There is so much wisdom to harvest from our past. We neglect it to our detriment.

Foundation Passport phishing email going around. Don't click on the links. Be safe out there.

The Greeks called it kleos aphthiton: fame that never wilts. Achilles at Troy was offered two fates: sail home and live long and be forgotten, or die young and become a story sung forever. He chose the story. The body dies, but the tale walks on its own. Sun Wukong (孫悟空) guided a monk west to bring the sutras to China and fought every demon on the road. When it ended, the Buddha gave him the name Victorious in Strife. Not for the battles he won, but for the enemy he finally beat: the anger and hunger in his own mind. He awakened and became enlightened. Centuries on, the story chose a new body. Akira Toriyama called him Son Goku, 孫悟空, the same name. The tail and the staff and the cloud went with him. Here, Goku is a tale of a simple lesson: train the body, train the mind, love while you do it. When Goku reaches Ultra Instinct, he stops thinking and lets go. That is the place the monkey also reached. The name says it in two characters. 悟 is to awaken. 空 is the void. Awake to emptiness.

Amphion built the walls of Thebes with a lyre. His brother Zethus hauled stone on his back; Amphion walked ahead and played, and the stones followed the music into place like magic. A city is something you can sing into order. To spell a word and to cast a spell come from one root, the old word for story. A story does work on the world. The work cuts both ways. Take the beauty out of order and you get glamour: the word is grammar without the beauty, sister to grimoire, the book of spells that coerce. Plato put manipulative speech in that same family, cosmetics, adornment impersonating order. He also said the soul is cured by charms, and charms are beautiful words. Be measured. Be beautiful with your words. Build, don't coerce.

Trying out @Nostrich store front for the first time and this is super cool!

When one fasts, especially in the modern age, it is a practice of learning to not follow the impulses of the mind. With our modern fridges, it is so easy to open one up and indulge, to satisfy the feelings of hunger. The practice of fasting teaches one to be aware of the mind, yet to pursue discipline in resisting the urges, so that one forms a different relationship with the mind. One thing we all indulge in constantly is our thinking mind itself. Our modern society glorifies it, and indeed it was built because of our ability to perform logic and reason. However, all things require balance, and it is important that we also practice mindfulness: to have a single pointed awareness of the present moment, our body and our breath, so that we can calm the mind in the manner where we can hear the true song of our world. Modern technology makes this even harder. Social media and now AI are akin to the refrigerator: they provide us a constant outlet to indulge our mind and to feed our ego. However, the computer, which includes both AI and Bitcoin, can be viewed as a tool that can equally liberate us. For the extent of recorded history, we have been using our intellectual mind to build an ivory tower, this amazing civilization all around us, but the overuse of our mind in this manner is making us sick. AI and Bitcoin can be a means to liberate us from that burden, as they can take the weight of thinking off of our shoulders, to continue to build this ivory tower on our behalf while we return to a more natural way of being. We all are in a kind of prison, and many of us carry it everywhere we go. We can either use technology to free us from it, or it can enslave us more. What will you choose?

Prometheus made us. He stole fire from the gods and gave it to us. That fire is our ability to reason. Reason made us the dominant species on earth. Zeus chained him to a rock for it, and an eagle forever eats his liver. While the punishment seems cruel on the surface, it was wisdom. Zeus knew the fire would sever us from the gods. Every other creature experiences the holy directly. Our thinking clouds us from it. The gift made us powerful. It cost us the divine.

What happened to us building great cathedrals? What happened to us devoting ourselves to something greater? There does seem to be a spiritual aspect to money.

I wrote this article when reflecting on the work of @Jack K. Hopefully it can stimulate discussion that leads to more peace, civility, harmony, cohesion, and resolution in the Bitcoin community. How many blocks does it take? View article →

Just listened to “The Last Honest Market” Much respect to you @jack mallers