254 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2024
    1. accumulation of all of that movement of charge is contributing to that electrical phenomenon and therefore in the end what you're doing is talking about a higher level of causation U than the components of the cell

      for - evolutionary biology - Denis Noble - journey from reductionist to non-reductionist - ion channel and cell membrane work - connects to bioelectricity in the entire body

    1. prosthetic leg um you have a very difficult time walking because obviously you're not getting any smata Sensation from the leg so we just just put in pressure and angle sensors o sorry we put in pressure and angle sensors and then the person can feel uh what the leg is doing and um an

      for - BEing journey - The Buzz - sensory substitution - for detecting somatic pressure and angle from artificial leg - Neosensory - David Eagleman

    2. a lot of people as they get older their vestibular function diminishes and they can't tell when they're tilting they can't tell when they're off axis and the problem is then they end up falling and they break a hip and they end up in the hospital and then things go downhill so um we just we built a little um you know a n axis uh motion detector and IMU and we can tell where they are axis wise and and when they're tilted we just tell them and they feel it on their wrist

      for - BEing journey - The Buzz - sensory substitution - for detecting tilting in older people - prevent falls from losing balance - Neosensory - David Eagleman

    3. we made this thing called the clarify for people with high frequency hearing loss

      for - BEing journey - consumer electronic device - the Clarify - sensory substitution - auditory to vibration compensation - for high frequency hearing loss in older people - Neosensory - David Eagleman

      • sensory substitution - The Clarify - Performs better than conventional hearing aids - Neosensory - David Eagleman
    4. The Buzz for deafness

      for - BEing journey - consumer electronic device - The Buzz - sensory substitution device - auditory to vibration - for deaf people - Neosensory - David Eagleman - The Buzz - 100x cheaper than cochlear implant surgery - being used around the globe

    5. little camera on glasses and you turn it into an audio image um and there are very sophisticated examples of this now one is called The Voice v i and it's it's an app that you can just download on your phone
    1. Prof. Smith lives in London and has a brother in Berlin, Dr. Smith. To visit him, balancing time, cost, and carbon emissions is a tough call to make. But there is another problem. Dr. Smith has no brother in London. How can that be?

      for - BEing journey - example - demonstrates system 1 vs system 2 thinking - example - unconscious bias - example - symbolic incompleteness

    1. The vOICe is the most practical and widely used, clearly demonstrated by its 100k+ downloads and around 1300 current active users on Android only.

      for - BEing journey - sensory substitution - visual-to-auditory (V2A) - Android app - The vOICe - to - Android app - The vOICe - https://hyp.is/T8YlEJ0_Ee-jKFfo0TcpWQ/medium.com/mindsoft/translating-vision-into-sound-443b7e01eced

    2. Visual-to-auditory (V2A) sensory substitution devices are designed to convert images to sound.

      for - BEing journey - sensory substitution - visual-to-auditory (V2A)

    1. hero's journey

      Here is the heroines journey The Hero's Journey Vs. The Way of the Feminine ~

      The Hero’s Journey is the masculine path of transformation. It is a Call to Adventure, a slaying of dragons, a battle between good and evil. It is ultimately a quest to be reunited with the lost feminine within us, for men and women alike.

      The Feminine’s Journey looks quite different. The Yin aspect of the path is not a Call to Adventure. It is a Call to Surrender. A call to quiet and stillness, receptivity and patience. While the masculine braves a treacherous world, the feminine weaves herself a cocoon. Where the masculine seeks to achieve a goal, the feminine waits in uncertainty. She waits in darkness. Not knowing. Not doing. Just being. And enduring. Enduring suffering that is sometimes so great and never-ending it seems unendurable. But it is here, in this cocoon, that the feminine will ultimately be reunited with the lost masculine.

      To be clear, the feminine is not doing nothing in her not doing. Nor is she a victim of her suffering. There is much going on but it is invisible to the eye. She is active in her passivity. Strong in her surrender. And she must strike the miraculous balance of being with her suffering without seeking to control the outcome - and also without completely giving up.

      She is pinned to a cross in which there is no solution. Her task is to bear the heavy tension. And submit to the eternal injustice that befell her. Until hopefully, maybe, one day... grace comes from deep within and all around and the cross is reconciled.

      But day after day she waits. Often hidden away. Usually in solitude. How long can this possibly last? It could be years. There is no end in sight. And the possibility that it will never end is part of what brings her to her knees. She realizes, finally, she is not in charge here. She cannot incubate this egg of potential on her own. She must hand it over to the Great Mother. It is she who holds our fate in her hands. It is she who we must entrust our lives to. It is she who teaches us just how much control we do not have - and how much we truly do.

      And unlike the epic battles of the Hero’s journey, the Feminine’s tasks in myths and fairytales are tedious, time-consuming, take commitment, seem trivial and require the help of animals and magic. There are no dragons to slay, but rather beans to sort, stinging nettle to weave, straw to spin into gold. She is not sure anything will come of all of this but neither is she sure nothing will. She only knows she doesn’t know, and she must do her part. She must keep following the breadcrumbs on the inner path of her psyche.

      This slow, unexciting path goes against almost every aspect of our culture. The Hero’s Journey, while treacherous and not for the faint of heart, is worshipped as the myth of our time. This is not the case for the Feminine's way. It does not make for million dollar blockbusters and best selling novels. It opposes our busy and fast-paced society. And to the immature masculine - both in the culture and in the person themselves - it can appear as if the one on the Feminine Journey is doing nothing and wasting her time. These voices will constantly exclaim: "You need to do more! You need to solve this now. You must stop feeling that. Nothing is happening! You're being lazy. Hurry Up!"

      But if we listen to these voices, we will either refuse the call or find ourselves stuck along the way. Unable to surrender, unable to move forward. Our suffering then will grow exponentially and our bodies will protest and our lives may become impossible, or maybe barren. Or, if we have begun the journey already, but wish to rush to the end, we could break the incubating egg and kill the potential.

      One of the keys on this path is to teach the masculine within to be a comforting and illuminating companion in the darkness rather than an obstacle. When he learns to honor and help the way of the feminine, the resistance melts, the way unfolds and the union draws nearer.

      And then one day, a day we never knew would come, the cocoon begins to hatch. Just enough to feel a ray of sunlight on our face. Just enough to breathe in the fresh air and hear the new life calling. While the Hero's Journey ends in surrender, like Yin springing from Yang and finding the passive in the active, the Feminine's Journey ends in action. Yang springs from Yin, the active from the passive. And as the cocoon opens, so too does the world. While returning may not be easy and our life still not perfectly sorted, we will make our way with the strength of the matured Masculine by our side, and the Feminine herself transformed.

      (Leyla @ Midwives of the Soul)

    2. if you built buildings you'll know that what's worse a dysfunctional seven stage or dysfunctional first stage it's all the footings it's all the foundations

      for - developmental journey - building metaphor - most important problem to fix is foundational - first level problems - John Churchill

    3. we now have all of the technology that goes all the way to Rainbow body

      for - developmental journey - includes Rainbow body technology - John Churchill

    4. essentially what we're doing is you know is taking the best technology of the East and the west and bringing them together

      for - developmental journey - human inner transformation - planetary training technology - integrating the best of the east and the west - John Churchill - developmental journey - healing the foundations affects the higher levels of human inner transformation - John Churchill

      developmental journey - human inner transformation - planetary training technology - integrating the best of the east and the west - integrating - developmental healing with - attachment to the meditation practice - resulting in: - meditating down instead of - meditating up - Opening up the lower attachment system - by building a powerful field of safety and attunement - dissolves the higher blocks

    5. we have to learn how to become friends and to do that actually involves quite a bit of learning to enter like Universal friendship and Universal friendship is actually a pretty high stage of realization

      for - developmental journey the great transition - requires each of us to learn how to form universal friendship - highly realized behavior - John Churchill

