Pascal Quignard - Le sexe et l'effroi

Based on old Roman texts, the author depicts some Roman habits and myths - building around two main themes sexuality and fear.

- Epicur is the 3rd century's Freud:

a. a person that doesn't enjoy life, creates his own illness.

b. any person, in his own intimacy, has a restless heart, that drives the soul crazy with silly thoughts.

- we were born animals, thus regardless of the number of laws, the humanity cannot escape it's animal roots.

- Septimius: "the one who writes - sodomizes, while the reader is sodomized"

- 470 a.d - Sollius Sidonius Apollinaris: "There are no longer hierarchies between the noble people, hierarchies that allowed us in the past to know the ranks; thus from now on the only hint about how noble one person is, will be found in the amount of knowledge".

Suetoniu, talking about emperor August's death: talking to his friends the emperor asked if they think he played a good role in the comedy of life, and than he added 'if i played well, give a round of applause for the play'

The French Lieutenant's Woman - by John Fowles

Written as an exercise of Victorian literature, the book depicts the psychological evolution of an impossible love. The characters psyche is Victorian, and all their inner evolution follows the epoch's constraints.

Island, by Aldous Huxley

Written towards the end of his life, the book draws Huxley's view about the perfect utopic society. With only minor influences from Brave New World, Huxley succeeds in creating a society where Budhism, psichology and medicine, drugs and sexuality, and many more, all add their benefit to the individual experience, to the personal achievement.

Quotes worth thinking about:

- But Good Being is in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences. So be aware - aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering.

- faith is something very different from belief. Belied is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's .. - people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history - sadism versus duty, sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia.. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being.

- .. about the sexuality of children. What we're born with , what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn't concentrated on the genitals; it's a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That's the paradise we inherit.

- does one learn how to forget?

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet be here, on the spot, with the living.

- one has no right to inflict one's sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn't sad. One just has to accept one's grief and one's absurd attempts to be a stoic.

- Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment.

- Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

- You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions.

- Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible.

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

- "I" affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; "am" denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. "I am". Two tiny word, but what an enormity of untruth.

- .. a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.

- The point is to get people to understand we're not at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we're disturbed by what's going on inside our heads, we can do something about it.

- one thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.

Book Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature - website, laureates

Pulizer - website, awards

Man Booker Prize (UK, 1969, fiction) - website, awards

Orange Prize (UK, 1996, English female authors) - website

Commonwealth Writers' Prize (UK, 1987) - website

National Book Awards (USA) - website

American Booksellers Association (USA) - website

Goncourt (France) - website

Prix Medicis  (France) - website

Prix  Renaudot  (France) - website

Prix  Femina (France) - website

Premio Nacional de Literatura (Espagna)

Romulo Gallegos (Venezuela, 1967)

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

The book tells the story of the cultural and emotional regression (degradation) of a group of young English school-boys that are by accident all alone on a deserted island. Some philosophical reasonings come to attention: hedonism versus responsibility, self versus group, death morality versus group adherence, innocence versus savagery.
The author leaves children to play and evolve under our eyes, their simple and rudimentary decisions become, at a smaller scale, the decisions of the modern civilization.

Mindfulness In Plain English - by Ven. Henepola Gunaratana

A good friend recommended this book, you can download it using the link.

This is the most clear book on meditation I've read until now. It clearly states what meditation is, and is not, it does not go into philosophy that much (unless needed for the understanding of the techniques), it gives lots of details and alternatives to the techniques used, it states what can go wrong and how to fix it, and what are the stages along the way.

Thought scramble / distractions (= monkey mind) =>
thought understanding (patience and usage of positive feelings as antidotes) =>
meditation (= mindfulness & concentration) =>
enlightenment

Some quotes I especially liked:

• The purpose of Vipassana meditation is nothing less than the radical and permanent transformation of your entire sensory and cognitive experience. It is meant to revolutionize the whole of your life experience. Those periods of seated practice are times set aside for instilling new mental habits. You learn new ways to receive and understand sensation. You develop new methods of dealing with conscious thought, and new modes of attending to the incessant rush of your own emotions. These new mental behaviors must be made to carry over into the rest of your life.
• You search for that thing you call 'me', but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them. You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective and defensive over these pitiful things and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself -- physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings and emotions -- it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for 'me'. You find nothing. In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes which have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

