Exhalation: Stories

experience is algorithmically incompressible.

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,”

if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.

When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.

It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

Brahman Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they are strengthening the building blocks of reality.