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Meeting the mysterious @BooksOnTheTub.

12 October, 201712 October, 2017 ~ poorbjorn

05.45 AM – Meeting the mysterious man behind Books on the Tub.

He got a hold of my “to-read”-list and had a few books in his collection that where in the list. So this morning, at un ungodly hour, I meet him in person for the first time and got a stack of interesting books.

“King of the world” – David Remnick
“The Four Alignments” – Don Miguel Ruiz
“Siddhartha” -Herman Hesse

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Posted in Blog posts audio books books boxing Buddhism donmiguelruiz enlightenment meditation morning Muhammedali personal development reading selfactualization siddhartha thefouralignments

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Reading List 2018
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This short and sweet books became the next stop for my Hermann Hesse obsession. —- The story has magical, almost mystical feel to it. Almost impossible to understand at times, but we are being warned, that the story about to be told about the journey to the East, is an untellable story. It’s not just a journey in space, but also in time. It’s is also both biographical and fictional. —- The main character, H.H, loses touch with himself, his Being and his previously natural creativity. In an attempt to re-live past days of glory he sets out to write an account of his greatest adventure; his journey to the East with The League. —- The League is a secret society that he ones where part of, with roots going back thousands of years. Famous members including both real and fictional hotshots like Plato, Mozart, Pythagoras, Don Quixote, Puss in Boots, and the ferryman Vasudeva (from Siddhartha) just to name a few. —- ”But no account of David (note: King David that is.) can prove to me that life is not just a game. That is just what life is when it’s beautiful and happy —- a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier? Goodbye, pleased to have met you!” — - Leo to H.H in Journey to the East. —- It’s an honest and personal story about the cycle faith gained, lost and regained. The unending search for enlightenment. —- It didn’t grab me right away but when I got into it I couldn’t put it down before I reached the last page. Beautiful book! —- What should be my next Hesse book? 🤔Btw. Just ordered The Stranger by Camus. So expect more classic fiction going forward! 😊 —— 4/5

This book left me humbled. I thought I was on top of my media game and was able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I was wrong. —- I knew the situation was bad, I even quit following “the news” 3 years ago because I thought it misrepresented reality to a larger degree than it represented it (and for the sake of my own my wellbeing), but Ryan Holidays confessions from his career as a media manipulator paints a darker picture than I could ever imagine. —- 📝 The constraints of blogging create artificial content (shamings, planted stories, sensational speculations etc..), which is made real and impacts the outcome of real world events. —- 📝 Trading up the chain: How to turn nothing into something! Send stories to small traffic hungry blogs with non-existing editorial standards and have them being picked up by bigger and bigger outlets until your fabricated story is national news. —- 📝 “The world is boring, but the news is exciting. It’s a paradox of modern life.” —- 📝 Top stories all polarize people. Threaten peoples belonging, belief or behavior and you will have a hit that will spreads! —- 📝 The economics of the web has made it impossible to portray the complex situation of Detroit accurately. Photographs of abandoned houses was shared like crazy while photos of the same houses with it’s despairing residents included was “too sad to share”, creating less incentive for media. Simple narratives > complex realities. —- 📝 On User Engagement: Provoke a person enough for them to be motivated to leave a comment. In the process of registering to be eligible to comment, a user has to go through up to 10 pageviews. That’s a lot of ads (and ad revenue!). —- ⭐️ TAKEAWAY: Sensational and fearmongering headlines has always made me sad. Understanding the structure and constraints of click-based media is essential. These structure explains almost everything they do. It’s the nature of the system. —— 4/5

I’m focusing on notes this time around! —— Watts does a really great job at explaining ideas that seem to be at the core of most religious and spiritual teachings. —— 📝 The Law of Reversed Effort. ”When you try to stay on the surface of water, you sink; but when you try to sink you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it— which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.” —— 📝 There is a contradiction between the desire of being secure and fact of change. We want to be separate from the life of flux and change to feel secure and that, paradoxically, create the sense of loneliness and fear. “The desire for security and the fear of insecurity are the same thing”. —— 📝 “You want to escape the pain, but the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame the agony”. —— 📝 “Look!” —— 📝 Money is as a token for wealth. “In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are “coins” for real things”. They represent them but are not those things. Words are fixed while what they represent change. —— 📝 “When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectations must come to an end”. —— 📝 “So long as there is the motive to become something, so long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what is at this moment, there can be no freedom”. —- 🤯 Is the brain really good for us? Or is it taking on a destructive evolutionary specialization by our focus on trying to predict the future? —- ⚖️ This book is a given in the library of the spiritually minded reader, alongside modern classics like the works of Eckhart Tolles, and timeless classic like Bhagavad Gita and Tao Te Ching. —- 5/5

“Each generation of media has a different cock in its mouth.” - Trust me, I’m Lying - by Ryan Holiday —— This book reminded me of a quote, which I first heard in Nicholas Carrs book The Shallows: “The medium is the message.” —— How many times have I neglected sharing interesting aspects and thoughts about books because I know the word-limit on Instagram (and modern attention spans 😜) won’t allow for nuance and depth? — more than ones! Instagram, as a media dictates to a large degree what type of content is being created for it. —— Anyway, I hope you all enjoy summer! ☀️ BTW, What’s the most outrageously click-baity headline you’ve seen recently? 🤔 —— Review incoming!