• When you hate somebody you think, "Let him be ugly. Let him lie in pain. Let him have no prosperity. Let him not be right. Let him not be famous. Let him have no friends. Let him, after death, reappear in an unhappy state of depravation in a bad destination in perdition." However, what actually happens is that your own body generates such harmful chemistry that you experience pain, increased heart beat, tension, change of facial expression, loss of appetite for food, deprivation of sleep and appear very unpleasant to others. You go through the same things you wish for your enemy. Also you cannot see the truth as it is. Your mind is like boiling water. Or you are like a patient suffering from jaundice to whom any delicious food tastes bland. Similarly, you cannot appreciate somebody's appearance, achievement, success, etc. As long as this condition exists, you cannot meditate well.
• Those who have studied Buddhism superficially are quick to conclude that it is a pessimistic set of teachings, always harping on unpleasant things like suffering, always urging us to confront the uncomfortable realities of pain, death and illness. Buddhist thinkers do not regard themselves as pessimists--quite the opposite, actually. Pain exists in the universe; some measure of it is unavoidable. Learning to deal with it is not pessimism, but a very pragmatic form of optimism. How would you deal with the death of your spouse? How would you feel if you lost your mother tomorrow? Or your sister or your closest friend? Suppose you lost your job, your savings, and the use of your hands, on the same day; could you face the prospect of spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair? How are you going to cope with the pain of terminal cancer if you contract it, and how will you deal with your own death, when that approaches? You may escape most of these misfortunes, but you won't escape all of them. Most of us lose friends and relatives at some time during our lives; all of us get sick now and then; at the very least you are going to die someday. You can suffer through things like that or you can face them openly--the choice is yours.
• Pain is inevitable, suffering is not. Pain and suffering are two different animals.
• If the breath seems an exceedingly dull thing to observe over and over, you may rest assured of one thing: You have ceased to observe the process with true mindfulness. Mindfulness is never boring. Look again. Don't assume that you know what breath is. Don't take it for granted that you have already seen everything there is to see. If you do, you are conceptualizing the process. You are not observing its living reality. When you are clearly mindful of breath or indeed anything else, it is never boring. Mindfulness looks at everything with the eyes of a child, with the sense of wonder. Mindfulness sees every second as if it were the first and the only second in the universe. So look again.
• Restlessness is often a cover-up for some deeper experience taking place in the unconscious. We humans are great at repressing things. Rather than confronting some unpleasant thought we experience, we try to bury it. We won't have to deal with the issue.
• Thoughts of greed cover everything connected with desire, from outright avarice for material gain, all the way down to a subtle need to be respected as a moral person. Thoughts of hatred run the gamut from petty peevishness to murderous rage. Delusion covers everything from daydreaming through actual hallucinations. Generosity cancels greed. Benevolence and compassion cancel hatred. You can find a specific antidote for any troubling thought if you just think about it a while.
• The purpose of meditation is not to concentrate on the breath, without interruption, forever. That by itself would be a useless goal. The purpose of meditation is not to achieve a perfectly still and serene mind. Although a lovely state, it doesn't lead to liberation by itself. The purpose of meditation is to achieve uninterrupted mindfulness. Mindfulness, and only mindfulness, produces Enlightenment.
• mindfulness and concentration. A bit of caution on this term: The word 'hindrances' carries a negative connotation, and indeed these are states of mind we want to eradicate. That does not mean, however, that they are to be repressed, avoided or condemned.
  Let's use greed as an example. We wish to avoid prolonging any state of greed that arises, because a continuation of that state leads to bondage and sorrow. That does not mean we try to toss the thought out of the mind when it appears. We simply refuse to encourage it to stay. We let it come, and we let it go. When greed is first observed with bare attention, no value judgements are made. We simply stand back and watch it arise. The whole dynamic of greed from start to finish is simply observed in this way. We don't help it, or hinder it, or interfere with it in the slightest. It stays as long as it stays. And we learn as much about it as we can while it is there. We watch what greed does. We watch how it troubles us, and how it burdens others. We notice how it keeps us perpetually unsatisfied, forever in a state of unfulfilled longing. From this first-hand experience, we ascertain at a gut level that greed is an unskillful way to run your life. There is nothing theoretical about this realization.
