world that is very close to that of Nagarjuna. What scientists have discovered is that there is no actual, easily identifiable "thing" at the basis of matter. Subatomic particles, the building blocks of the physical world that we inhabit, appear to oscillate between states of being and nonbeing. Instead of a fixed "thing" in a particular place, we find only shifting waves of probability. At this level, the world is actually a highly fluid and unpredictable place, essentially without substance. It is this non-substantial nature of reality that the concept of ku describes.

Modern loneliness

Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth.
For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures,
and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.- Francis bacon


Studies indicate that loneliness is increasing in spite of incredible communication advancements over the past decade. Isolation is far more than a social misfortune, it is a significant problem of health and happiness that is distinct from but contributes to the likelihood of depression.

In surveys to determine the factors that contribute most to human happiness, respondents consistently rate connection to friends and family-love, intimacy and social affiliation first, above wealth and fame.

Nowadays we're seeing an incredible retreat into virtual worlds. People spend time staring at their monitors more than ever before. This may imply less human interaction, less touch, less accountability, and less human connection. That can be a sure sign of loneliness. In fact, the use of social media sites, when gone unchecked, can actually exacerbate feelings of loneliness, because they remind the user of how little interaction they truly have with others.

Social Networks make a lot easier for people who are shy or socially awkward to communicate with others. This might help to prevents loneliness. But reality is complex. The Web provides large amounts of connection points; people who are truly isolated might end up over-using them. Besides connections might increase in number but not in quality – says John Cacioppo.

With email, communication is instant. And "kissing on that first date" is now more common. Within a couple of emails you are told intimate details you would be embarrased to tell anybody else. Those seem to be desperate attempts to satisfy the need for real human contact.

A recent research by Stepanikova concludes that more time browsing and communicating online appears to be linked with more loneliness, the two even increase together over time. However, it is important to appreciate that we don't know the direction of causation. Increased loneliness may well encourage people to spend more time online, rather than web time causing loneliness. Or some other factor could be causing both to rise in tandem.

Piglet

Piglet is the material heroes are made of, a great achiever, a gallant fighter, or a courageous rescuer, a piglet can be found if one looks closely enough, so it has always been, and so we are sure it will always be. He might appear to be the most significant of The Tao of Pooh characters. Yet he is the only one of them that changes, grows, becomes more than what he was in the first place. He does this not by denying his smallness, but by applying it. He accomplishes what he does without accumulating a great ego; inside he remains a very small animal but a very different kind of small animal than he was before.


Animal so shy and small
Dreaming you where bold and tall

Time is swift it races by
Opportunities are born and die

You can be a guiding star
If you make the most of who you are
You can find the hidden doors
To place's now one's ever been before
And the pride you’ll find inside
Is not the kind that’ll make you fall
It's the kind that recognizes
The bigness found in being small

Personal Information Disclosure

Most people are well aware of the undesirable consequences that making their personal lives public can bring, nevertheless they keep doing it. Why does this happen? Here are some possible reasons for it:

• To stay close with friends and family members who live far away: Social networking permits folks to stay in contact with relatives who live in different cities. College students, sibling in different states and countries and family members who are only on vacation for a few weeks can all find value in being an affiliate of different social media portals. They can stay in touch more often than they usually would without the simplicity of being connected in an internet network.
• To help construct their own narratives: Narratives are an often ignored aspect of psychology , though they are essential for us and are fundamental for providing us with a framework in which we can reconstruct our memories and think about the future. Narratives of the life stories we tell ourselves help to make sense of our lives.
• Because they feel the need for more human contact: Social networking sites actually appears to reduce loneliness and improve well-being, as was reported as long ago as 2002 in the Journal of Social Issues, People who have difficulties with conventional socializing, such as those with Asperger's syndrome, experience great benefits.
• To connect with people who have similar interests: Facebook created it's "Community Pages" for people to connect more easily with others on the social network who share similar interests. It will serve as an alternative to the official Facebook Pages for businesses, organizations and public figures. The aim is to let people create unofficial pages around topics, themes or ideas that don't fit easily in narrowly tailored Facebook Groups.
• To achieve fame: There's little doubt that the Internet supports new kinds of publicity, enabling average people to develop audiences and speak broadly while also giving those who know how to build an audience new tools in which to do so. This is part of what makes Twitter such a fascinating phenomenon. And Twitter has become a space for celebrities, micro-celebrities, wanna-be-celebrities, and all of their fans.
• To form part of a community where they feel respected and appreciated: In social media we can recognize how highly respected bloggers receive respect from others. In parallel to honor cultures, where public reputation is more important than one’s self esteem, bloggers achieve huge respect within their community.
• To maintain relationships with people they meet offline: Social networking sites are a poor alternative to real-world socializing, but they can help people stay in touch.
• Build on self-confidence: this can be attained through interacting with tweeps who continuously praise your tweets, personality,knowledge and/or looks.
• To transmit personal experiences that they feel can be valuable for others.
  