    6. it isn't just about alleviating their own personal suffering it's also about alleviating Universal suffering so this is where the the bodh satra or the Christ or those kinds of archetypes about being concerned about the whole

      for - example - individual's evolutionary learning journey - new self revisiting old self and gaining new insight - universal compassion of Buddhism and the individual / collective gestalt - adjacency - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER

      adjacency - between - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER - adjacency relationship - When I heard John Churchill explain the second turning, - the Mahayana approach, - I was already familiar with it from my many decades of Buddhist teaching but with - those teachings in the rear view mirror of my life and - developing an open source, non-denominational spirituality (Deep Humanity) - Hearing these old teachings again, mixed with the new ideas of the individual / collective gestalt - This becomes an example of Indyweb idea of recording our individual evolutionary learning journey and - the present self meeting the old self - When this happens, new adjacencies can often surface - In this case, due to my own situatedness in life, the universal compassion of the bodhisattva can be articulated from a Deep Humanity perspective: - The Freudian, Klinian, Winnicott and Becker perspective of the individual as being constructed out of the early childhood social interactions with the mOTHER, - a Deep Humanity re-interpretation of "mother" to "mOTHER" to mean "the Most significant OTHER" of the newly born neonate. - A deep realization that OUR OWN SELF IDENTITY WAS CONSTRUCTED out of a SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP with mOTHER demonstrates our intertwingled individual/collective and self/other - The Deep Humanity "Common Human Denominators" (CHD) are a way to deeply APPRECIATE those qualities human beings have in common with each other - Later on, Churchill talks about how the sacred is lost in western modernity - A first step in that direction is treating other humans as sacred, then after that, to treat ALL life as sacred - Using tools like the CHD help us to find fundamental similarities while divisive differences might be polarizing and driving us apart - A universal compassion is only possible if we vividly see how we are constructed of the other - Another way to say this is that we see others not from an individual level, but from a species level

  2. Oct 2024
    1. for - rapid whole system change - Nafeez Ahmed - planetary phase shift - Nafeez Ahmed - planetary adaptive cycle - Nafeez Ahmed - essay - The End of Scarcity? From ‘Polycrisis’ to Planetary Phase Shift - Nafeez Ahmed - 2024 Oct 16 - to - book - The Ascent of Humanity - chapter 8 Self and Cosmos: The Gaian Birthing - stillborn and the perilous journey through the womb - Charles Eisenstein

      summary - This is a good article that makes sense of the inflection point that humanity now faces as it contends with multiple existential crisis - It summarizes the complexity of our polycrisis and its precarity and lays the theory for looking at the polycrisis from a different perspective: - as a planetary phase shift towards the potential end of scarcity and the next stage of our species evolution - Through the lens of ecologist Crawford Stanley Holling's lens of the adaptive cycle of ecological population dynamics, - and especially his 2004 paper "From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds" - Nafeez extends Holling's argument that we are undergoing a planetary adaptive cycle in which the back-loop is the dying industrial era. - In this sense, it is reminiscent of the writings of Charles Eisenstein in his book "The Ascent of Humanity", chapter 8: Self and Cosmos:, The Gaian Birth. - Eisenstein uses the the perilous journey of birth through the womb door as a metaphor of the transition we are currently undergoing.

      to - paper - From Complex Regions to Complex Worlds - Crawford Stanley Holling - 2004 - https://hyp.is/KYCm2pFrEe-_PEu84xshXw/www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art11/main.html?ref=ageoftransformation.org - book - The Ascent of Humanity - Chapter 8 - The Gaian Birthing - Charles Eisenstein - https://hyp.is/r8scTpG_Ee-gLTujlli5hQ/charleseisenstein.org/books/the-ascent-of-humanity/eng/the-gaian-birthing/

    1. it's a new mode of living and perceiving the world

      for - adjacency - the society of the spectacle - internet society of modernity - Deep Humanity - BEing journey - to discover the society of the spectacle

      Being journey - to discover the society of the spectacle - Modernity, so steeped in social media and the internet is INDEED a new mode of living and perceiving the world - To discover the extend to which we have socially normalized a social pathology, we can introduce BEing journeys that help us explore how a life that is freed from the social norm feels like

  3. Sep 2024
    1. we're not called to like everybody but we are called to love everybody i i have a a practice um and it involves taking the image of two people one whom i love deeply and who i like deeply and i take my son for instance that i love him that i feel one with him goes without saying but i also like him very much i then take a second image of someone who i dislike intensely vladimir putin

      for - BEing journey - meditate on two polar images - apply nondual love - can you recognize the sacred? - the shared being of both? - Rupert Spira

      BEing journey - meditate on two polar images - apply nondual love - can you recognize the sacred? - the shared being of both? - Rupert Spira

      adjacency - between - Rupert Spira's exercise to identify the Common Human Denominator (CHD) of the sacred in both - abused-abuser relationship - adjacency relationship - Rupert's exercise can lead to compassion if we study the abused-abuser relationship deeply and bring it to bear - The coexistence of - the feeling of anger arising from the suffering the abuser causes - the feeling of sadness arising from the suffering the abuser has suffered earlier in life - creates a mixture of feelings in the same person - Also can help to think of the mechanism by which the abused-abuser cycle continually becomes reconstructed and perpetuated in the world

      reference - untreated childhood abuse of children - they can grow up to become dictators - such as Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Un - https://hyp.is/LOhh4mqvEe-mU3_0EcDYiQ/acestoohigh.com/2022/03/02/how-vladimir-putins-childhood-is-affecting-us-all/

  4. Aug 2024
    1. to give you a sense of my um trajectory

      for - personal awakening journey - description - Rupert Spira

      personal awakening journey - description - Rupert Spira - Interesting description of his awakening journey - He would gradually learn to abide more and more often in the background awareness and less in the content of experience

    2. don't do this experiment philosophically do it experientially it's like undressing at night we take off everything that can be taken off

      for BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira

      BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira - metaphor - Like taking all our clothes off when we are preparing for bedtime

      comment - self knowledge exercise - Rupert Spira - This exercise makes me think of my own thoughts around discovering or rather, rediscovering one's true nature - If we are to discuss the "greater self" from whence we came, then it's tantamount to discovering - the nature nature within - human nature - So anything that is recognized as human nature, cannot be the ground state - The ground state must go beyond anything that depends on the human body - Thoughts and perceptions are mediated by brains and sense organs, both depend on the human body and so - are dependent on human nature - Self knowledge is unmediated and directly experienced - It has the quality of the ground state within us, the nature part of our human nature

    3. i'll start by way of um an analogy everything that all the objects and characters that appear in a movie derive their reality relatively speaking of course from the single screen

      for - Rupert Spira - meditation - metaphor - movie and screen - BEing journey - identifying our true nature - movie and screen metaphor - Rupert Spira

    4. one way to make this experiential investigation into the essential nature of our self would be to remove in fact we don't need to remove it would be sufficient to imagine removing everything from us that is not essential to us so i suggest we let's just embark do this investigation for a few minutes

      for - BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira

      BEing journey - self knowledge exercise - removing everything from our experience that is not essential Rupert Spira - Remove phenomenological experiences that are transient - that is, have a beginning or end - The fact that they do not last implies that they cannot be part of our essential, unchanging nature

    1. a big part of the book and a big part of your previous book as I've read both of them is your joury because you describe your life going into different phases

      for - Federico Faggin - personal journey - profound awakening experience - reorientation of consciousness - from materialist - to idealist

  5. Apr 2024
    1. there are universal similarities and effects of music and sound on individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds

      key finding - body responses to music are universal

      for - BEing journey

  6. Feb 2024
    1. One of Seth’s recent projects was called Dreammachine—an immersive art-science hallucinatory experience

      for - BEing journey - Anil Seth - BEing journey - Dream machine

      reference - https://dreamachine.world/about/

  7. Jan 2024
  8. Dec 2023
  9. Nov 2023
    1. the overwhelming majority of our time is spent looking down and as we should have talked about in previous videos we really care about 00:03:57 the hinges that you place in your spine so if you're on a laptop or looking down on your phone there's generally a hinge that we put into our neck and keep it there for a period of time and that 00:04:09 section and it can be right at the top if we're looking at you we've down or it can be lowered down if we're hinging down a lot more towards more of a 90-degree angle the longer in those shapes and the average American at 00:04:22 least can sit you know 10 to 14 hours a day particularly in today's climate without raising an eyebrow it can be just a simple thing that we do and if that's sitting down looking down is a 00:04:33 constant thing then what happens is we take that overloaded tissue to bed and sleep is our recovery time
      • for: BEing journey - unconscious body posture - sleep impacts
    1. there's things in the 10th Century in what we think of as now as broadly Western and Central Europe 01:13:46 that are beginning to show up particularly in art and architecture and poetry and music not an accident the musician we know that artists are often people who sense 01:13:59 things and are ahead of a culture they give the first articulation to a set of ideas and so if you today if next time you're in Ottawa I invite you to go to the 01:14:10 National Gallery because the National Gallery in Ottawa has one of the world's best collections of European northern European art and it starts about 1300 01:14:22 there's some before that but their collections of that's old enough to get you into it and it works through historically as you work through the rooms and at least it used to last time I brought it was there it brought you 01:14:36 out into a post-modern into postmodern art as if what's beyond what we think of as Modern Art uh into post-modern art
      • for: BEing journey - history of art from 10th century to present
      • for: Deep Humanity, epoche, BEing journey, Douglas Harding, Zen, emptiness, awakening, the Headless Way