• desire => want more => use more energy to get it => never ending circle
• Aversion: Suppose that you have been distracted by some negative experience. It could be something you fear or some nagging worry. It might be guilt or depression or pain. Whatever the actual substance of the thought or sensation, you find yourself rejecting or repressing -- trying to avoid it, resist it or deny it. The handling here is essentially the same. Watch the arising of the thought or sensation. Notice the state of rejection that comes with it. Gauge the extent or degree of that rejection. See how long it lasts and when it fades away.
• Every mental state has a birth, a growth and a decay. You should strive to see these stages clearly. This is no easy thing to do, however. As we have already noted, every thought and sensation begins first in the unconscious region of the mind and only later rises to consciousness. We generally become aware of such things only after they have arisen in the conscious realm and stayed there for some time. Indeed we usually become aware of distractions only when they have released their hold on us and are already on their way out. It is at this point that we are struck with the sudden realization that we have been somewhere, day-dreaming, fantasizing, or whatever. Quite obviously this is far too late in the chain of events. We may call this phenomenon catching the lion by its tail, and it is an unskillful thing to do. Like confronting a dangerous beast, we must approach mental states head-on.
• Meditation is a bit like mental acid. It eats away slowly at whatever you put it on. We humans are very odd beings. We like the taste of certain poisons and we stubbornly continue to eat them even while they are killing us. Thoughts to which we are attached are poison. You will find yourself quite eager to dig some thoughts out by the roots while you jealously guard and cherish certain others. That is the human condition.
• Mindfulness is mirror-thought. It reflects only what is presently happening and in exactly the way it is happening. There are no biases.
  Mindfulness is non-judgmental observation. It is that ability of the mind to observe without criticism. With this ability, one sees things without condemnation or judgment. One is surprised by nothing. One simply takes a balanced interest in things exactly as they are in their natural states. One does not decide and does not judge. One just observes.
• Mindfulness is goal-less awareness. In Mindfulness, one does not strain for results. One does not try to accomplish anything. When one is mindful, one experiences reality in the present moment in whatever form it takes. There is nothing to be achieved. There is only observation.
• Mindfulness, one is an unbiased observer whose sole job is to keep track of the constantly passing show of the universe within. Please note that last point. In Mindfulness, one watches the universe within. The meditator who is developing Mindfulness is not concerned with the external universe. It is there, but in meditation, one's field of study is one's own experience, one's thoughts, one's feelings, and one's perceptions. In meditation, one is one's own laboratory. The universe within has an enormous fund of information containing the reflection of the external world and much more. An examination of this material leads to total freedom.
• There are three fundamental activities of Mindfulness. We can use these activities as functional definitions of the term: (1) Mindfulness reminds us of what we are supposed to be doing; (2) it sees things as they really are; and (3) it sees the deep nature of all phenomena.
• Mindfulness alone has the power to reveal the deepest level of reality available to human observation: (a) all conditioned things are inherently transitory; (b) every worldly thing is, in the end, unsatisfying; and (c) there are really no entities that are unchanging or permanent, only processes.
• Mindfulness reminds the meditator to apply his attention to the proper object at the proper time and to exert precisely the amount of energy needed to do the job.
• Concentration should be regarded as a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. A sharp knife can be used to create a beautiful carving or to harm someone. It is all up to the one who uses the knife. Concentration is similar. Properly used, it can assist you
  towards liberation. But it can also be used in the service of the ego. It can operate in the framework of achievement and competition. You can use concentration to dominate others. You can use it to be selfish. The real problem is that concentration alone will not give you a perspective on yourself. It won't throw light on the basic problems of selfishness and the nature of suffering. It can be used to dig down into deep psychological states. But even then, the forces of egotism won't be understood.
• In a state of mindfulness, you see yourself exactly as you are. You see your own selfish behavior. You see your own suffering. And you see how you create that suffering. You see how you hurt others. You pierce right through the layer of lies that you normally tell yourself and you see what is really there. Mindfulness leads to wisdom.
• We spend most of our time running on automatic pilot, lost in the fog of day-dreams and preoccupations.
• One of the most frequently ignored aspects of our existence is our body