“By trying to understand everything in terms of memory, the past, and words, we have, as it were, had our noses in the guidebook for most of our lives, and have never looked at the view” —- Alan Watts - The Wisdom of Insecurity —- This is one of two new books I started last week. This one was written in 1951, the same year the immortal cancer cells, known as HeLa, where discovered; which is the main topic of the other book ”The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”. What a coincidence! —- What book on Eastern Philosophy are on your To-Read-List? 🤔 —- Review coming soon!

This book was really really hard for me to get into. I had a hard time to relating to the his story, and the politics and courtroom drama was a snooze for me. The only thing keeping me going with this book was that I felt is was important for me to familiarize with Nelson Mandela’s achievements in the lifelong struggle against apartheid. He was an extraordinarily man to say the least. —— 📝 “Habit makes everything look bland; it is sleep-inducing. Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again.” This quote reminds me of Montaigne, who loved this perspective switching trick all the time in his writing. —- 📝 “A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor that defines the nature of the struggle.” After using all the tools of non-violent resistance - only to be beaten down hard - the AMC had to turn to violence and fight fire with fire. —— 📝 After a successful term as president, he declined not to run again, this was to set an example of power being turned over to the next generation. —— ⭐️ TAKEAWAY: Resilience, Forgiveness and Perseverance. These are the traits I associate with Mandela. “We should forget the past and concentrating on building a better future for all”. His focus on the future and forgiveness - rather than revenge - hastened the abolition of apartheid, I think. —- I’m not regretting pushing myself through this tome of a book, quite the opposite, I feel like another missing puzzle piece in my history education is found and put in place. —— What booked bored you, but you felt reading it was important enough to keep going? 🤔 —— 3/5 —— Photo credit: @ildarabbit

Do we face a crisis in masculine identity? This books claims that’s the case. The disintegration of traditional family systems being one reason - but it’s not whole story. —— There are two other factors: —— Lack of initiation into manhood leaves modern society to a dominance of Boy psychology. —— The other factor is patriarchy which is the expression of the immature masculine. What today is called patriarchy is really “puerarcy” (I.e the rule of boys) - like Lord of the flies! An expression of boy psychology and the shadow (crazy) side of mature masculinity. The authors see patriarchy as an attack on both masculinity and femininity in its fullest. Boys fear women and boys fear real men. —— So how do we deal with this? In lack of rituals we have to each find our own way to Man psychology and that’s the purpose of the book. To help us on our way by showing how to access the mature masculine energies. —— 📝 For initiation rituals to work there needs to be a death. Effective, transformative initiation slays the ego. This is not the case for our modern initiations (I.e military, criminal gangs). ——- 📝 The Patriarchal male does not welcome full masculine and feminine development. The more beauty, maturity, creativity and generativity we display the more envy, and hate we generate in superiors and peers. ——- 📝 King, Warrior, Magician, Lover being the dominant masculine archetypes. We have all archetypes within us. Like board members we need to make all of them heard. —— 📝 We can only admire others if we have a sense of our own worthiness. —— 📝 Kings in the ancient world was often ritually killed when their ability to live out the King archetype began to fail. —— 📝 If we are not secure enough in our inner structure, we will rely on our performance in the outer world to bolster our self confidence. —— TAKEAWAY: By learning about the archetypes and their shadow versions we can assess them in ourself. I have a hard time imagining anyone reading this book without getting an aha- moment for sudden insights, whether it’s about yourself or people around you. Loved it! —— I posted my full notes on my site. (LINK IN BIO.) —— 5/5 —— Archetype are you most aligned with?

Looking through my reading list for the last couple of years I noticed that I have some major shortcomings when it comes to diversity in my reading. —— Diversity has many components, a major one being the inclusion of different kinds of people - and I want to start with addressing the lack female representation on my bookshelf. —— I have noticed that there is a lack a women in my literary life. My wife pointed this out to me a few days ago and I told her that I was aware of the problem and that I have taken measures to improve it. I read more books by female authors than ever before. She follow up with; “and how many of those books are about women?”. This question highlighted another issue; When I read books by women the subject is usually men (Montaigne, Theodore Roosevelt, Warren Buffett to name a few bios). —— Now is need your help with recommendations for books BY women and/or ABOUT women. I know you have quality suggestions! 📚 🤔

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