      • summary

      • adjacency between
        • Kensho
        • Zen
        • Douglas Harding's Headless Way
      • adjacency statement

        • this paper explores the parallels between Zen b experienced of Kensho and Douglas Harding's Headless Way
      • question

        • can this technique be adapted for Deep Humanity BEing journeys and mass awakening /epoche?
      • for: BEing journey - adapt to, DH, Deep Humanity

      • comment

        • Potentiality coupled with limitations - Daseitz Suzuki and the elbow does not bend backwards.
        • The experience of the unnamable quality present in every moment - infinite potentiality
        • The mundane is the extraordinary. Even when we name it and discover it in all our scientific discoveries and articulate it, and mass produce technologies with it, is is still miraculous
      • adjacency

        • Nora Bateson's book Combining and the Douglas Rushkoff podcast interview
        • potentiality
      • adjacency statement
        • both are alluding to the pure potentiality latent in the moment
        • language can be contextualized as an unfolding of the space of potentiality to a specific trajectory. Each word added to the previous one to form a sentence is a choice in an infinite, abstract space of symbols that communicates intentionality and is designed to focus the attention of the listener to one very narrow aspect of the enormous field of infinite potentiality
    1. After I had been searching for ways to flesh out this parallel between contemplative and scientific research, through the common element of a lab method, I finally stumbled upon the Husserlian epoche as a stepping stone or connection piece between the two
      • for: bridge between - scientific and contemplative world

      • comment

        • this describes my current strong interest in the epoche as a potentially b transformative Deep Humanity BEing journey tool
  10. Sep 2023
    1. The invisible hand is a metaphor used by the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith that describes the inducement a merchant has to keep his capital, thereby increasing the domestic capital stock and enhancing military power, both of which are in the public interest and neither of which he intended.[1]

      See invisible hand as a force that aids us in our life journey as a metaphor of Adam Smith his metaphor of the invisible hand

      • Joseph Campbell also coined this term somewhere, in his explanation of the hero’s journey
  11. Aug 2023
    1. What is one of our greatest needs, one of our greatest needs for our brain? And instead of telling you, I want to show you. In fact, I want you to feel it. There's a lot I want you to feel in the next 14 minutes. So, if we could all stand up. 00:00:39 We're all going to conduct a piece of Strauss together. Alright?
      • for: BEing journey
      • comment
        • This was a good BEing journey for anticipation.
        • We wait for closure, anticipate what is next based on previous experiences.
        • The sand artwork performed by the artist in the background is also a demonstration of anticipation and of symbolic representation - the ubiquity of the symbolosphere.
  12. Jul 2023
    1. we are modern humans we've been around as modern humans for 00:04:32 200 000 years on Earth but we are hunters and gatherers we have a rough time we live under extremely variable conditions in deep Ice Age we come into the Holocene the neolithical revolution takes part one of the biggest 00:04:44 Innovations in human history and off we go in the civilizational journey that we all know and here we are today
      • for: civilizational journey
    1. Guided meditation: The carbon cycle
      • Guided meditation
        • consciousness thinking about its own atomic constituent
      • Carbon cycle meditation

        • to help achieve awareness of our physical connection to the world
      • Comment

        • This is a limited practice as it still depends on conceptual models.
        • An atom is not an object we can directly experience phenomenologically.
        • Rather, it is a conceptual model and through social norm of using it as if it were phenomenologically a directly experienced object, we confuse ideas of phenomena with the phenomena itself
        • One way to determine if it is a fundamental human quality or if it is simply one narrative, is to determine if there are people such an exercise would NOT resonate with?
          • For instance, it would likely not resonate strongly with
            • climate deniers,
            • uneducated people
            • religious fundamentalists
        • to develop a method to reach ALL people, we need to look at even more fundamental commonalities - namely, how we use language to mediate reality
        • Perhaps a BEing journey can consist of two lievels
          • 1st level: conceptual
            • do the BEing journey as described using conventional concepts
          • 2nd level: meta-level
            • observe how you construct the narrative using language
        • it could be good to animate this with AI drawing program
    2. guided meditation to help achieve this awareness of our physical connection to the world around us.
      • comment
        • these guided meditations are interesting because they are one level of our superorganism (consciousness)
          • thinking about a lower level of the same human superorganism
            • carbon molecule that was part of us
            • genetic material that was part of our ancestors going back billions of years
      • not learning oneself, self-master as self-discovery & self-awareness
      • spirituality as learning of oneself
      • enjoy time doing nothing, also find things you like to do
      • each person find way to climb the mountain (gaining clarity on top of mountain)
      • 5 hindrances as challenges to journey (state of mind, not having/getting clarity)
      • (1) sensual desire
      • 2 ill will (rejection, also see my ideas on madness) "let go"
      • 3 sloth (dullness of mind/body) lack if motivation/energy (see flow)
      • 4 restlessness (not being in present)
      • 5 sceptical doubt (being indecisive, getting lost in thoughts)
      • structure/design life to prevent hindrances from arising (see my way of life as making environments/practices to prevent?) "techniques to remove them"
      • (4 steps to prevent the hindrances)
      • 1 what is your state of mind
      • 2 accept the situation/someone/something to be they way it is/the way they are
      • 3 emotional & mental questioning (why did it come up? understanding it, what will happen if it remains?)
      • 4 non-identification (I am not my mind, my body, or my emotions, it is just that I am there to observe them all)
  13. Jun 2023
    1. 13:00 talks on finding a (1) zone of fascination, (2) go into a congregation (a community, a discours), and (3) master the thing (and fulfil the hero's journey), and (4) add these to the congregation - Scott relates this to the hero's journey

    1. Ulisse

      Ulysses can be considered as an alter ego of Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ and other passages of the writer’s works. By considering the nature of the link between the author and the classical hero, we can also clarify the reasons behind Levi’s choice of presenting to Pikolo the core episode of canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Levi himself connects his experience to that of Ulysses in a 1973 interview, where he states: ‘[M]i ero reso conto che proprio il canto di Ulisse era abbastanza importante, perché è un’evasione anche quella: cioè ero evaso raccontando di un’altra evasione. Questo Ulisse che si strappa dalla vita quotidiana per fare un viaggio che non ha ritorno: mi sembrava che avesse una vaga analogia con la [mia realtà]’ (OC III, 988).

      First, Levi underlines the parallel between his condition of deportee and that of Ulysses, driven by his nature and fate (‘fortuna’?) to embark on a journey without return. On a smaller scale, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ we also find one of the few physical movements in SQ – Primo and Jean’s trip to collect the soup. The chapter also represents a textual journey, where, while reading about Primo translating and interpreting Dante’s canto for Jean, we follow the path towards knowledge of the two characters. Finally, we can read it as a sentimental journey: the chapter is a nostos, a (temporary) memorial homecoming of the two protagonists to their homes and pre-Auschwitz lives. In the chapter, there is a constant superimposition of the experience and memory of Dante’s Ulysses with those of Levi (and Pikolo). Far from his home and family, Dante’s character sees Mount Purgatory in the distance before the shipwreck; this episode triggers in Levi the memory of the Piedmontese Alps he used to see on the horizon while going back home by train: ‘E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano…le montagne…oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’

      When we consider the presence of Ulysses in Levi’s works, we should not only think of the Commedia. We must consider Homer’s Ulysses too, a character appreciated by Levi since his high-school years and often remembered in his writings and interviews. If we analyse Levi’s quotes from the Odyssey, we can find further points of contact emerging between Levi and his alter ego. We can start with the episode of Ulysses’ deception of Polyphemus, quoted explicitly in the chapter ‘L’ultimo’ in SQ. Here Levi narrates that as he was leaving the shower, ‘un fiduciario del Block si installa sulla porta, e tasta come Polifemo chi esce per sentire se è bagnato’. Primo and Alberto manage to trick the guard and even gain a generous amount of bread from their kombinacja. The common ground between the Greek hero and Levi are versatility and resourcefulness, the most famous traits of Homer’s Ulysses.

