I heard a pretty good story the other day on the radio. It was about these two guys back I Europe, a couple hundred years ago who had an interesting theory. I’m not exactly sure what their professions were, but I think it was some type of profession that had to do with sociology or religion. I think maybe they were professors or something.

Anyway, they had this idea that if they went out to the small towns around Europe (this during a time of relative peace, before the two big world wars) and talked to enough people, they would find something very interesting. Being both devout Christians, they figured they would be able to piece together all the stories from various towns and villages, and put together some super grand unification theory of morality.

They were hoping to find some kind of underlying message or ethical punch line to all these various stories that had been passed down from generation to generation. Their underlying assumption was that God somehow transmits ideas to people, and then people transmit His ideas through their own experiences.

If they collected enough of these stories, they would be able to find the similar themes and messages, and strip out the various personal and local flavors that had been added to these tales over the years, and uncover Gods clear message to humanity.

Unfortunately, after several years of research, all they had was a bunch of nonsense that didn’t really make any sense. The stories they heard from this town over here had absolutely nothing at all to do with the tales they heard from that village over there.

Dejected, they gave up, and went home as failures and went back to teaching, or whatever it was they did before they set out on their failed mission.
Those that have studied the works of Joseph Campbell may see a similar structure in this. He went around the world, for many years, and studied mythology from different cultures, and unlike the two failed researchers mentioned above, he found some very striking similarities between the myths of all cultures.

They more or less followed something called a “Hero’s Journey,” in which there was a young kid, who lived a relatively boring life. Then some higher spirit or god called him on a journey, and he either was forced to go, or went on it on his on volition. On the journey he learns new things about himself, and fights some evil monster, and then returns to his previous life, but now an “enlightened” person, who is seen as a leader or a person of significance in his original community.

That’s pretty much the rough outline, there are several variations, and he identified seventeen or eighteen elements of which 4 or 5 exist in almost every mythological tale ever passed on from human to human. The “Hero’s Journey” is at the core.

If you take as step back, you can see this in many popular movies, as well as modern mythology (e.g. Christianity). Luke Skywalker, Dorothy, Harry Potter, that kid in Transformers, and even Jesus of Nazareth follow the same outline of the Hero’s Journey.

Many believe the reason behind this ubiquitous story structure is the method by which we are all born. We are in the womb, and then the contractions start, and then we are forced through the birth canal and out in the world, literally kicking and screaming. Dorothy and Luke on their respective farms, Harry in his room under the steps, Spiderman living a life of Peter parker, and even Jesus the humble carpenter are all metaphors for the womb.

The Dorothy’s tornado, Luke’s journey with Obi Won, Harry being swept away to Hogwarts, are all metaphors for being pulled into the birth canal.

Then when Harry becomes a wizard, Dorothy finds the wizard, and Luke becomes a Jedi are all metaphors for being born. And the same process, repeats over and over again throughout our lives, giving that particular story structure a strange affinity to our unconscious.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about linguistics. And there are two kinds of grammar, prescriptive grammar, and descriptive grammar. Prescriptive grammar is the kind of grammar you “should” use, and descriptive grammar is the kind that people actually use.

Apparently, any linguist worth his salt studies “descriptive,” grammar, just like any scientists worth his salt checks his expectations at the door and measures reality the way it really is, and not the way he thinks it should be, or the way he wishes it were.

Those that advocate prescriptive grammar, (which actually stems from schools in London many years ago that basically “invented” certain grammar rules so that upper class wanna-be’s could distinguish themselves from the rabble) are advocating a method of speech based on what they think “should” be the way you talk.

There is more and more evidence that strongly suggests that language is a biologically based instinct, and prescriptive grammar is no more natural than removing a couple of ribs to make your waist skinner.

Which, I think, lays the difference between those two researchers, who came up empty, and Joseph Campbell, who discovered some fantastic insights into human nature.

The first two were trying to prove what they thought was a pre determined outcome, while Campbell was merely studying and observing, as a scientific.

Of course the first two guys, who were brothers, and had the last name of Grimm, didn’t completely fail. Several years after they collected their stories, a friend suggested they publish them as children’s stories.

And that is how the Brothers Grimm Fairly Tales came to be. An attempt to uncover some mystical teachings of God, which turned out to be some pretty cool stories.

