Personal Blogs

My latest newsletter on Substack (free to read):

https://asokar.substack.com/p/dhamma-and-painting

Having to deal with others is tiring. I don't think I can spiritually grow whilst having to deal with other humans and what they want. What other humans want, is often not what I want. At least, not anymore.

At times, I long to be completely alone. I find it much easier to practice spirituality when I’m in solitude. Having to deal with other people feels like torture sometimes.

I don’t have the same bother when dealing with animals. Animals are less judgemental, less demanding, and they don’t care for money, they are not as complicated as humans and much easier to share my space with.

Sometimes it feels like humans care more about money and economics than they do about the other living beings who inhabit this planet.

It is hard changing the way I talk to myself. It does work, but it can be challenging at times.

It's helpful to find a way to pause the inner monologue, so I can step back from it, reflect on it and then practise narrating things in a different way, which can help change my perceptions of things.

Sankaras are moral choices, intentions, the tendencies of the mind, the inner volitions, that produce our karma (our speech and action). 

When intentions are driven by craving and ignorance, they produce Samsara.

As beings become less ignorant of their intentions they can learn how to change them to something more helpful, which in turn changes their karma.

It takes time, and one will fail over and over again. I certainly do, I'm no angel. But I am learning that that is part of the training too, learning how to fail well, with wisdom (-:

Trying not to be so hard on myself when I don't always get it right. To experiment and play, investigate. To become a friend to myself instead of a horrible boss. Training myself to see the mind as a team, and to be compassionate and friendly towards it instead of bossy.

Training the mind is like when one learns to paint, or to make music, or learns a sport, or learns to ride a bike. Effort is needed at first, but the effort is something we already know about, it comes naturally to us. We use it without thinking when we learn a new skill.

I am concentrating mainly on learning to calm the mind at the moment. Developing serenity practices that help quieten the thought energies and bring the mind to stillness and balance. These are also samadhi practises. I find these practises very challenging at times, but they are very helpful and worth the time spent learning them.

My latest article on Substack:

Have been writing a lot on Medium. I like it that they have decided to set the default flag to 'no' for allowing A.I. to train on the site's content. 

I don't know if putting writing behind a paywall also helps to protect one's writing from being fed into a large language model, but I have decided to do that now. I put my best polished work on there.

Medium encourages one to work hard on their articles, which is good, and the financial incentive does work as a carrot on a stick to work harder at carefully crafting my articles, especially when submitting to a publication (magazine) on there. The editors of publications I have got feedback from have been really helpful in me improving my writing.

I don't think it is fair that A.I. companies are just hoovering everyone's content off the Internet to train their machines without asking permission or compensating authors for it. Especially as these companies are for-profit. Using people's hard work to make money, without acknowledging them or sharing any of the profits with the artists whose work they've used is wrong.

Another thing that concerns me, is if enough of your content is fed into the machines, they can start to mimic your style. And that could be used by people wanting to market and promote stuff, (stuff you might not agree with), and to create propaganda, and deep fakes. That gives me the creeps. We are entering a world were noone will know what is true anymore. People will be smeared by deep fakes that look real, and those who are not victims of deep fakes will claim to be, when something true is reported about them that they don't want people to know. It is a very disturbing and troubling world we are heading towards. One were critical thinking will be invaluable. 

The sad thing is we are all conditioned to believe what we see on a screen. So one is going to have to be very careful about what they trust in the future. Now in fact, the future is already here.

I am about to study A.I. for the next module on this degree. I am not sure I am well enough to work in an office again, or do long hours, or if I want to work for companies that steal people's data to make money. I am hoping to make a livelihood with writing, as that's where I feel passion when it comes to making a living. But it won't hurt to learn about how A.I. and machine learning works, and I also may be able to make a living writing articles about it in the future. So studying this will not be a waste of my time.