There should be a clear difference between tasks/actions on one hand and feelings and actions tight with those feelings on the other hand. One should be able to be Mindfull on the first and do the task, while should be analytical-Mindfull with the second. Otherwise the meditator would not be able to solve any activity.
VERIFY THIS AGAINST
"The meditator learns to pay bare attention to the birth, growth, and decay of all the phenomena of the mind. He turns from none of it, and he lets none of it escape. Thoughts and emotions, activities and desires, the whole show. He watches it all and he watches it continuously. It matters not whether it is lovely or horrid, beautiful or shameful."

Foucault's_Pendulum - Umberto Eco

Reminded me of two books "Alice in wonderland" and "Da Vinci Code", the plot is about the creation of a mystical book by three authors. While in the creation process, the book affects the author's lives profoundly.
I did not enjoy the tons of mystical, Templars and RosiCrucians literature cut-pasted in the book,
never the less I did enjoy the creative process, and the final plot, but that is aprox less than 10% of the whole book.

Norwegian Forest - by Haruki Murakami

The book follows the story of 2 Japanese teenagers, that are in love. Both of them go through a shock, after their best friend, and the former lover of the girl, commits suicide.

Recommended readings:
- "The Centaur" - John Updike
- "Sexual Beings" - Kenzaburo Oe - Nobel Prize '94
- "August Light" - Faulkner
- "Beneath the Wheel" - Hermann Hesse

Midnight's Children - by Salman Rushdie

This is the last time I read Rushdie .. :(

It is my second attempt to read Rushdie, after "The Satanic Verses"; this time I finished the book, and I was very disappointed. After finishing the book, I thought I should have known more about the Indian history in order to really appreciate it, but than I read the description on Wikipedia, and the review there is exactly as I would describe the book in a few words..

John Fowles - "The Collector"

Two completely different characters meet, an artist young girl, dedicated to art, creation, love and life, and a brain-limited butterfly collector, in search for love.

Striking is the intersection of the two universes that seem not to have anything in common, even the understanding of one character from the perspective of the other is very far from the truth. A reminder of how different people are, think, feel, and understand the others.

The Dalai Lama at MIT

Brief:
This is one of the most rewarding books I read on Buddhism, and the connections with the modern sciences like psychology and neurology.
Some prominent Western scientist meet Buddhist monks under the roof or MIT, and discuss topics of interests for both parts, as well as means of better collaborating in the future. Main topics are:
- attention and cognitive control
- imagery and visualization
- emotion



Some thoughts:
- attention as a relaxing state of mind (effortless process)

- how can we possibly experience compassion for a person who engages in evil, especially if this very harmful behavior is directed toward ourselves

- emotions in Buddhism: the concept of emotion as we know it plays practically no role in the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist discussions of the mind. There is no term in the traditional Buddhist vocabulary that resembles our notion of emotion

- the connection between feelings and afflictions is crucial in Abhidharma: on the basis of our misapprehension of the self, we become entangled in the compulsive attitudes that lead us into suffering.

- the possibility that certain emotions such as anger, that we normally consider destructive might contain some root component that is valuable, that can be used skillfully to overcome obstacles. What is the evolutionary role for what Buddhists would consider nonvirtuous emotions like anger and fear?

- What is interesting is that ordinary people have so little insight into the sources of their own well-being and happiness. Both traditions agree on that. There isn't a lot of mystery about why Westerners believe that transitory pleasures should last. We live in a consumer society. It's meant to maximize consumption, not our happiness. We want to maximize our happiness and the society wants to maximize our consumption, and so we are taught that our consumption will bring us happiness. It turns out to be a lie, but we dies soon enough and then a whole new generation gets to believe it.