      Levi considered this episode of the Odyssey crucial and included it also in his auto-anthology La ricerca delle radici with the title ‘Un uomo da nulla’. First of all, the physical description of Ulysses in the passage quoted in La ricerca delle radici – the hero is described as ‘un uomo da nulla, slombato, piccino’ – recalls Levi’s aspect in SQ. More importantly, the whole passage quoted by Levi revolves around the double name and identity of Ulysses. Introducing the excerpt, the writer notices that, while talking to Polyphemus, Ulysses ‘è fiero del suo nome, che finora aveva taciuto’. The name Nobody, chosen by Ulysses to fool the cyclops, recalls the loss of individual identity and the attribution of a new name (the number tattooed on the forearm) to Auschwitz prisoners.

      In this sense, Ulysses can be seen not only as an alter ego of Levi, but also as an allegory of the Jews detained in Lagers. This is true also for some aspects of Dante’s Ulysses, as we can read in Levi’s comment to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in the notes to the school edition of SQ: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra il naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”’. In his narration of Ulysses’ shipwreck, Dante tells us that everyone on the boat is punished and dies. If we go back to consider the story of Homer’s Ulysses instead, the character could instead be an example of being ‘saved’. Having wandered for ten years, he was finally able to return to Ithaca, just as Levi managed to go back to Turin. Ulysses’ fellows represent instead the ‘drowned’, just like the majority of the prisoners detained in Levi’s barrack.

      A final, crucial shared aspect linking Levi to Homer’s Ulysses is the narrative ability and the urge to relate his misadventures to others. The ethical need to share with others the trauma of Auschwitz is strong in Levi already during his detention and impelled him to write SQ. In the 1976 Appendix to the book, he remembers that ‘era talmente forte in noi il bisogno di raccontare, che il libro avevo incominciato a scriverlo là’ (OC I, 281). Levi will reconsider his previous accounts of the Lager from a new perspective in the 1970s. On several occasions, he compares the urge to communicate his experience of the concentration camp to Ulysses’ narration of his decade-long wanderings at the court of Alcinous. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi adopts this comparison as the opening of the chapter ‘Stereotipi’, writing: ‘[È] bello sedere al caldo, davanti al cibo ed al vino, e ricordare a sé ed agli altri la fatica, il freddo e la fame: così subito cede all’urgenza del raccontare, davanti alla mensa imbandita, Ulisse alla corte del re dei Feaci’. Ulysses is seen here as a prototypical model of the oral narrator and the founder of the genre of the memorial accounts of the survivor (‘reduce’) of traumatic events. Thus, an alter ego not only of Levi as a character but also of Levi as writer.

      MM

  14. Mar 2023
    1. The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.
      • Despiritualization
      • Definition
      • Comment
      • This is a very salient term appropriate to modernity's propensity for objectification that uses language and acculturation to remove the sacred from being a lived experience:
      • Means says that European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. This is also the process of despiritualizing nature so we can plunger her. It is the raison d'etre for objectifying nature in the scientific / technological / industrialist / globalist capitalism supply chain. Means provided some examples:
        - Soldiers to kill an enemy soldier.
        - We do it to eat food 
        - Murderers do it before killing .
        - Nazi SS guards did it to inmates. 
         - Cops do it to those they arrest.
        - Corporation leaders do it to their workers and to the environment
        - Politicians do it to everyone
        - factory farming takes away the individuality and recognition of each unique, living being and commodities then all by replacing each life by with the genetic label "food" ( author's addition)
        
        • Mean says that for each group doing the Despiritualization, it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people/species.
        • Means further says:
        • One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans,
        • so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans.
        • Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.
        • In most indigenous traditions, if not all, prayer is given before a meal.
        • Prayer can be seen as a spiritualistion practice that recognizes that we, as participants in life, must take some other life in order to sustain our own
        • It is the practice of recognizing the built-in cruelty of life.
        • If taking another living beings life is the ultimate transgression, and we must commit that murderous act many times a day in order to survive meal prayer establishes a direct connection with the individual plant or animall that has made the ultimate sacrifice and has forfeited its life so that we may continue ours.
        • meal prayer is therefore, in the context of Deep Humanity practice, a BEing journey of continuous gratitude
    1. Ithaka - C. P. Cavafy, "The City" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

      The first version of "Ithaka" was probably written in 1894. Cavafy revised the poem in 1910, and it was first published in 1911. The first English translation was published in 1924, and there have been a number of different translations since then. The poem can be found in Cavafy's Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis, Princeton University Press, 1980.

  15. Feb 2023
    1. It might also help to visually split the mapping area in zones, such as "on-stage" (what the customer experiences) versus "back-stage" (what systems and processes are active in the background).

      I like this idea: break it into customer experience and backend enablement.

  16. Jan 2023
    1. Let me pose the question in the following way: Is the condition of autonomia fulfilled or undermined by the condition of sumbiōsis? Could it be that autos and sumbios—the most fully realized, best self and the companion—are two sides of the same coin; that is to say, entangled?

      !- comment : autonomy and symbiosis entangled - this goes to the heart of Deep Humanity, the entangled individual / collective

    1. what i want you to do is to now imagine somebody whose body you would like to have 00:28:23 as your own either for a few minutes or maybe long term i'm not going to ask you why you want that body i don't want to get that deep into your psyche and that might be very personal um 00:28:35 but i'll tell you whose body i'd like to have and for how long just to give you a warm-up feel for this i really would like to have usain bolt's body of a few years ago for 9.6 seconds 00:28:47 because i would love to know what it feels like to run 100 meters that fast now when i form that does i think it's a coherent desire how do i why do i think that because i really do desire it i would love it i'd pay a lot of money to 00:28:59 do that um but what i don't want is to be usain bolt because usain bolt is already the same bolt and that doesn't do me any good um what i want is to be me 00:29:12 j with usain bolt's body so i can know what it feels like to run really really fast now i'm not claiming that this is a coherent desire i'm not claiming that it's 00:29:24 possible for me to remain jay and have usain bolt's body but i am claiming that i can desire it and if you are anything like me for some body or other you can desire to 00:29:36 have it for some time or other if you can form that desire then you in deep in your gut don't believe that you are your body you believe that you have a body and that 00:29:48 you might have a different body just like you might have a different hat or a different cat and if you believe that then you really do believe that whatever you are you are not your body 00:30:01 now you might think well that's obviously true i've never thought i was my body um but maybe on my mind i don't think you really believe that either and i want to do the same thought 00:30:13 experiment to convince you of that now i want you to think about somebody's mind that you'd really like to have maybe not for a long time maybe only for a few minutes um i'll tell you mine again i'm really 00:30:25 big and divulging you know hyper sharing over sharing personal secrets um i would really love to have stephen hawking's mind when he was still alive of course not now um and i'd like to have it only for about five or ten 00:30:36 minutes because what i would really like is to be able to really understand quantum gravity and i can't really understand it but if i had stephen hawking's mind for a few minutes then i could understand it now i obviously 00:30:48 don't want to be stephen hawking for one thing he's dead for another thing he was already stephen hawking and it didn't do me a damn bit of good what i want is to be me jay with his mind so that i can 00:31:00 use it to understand quantum gravity um i think that'd be really cool again i'm not claiming this is coherent i'm not claiming that it's possible but i am claiming that it's a 00:31:11 psychologically possible state to be in to crave somebody else's mind and if you like me can form that desire then you like me deep in your gut do not believe that you are your mind 00:31:25 you believe that you're something that has a mind just like you have a body um and that you possessed that mind and you could still be you with another mind and another body i mean just imagine having 00:31:37 the same bolts body in stephen hawking's mind that would be totally cool then i could understand quantum gravity while setting a new record for the 100 meter sprint um but that's not going to happen alas 00:31:50 um the moral of these experiments um takes us right back to chandragiri serpent i think the moral of these experiments is that deep down at an atavistic gut 00:32:02 level we believe that we are something that stands behind our minds and our bodies that thing is the self the thing that is not the mind in the body but possesses the mind in the body that's the thing 00:32:14 that sean decurity identifies as the serpent in the wall our arguments are going to be aimed at that not at our bodies not as our minds not as our personal identities they're 00:32:27 going to be aimed at that self that we really atavistically believe stands behind all of those that's the illusion that's the thing that causes us to be incompetent morally that causes us to be 00:32:41 confused about our own identities and to be confused about our role and our place in the world

      !- BEing journey Gedanken : imagine yourself to have different body, different mind - if you can imagine this, then you believe you ARE NOT the body or mind, but the SELF that HAS the body or mind - examples of imagining having another mind or body: what would it be like to be there mind of wife? My husband? My child? My friend? My enemy? My dog? My cat? A bat ( Thomas Hagel)? Isn't this imagination salient for empathising? To imagine being another person, don't we need to imagine being in their mind and body to imagined experiencing like they do?

