An Ting's contemplating... 🤔

📚 Intrepid writer delighting in subverting genres 🕵🏻‍♀️ Exvangelical curious about the esoteric 🧶 Crochet lover 💁🏻‍♀️she/they 🌈 pfp: @makowwka

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

Here's a thread of threads I've woven thus far... is it eventually gonna be a colourful tapestry?

Let's find out!

[xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen) @xuanalogue]

I think it's important to recognize how a public dividend can still be a bad deal for content creators compared to banning AI -- for e.g. it won't be enough to offset the sharp drop in demand for human illustrators due to AI-generated images being cheaply available.

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

Would you like to hear more about:

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

Okay poll in next tweet if you’d like to hear some of the (weirdest and) most interesting stuff I’ve been a part of in sunny Singapore!

🇸🇬🤭🙏🏼

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

You need a personal invite to get access to the interesting stuff.

This isn’t something expats or tourists get access to.

[Alex Olshonsky @oloal]

Most cravings are misdirected prayers

[Liminal Warmth ❤️‍🔥 @liminal_warmth]

The fact that three AI apps are dominating the app store is a bigger deal than most people realize

Regardless of what political or data center positions some people express, the normie adoption is snowballing and AI is becoming ubiquitous

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

I actually agree with this tweet.

Sadly the most unhinged flee the country #iykyk

Fortunately for us, plenty still exist, albeit underground.

[Sherry Jiang is at ai engineer singapore @SherryYanJiang]

@AltcoinSherpa gotta be a bit more unhinged imo

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

I’d say both Phil & @AltcoinSherpa are both a lil right & a lil wrong.

As a Singaporean, having organised & been a part of many events…

The most interesting stuff is gatekept, not intentionally - it’s just how things are.

Foreigners never get to see the coolest bits of 🇸🇬.

[Phil Hedayatnia @PhilHedayatnia]

People like debating this to hell and back, but at the end of the day, Singapore is just small! Don't expect it to have the diversity and vibrance of the cultural capital of a country of half a billion people or more. It's less than 5 million people, and they're doing damn well!

Everything you love about the world cannot be in one city all of the time. There is no perfect place, but there are nice ones, and this place is one of them.

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

And even without a personal invite, networks take decades to cultivate.

Inching ever closer to 40, I still meet fascinating people every month & have the most scintillating conversations.

Singapore is so tightly knit & so tiny, outsiders can’t really comprehend how things are.

[Vacha @TVachaW]

The impulse to doomscroll comes from the fact that the brain’s dopamine system has identified your phone screen as a reliable source of pleasure.

One of the best short term ways to overcome this impulse is to establish healthier reliable sources of pleasure that are just as easy to access.

One way to do this is to learn how to become more sensitive to pleasure in your body.

You can do this via formal sitting sessions where you look inwards and patiently learning how to notice and cultivate pleasure in your body.

You can also do it by paying more attention to sensations of pleasure in you body as you go about your day.

Eventually, as your sensuality to pleasure in your body increases, your body will start to rival you screen as a reliable source of immediately accessible pleasure.

Then, every time you feel an impulse to grab your phone you can redirect that impulse towards finding and connecting to pleasurable sensations in your body.

Over time you can establish a new mental routine this way and rewire you brain’s reward system.

Positive techniques like this I think tend to work better than just trying to grit your teeth and resist addictive patterns without anything to replace them.

[Basho Society @BashoSociety]

summer moon
a pair of hands
meeting in prayer

Basho

[Vacha @TVachaW]

Did you know that the Buddha taught that if you practice the types of love that Jesus taught, you will go to heaven after you die?

In the Paṭhamamettāsutta Sutta, the Buddha teaches that there are 4 ways to ensure you go to heaven after you die.

The first is to practice loving kindness with great commitment in this life.

The others are practicing compassion, sympathetic joy or equanimity with great commitment in this life.

This matches up fairly well with the love portions of Jesus' teachings, which encourage radical loving kindness, compassion and equanimity (perhaps only missing sympathetic joy, which Paul fills in for with "rejoice with those who rejoice").

Of course, where they differ is that "heaven" in the Christian scheme is the highest destination, whereas on a Buddhist model, realizing nibanna is preferable to going to heaven.

But it's an interesting notion to me - that one of the areas that the teachings of Buddha and Jesus coincide is that living a life of love results in going to heaven after death.

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

Read more here:

https://t.co/4UBVp4dc6W

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

Happy Vesak Day!

☸️

Wrote some queer Vesak reflections.

🌈

My (slightly unorthodox) birthday present to Buddha as it were...

🥳

[xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen) @xuanalogue]

did not know this in the same way I did not know Canon refers to Kannon (Guanyin) Bodhisattva 😵‍💫

[xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen) @xuanalogue]

I don't feel deeply attached to my current life projects, and if external forces like AI make them subjectively meaningless, I feel okay pivoting to other projects, and optimistic about finding meaning even if others (human or AI) exceed me entirely at whatever I pursue next.

[xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen) @xuanalogue]

One benefit of going through a nihilist-existentialist phase as a teenager and later encountering Buddhist no-self doctrine is that I don't feel worried about AI "robbing my life of meaning" even if it eventually exceeds me at e.g. all knowledge production work I could do.

[Vacha @TVachaW]

When we look really closely at our sexual fantasies, we can see that they actually have nothing to do with the person we are fantasizing about.

A fantasy by its nature is always something we construct and project.

To some degree, it's a skill issue if we need new people to fulfil any given sexual fantasies.

As we become conscious of how we construct our fantasies, we gain more choice and optionality on how we construct them and who we project them onto.

With this skill well developed, it is almost always most satisfying to project it onto a person you love who you can explore it with in so much more depth.

The most interesting thing about sexual fantasy is that when we look at it even closer, we can see that we actually don't even need to project it onto other people.

There is an even deeper skill where we can see into the energy of the fantasy itself and see that it is whole and complete in itself without any need for projection.

Indeed this specific energy of sexuality is a particularly powerful one to meditate on when we stop recruiting it into fantasies and projecting it onto other people.

Because it is such an intense energy, it is one where the nature of reality can come into intesne and sharp focus when we look deeply into it.

Unplugging sexual energy from the matrix of fantasy creation / projection and sitting with that energy is ime one of the easiest ways to penetrate into the empty / unfixed nature of all phenomena.

Nothing viscerally drives home the unfixed nature of all phenomena like experiencing an energy that felt inextricably bound to some particular desire, fantasy or projection, unwind itself into pure, blissful, spacious empty awareness.

In doing so, we see how our desires are constructed, how they can be deconstructed.

This also allows us to see how that they were never inherently desires in the first place, but just an infinitely flexible energy bent into an arbitrarily desire-shaped posture.

This is an extremely useful skill for spiritual development.

But on a mundane level it is also an extremely useful tool for learning how to experience are fantasies as tools we wield rather than compulsions we're beholden to.

[Vacha @TVachaW]

If you want to have more mental dexterity, you should learn to cultivate the intelligence contained within your hands.

If you want to get better at digesting and processing information, you should learn to cultivate the intelligence contained within your gut.

If you want to live a more virtuous and upright life, you should learn to cultivate the intelligence contained within your spine.

If you want to have more warm and kind thoughts, you should learn to cultivate the intelligence contained within your spine.

The good news is that cultivating each of these intelligences is actually very simple.

All you have to do is bring deep awareness to the body part in question, then genuinely listen to it with an attitide of genuine openness to the idea it has something to teach you.

We shouldn't be so over-reliant on the intelligence contained in our head. Doing so, is really like living life with your hands tied behind your back.

[An Ting's contemplating... 🤔 @antingreads]

@__drewface 💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼

One day if I should visit / stay in NYC, I’d be sure to hit you up!

Heard so many good things.