UnbornTao

If you hand me a ball called "my experience" and I catch it, then in that connection we might say that, metaphorically speaking, listening took place. Not the best metaphor. We see that this has to occur outside of, or independent of, my intellect and view. This action of mine would have to be entirely about you. If you think about it, you can't escape being relational. And being emotional oneself obstructs listening. It isn't really needed at all. One's reactions would be irrelevant here. Jargon, giving instructions, providing information, sharing the contents of your mind - these are not the same as the act of communicating. I feel that the depth of this simple act is hard to convey and develop for everyone. Just consider that it is possible for two people to create the same experience as a result of this process. Magic! And then what you do with it is up to you. Maybe you see it as a delusion, a fascinating idea, an intriguing notion, a profound insight, a manipulation, a joke, nonsense, or a feeling of sadness.

Oh yeah. Like K said, to truly listen to someone isn't very common. What would you say listening to another, in that case, would require? What would the other "do" beyond the ritual (nodding, hearing, paying attention) of having heard what you had to say? What would that process leave them with? For example, an idea? What would make you say, "Oh yeah, you listened"? This can be hard to see. Sometimes it seems someone may have listened because they agree with you or share the same view or conclusion, or can express themselves with similar terminology as yours. Not necessarily. After the process: What's their experience? And this very process is happening to us as we speak, and yet we think it doesn't apply to us.

Learn to discern hoopla from a communication. The following is an extremely obvious case of the former. Also, it's just funny as hell:

@EmiHyen Welcome.

@Eskilon I had finished writing a long response but ended up deleting it. This is just too superficial and inefficient. It would require a course or a seminar. Just be grounded. Enjoy.

I'd look into the work of someone who knows what they're doing, like Gabor Maté.

I admire your dedication to the craft. With AI, it's too tempting to outsource most of the coding work to it these days. Not that this is necessarily bad. It depends on your goals. Ahh, yeah, I remember lurking on one of those websites many years ago for your book list and downloading your commentaries/journal, but I never got around to reading them (just some fragments).

Didn't watch the entire video. Too depressing. What kind of people do that? Monsters.

Convert it to JPG.

Do you often code from scratch? Best I can do is *Markdown*.

No

There is, once again, a conflation between listening and gullibility or agreement (or disagreement, for that matter). As usual, we tend to see listening as "saying yes" to things. Anything that takes the form of a straightforward position against a stance comes across as not having heard. Understandable, but wrong. And don't forget that the same position could be taken by the other party: "I'm the one not being listened to - don't be so closed-minded." Listening isn't incompatible with recognizing what something is - deluded, accurate, plainly false, biased, a manipulation, and so on - whatever purpose it may have had when it was invented. This is why questions are asked in the first place, especially basic, common-sense ones that people somehow tend to overlook. Educating people on this would easily take a good hundred hours of work. Why do cult dynamics always implicitly emphasize a certain kind of "open-mindedness"? You can begin to intuit what that's about. So yes, being critical and listening are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they complement each other. Without the former, what you may end up with is a kind of lightweight spiritualism, which is quite common. "The Earth is a rectangle."

Discussing listening while some kind of noise keeps making him pause, like on the other video. The guy knows what questions to ask.

So little commitment to your values.

I'm not familiar with most of those frameworks, to be clear. I taught myself basic CSS and HTML as a teenager and set up a tech site with a friend, but don't remember most of it at this point. If you're serious or genuinely curious about it, taking the tedious path is worthwhile - you can then understand how the wheel works and recreate it any way you want when it comes to CSS.

There were also some Chinese ones and whatnot. But the joke's on you, I'll be the robot wiping your ass.

I call that Tuesday.

Have you heard of our lord and savior Linus Torvalds?

God, the new web app.

I wish we could see some of the past Zen masters and observe how they might contradict our ideals. Words don't necessarily constitute understanding, even if they sound like the same things others say. And making certain impressions on people is relatively easy. Talk has always been cheap, particularly in spiritual pursuits. This is why I like guys like Jiddu Krishnamurti. Among other things, he shattered people's assumptions about these matters. He simply appeared normal and didn't offer a fantasy (which is what most people are looking for). In other words, he was authentic. He also emphasized that intellectual understanding is rather superficial when it comes to existential matters.

It's either blueberries, or you haven't gone deep enough yet. Do you want to leave this here or move it somewhere else? Or perhaps add something else?

Yep. The allure of a convenient path is apparently too hard to resist. What you're describing seems to be happening, to some degree, with Windows PCs now. I'm not even sure Microsoft has beta testers for the OS - or even that they have many developers and coders these days. They just wing it and treat users like guinea pigs.

Anyone can be now! "Code a coffee ordering app now, make no mistakes."