Note: The story of how the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales came about was heard on Paul Harvey’s “The Rest Of The Story.”

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Once a friend of mine were watching some videos at his house. This way back in high school, and his parents were out of town, so we had the house to ourselves. Nearby his parents place they were building a new group of houses, and they were at the stage where they all had that wooden skeleton look to them. After we grew bored watching our videos, we decided to go exploring through the construction site.

He lived in these hills, and the construction site was for some houses that were going to be pretty expensive. They were on the top of this one particular hill that had a decent view of the ocean a few miles way. So they were big, and fairly spread out. It was dark, and very windy. We didn’t really have any specific plans, other than to just walk around someplace at night that we weren’t supposed to be.

It was fun at first, walking through the houses, climbing up to the second story, and standing in the areas where the doors would go. Then we saw this big dark thing that seemed to be moving. My friend suggested it was some kind of guard that was well trained to attack if anybody got too close. We hadn’t brought any flashlights, and there was no moon out, so it was pretty dark. We stood there frozen for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. Should we slowly approach this black object, and see what would happen? Or was this some trick, was this some highly trained guard dog that had been taught to lay in wait for its victims to get close enough, and then jump for the jugular. Perhaps it was on a long chain, and was waiting for us to get within striking distance.

I remember once another friend of mine and I were on this hike through the Sierra Nevada mountain range. We were on the second day of a weeklong backpacking trip. There was this particularly tough pass that we had to go over. Mountain passes can be the most difficult part of a hike, as they sometimes require you to spend several hours on these switchbacks. The side of the mountains you are trying to hike over are so steep, the only way to get over the top is to traverse back and forth at an angle several times. Our guidebook mentioned that this particular pass was one of the toughest in the whole mountain range, and when we got close enough to see it, I understood why.

Usually when you come up within site of a pass, you can sort of guess where the trail will lead up and over the lowest point, judging by the terrain and such. But this particular pass looked impossible. There didn’t seem to be any possible way to get over the looming pass on foot. I remember remarking to my friend that had I been a retreating general in charge of several hundred troops, upon sight of the pass I would have told my men to turn around prepare for a fight to the death, as this pass was impassable.

I remember when I was a kid, and I had to get this shot for one reason or another. It wasn’t my first shot, I’m pretty sure I don’t remember my first shot, but for some reason I wasn’t looking forward to this one. Maybe because I knew it was coming, and I had few days to look forward to it. I suppose I had built I up in my mind to be a gigantic rusty needle that they would stick in my behind and twist around for a few minutes before ripping out hunks of flesh. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and was in near tears when we got the doctors office.

The doctor sensed I was nervous, and started telling me a story about basketball. At first I was confused, but he seemed to be really interested in his own story, so I couldn’t help but to become a little curious.

He started talking about shooting free throws, and how it really helps to imagine the ball going in the hoop in your mind before you take the shot. It also helps to have taken plenty of practice shots before, so you know what to visualize. The funny thing is that he said you only need to make one or two shots when you practice. Even if you take fifty shots, if you only make five, that’s plenty. So when you are playing for real, and you have to make a free throw, just concentrate on those five that you made, and remember them in as much detail as possible.

He said that many players focus on the wrong thing. They focus on the empty basket, and the ball in their hands, and how they will move their arms, and how they should stand, or how many times you should bounce the ball before you shoot. He said when you do that your brain isn’t really sure what you want, so you always have mixed results.

He said that by only thinking of those few times (or many times, it doesn’t really matter) in the past that you got what you wanted, the rest will fall into place. That way when you are practicing, you are really just collecting a few data points to help to point your brain in the right direction the future. Kind of like when you preprogram your GPS in your car before you drive someplace. Once you set it, you just listen to the voice tell you where to go, and you can sit back and enjoy the scenery (but not too much) or listen to the radio, or chat with your partner.

He was telling me how good he became at making free throws, when I vaguely felt this wet sensation on my behind. Then I felt some nurse (who I didn’t even remember walking in) put one of those round band-aids on, and pull my pants back up. I didn’t remember her pulling them down. Then she handed the empty shot to the doctor, who turned and threw it dead center into the trashcan across the room.

“Told you I was good,” he said, and winked at me.

