For those of you not in the know, Twitter is the wildly new IM-like/blog-like/text-message-like thing. Basically it is a text box that says "what are you doing?" with an "update" button. When you click update, it updates your personal Twitter page (you can also make your page private and only accessible to your Twitter friends, which is what I've done). Your personal page also has your friends' updates, so you can keep tabs on what everyone's doing (and reading online, etc).

You can also update your Twitter page (which is really a feed) by instant message or by text message, and you can receive your friends updates by IM or text to your phone (although this seems a bit obsessive, depending on how many friends you have on Twitter, but for Twitter's credit, you can receive updates from only some of your online friends).

Hard to describe, so go check it out.

Some people think Twitter is too much information or ruins your productivity. Others find it useful and here to stay.

I say that Twitter can be useful if we use it well. Don't use Twitter like a blog (short updates only), don't use it as IM (send personal messages through IM or email or text or phone, ok?), and don't simply post completely inane narcissistic stuff. Blog technology can be too much information or ruin productivity as well if used improperly. The keys are to have your blog readers or Twitter friends in mind when you blog or tweet, and to set up your personal system and habits appropriately to keep the technology serving you and not the other way around. Don't live to geek , geek to live, as Lifehacker puts it. :)

Like I've always said, I prefer to be a member of multiple, competing cults. That way I get all the benefits without getting stuck in any one ideology.

Today I removed the Firefox plugin GTDInbox (formerly GTDGmail). When I first found this I thought it was so freaking cool!! I mean, here's a technology that changes Gmail via a plugin to my web browser--how cool is that!

So I used it for about 6 months, but all that time kinda realized in the back of my head that there were now too many features in Gmail, and I really liked how simple Gmail was, and how fast. I didn't even realize it created tiny delays every time the view changed in Gmail until I got rid of it.

Now I've found a simpler solution that does what I need: simply using the labels in Gmail, plus the "C:" for context and the "P:" for project. That's all I really needed!

Pavlina's recent post on Subjective Reality and Nonviolence is bad philosophy and bad spirituality. The "subjective reality" position that Pavlina subscribes is a form of individualist subjectivistic reductionism, i.e. it reduces all things to what I experience. In other words, pure narcissism.

The perspective of subjective reality says the entire world — i.e. your seemingly objective physical reality — is a projection of your own consciousness.  This perspective suggests the only thing you can really change is yourself.  If you want to address the issue of violence in the world, you can only do so by turning within.

Like with many narcissistic philosophies of life, at first glance it appears to be a call for more personal responsibility. But in fact, the only call is to do your own personal inner work, which is only half the picture.

Working on ourselves is certainly important! And nearly everyone could use more inner work. But to raise inner work to the status of all-important conveniently removes our responsibility to others, freeing us to be self-obsessed personal-growth narcissists, and ignores real objective differences in resources.

If you inquire into the context of most of the subjective reality people, you'll find that (gasp!) they are all wealthy, white, 1st world county residents. The subjective reality fantasy completely denies the influences of culture and assumes 100% free will. This is an almost uniquely American habit, in our individualistic culture-blind culture.

And while some personality styles are more apt to do personal growth work, others are more systems and culture oriented. Similarly some cultures are more individualistic (America being the best example, as we are a culture of immigrants), and others are more culture or community centric, and others more systems-oriented.

Furthermore, the subjective reality position fails to be coherent. If the entire world is a projection of my consciousness, than I can change my consciousness by working on the world directly. I've found this to be true from direct experience--by engaging with the world, with relationships, with business, with community, with politics, my subjective experience changes. Change does not only flow outward. If we allow the world to change us, we can often be changed for the better.

If we’re ever encouraged to take action, it’s not on ourselves.  It’s on “the system.”

It is both-and, not either-or. We can work on ourselves and the system; we can work on the system by working on ourselves; we can work on ourselves by working on the system.

Taking a subjective reality stance is nearly as reactive and limiting as allowing ourselves to be overcome by fear and inaction.

In response to the Virginia Tech incident in particular, it is both uniquely America to have shootouts and to be narcissistic subjective reality reductionists. This is our cultural karma. One solution to these systematic problems in my opinion is to be more broad and integrated in our thinking by dialoguing in community, to develop the ability to hold multiple perspectives, and to build learning organizations that function integrally in healthy ways. Only then will we have the flexibility to overcome deep cultural patterns of radical and unhealthy individualism.

Passion and Reliability tend to be opposing poles. How many people are consistently both fully passionate and absolutely reliable?

Usually the person who is solid as a rock is also as dull as one. And your passionate artist friend can neither hold down a job nor return your phone calls.

I've cultivated passion, so that's no problem for me anymore. But I've been afraid of becoming too reliable, for then the world will expect things of me that I don't feel capable of doing consistently.

Which is why this is my new goal: I intend to be reliably passionate and passionately reliable in everything I do.

GTD helps big time. I'm now scoring 74 on my checklist, after being a paltry 33 when I wrote it 3 months ago. I fully intend to reach 90+ in 2-3 more months. And I'm taking my passion and lust for life with me--in fact it seems to increase the more reliable and organized I get. Fun!

Great things are happening!

YouTube is facinating, but I couldn't figure out it's usefulness until recently.

The cool thing about YouTube is not what's getting 1,000,000 views, but what's in the long tail.

Like this:


Krisnamacharya was one of the main fathers of yoga, a freaking genius, and master yogi. Now I can watch him do asana for free, anytime, and gain some insight into the history of this great tradition. Or I could just check out the latest viral entertainment.

We need to be thinking more about the spiritual potentials of new technology (like Twitter, like YouTube, like Podcasting). And we need to think about how to collectively develop habits such that technology serves our highest selves instead of our lowest, and without turning the technology itself into a false idol.

Zaadz is doing it. Buddhist Geeks is doing it.

Who else is wants to go technospiritual?

Sometimes the practical part of me gets frustrated with green products, like for instance the fine soaps from Pangea Organics.

My rational, practical brain says, "Who cares how organic your soap is! Let's work on the 'big rocks' first like carbon emissions."

But it just occurred to me tonight that this is not how values get changed in society. For many people, green must be linked to cool before it can be adopted at a deeper level, and Pangea does this beautifully.

Similarly, many people complain that yoga in the United States has degraded from a great spiritual tradition to narcissistic stretching aerobics classes. While I tend to agree with the shallowness of most people's practices, an alternative perspective is that practicing yoga is one step closer to spirit than these folks used to be, and it creates a "product funnel" that some practitioners will travel all the way through.

There is a danger that enough people won't make it to green values in time to prevent ecological collapse though, so even though the superficial can be a gateway to depth, we don't want to confuse the two.