    2. so i want to convince you now that you 00:27:18 really do think you have a self no matter how many years you've been practicing

      !- following argument : will convince you that you are convinced you have a self

  17. Aug 2022
    1. i'm going to simply turn our line drawing upside down and then draw from 00:04:20 the upside down reference what's going to happen here is it's going to force my mind to not think about what i'm drawing but instead focus on the lines and shapes that i actually 00:04:33 see so you can see it takes my left brain out of the process almost completely

      !- BEing Journey : drawing example * inverting the picture upside down to draw it helps to remove the analytic part of the brain from the drawing.

  18. Jul 2022
    1. we term these individually constructed networks by the aggregate namepersonware. Serving as a medium between the individual and the social world, personware provides aself-reinforced and self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationships with society. It is boththe sense-maker and the sense being made of social reality entangled into an interactive autopoieticconstruct. It maintains a personal line of continuity that interfaces with the broader societal threads bymeans of concrete intentional cognitive selections. These cognitive selections determine how individualminds represent (encode) the state of affairs of the world in language, how they communicate theserepresentations and how they further decode received communications into an understanding of thestate of affairs of the world that eventually trigger actions in the world and further cognitive selections.At moments of decision, that is, attempting to make a choice to affect the world, the human is thusmore often than not symbolically pre-situated. He enacts a personal narrative of which he is hardlythe author and to which almost every decision is knitted in.

      !- definition : personware * individually constructed network of relationships and social systems that * provides self-reinforced, self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationship with society * Metaphorically conceive of personware as a suit we don based on years and decades of social conditioning "Personware" is a good word to use in SRG / DH framework that views the individual human organism's life journey as a deeply entangled individual AND collective journey or entangled individual/civilzational journey * From SRG/DH perspective the individual human organism is always on an entangled dual journey - from birth to death within a biological body and as part of a much longer civilizational journey since the beginning of modern humans (or even further back) * Individuals make intentional cognitive selections * Individual minds encode state of affair of the world via a combination of cognitive experience and language * Individual minds share their understanding of the world through outgoing language communication * Individual minds decode incoming information and store

    1. when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately

      This comment suggests a Color BEing Journey. How can we demonstrate in a compelling way that color is an attribute of the neural architecture of the person and NOT a property of the object we are viewing?

      See Color Constancy Illusion here:

      David Eagleman in WIRED interview https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FMJBfn07gZ30%2F&group=world

      Beau Lotto, TED Talk https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Fmf5otGNbkuc%2F&group=world

      Andrew Stockman, TEDx talk on how we see color: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F_l607r2TSwg%2F&group=world

      Science shows that color is an experience of the subject, not a property of the object: https://youtu.be/fQczp0wtZQQ but what Jay will go on to argue, is that this explanation itself is part of the COGNITIVE IMMEDIACY OF EXPERIENCE that we also take for granted.

    2. cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives 00:01:44 from buddhist philosophy

      Title: cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives from buddhist philosophy Author: Jay L. Garfield Year: 2022

      This is a very important talk outlining a number of key concepts that Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity are built upon and also a rich source of BEing Journeys.

      In brief, this talk outlines key humanistic (discoverable by a modern human being regardless of any cultural, gender, class, etc difference) concepts of Buddhist philosophy that SRG / DH embeds into its framework to make more widely accessible..

      The title of the talk refers to the illusions that our own cognition produces of both outer and inner appearances because the mechanisms that produce them area opaque to us. Their immediacy feels as if they are real.

      If what we sense and think is real is an illusion, then what is real? "Real" in this case implies ultimate truth. As we will see, Nagarjuna's denial of any argument that claims to be the ulitmate is denied. What is left after such a complete denial? Still something persists.

    1. so this is white light passing through a dispersive prison and this is a visible spectrum from about 420 nanometers in the violet through 500 nanometers and 00:00:18 the green 580 yellow 610 and orange and 650 red and some of the slides that have this along the bottom axis so how dependent I'll be in color what do you 00:00:30 think we depend on color a lot a little lots okay
      • Title: How do we see colours?
      • Author: Andrew Stockman
      • Date: 2016

      Many different color illusions Good to mine for BEing Journeys

    1. I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one. Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. 00:00:41 So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. 00:01:16 (Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right? (Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, 00:01:40 context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society.
      • Title: Optical illusions show how we see
      • Author: Beau Lotto
      • Date: 8 Oct, 2009

      The opening title is very pith:

      No one is an outside observer of nature, each of us is defined by our ecology.

      We need to unpack the full depth of this sentence.

      Seeing is believing. This is more true than we think.Our eyes trick us into seeing the same color as different ones depending on the context. Think about the philosophical implications of this simple finding. What does this tell us about "objective reality"? Colors that we would compare as different in one circumstance are the same in another.

      Evolution helps us do this for survival.

    1. so here's a straightforward question what color are the strawberries in this photograph the red right wrong those strawberries are gray if you don't 00:00:12 believe me we look for one of the reddest looking patches on this image cut it out now what color is that it's great right but when you put it back on 00:00:25 the image it's red again it's weird right this illusion was created by a Japanese researcher named Akiyoshi Kitaoka and it hinges on something called color constancy it's an incredible visual 00:00:39 phenomenon by which the color of an object appears to stay more or less the same regardless of the lighting conditions under which you see it or the lighting conditions under which your brain thinks you're seeing it

      Title: Why your brain thinks these strawberries are red Author: WIRED Date:2022

      Color Constancy

      Use this for BEing journey

    1. When we see the world from the vantage point of all-at-oneness, always right here, we can be said to be like a pearl in a bowl. Flowing with every turn without any obstructions or stoppages coming from our emotional reactions to different situations. This is a very commonly used image in Zen — moving like a pearl in a bowl. As usual, our ancestors comment on this phrase, wanting to break open our solidifying minds even more. Working from Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, Spring and Autumn, we have an example of opening up even the Zen appropriate phrase — a pearl in a bowl. Editor of the Blue Cliff Record Engo ( Yuan Wu) wrote: A bowl rolls around a pearl, and the pearl rolls around the bowl. The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute.   Dogen: The present expression “a bowl rolls around a pearl” is unprecedented and inimitable, it has rarely been heard in eternity. Hitherto, people have spoken only as if the pearl rolling in the bowl were ceaseless.

      This is like the observation I often make in Deep Humanity and which is a pith BEing Journey

      When we move is it I who goes from HERE to THERE? Or am I stationary, like the eye of the hurricane spinning the wild world of appearances to me and surrounding me?

      I am like the gerbil running on a cage spinning appearances towards me but never moving an inch I move while I am still The bowl revolves around this pearl.

    2. I have written previously about the issue of “both”. In one sense, interdependence and total dynamic working implies that everything is both form and emptiness simultaneously. But the problem is that you can’t PERCEIVE both form and emptiness at the same time. They are both there supporting each other but our discriminative thought can only see one or the other; like the front and back foot in walking, like the old lady and young lady optical illusion, or the front and back of a hand. Both sides are always there. We have a whole hand but you can only see either the front of the hand or the back of the hand in a single moment.

      This needs unpacking and can be a good Deep Humanity BEing journey exercise, as all of this can be.

  19. Jun 2022
    1. So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. So, if we have the lights down. And what we have here -- Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, 00:15:03 and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them. Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right? Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. I'm going to do the opposite on the left here. 00:15:31 I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light. Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. Agreed? Yes? Okay. So they are physically the same. 00:15:56 Let's pull the covers off. Now remember -- you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. Do they look the sa

      BEing journey 9 color illusion

    2. also true for complex perceptions of motion. So, here we have -- let's turn this around -- a diamond. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, 00:08:53 and I'm going to spin it. And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. Now I want you to keep looking at it. Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? Keep blinking. Every time you blink, it will switch. So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? 00:09:20 How do you know? Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely. So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities

      BEing journey 8 Direction of motion

    3. What is color for?" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. What you see here is a jungle scene, 00:02:08 and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right? (Laughter) Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. And now you see it. So, color enables us to see 00:02:32 the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, 00:02:56 but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources

      BEing journey 2 pattern detection

    4. Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. 00:07:11 And see what happens to your perception. Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye 00:07:35 as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics. So you see it that way. Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions.