Once we started hiking up the seemingly impassable pass, the trail became clear. And the further up we got, the entire trail became visible. What seemed like an impossible task suddenly became just another set of switchbacks, and before we knew it we were on top of Sheperd’s Pass, the hardest pass in the Sierras, according to the guidebook we had.

After finally debated for a while, we decided to pick up a rock and throw it at this dog/thing/monster that was waiting to rip out our jugulars and then feast on our brains. Nothing. We threw another rock, nothing. Another rock, nothing.

When we got closer, it turned out to be a roll of that black asphalt stuff that had come undone. No big deal. We explored some more houses, vowed to become rich enough one day to buy a big house like that, and went back to his parents house to finish our videos, and whatever microwaveable food we could find in his parents fridge.

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Today’s topic is about apples. Apples are the most delicious things you can eat, except for oranges, even though I’m not particularly fond of oranges. Sometimes I can’t resist the smell, and I pick up a couple dozen. Sometimes at one of those roadside stands that are selling them by the bag for something like two dollars or something. It just seems like a deal that you cannot possibly pass up. These beautiful round, sweet smelling vitamin C loaded hunks of citrus selling for only two dollars for a giant bag. It’s almost too good to be true.

Of course when I get them home, I remember that I don’t particularly care for oranges. I’m a pretty lazy person, and eating them is just too much trouble. I like orange flavor. Usually when I pass by the vending machine and there are several different flavors of Fanta to choose from, I often choose orange. If somebody figured out a way to make an apple taste like an orange that would be fantastic.

Apples are the perfect fruit to eat, in my opinion. Not the perfect taste, or the most versatile, but as far as the mechanics of eating goes, they are as close to perfect as you can get. You can reach up, pull one off the tree, and start munching without a second thought. You only need one hand, there aren’t any peels to worry about, or small in every bite you need to worry about spitting out.

I was at my friends house recently, and she was telling me her dogs really love me. Her husband likes to make these barbecued chicken wings, and I never eat all the meat off them. So when we’re finished, and she gives all the bones to the dogs, they naturally like my leftovers the best because they have the most meat on the bones. So maybe I also leave more apple on the core than most people as well. I did mention that I am pretty lazy.

And from the apples perspective, it’s a great reproductive strategy. There you are, the seed in the middle, surrounded by all this fructose. Most people, when they eat an apple, don’t eat nearly all they can. That would take too long. To sit there and suck every last piece of pulp from the fruit. Most people just eat about 80 percent of the good stuff, and discard the rest. Of course in modern times we throw the empty in a garbage can.

But long long ago, when we wore loincloths and didn’t watch TV, we would throw the apples on the dirt. And the discarded apple core was a perfect vehicle for growing another tree. It has plenty of nutrients for the seeds to use to sprout and grow. What’s even better is animals that either are too dumb to know the difference, or don’t have hands to eat with, will eat the entire apple. Then when the animal in question does his business, there are seeds surrounded by the best plant generating material there is.

Of course, then there’s the metaphor about Johnny Appleseed, who roamed the country planting apple seeds every where, and is responsible for the vast number of apple trees across America. One wonders what saying “As American As Apple Pie” would have been if Johnny Appleseed planted watermelon seeds, or kiwi seeds. Perhaps we would have gone to war with New Zealand or something equally as senseless.

I guess having a metaphor as some happy guy planting apple trees sounds better for the kids. If you had a metaphor as some goofy animal roaming the country eating apples whole and then pooping out the seeds, or a bunch of prehistoric people eating apples and then littering everywhere, that wouldn’t sell as many children’s books. Johnny Appleseed sounds better than Johnny Apple Litterbug, or Spot The Fierce Apple Seed Pooper.

I suppose that happens a lot. We see something, we figure out how it works, or we have a basic idea of how it works, but instead of describing it accurately, we make up some story. Either the story sounds better, or it’s easier to come up with, or it’s simpler.

I was reading this essay once on memes (I’m afraid I don’t remember where, so I can’t link to it) and the guy who wrote it was saying there are several reasons why memes spread. One of them is how easy the idea is to understand. One example that is often used is how to fold a particular Japanese Origami. There are a certain number of steps, and depending on how faithfully you reproduce those steps, you’ll end up with a pretty decent shape.