Public lives

Human beings have a natural tendency to protect their privacy. It's in our essence to allow only certain people to see who we really are, what we really do, what we really think, and how we really feel. Nowadays Social Networks make us feel more comfortable sharing more information openly and with more people making people's lives less private.

Twitter can feed the narcissistic tendencies of human beings. A large amount of people believe others are interested in the everyday minutia of their lives. Judging by Twitter's initial success and unparalleled growth, it appears to have fulfilled a need for self-expression far beyond what other technologies allow. This incessant broadcasting of people's lives, however, comes with its own set of dangers beyond its pernicious effect of inflating our egos.

• When you make private information public it is easier for others to spot your weaknesses and figure out ways to harm or take advantage of you.
• It is not uncommon to receive inaccurate feedback from others, which can lead to misunderstandings and/or misinformation.
• The information you publish can be taken out of context, making you an easy target for defamation.
• People do not fully understand the extent of the impact information disclosure can provoke. Twitter is less than five years old. This is a brand new medium, and we are just now beginning to recognize its potential consequences.
  

Every one must think hard before they make any data public. Realize that the information, once released, will live forever on the Web. The consideration must always be whether or not it can ever come back to haunt you resulting in any kind of damage (to your reputation, relationships, businesses, job, etc.). It is easy to avoid bad results from happening just by thinking before acting.

Coping with Streams

Thanks Wildcat for opening my networking world.

In network culture information is less the product of discrete processing units than of the outcome of the networked relations between them, of links between people, between machines, and between machines and people. A node's relationship to other nodes and/or networks is more important than its own uniqueness - states Varnelis .

Social Networks allow nowadays activity streams to be displayed on third party sites. Therefore this streams became public and can be observed and manipulated inside other sites that can also make public their activity stream.

According to Gelernter Streams are real time, rapidly changing, flowing, dynamic rivers of information. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet is starting to flow through streams. You are able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or new findings in any field— they can be blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream can be added. The result is your own particular mainstream: a flow of information of all you care about.

Stream difficulties:

• In a networked mass culture bland uniformity and immediacy dominate over uniqueness and complexity, given that streams emerge from that mass culture, it is not easy to rescue non mainstream and particular interest from such an amazing amount of information.
• Most of us digest a piece of information as soon as we consume it. We read a blog post or an article, and we must let the information pass through our intellectual digestion system completely until it is processed into knowledge. This process is slow and limits the amount of information we can turn into knowledge during a period of time. So, for most of us is not possible to keep up to date with with our streams. We tend to consume more than we can process.
• Our Attention is limited.
• The information we see in the stream tends to repeat. This wastes our limited time because we need to pre-process the same information more than once.
  

Proposed Solutions:

• Get out of the flow every so often to rest and reassess the situation. Let the flow pass you by and take a break. The stream will continue to flow without you.
• Pick a few streams to monitor at a time. Then portage on over to another stream or two for awhile, taking a break from the others (proposes Jeff Sayre).
• Get rid of redundant information in an automatic way.
• Develop new tools that help us spot the information from the past we were not able to process in time but we still find relevant.
• Create new visualizations to allow us to identify most relevant information to us at the present time. This could be done with the use of a personalized automatic data analyzer.
• Create and use tools to help people filter the information. Filtering in its essence is a process of attenuation - a way to focus attention more efficiently on signal versus noise. Broadly speaking there are many forms of filtering from automated filtering, to social filtering, to personalization, but they all come down to helping someone focus their finite attention more efficiently on the things they care about most (says Nova Spivak).

Random quotes and tweets

More interesting than building a lie detector would be to make a self-lie detecting device.

Widespread fake belief: Each person is it's own puppeteer.

Language is the main currency of WWW (expanding at an incredible rate).I am afraid humans end up believing life consists just of it (language).

The media is a mirror of our culture which is a byproduct of our minds.

People should try to be whatever the situation calls for. The problem is in perceiving what the situation is.

The key is in finding that balance where each persons production is valued by the use of what is produced.

We need to be headed, towards a day worth remembering and a history worth repeating.

Authenticity is invaluable originality is non-existent.Wit is not where you take things from is where you take them to.

Life is always a work in progress.