      BEing journey 5 shadow and light

    5. let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. 00:05:29 So if I could have the lights down up here. I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. One is simply the flipping of the other. Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. (Laughter) But I really want you to learn. 00:05:55 And I'll tell you -- don't look anywhere else -- I'll tell you what's happening in your head. Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. That's what it's learning. Okay? Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. So why don't you do that now? (Laughter) 00:06:21 Can I have the lights up again? I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right? (Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. That's your new normal. Okay? So, what does this mean for context? It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround. 00:06:47 What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past.

      BEing journey 4 Color persistence Try noticing this throughout your life to see how often it occurs.

    6. we see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, 00:04:38 and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can. Audience: "Can you read this?" "You are not reading this." "What are you reading?" Beau Lotto: "What are you reading?" Half the letters are missing, right? 00:05:04 There's no a priori reason why an "H" has to go between that "W" and "A." But you put one there. Why? Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so. So you do so again. And yet you don't put a letter after that first "T." Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. So you don't do it again.

      Being journey 3 Linguistic BEing journey - filling in missing letters in incomplete sentence is based on our past experience with specific sentences that have those letters. This becomes compelling when we can demonstrate with multiple languages, including ones we are not familiar with. Those people in the other cultures will fill in missing letters in their words in their language that we would be completely clueless about.

    1. (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) 00:07:16 (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Beau Lotto: Ah, how wonderful, right? So right now, you're probably all feeling, at some level or another, awe.

      BEing journey that inspires awe, wonder and the invocation of the sacred.

  20. May 2022
    1. new way of being

      It may be that our civilization must undergo a transformation process that places less emphasis on intelligence and more intelligence on wisdom. That wisdom is intimately bound with rediscovering the essence of what it is to be a living and dying human being. The enormous polycrisis of the Anthropocene leads us to the inescapable conclusion that human intelligence alone is insufficient to lead to a holistic wellbeing within the biosphere. Insofar as the biosphere is a vast interconnected mutually supporting web of life, the overconsumption by one species, modern humans has upset the balance of the biosphere.

      A new way of being requires fundamental collective reassessment of what it is to be a living and dying being. The intelligence alone of our species has led to an extreme imbalance of the natural world, whose blowback we are now beginning to experience. The blind, recursive application of intelligence has led to greater and greater separation from nature to the point of the present polycrisis. As a species, we can only distance ourselves apart from nature to an extreme extent when nature reminds us we are NOT separate from her. She is now violently reminding us that we ARE a part of nature. A new way of being is to reconcile technology, that pushes the limits of intelligence alone, with ourselves as being a product of nature herself.

      Deep Humanity is that open collective process we call which reminds us that we are a product of nature in every way, and is a journey to reconnect with nature. BEing journeys are the crowdsourced processes of rediscovering our deep connection with nature through participatory, compelling, interactive, immersive explorations of what it is to be a living and dying human being.

    2. OP VAK is a concerted effort to make the hyperthreat visible and knowable across the broad spectrum of society. This has practical, educational aspects, including increasing CEC literacy and improving ecoproduct and services labeling. It also links to the integration of CEC into the remit of mainstream intelligence agencies. To address sensory and affective knowing, as well as the deep framing and meaning-making dimension of hyperthreat “knowing,” it will partner with the communications, arts, and humanities sectors in line with the “60,000 artists” concept.24 It will also harness the potential of virtual reality technologies, which have already proven effective in CEC communication.25 Finally, it will involve fast-tracking relevant research and improved mechanisms for conveying and sharing research and knowledge.

      Deep Humanity open access education program in museums, workshops and at public festivals can use the tool of compelling, engaging, interactive BEing Journeys to make the invisible hyperthreat visible.

    3. Here, in PLAN E, the concept of entangled security translates this idea into meaning that humanity itself can make a great sudden leap.

      An Open Access Deep Humanity education program whose core principles are continuously improved through crowdsourcing, can teach the constructed nature of reality, especially using compelling BEing Journeys. This inner transformation can rapidly create the nonlinear paradigm, worldview and value shifts that Donella Meadows identified as the greatest leverage points in system change.

    1. We fail to realise that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey.

      This is such an important concept to acknowledge and face! EVERYTHING we do is framed by a process, whether we are conscious of it or not. There are so many things I consider myself a beginner at, especially in terms of the arts. It is easy for me to say "I'll never be good at [fill in the blank]..." I've become increasingly aware that being "good" at something is relative, and harks back to the "journey" part of this quote. We only become better through practice, and "good" and "perfection" are in the eyes of the beholder anyway. Who amongst us hasn't been moved by a small child's drawing, not because of its "perfection," but because of the the story the child is telling in their art?

  21. Feb 2022
    1. To create trails  When we are studying a text we need to take the time to understand more than just the storyline. During your second reading, any comments made during the first reading (marginal comments or summaries) will quickly give you the gist of your first reading, so that you can take advantage of your second.

      While multiple readings of a text in antiquity may have been rarer, due to the cheap proliferation of books, one can more easily "blaze a trail" through their reading to make it easier or quicker to rebuild context on subsequent readings.


      Look at history of reading to see which books would have been more likely re-read, particularly outside of one's primary "area" of expertise.

      Link to the trails mentioned by Vannevar Bush in As We May Think.

  22. Nov 2021
    1. Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, Jayne, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

      While in the store, I was checking my email and noticed there was something from the Design Science Studio.

      Tomorrow’s visiting Visionary, Catherine Connors will be speaking on New Narratives: Storytelling ARTchitecture!

      As I was flipping through the book in the checkout line, I noticed the preface to the second edition:

      “I’m not trying to copy Nature. I’m trying to find the principles she’s using”

      — R. Buckminster Fuller

      A book goes out like a wave rolling over the surface of the sea. Ideas radiate from the author’s mind and collide with other minds, triggering new waves that return to the author. These generate further thoughts and emanations, and so it goes. The concepts described in The Writer’s Journey have radiated and are now echoing back interesting challenges and criticisms as well as sympathetic vibrations. This is my report on the waves that have washed back over me from publication of the book, and on the new waves I send back in response.

      On the back of the book, the description includes the following introduction.

      Christopher Vogler explores the powerful relationship between mythology and storytelling in his clear, concise style that's made i this book required reading for movie executives, screenwriters, playwrights, fiction and non-fiction writers, scholars, and fans of pop culture all over the world.

    1. Vogler based this work upon the writings of mythologist Joseph Campbell, particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and holds that all successful films innately adhere to its principles.

      Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

    1. Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.

      The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.

      Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.

      CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)

      This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)

      We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.

      Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.

      Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.

    2. That's a picture of it in the background. And this organism has the special trick that we call "photosynthesis," the ability to go take energy from the sun and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. And over the course of billions of years, so starting from two and a half billion years ago, little by little these bacteria spread across the planet 00:07:08 and converted all that carbon dioxide in the air into the oxygen that we now have. And it was a very slow process. First, they had to saturate the seas, then they had to saturate the oxygen that the earth would absorb, and only then, finally, could oxygen begin to build up in the atmosphere. So you see, just after about 900 million years ago, oxygen starts to build up in the atmosphere. And about 600 million years ago, something really amazing happens. 00:07:35 The ozone layer forms from the oxygen that has been released in the atmosphere. And it sounds like a small deal, like we talked about the ozone a couple decades ago, but it actually turns out that before the ozone layer existed, earth was not really able to sustain complex, multicellular life. We had single-celled organisms, we had a couple of simple, multicellular organisms, but we didn't really have anything like you or me. 00:07:59 And shortly after the ozone layer came into place, the earth was able to sustain complex multicellular life. There was a Cambrian explosion of life in the seas. And the first plants got onto land. In fact, there was actually no life on land ahead of that. Another way to see this is, this is kind of a chart of pretty much most of the animals that you guys are familiar with. 00:08:24 And right at the bottom in time is the formation of the ozone layer. Like nothing that you are familiar with today could exist without the contributions of these tiny organisms over those billions of years. And where are they now? Well actually, they never really left us. The direct descendants of the cyanobacteria were eventually captured by plants. And they're now called chloroplasts. 00:08:49 So this is a zoom-in of a plant leaf - and we probably ate some of these guys today - where tons of little chloroplasts are still trapped - contributing photosynthesis and making energy for the plants that continue to be the other half of our lungs on earth. And in this way, our breaths are very deeply united. Every out-breath is mirrored by the in-breath of a plant,

      This would be nice to turn into a science lesson or to represent this in an experiential, participatory Deep Humanity BEing Journey. To do this, it would be important to elucidate the series of steps leading from one stated result to the next, showing how scientific methodology works to link the series of interconnected ideas together. Especially important is the science that glues everything together over deep time.

