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Easy on the bottle old3bob 😀

forgot to mention there were also multiple ufo's that night and one of them landed in my backyard whereupon some little gray guys disembarked from their craft to share their take on non-dualism with me ...while a big black cat observed us which I could see with my night vision device.

Has anyone read this? I owned it since the 1990s and never got around to actually reading it.

I had a horrible physics teacher in school, a horrible chemistry teacher, and a horrible math teacher. Just my luck. They were like that "if you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding" teacher from The Wall. Borderline psychotic, mean, vengeful, corrupt, you name it. So all I did in school for those subjects was the absolute minimum I could get away with, if that. But then for some 2 months we had a substitute math teacher from another school (a specialized math-slanted school where he was one of the teachers known as genius-makers). He started giving us strange math problems of totally unfamiliar design that weren't hinged on whether you had memorized the formulas, and instead required something else, maybe pattern recognition, don't remember what exactly they were about of course. And what a shocker! -- turned out I was a natural for those, and for two months I was treated by the teacher and my surprised classmates as a math star. (We did have a resident math star, with many citywide math competitions victories under his belt, and he was sort of average with those strange different problems. He managed, but not as spectacularly as he usually did with the usual.) It was surprising and exciting. That was the first time in my life when I discovered I may have something mathematical going beneath the surface... sans the mathematical apparatus... but those two months weren't enough for it to emerge, it just peeked out through the hole in The Wall... And then our wall-building regular teacher returned and it was over. What I'm driving at is, there's not enough progress maybe at least in part because educational systems as we know them aren't catching those who could potentially facilitate it, and instead discourage some (many) potential "progressors."

You should also have mentioned what happened next.

Not really related but your mention of seeing "patterns" had a sort of example that happened to me early this morning when I looked up into the dark night sky from my back porch, there were stars and constellations there that I had never seen before? Wtf? Anyway I kept looking and then realized that my mind had made or filled in that sight with the explanation of never before seen stars, being that they turned out to be just reflections from my nearby outside lights on the few remaining and upper leaves on my tree where it was hitting at just the right angles to appear as stars was what I was really seeing.

Did you learn any lessons from military service that you feel have been useful in civilian life? What do people who haven´t served tend to get wrong about the military? Any advice for us non-veterans?

I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it, also in the 90's as I recall. I also read The Dancing Wu Li Masters, before Tao of Physics, and liked that more in some ways.

Now you have given me an image of old3bob , bottle in hand , staggering around the yard at 4 am and trying to swat the stars while yelling ; ''Damn fireflies ! '' .

As a lad , passenger in a car late at night with my friend and his parents ... I had been watching 5 UFOs for some time , low altitude, just ahead of us to the side and in formation and occasionally ducking behind a line of trees along the road . It became too much so I eventually said something about it , which of course , everyone thought I was cuckoo , but I insisted and I guess something in my manner made them curious or whatever . But every time I would ; ''Look! There they are ! '' they would duck behind the trees again . Eventually I realized that it was a damp night and power lines ran alongside the road on the far side of the line of trees and the car headlights were shining on five lines , making little blobs of light moving along with the car in 'formation' .

You did well with those stars -- first noticing them, then noticing the surrounding circumstances and arriving at correct rather than erroneous conclusions. Part of the pattern recognition skill is to be able to first notice and then dismiss false or illusory patterns, the ones that appear to convince our senses they are there and fool our minds into believing in their existence -- or vice versa, convince our minds and fool our senses. In psychology, this fallacy of discerning a pattern that isn't there is known as apophenia, interpreting meaningless noise as meaningful. Sometimes it is an early symptom of schizophrenia -- including society-wide mass psychoses induced by being continuously fed false/fake patterns by the media, the educational system, and assorted institutions.

surely it's here https://terebess.hu/english/tao/amb.pdf

Yes, a long time ago. And this one, also ages ago: And this one And a favorite:

Thank you to both of you!

I enjoyed Huw Price's book Time's Arrow and Archimedes point. A cousin of mine wrote a book about the physics of time reversal. I tried to read it but didn't get very far:

I'd love to know where it is too ! ..... Cobie's bookcase ?