Obviously, the Origami’s that last the longest are both easy to do, and have a result that is aesthetically, and symbolically pleasing. One of the most ubiquitous Origami shapes in Japan is the crane. Birds represent freedom (among other things) as they can fly wherever they want. Cranes are white which represent purity and peace (among other things). And folding a paper crane isn’t particularly difficult. Most elementary school kids in Japan can make one easy enough. So you have a shape that is fairly easy to fold, and the outcome gives the folder a pretty good feeling.

Compare that to some Origami shape where the outcome was symbolic of death and disease, and in order to fold it you have to be an Origami grand master, that particular meme wouldn’t lend itself very much to spreading.

When you throw in something like a naturally occurring event, like the number of apple trees in a particular area, that throws another variable in the mix. Now you’ve got this thing in reality that you need to describe. The outcome can’t be changed, (e.g. there are a bunch of apple trees) but the stories will vary widely, and depending how simple they are to transmit, and how happy they make the teller/listener, they will propagate at different rates, until one story is the exclusive story being told everywhere.

Maybe there were a bunch of different stories told to explain the number of apple trees. The one that stuck was the one that was easy to tell (some guy roamed the country planting them) and it sounded pretty good. (The guy that planted them was somebody that intended to provide apples for everybody.)

Of course there is one more variable that we could talk about, and that is intention. Johnny Appleseed has a pretty good intention, namely to help others. Some caveman litterbug’s or some pooping animal’s intentions aren’t so noteworthy. That, however, shall be addressed in another post.

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The other night I was supposed to go to this party with a couple of friends of mine. Within thirty minutes each one called me with some last minute emergency that kept them from going. Not such a big deal, it was a birthday party of a friend of a friend, one of those things where nobody is really spearheading the effort. Like when you get a group of people together, and everybody’s first choice of what to do is different, but everybody’s second choice is the same, so you go with your second choice. That’s kind of how this plan got formulated. Which is why it disintegrated without much fanfare.

After they bailed out, for reasons I’m pretty sure were honest and legitimate, I bailed out myself. So there I was, left without any plans for the evening. So I did what any other normal person would do with an evening suddenly free of organized activities.

I went to work in my basement to further my research on alternative energy sources using a combination of hybridized cold fusion with solar image refraction.

Just kidding.

I watched TV.

It started out like any other night of TV watching. My TV, my remote, and my attention deficit disorder rapidly clicking through channels, pausing at any thing that resembled girls in bikinis.

I happened across a documentary about something, I think it was a religious program on the bible or something. It was one of those shows where they have the host, which really isn’t an authority on the subject, but a recognized figure, and a bunch of pre made clips spliced in with so called “experts” sitting in some office with a large impressive bookcase behind them, talking about the particular subject.

They were talking about the various stories from the Old Testament. I think the gist of the show was how much of the Old Testament is historical, and how much is mere allegory to explain a particular point.

For example they showed the story of Noah and the great flood is fairly ubiquitous throughout many different religions that predate the Old Testament. Most of the guys they talked to seemed to agree it was symbolic, as water is often used as a cleansing metaphor in stories, both religious and non-religious. I remember a professor of philosophy explaining to us, as we were studying Siddartha, by Hesse, how when the main character crossed a river, it had metaphorical significance, and then later when the main character became the actual ferryman, that had even more significance. For those of you who haven’t read Siddharta, it’s basically about the Buddha before he became the Buddha, and how he reached enlightenment.

There were a couple of guys they interviewed that maintained the story of Noah and the ark was literally truth, and there is evidence of an Ark somewhere in Turkey. Sonar imagery shows something that appears to be boat of pretty much the same dimensions as described in the Old Testament.

One interesting metaphor, or truth, depending on your belief system is the Temple of Solomon. The temple of Solomon is often referred to, and is believed to be an important Temple of King Solomon long before Kind David.

If you’ve ever read the DaVinci Code, or seen the movie, part of the story involves the Templar Knights, who, as a group, gained an enormous amount of power during the middle ages. The supposedly found some secret hidden in the remains of Solomon’s Temple, and that is where they got their power. Some say that it was a secret so devastating to the Catholic Church that they effectively blackmailed the pope, giving them enormous authority.

Then, on the other side of the spectrum are those that believe the Temple of Solomon is completely metaphorical for the power of the unconscious mind.
There’s actually quite a bit of Gnostic thought that seeped into both the Old and New Testament. When the Romans politicized religion, they pretty much stamped out any beliefs that didn’t see the Pope as the supreme ruler, and any Gnostic thought was made illegal.