- Even if the trained introspectionist were able to pierce the veil that hides the fast-moving, subtle changes that occur in brain and body, the person would have great difficulty in sharing that information with others. Perhaps nature wanted these feelings to remain secret, locked in each agent's sense of his being. "I've often mistrusted the spoken word. You give a quick tug on a line and out they come from the dark continent of the mind, those little rasps of sound that jostle together, shoulder to shoulder, that are supposed to be able to five shape to what you really think, feel, or know. But words easily miss the point. They drift in the wrong direction, or they insist on providing a clear shape for something that, by its nature, is lost when it's pinned down." (Julia Blackburn)

- Buddha's teachings: "you are right to doubt, because you double that which should be doubted - because you don't know. When you hear something being expressed of this nature, you shouldn't accept it just because it's widespread news that everyone thinks this way. You shouldn't follow it just because it's what your parents do. You shouldn't follow it just because it's the lates new thing. You shouldn't follow it just because it 's cited in scriptures. You shouldn't follow it just because it is hammered out by logic or by inductive or deductive reasoning. And you shouldn't follow it just because it appeals to common sense, or because of the credibility of the speaker, or even because it's your own teacher who's saying it to you. If you take something and apply it, see whether it leads to benefit for peaceful, more harmonious, more benevolent? Then take it and use it. If it makes life more difficult and more harmful for yourself and others, than leave it aside."




Suggestions of reading:
- Abhidharma: one of the oldest Buddhist textual traditions. It contains the earlier texts in which Buddhist concepts were developed, as such it has been the source of most philosophical developments in Indian Buddhism.
- Howard Cutler - "The Art of Happiness": "The systematic training of the mind, the cultivation of happiness, the genuine inner transformation by deliberately selecting and focusing on positive mental states and challenging negative mental states, is possible because of the very structure and function of the brain. But the wiring in our brains is not static, not irrevocably fixed. Our brains are also adaptable" (Dalai Lama)

"Why Most Things Fail: And how to avoid it" by Paul Ormerod

Brief:
An interesting book of modern-wave economy. The author proves that the universe of a company is way to complex to be understood, thus any strategy has an undetermined probability to succeed or fail. There is a great number of examples of strategies that failed, of big companies that really did not understood their market even after being a leader in the business for many years. Also the game theory is presented, along with the ice-cream vendors on the beach game.
I personally did not appreciate a great deal the "What is to be done?" chapter, otherwise the book has tons of good information.

Links to other books:
- "Scale and Scope: the Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism" by Alfred Chandler
Charts in great detail the development of large firms in America, Britain and Germany around 1900

- "Eat the rich" by P.J. O'Rourke
"Microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally"

- "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" by Marlin Eller
About Microsoft strategies, and the lack/luck of it..

- "The Country of the Blind" by H.G. Wells
"In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King."

New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought by Todd G. Buchholz and Martin Feldstein

"Our children are no longer raised by people who know the world, not because parents have gotten stupid or lazy, but because the world has gotten too big to master. Parents must eventually learn to teach their children how to handle uncertainty - not how to ensure stability"

I find that all people that know very well their business, they obey two rules: first they can make even a stupid man understand, by simple and amusing stories, such a way regardless of how complicated all seems so simple and common; and second they can always look at many sides of the story, and as Keynes "always have two answers for one question". This reminded me of other two writers I liked a lot Stephen Hawking and Bill Bryson, that after analyzing many theories, inside up, they come to the conclusion that sill there is much to discover.

The book simply presents all the important economists and their ideas through the centuries, with lots of humor and simple example. I found out about: Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" - the free market, the division of labor, deregulations.. Found out the the prophecies of overpopulation and global climate change are actually very old, dating from Malthus time, that is around 1800. Found out how Ricardo's law of "competitive advantage" works, and why free trade is so important.

Jeremy Bentham's "pleasure, pain and arithmetic" sounded a little similar to Dalai Lama's teachings, thou I am pretty sure I have to read a little more into it.. :)

Also found out about John Stuart Mill's theories, Karl Marx life and "contributions", Alfred Marshall's marginalist theories, economic time - short and long runs (and how our perception of morality and ethics changes given a different time constraint), the biological view of economy.

And here comes the fun part:
1. Institutionalists:
- Thorstein Veblen and his "Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899) "Clothing use to have labels on the inside, hidden from view. [..] Ralph Lauren's name tells the world that the wearer can afford expensive clothing."
A follower, John K Galbraith - "advertising and salesmanship cannot be reconciled with the notion of independently determined desires, for their central function is to create desire - to ring into being wants that previously did not exist "

- The creativity of engineers, in the face of business man
- Economy and law - hand in hand, and how does it apply to negligence, property, crime and corporate finance.

2. MV = PQ : Keynes vs Friedman (monetarist), and how modern economies are shaken/driven by the four pedals that these currents created.

