Curious, heavy with dread, I decided to walk down to the basement. There I found the presence of an evil that was concentrated and coldly alien. It was not an animal hiding in the dark with red eyes and sharp teeth. It wasn’t satanic, or anything like the demon in the famous Amityville house. It was not one thing, nor was it many things. I could not see it. But it had a smell. The closer I got to it, the more musky and musty it became. The evil was by a few sacks of rotten potatoes, and beneath me, and behind me.
[…]
And this no-thing is the ultimate horror. I understood then what it is we fear most about death. It is the ultimate paradox. You can know death, but death can never know you. You can think about death, but death cannot think about life. What this means is: In death, you never existed at all. The nothing in death fuses with the nothing before life. And nothing becomes all there ever was. To exist is only to exist. To not exist is never to have existed.
Charles Mudede
Long Tall Jefferson: Lucky Guy
Do you own a smartphone, or does the smartphone own you?
As everybody these days owns a smartphone that keeps them connected day in and out, there is a nascent need to differentiate. Smartphones have brought internet addiction, increased stress levels, and bad body posture; I believe freeing yourselves from these effects, freeing yourselves from being a “slave” of technologies and virtual social networks will be increasingly sought after as the millennials start ageing. At the same time, you don’t want to be completely cut off.
The problem here is not the smartphone per se, but our increasing dependence on it and the “outsourcing” of our thinking and desires to our smartphone.
Imagine the following scenario:
My Brother's Passing, God, and the Origins of Life
In the normal universe, “to be” is annihilated by “not to be.” But for reasons that are still a mystery to even the deepest math of physics, a bit of matter in a billion or so is not obliterated, it has no antimatter partner. It becomes a drop of experience. But why is the universe not symmetrical, not a perfectly smooth spread of photons, the particles of light? What’s behind this break in symmetry? Why do some quarks (the stuff of particles in the nucleus of an atom) escape what’s called the “primordial annihilation”? This question was on Nelson’s mind for much of her life.
As for me? The mystery of cosmic asymmetry will always be the point at which an imaginary conversation with my brother about God would begin. We are on one of those docks on Lake Washington. The stars are in the sky. Bellevue shimmers in the distance and is reflected by the water. I turn to my brother and say: “I have never, ever said this to you before, but I will tonight. If there is a God, Kudzai, He can only be a break in symmetry. Not creation, but violation.”
Charles Mudede
Japan