    3. today I'm here to describe that everything really is connected, 00:02:02 and not in some abstract, esoteric way but in a very concrete, direct, understandable way. And I am going to do that with three different stories: a story of the heart, a story of the breath, and a story of the mind.

      These three are excellent candidates for multimedia Stop Reset Go (SRG) Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journey.

      It is relevant to introduce another concept that provides insights into another aspect required for engaging a non-scientific audience, and that is language.

      The audience is important! BEing Journeys must take that into consideration. We can bias the presentation by implicit assumptions. How can we take those implicit assumptions into consideration and thereby expand the audience?

      For a non-scientific audience, these arguments may not be so compelling. In this case, it is important to demonstrate how science can lead us to make such astounding predictions of times and space not directly observable to normative human perception.

    1. Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance and importance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitive shortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and responding to climate change (152), including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physically remote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview (153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangible threat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does not present itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events. Where strong concern does exist, this tends to be linked to care for others (154) combined with knowledge about the causes and possible consequences of climate change (155).

      This is indeed a problematic feature of human evolution. It has given rise to what Timothy Morton refers to as "hyperobjects", objects of such vastness in space and time that it defeats human mechanisms of perception at local scale: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects https://hyp.is/xROjpD_jEey4a6-Urbh4_Q/www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic

      This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way within the context of Deep Humanity open source praxis BEing journeys.

      As in the New Yorker interview with Morton, we can take Deep Humanity participants on BEing journeys, walkabouts to identify hyperobjects.

      Hyperobjects are also cognitive and highly abstract in nature. This is a clue to another idea that could be enlightening to understanding the problematic context of appreciating hyperobjects such as climate change, and that is the idea of Jakob Von Uexkull's Umwelt:

      "Uexküll was particularly interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). He argued that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, 'self-in-world' subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as surrounding-world,[9] phenomenal world,[10] self-world,[10] environment[11] - lit. German environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the "Umgebung" which would be the living being's surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the human observer. Umwelt may thus be defined as the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts as a subject. By studying how the senses of various organisms like ticks, sea urchins, amoebae, jellyfish and sea worms work, he was able to build theories of how they experience the world. Because all organisms perceive and react to sensory data as signs, Uexküll argued that they were to be considered as living subjects. This argument was the basis for his biological theory in which the characteristics of biological existence ("life") could not simply be described as a sum of its non-organic parts, but had to be described as subject and a part of a sign system.

      The biosemiotic turn in Jakob von Uexküll's analysis occurs in his discussion of the animal's relationship with its environment. The Umwelt is for him an environment-world which is (according to Giorgio Agamben), "constituted by a more or less broad series of elements [called] "carriers of significance" or "marks" which are the only things that interest the animal". Agamben goes on to paraphrase one example from Uexküll's discussion of a tick, saying,

      "...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood."[12]

      Thus, for the tick, the Umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: (1) The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, (2) The temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals), (3) The hairiness of mammals." ( From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Johann_von_Uexk%C3%BCll)

      The human umwelt limits us to a relatively small range of sensed signs. CO2 particles is not one of them. We rely on scientific narratives but these are far removed from direct sensing, into the field of conceptualization and abstraction. We have evolved to respond to danger that is sensed, less so to danger that is conceptualized.

  23. Oct 2021
    1. With the aid of the concept of opposing pairs of magnetic poles, we can clearly contribute in a significant way to our expression and understanding of basic relationships in the overall magnetic field. We are proposing to look at soma and significance in a similar way. That is to say, we regard them as two aspects introduced at an arbitrary conceptual cut in the flow of the field of reality as a whole. These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality.

      When Bohm writes "These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality", it reveals the true nature of words. Their only ever revealing aspects of the whole. They are NOT the whole.Hence, as linguistic animals, we are constantly dissecting parts of the whole of reality.

      Deep Humanity open-source praxis linguistic BEing journeys can be designed to reveal this ubiquitious aspectualizing nature of language to help us all better understand what we are as linguistic beings.

    1. In the Stop Reset Go project, I have been tasked with a journey map. How do we get a billion people to press a button? What happens when they press the button?

    1. Components of a Customer Journey Map

      1. Review Goals
      2. Gather Research
      3. Touchpoint & Channel Brainstorms
      4. Empathy Map
      5. Brainstorm with Lenses
      6. Affinity Diagram
      7. Sketch the Journey
      8. Refine & Digitize
      9. Share & Use

      This is the same process outlined in this journey map.

  24. Sep 2021
    1. The book, This is Service Design Doing, includes journey maps as a method for participatory design and co-creation workshops.

      I suggested to the Stop Reset Go team that we should map out the interactions and touch points to engage people with the process of bottom-up whole system change.

  25. Jul 2021
    1. How to Create a Travel Website: Types, Features, Industry TrendsTimur YilmazTech JournalistProduct GuideHomeBlogEntrepreneurshipHow to Create a Travel Website: Types, Features, Industry TrendsJul 13, 202119 min readMost people plan a journey by seeking advice from the same source — the Internet. As ending the pandemic is becoming more solvable, many of us think about where to travel next. Ironically, we tend to get easily overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tasks. What place is ok for a night stay? Which is the best camera backpack? Where to refuel? So today, we will figure out how a travel website works. We will also share tips on how to make your own travel website genuinely shine.

      Most people plan a journey by seeking advice from the same source — the Internet. As ending the pandemic is becoming more solvable, many of us think about where to travel next.

      Ironically, we tend to get easily overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tasks. What place is ok for a night stay? Which is the best camera backpack? Where to refuel?

      So today, we will figure out how a travel website works. We will also share tips on how to make your own travel website genuinely shine.

  26. Jan 2021
    1. From morn to night

      We started the poem at the beginning of the day and now end at night. Not only does this show the "circle motif" in this poem - what I mean is how "all things come to a close" and then restart anew - but it also parallels the journey of the youth, from being naive and blissful to being to falling victim to that naivety and becoming unaware of their fictitious bliss in the unknown; the journey leads to isolation from reality.

    2. folly=inescapable

      Blake shows how youth can be unaware that they have been corrupted. When they are brought down a path of ignorance, they become trapped in the dark, unless a light appears to guide them. Youth have few doubts, and when that is fed into, they continue without doubts, content with not having opposing views and nuance - stuck in their own folly.

  27. Dec 2020
    1. Some suggestions:   -Interrogate your life           Who are your heroes?           Who are your villains?           Where did you come from?           Who are your people? - Contemplate your own life story and those concerning your family. - Write down your life story.   - Identify your family rituals (birthdays, marriage, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.). - Write down your dreams and the impact they’ve had on your life.   - Religious beliefs and how they have affected your life. - Identify how your family recognizes the changes in life status, e.g., the passage from adolescence to adult, "coming of age". Note any differences between the way women and men are treated. - Identify any conflict resulting from the change in life status and its resolution. - How does religion or philosophy of life fit into your personal myth? - What major events have influenced your life? In what way have these events been the hinges whereby the story of your life swings? - Think about the story elements in your own life, then look for the meaning beneath the surface. - How does your interpretation of events differ from that of others who witnessed them?

      Prompts for journaling.

  28. May 2016
  29. journey.pathworkers.com journey.pathworkers.com
    1. highlighting and annotating

      Login to Hypothesis to highlight, annotate, add notes, comment. (If you don't have an account, you can create one for free here: https://hypothes.is/ Thanks.

      • Pathwork Journey
    1. that which you have read has awakened a response within, and the Soul of you yearns formore, -- then you are ready for what follows.If you still question or rebel at the seeming assumption of Divine authority for what is hereinwritten, your intellect telling you it is but another attempt to beguile your mind with cunningsuggestion and subtle sophistry, -- then you will receive no benefit from these words; for theirmeaning is as yet hidden from your mortal consciousness, and My Word must come to youthrough other avenues of expression.It is well if your personality with its intellect impels you thus to question and rebel againstauthority you do not yet know to be Mine. It is really I Who cause your personality thus to rebel;for your personality with its proud sense of individuality is still needed by Me to develop a mindand body strong enough that they can perfectly express Me. Until you have become prepared toknow Me it is but natural for your personality thus to question and rebel. Once you recognize MyAuthority, that moment the undermining of the authority of the personality has begun. The daysof its dominion are numbered, and you will more and more turn to Me for help and guidance.Therefore, be not dismayed. Read on, and mayhap the recognition will come. But know that youcan read or not, as you choose; but if you do it is really I Who choose, and not you.For you, who seemingly choose not to read further, I have plans, and in due season you shalllearn that whatever you do, or like, or desire, it is I leading you through all the fallacies andillusions of the personality, that you may finally awaken to their unreality and then turn to Me asthe one and only Reality. Then these words will find a response within:

      As I practice the mantra, I can feel the energy within of the Truth of it, yet I witness the egoic mind doubt that I can really allow this.......... yet I am aware that the part of me that doubts is simply the egoic mind itself..............

      And the amazing thing here is that even this that to me it says that there is 'no problem' in this as it simply means that the persona is "still needed by Me to develop a mind and body strong enough that they can perfectly express Me". This is powerful and it undermines the doubt........... I can relax, allow, surrender and know that my Being is unfolding me.

    2. "Be still! --- and KNOW --- I AM --- God."Yes, I AM that innermost part of you that sits within, and calmly waits and watches, knowingneither time nor space; for I AM the Eternal and fill all space.I watch and wait for you to be done with your petty human follies and weaknesses, with yourvain longings, ambitions and regrets, knowing that will come in time; and then you will turn toMe, weary, discouraged, empty and humble, and ask Me to take the lead, not realizing that I havebeen leading you all the time

      The part of which which is who I AM awaits....

    3. 8Yes, I sit here within, quietly waiting for this; yet while waiting it was really I Who directed allyour ways, Who inspired all your thoughts and acts, impersonally utilizing and manipulatingeach so as eventually to bring you and My other human expressions to a final consciousrecognition of Me.Yes, I have been within always, deep within your heart. I have been with you through all, --through your joys and heartaches, your successes and mistakes, through your evil-doing, yourshame, your crimes against your brother and against God, as you thought.Aye, whether you went straight ahead, or strayed aside, or stepped backward, it was I Whobrought you through.It was I Who urged you on by the glimpse of Me in the dim distance.It was I Who lured you by a vision of Me in some bewitching face, or beautiful body, orintoxicating pleasure, or over-powering ambition.It was I Who appeared before you within the garb of Sin, or Weakness, or Greed, or Sophistry,and drove you back into the arms of Conscience, leaving you to struggle in its shadowy grasp;until you awakened to its impotence, rose up in disgust, and in the inspiration of a new visiontore off My mask.Yes, it is I Who cause you to do all things, and if you can see it, it is I Who do all things that youdo, and all things that your brother does; for that in you and in him which IS, is I, My Self
  30. Jan 2016
    1. So, you must arrive at a conviction, and a willingness to commit to that conviction, which allows you to abandon reason for the apparently unreasonable. It is because what we are doing at this moment, you and I, does not compute with your preexisting conditioning that it seems unreasonable and impractical, and will seem so if you do not stay in touch with the unjustifiable claim that I am making—that you and I are together, actively and consciously together, to the degree that you are Hearing me, in the Fourth dimension, in the Kingdom of Heaven, in the middle of Reality, and that it is only by means of this connection and your embrace of the ability to conceive of your being Here with me that you can break through your “amnesia.”
  31. christmind.info christmind.info
    1. Now, this evening, I want you to explore being from your Knowing, not from your thinking. You will not be tested, nor judged. Just explore it, and the exploration of it will provide us with grist for the mill, as it were—further elucidation which will be relevant to you and will have meaning. And ask me questions. Don’t assume that somehow the process of Listening and Hearing is going to be different.

      Exploration, this is the Journey....

    1. All you can be sure of—and this is the Fact—all you can be sure of is that you are seeing something, and it is something functioning Fourth-dimensionally, even though the definitions and meanings you are giving it, which seem so real, are invalid. In order for what they really mean to register with you, you must go through a phase where, indeed, you are unsure.

      Being unsure is a necessary phase!

    2. Let this sense of Reality and unreality, without clear distinction, be. And do not try to figure it out. But insist, as you have, upon communicating with me, because our communication does now cease to be a communication of information and becomes a substantiation of where you, as you are experiencing yourself, are originating from. In other words, again, our conversation confirms your divinity and its active presence, Fourth-dimensionally speaking. What I am saying, you are experiencing—and I am not talking about an idea! To continue frequently to experience—not think about—that confirmation, you will become grounded Fourth-dimensionally and ungrounded three-dimensionally. That is the shift. As that confirmation is reconfirmed when you frequently address me and hear me respond, it will include illumination of the details which in the past you have hoped to arrive at by means of thinking and reasoning. You are indeed on the move again—not stuck in an improved belief.

      Raj shares with Paul to insist upon communicating with him because through this communication which is in 4d it affirms Paul's divinity.

      The shift is to be more grounded in 4d and less in 3d.

    3. I encourage you, during the next twenty-four hours, to check in with me even more frequently. And again, I caution you not to become concerned because of a lessening of your ability to tell what is real and what is not, what is important and what is not. Allow that flux, and address yourself to the one unchanging, anchored aspect—that of our connection and the fact that that connection is occurring Fourth-dimensionally; that you are not connecting with me from the three-dimensional-only frame of reference, but are connecting with me from and as the Fourth-dimensional conscious experience of Being.

      Again I hear here that Raj is reassuring Paul that 'unsureness' is a stepping stone.

  32. Dec 2015
    1. You are realizing that when that sensation occurs to you in a healing session, it indicates not a three-dimensional point of view on your part, but an awareness of a pervading feeling (distress) in the area of the person you are working with.

      Learn to discern what you are aware of. Is it coming from 3dRef or 4dRef? What is there to be discovered.

    1. Although the transcript gives some slight indication of what we have been discussing, the emphasis should be placed on the actual experiences which you have had. The value is in the communication of meaning as experienced within your consciousness.

      Words are symbols of symbols twice removed from Reality ~ACIM

      It's the meaning of the words that is important - that has value. Meaning is communicated by experience.

    2. The only solution which can actually resolve a relationship problem is for the one experiencing discomfort to drop the personal sense of involvement, thus resolving it actually back into the normal Universal Harmonies that constitute the existence of the individualities involved. This is a phrase which you have heard many times before, but it has been unclear to you how to do it. Trying to lay down a personal sense is like trying to lay down a piece of flypaper. The more you attempt to put it down, the more firmly it sticks! The only way to lay down a personal sense of things is to go within to that Place of quietness and attentiveness, and listen for the influx of your Being as It sees Itself from Its infinite standpoint. This can be achieved through meditation, if one is a beginner. Here, you not only see things as they are, but you experience them as they are. In that experience you cannot find a trace of that personal sense of things from which you had been suffering.

      The way to resolve challenge with in personal relationship.

    1. Raj, is there anything you can do to help me quit smoking, or is there anything you can suggest to me that will allow me help myself more effectively quit smoking? RAJ: As you asked the question, you realized that all you have to do is set into motion the fact that you are not addicted to cigarettes—or, more positively, that you are free of the desire to smoke cigarettes—and that that is the most effective means you could possibly use in order to give them up. As I said earlier, they, as part of Your infinitude, are going to be more than willing to cooperate with that desire, placed at the point of Conscious Being, and set into action by the Law of Being. I would suggest that you simply begin to use that facility to see your desire manifest in your life. You see, Paul, it all has to connect up. There is truly only one thing going on. From the first through the Fourth Dimension there is only one Activity, and that is the Activity occurring as Conscious Being. All of you is always present, and all of you is always functioning and the manner or the means by which it is present and functioning is the simple practice with which I began our conversation today. As you can see, this is not self-hypnosis, nor is it an attempt to influence the three-dimensional conscious frame of reference. It does not involve manipulation of things “out there,” or ideas within your head. You simply go to the Source, bringing to it the perfect desire. The Law, then, together with the Nature of Substance Itself, takes care of the objects “out there” and the beliefs “in here”—in three-dimensional awareness. You are going to have fun with that.

      Raj suggests to practice manifestation of quitting smoking in the manner he described earlier - to actually put it into practice with something occurring in everyday life.

    1. PAUL: Very well. What about the three gentlemen that were here? RAJ: Paul, I know you are still looking for some specific, objective evidence to totally prove the fact that all of this is valid. Paul, it will happen in its own time, and you must be patient. The formation of voluntary trust on your part is still in the development stage. The need at this time is for you to persist in this process because you feel it is right.

      Development of trust