Basically, the idea behind Gnosticism is that the entire power of the universe resides in every person, and is easily accessible if you know how to tap into it. According to this theory, the Temple of Solomon is simply a metaphor for the power of the unconscious. Of course, if you are a Roman leader, and you’ve got millions of people you need to control, this idea doesn’t do you very much good. It’s much better to invent an idea of the power of the universe residing in some spiritual leader or guru, upon whom the people depend on for their salvation.

If you are the Pope, having the power to excommunicate entire nations can be extremely powerful, more so than whole armies of soldiers willing to die.

Obviously, when it comes to Biblical stories, there’s no proof one way or the other. You can believe they are literally true, or you can believe they are simply metaphors designed to help people out. Whether or not you believe the sun is the son of Zeus traveling across the sky, or merely a huge ball of hydrogen slowly turning into helium that the Earth is revolving around doesn’t really matter when your alarm clock rudely shakes you out of your sleep on a Monday morning. You’d better get out of bed either way.

I suspect that all this is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to how we humans perceive our environment, and our shared history.

The conclusion of that show wasn’t really much of a conclusion, rather than a restatement of the original questions. But it was certainly interesting to hear all those different opinions.

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The other day I was wandering down town, not really wandering, just kind of maybe shuffling along. Shuffling doesn’t quite describe it either, shuffling is what drunken people do that don’t have a destination. While I didn’t have a destination, I wasn’t drunk, so maybe I’d better choose another verb. Staggering? No, ambling? Not sure if that’s a word. Meandering. That’s it, I was meandering down town the other day, and I saw this strange looking man. He had this peculiar feeling about him, and he was looking at me a bit strangely. I wasn’t sure if he was going to introduce himself as a long lost pal, or pull out a knife and kill me where I stood.

But before I describe the strange looking man, I need to explain why I was meandering down town in the middle of a sunny weekend afternoon. I had originally gone downtown to catch a movie, but as it sometimes happens, the times they list on the movie page are not the same as at the actual theater. To make matters worse, the movie I had intended to see not only started at a different time, but instead of being in English with Japanese subtitles, it was dubbed in Japanese.

Of course if I read a synopsis of the movie before hand, and paid close enough attention, I’d be able understand enough of the dialogue to make out the basic plot. But that would require brainpower, and that’s one of my main reasons for going to the movies, so I can shut off my brain for a couple hours. Not completely shut if off, I still need to be able to work my mouth and my hand so I can stuff my face with as much popcorn as possible.

But there I was, ready to spend a couple hours of brain-free relaxation, when my plans were thwarted by Internet inaccuracy. I wasn’t going to give in without a struggle. I was determined to expend a little brain energy as possible.

I can be frustrating when you are expecting one thing, but then something else entirely shows up in its place, and despite really liking this thing that you have here in front of you, you were maybe expecting something else. And no matter how much you try and convince yourself that this is OK, part of you continues to wish that you’d gotten the other thing that you’d expected in the first place.

Kind of like if you were expecting to go on vacation in Hawaii, but you got on the wrong plane and ended up in Alaska. Alaska is a cool place, and had you planned on going there, you’d likely enjoy it. They have some cool stuff in Alaska. But since you were planning on Hawaii, you wouldn’t be able to fully throw yourself in to your suddenly determined by fate vacation in Alaska. Not to mention that you’d probably be pretty cold, seeing as how all you had was a grass skirt, a surfboard, and a couple of ukulele’s. And to add insult to injury, instead of getting lei’d by a cute Hawaiian girl, you’d get hit in the face with a snowball by some angry alcoholic Eskimo. Which would suck under any circumstances.

I was just about to try and ignore this strange guy, and turn into the shop I happened to be standing next to, when he called out my name. So he did know me. I turned, wondering where I knew him from. When he started to approach, he did the strangest thing. It was odd, and I looked around wondering what other’s reactions would be, as most people don’t do what he was doing right there on the sidewalk.

