Trip to China — part 3: where am I now

This is more about things after the trip to China.
While I was in China, many times I have to multitask. It is not real multitask since at every moment I am still just doing one thing. But there are just many things coming at you almost the same time. My father just gave me the [...]

Read Full Post »

The revolution in America

In America, a revolution is happening now. Actually it is better to be called Evolution. It is not very much recognized by the public so far since it is has been going mostly peacefully. The impact of this evolution to human society is going to far exceed that of American revolution 200 years ago.
The evolution, [...]

Read Full Post »

Trip to China — part 2

I put off for a long time to write about my trip to China, despite some friends’ request. They don’t know how despaired I am from this trip. I am in total despair, knowing that it is impossible for me to do what I want to do (Open Source Learning) in China. But coming back [...]

Read Full Post »

Review of 2008 posts

I just reviewed all the posts I had this past year (2008). Now I summarized them below as an outline of a potential book. Before I have more time to work on this, here is a very rough draft.
The outline of the book:
Part 1: Individual:
ch 1: brain, mind, consciousness, growth of consciousness, and how they [...]

Read Full Post »

How to take back our democracy Part 2: Democracy, Money, Social Products, Local Services, the Power of Consciousness

This is to follow up with the part 1
The power of politics is the power to make laws to govern. The law should be minimum. Otherwise it become a tool to restrict people’s freedom instead of facilitate it. So by nature, what we can do should be much larger than what should be governed. Thus [...]

Read Full Post »

Play

Play
When the world is still, the whole world is just one. When it starts to move faster, forces are applied to its body and split out many small parts. For each small part to follow the flow of the whole world, greater emphasis needs to be put on the parts that are involved in the [...]

Read Full Post »

Peace: What is peace? How do we build peace in our world?

We human beings, like everything else, are just like simple objects, which have both inside and outside. Deep inside of us is an inner core. On our outside, we have an outer layer that is in touch with the outside world. Various forces are acting upon us through the outside layer and are transformed into [...]

Read Full Post »

Build a better playground

Where are we going? How do we understand human history? How do we understand our current trend, especially changes brought out by software and web?
There are a lot of economic theories. There are a lot of ideologies, religions based on whether human nature is selfish or altruistic. In China, in the recent decades, people realize [...]

Read Full Post »

Life is colorful (English)

Note: The original Chinese version is here. I am not satisfied with the English version at all. I cannot feel well with English. The original Chinese version is very beautiful, and I am quite satisfied with it.
Life is colorful!
In my life, I have heard three most beautiful sentences. The first one is Life is Colorful. [...]

Read Full Post »

Reflection on My Schooling

Note: this is a paragraph I just added to my article: the Art of My Life. (http://freestone.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/the-art-of-my-life/). I think it might be good to separate it out as a single article as well.
As I reflect on my schooling experience, I did well at school. Except for some short periods of time, generally I kept to [...]

Read Full Post »

What is Self and Introduction to Buddhism

What is self? According to Buddhism, the universe shares the same substance. This substance is emptiness, or we can call Zero. We human being is part of the universe. So we are also composed of emptiness or Zero. By looking deeply into ourselves, we understand this universal substance which is emptiness. Thus we can understand [...]

Read Full Post »

The Art of My Life

I am going to talk about the art of my life and how I came to it. It is going to be a long article since it spans my whole life. I cut many things off, but it is still quite long. So please bear with me.
As a kid, I enjoyed playing very much (http://freestone.wordpress.com/2007/03/14/the-meaning-of-life/). [...]

Read Full Post »

Science, mystical power and Buddhism

Inspired by a Buddhism meditation and discussion
There is no conflicts between science and Buddhism. Buddha’s analytical thinking ability is amazing. Given him enough time, he can figure out how to build a rocket. He will also know how to build a better society. Of course, he didn’t have that much time. So he only focuses [...]

Read Full Post »

Comments on Whither the World

http://libcom.org/library/whither-the-world
I like this article. I agree with his view on capitalism and most of his analysis. I agree with him that capitalism is a historical advancement. A lot of things in capitalism can be justified. The real change in capitalism has to start from a underlying structure change. Throughout the article, the author is looking [...]

Read Full Post »

Web2.0 is grassroots

This article just serves as an introduction to web2.0 for the grassroots people. So this article is by no means academic. I will try to avoid tech terms.

Web2.0 is grassroots in the sense that if you look at web2.0 websites (meetup, craigslist, youtube, flickr, del.icio.us …), they are all built by the user. It [...]

Read Full Post »

Creativity, Business and Buddhism

During my first day of meeting with my teacher, I brought three things to him: a stone, a pine tree branch and an acorn. I asked him that of these three things what are the same, what are different and which one he likes the best. Heaven on earth, here life takes on different forms. [...]

Read Full Post »

Some minor disagreement with Mr. Gatto

Mr. Gatto’s books are indeed very profound. I learned tremendously from his books. Here is just some minor disagreement I have with him. Some of them, if not corrected, can be very misleading. Since I recommend everyone to read Mr. Gatto’s books, I certainly also need to point out these flaws.
Below are just some notes [...]

Read Full Post »

Against Compulsory Schooling: from mass production to empowering individual professionals

Modern compulsory schooling is a product of mass production. It is to produce laborers for the mass production.
When people learned to unleashing the power from the coal and later oil, we entered a new era of human history, the age of machine or the age of mass production. For a moment, please put yourself back [...]

Read Full Post »

Tech Activism — For IDProject friends

If you come from IDProject to this blog, this article is written for you.

As for myself, I feel very lucky to have the chance to be exposed to the teaching of Buddhism. Having gone through training in the monastery, I know this world needs a monastery where people can go for practice, wake up, and [...]

Read Full Post »

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

Thinking after reading Dumbing us down.
No one can do a good job on education without reading Mr. Gatto’s books. Reading his book, you will have a feeling that education is the root of nearly all problems of our society. The education is to understand other social issues on a very deep level.
Brief recap [...]

Read Full Post »