3. The Public Choice School/The politics as a business: trying to explain why politicians act as they do, and what are their constraints from an economical point of view.

4. The Rational Expectations and Behavioral Economics: that brings fresh ideas on stock exchange and the new economy we leave in. "Stock picking is ineffective because so many people engage in research and stock analysis." "Plenty of brokers and publicists rave about their predictions. Careful studies uncover little reason to believe them."
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - theories on how people react depending on the why the problem is formulated. Rchard Thaler's intertemporal choice - how people value the future - the people discount the future too much.

Even so, even if my late-hour review is just a long list of names, at the end of the story it is a good start point to investigate more, at least on bold topics. Night night.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins

Definitively a must-read book for any company, manager and self-motivated employees.

The book is a remarkable synthesis on the research analysis of the Forbes's company top in the last 70 years. From all the companies that made it in the top, they especially select and analyze companies that respect one pattern: when they started growing as a business, successfully sustained the growth of the company for several years in a raw.

Incredible or not, from thousands of companies, only 11 were selected!
Even more incredible are their conclusions regarding: motivation, team cohesion, creating a unique-company-concept for income, and keeping to that concept regardless of what it takes.

The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic by Wade Davis

Wade Davis is one of the persons I really admire. He dedicated an important part of his life to anthropology and ethnobotany, so he is one of the persons who tried it all from the herbalist point of view.. :) up-to meeting the most interesting and remote communities of people.

In this book, Davis relates his stay in Haiti, a place and culture that he felt in love with.
His story presents the mind-set of the local people. Through the eyes of the US PhD author, the voodoos are presented, very different from the Hollywood's portrait, with subtle and insight details of the zombies, their herbals, their secrets, and people way of thinking.

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel

I found by mistake "Zen Bow, Zen Arrow - John Stevens" while killing time in Cape Town, looking for presents, and it directed me to "Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel", which I prefer from the two books.

Both of the books are about Awa Kenzo, the Japanese archery master, the big difference is that Herrigel is the one that actually took classes with the master, and recalls his history.

Other than the clear explanation of the sport itself, and the struggles to learn it, I liked a lot the explanation of the meditation while doing archery, or any another Asian art (even gardening). At the end of the day is the story of a westerner, that tries to understand the mindset of orientals through the art of archery; and as I was also arguing in this post, this is not that easy as it seems.. :)

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

A good book, basically it talks about improving one-self up-to the point that one can do a task, perfectly without even thinking of it.

Also I have recently seen an interesting documentary about the savant syndrome, and it seems that the research in this field may one day provide us means to develop our mind in the most unusual ways. Ex: the Chinese scholars that practice long computations with the abac, after several year, they can compute without the abac long computations, without even not thinking about it, by a simple movement of the hand.

Also interesting enough is the other side of the story, the more you develop your inner side, the more it is possible to affect your means of interrelation with other people.

Dalai Lama

"Freedom in Exile" was one of the first books to introduce me to the Buddhist religion, even more the book is the presentation of the Dalai Lama's first years of life, through the eyes of the mature man; still the text is abundant in childish jokes, making this one of the best autobiographies I have read so far.

"Ethics for the New Millennium" is an approach to the tough subject of ethics through the eyes of the Dalai Lama. I would silly-interpret the main idea as follows "an ethic action is an action that makes the vast majority of people happy". Quite difficult I presume to measure the happiness of the people around us, when taking an action; never the less interesting enough, the theories seem quite similar with what I found about Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian writings; I will investigate more on the topics.

The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

In the book, Friedman analysis the new world, and the means of collaboration in between companies. One can ignore this book, as one can ignore his company.. :)

Ex, I found great the means of using other channels for fast deployment and support in the large world-market.

I especially enjoyed his African proverb quote, and use it as my motto:

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running. (Africa proverb)"

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner

A charming book, because each idea, as crazy as it might seem, is backed-up by numbers and facts. One can find out:
- who cheats? Bagel Man: "mankind may be more honest than we think"
- understanding KKK and why a new car is suddenly worth so much less the moment it leaves the lot
- why drug dealers still live with their moms.

Regardless of the question, the way each theory is proven is great! Take nothing for granted.. :)