Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 12)

While many people know the famous Ram Dass book, Be Here Now — which is currently the #1 All-Time Best-Selling book in Spiritualism on Amazon — I’d argue that it’s not necessarily his best book.

For example, I have met a few people in my travels who were struggling to read and understand it it because of all the art and 1960s “hippie style” stuff — which I personally like — and it was at that time I realized that while Be Here Now is his most famous book, it may not be his best book. (The problem with the “hippie stuff” is that it’s also distracting.)

Ram Dass’s best books

IMHO, I think the following books are his best, where I believe best will also depend on (a) a person’s experience with his writings and teachings, and also (b) their own progress on the spiritual path. And in this case, I think it’s also about book’s that are more straight to the point.

When I first started meditating in the 1990s, I often had a hard time getting into the proper meditative state when I sat down on the meditation cushion. My “monkey mind” would be jumping all over the place, and it would take me a long time to get it to settle down. Many times I couldn’t even get it to settle down before my 30-minute timer went off.

Because of that, and because I really wanted to become better at meditating, I began experimenting with different ways to get into the meditative state faster.

As a result, this page is a summary of the best ways I know to help you get into a good meditation state when you take time to sit on the meditation cushion (or wherever else you sit). If you’re interested in getting into a deep state fast, these are the “best practices” I know, especially when you’re short on time.

In 2024 I watched the very emotional Elton John “Tiny Dancer” music video, and afterwards I wanted to do some research on how the music video was created, the story behind it, and what its meaning is. To that end, here’s a summary of what I found out about the “Tiny Dancer” music video.

The story and meaning of the Tiny Dancer song

The short story behind the Tiny Dancer song goes like this:

The song, “Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny),” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin is one of my favorite “sad” songs, and a great tribute to John Lennon, who was one of my “peaceful” inspirations when I was growing up. In the song, I think there are at least two interpretations of the lyrics, “It's funny how one insect can damage so much grain,” and I’d like to share those here.

Many websites seem to have the wrong lyrics for the Dave Matthews song, Grey Street, so to help correct that problem, here are the correct lyrics for the long version of Grey Street that Dave Matthews played with Tim Reynolds at “Live at Farm Aid 2021”:

Daniel Ingram was the first meditation teacher I ever heard who said that we should make meditation fun. He said something to the effect that when we sit down to meditate, we should try to sense vibrations as fast as possible — like playing a video game — and said, “Let’s bust some vibrations!”

Famous meditation teachers on staying mindful 24x7

As I think about trying to make meditation fun — and the use of mantras — I recall meditation teachers who have talked about the importance of staying mindful all day — 24x7 — to achieve enlightenment. For instance, here are just a few quotes:

This is an excerpt from the Scala Cookbook (partially modified for the internet). This is Recipe 20.3, “Scala best practice: Think "Expression-Oriented Programming".”

Problem

You’re used to writing statements in another programming language, and want to learn how to write expressions in Scala, and the benefits of the Expression-Oriented Programming (EOP) philosophy.

Because functional programming is like algebra, there are no null values or exceptions in FP code. But of course you can still have exceptions when you try to access servers that are down or files that are missing, so what can you do? This lesson demonstrates the techniques of functional error handling in Scala.

NOTE: This is a chapter from my book, Learn Scala 3 The Fast Way. Due to a mistake, this lesson was not included in the book.

When you write functions, things can go wrong. In other languages you might throw exceptions or return null values, but in Scala you don’t do those things. (Technically you can, but other people won’t be happy with your code.)

Instead what we do is work with error-handling data types. To demonstrate this I’ll create a function to convert a String to an Int.

As a little note here today, here’s an example of how to use a Scala Either inside a for-expression when using ZIO 2. In the code you’ll see that I convert each Either into a ZIO in each line of the for-expression.

This is an excerpt from the Scala Cookbook, 2nd Edition. This is Recipe 23.9, Simulating Dynamic Typing with Union Types.

Problem

When using Scala 3, you have a situation where it would be helpful if a value could represent one of several different types, without requiring those types to be part of a class hierarchy. Because the types aren’t part of a class hierarchy, you’re essentially declaring them in a dynamic way, even though Scala is a statically-typed language.

As a “note to self” about using ZIO 2, here are a few ZIO examples that show the ZIO.fail, ZIO.succeed, ZIO.attempt, orElseFail, and orDie methods and functions.

Before looking at the following code, it’s important to know that it uses the following Scala 3 enum: