Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time
Children of time is a fantastic creative novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Since this a summary of a thriller with a suspense ending, you have to stop reading right now if you don't want to be ruined by a spoiler.
Spoilers!!! Spoilers!!! Spoilers!!!
The novel opens with a terraforming project (Brin) in a far away world lead by Dr. Avrana Kern. The goal of the project is a scientific one - to investigate the possibility of giving intelligence to monkeys by introducing a virus that accelerates certain desirable characteristics, primarily around cognition. However, this is not well received by everyone. There's a lot of opposition to it in Earth. Unbeknownst to the crew of the project circling a world many light years away from Earth, Earth has descended into wars between factions that support terraforming and experimentation and those that are opposed to it. Also unknown to them is a mole within their ranks that's intent on destroying the entire vessel and the crew with it.
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Embracing Your Life With The Heart Of A Buddha by Tara Brach
1. The Trance of Unworthiness
We live our world in a trance; inherent in this trance is the belief that no matter how hard we try we are always falling short. This belief of unworthiness goes hand in hand with the alienation we feel from others and life. The belief that we are unworthy makes it difficult to trust that we are truly loved. We also assume that our physical sickness or emotional depression is our own fault.
As you go through your day, pause occasionally to ask yourself, “This moment, do I accept myself just as I am?” Without judging yourself, simply become aware of how you are relating to your body, emotions, thoughts and behaviors. As the trance of unworthiness becomes conscious, it begins to lose its power over our lives.
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What's the motivation behind this blog?
Like all ideas that are worthwhile, it came to me out of nowhere that I don't seem to remember most of the things I read from a book. What's the point of reading a book if we don't seem to be able to recall anything from it by the time we reach the end of it? I realized I need a mechanism to recollect and be able to reference. I already keep highlights and notes on Kindle. So, why not try to distill them into an essay (or a collection of notes). This is just an attempt at it.
(Of course I also wanted to do this in Clojure and started building my own blog engine to generate html from markdown and hosting it - Cryogen had already solved it for me.)
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