Either nobody seemed to notice, or they just pretended they didn’t notice. Or maybe part of them noticed, but another part of them didn’t notice that they noticed, like some strange form of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is an interesting thing. Some say it’s the brains way of keeping everything in order, and not seeing things that are right in front of you, because if you acknowledge certain things, you would have to go through a lot of mental recalculation to re figure out your model of reality. And that can be time consuming. So the brain has evolved this mechanism for shutting out certain parts of the reality.

Those that study Freud say it’s to protect the ego. People that have bad habits, for example, don’t see them as being bad, at least to the extent that they do them. If we were to look at them objectively, or if we saw another person with the same habit, we’d be much more realistic in our judgment of the habit. But because that would require making a hard decision about what to do, we tend to ignore it.

But that only goes so far to explain why all those people ignored this guy, who pretended to know me, when he started doing what he did. People don’t usually do that out of context, and especially when they are alone. I certainly hope that I didn’t cause this strange looking man that pretended to know me to start to do that. I checked again to everybody that was walking past this guy, within a couple feet of him, and they didn’t even turn their heads. I started to think maybe I’d slipped through some crack into an alternative reality, I even started thinking that was why the movie times on the Internet were different from the real movie times.

I started to really get nervous. Everything that I thought was absolutely true was turning out not to have any corroborating evidence. What if reality really was a fiction of your imagination, and you can only succeed in life so long as you find enough people that have an overlapping hallucination? How do you know that red really is red? I started to panic, when this old lady stopped and started to lecture this crazy guy. As soon as she started to lecture him, other people turned to look, and started whispering amongst themselves. He apologized, and said he’d got carried away. He kept motioning over toward me while he was talking to this old lady, and for some reason, I stood where I was, a bit curious, and relieved that reality was still intact. But before I knew it, the man apologized once more, bowed to everybody that has stopped to watch him receive the shellacking from this old woman, hopped on his unicycle, and rode away.

Of course, I was left standing there, absorbing all the residual curiosity from the now very interested crowd. What I did next is another story.

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I was reading this book the other day. It was a non-fiction book, one that makes stop every couple of pages and think, or maybe take notes. The guy that writes this has this way of making you really reflect on what you’re reading, now. The book is about language, and anytime you use language to talk about language, it has this self-reflexive hypnotic effect. Kind of like when you stand between two mirrors, you can see yourself going back into infinity.

One of the things this book was talking about was the theory of recursion as being a test for a “human” language. Recursion is kind of like a nested loop inside of a sentence, where you have one entity, or thought, inside another. Instead of saying “the tiger ate her,” you could say “the tiger the girl who was running” to further expand on “her.” Or you could say “the tiger ate the girl wearing the blue shoes who has running.” According to Chomsky, language has the possibility of an infinite level of recursion.

They were comparing human language to the alleged “language” they teach chimps, which is supposed to show the humans aren’t the only ones that can master communication. Unless you consider the sentence “me banana banana me me me banana banana banana me me me banana banana,” an acceptable sentence in (any language) those chimp trainers have got a long way to go.

There was that scene in planet of the apes where they “expert” was on TV trying to explain the complexities of time travel. He showed some guy painting a picture of the sunset. But if it were an accurate picture, he would have to put himself in the picture. But then if that were an accurate picture, he would have to paint a picture of himself painting a picture of himself, and so on.

Infinite loops are everywhere.

There was this king once in Europe several hundred years ago. He hired a mathematician to figure out some problem, and as a model the mathematician studies the theoretical growth of rabbits. Starting with two rabbits, and assuming that each pair of rabbits make a new pair every month, he came with what is now called the Fibonacci sequence. Perhaps you’ve heard of it if you’ve read the DaVinci Code. The sequence is 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13 etc. Can you see the pattern? Each number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers.

What’s cool is if you plot it on a graph, starting with zero in the center, an interesting pattern emerges. Go up one, and draw a point. Then go to the right one (the next number) and draw another point. Then go down 2 (the next number) and draw another point. Then go to the left 3 (the next number) and draw another point, and keep this up. Pretty soon you’ll have this nice spiral that expands outward as you continue to draw points and connect. The particular mathematical shape of this spiral is found everywhere in nature. The curve of breaking waves at the beach, ram’s horns, flowers. There are even those that use this sequence to predict (fairly accurately) the movement of stocks and other financial securities.

Another cool part of the Fibonacci sequence is what’s known as the “golden mean.” If you take any one number in the sequence, and divide it by the previous number, you’ll get about .6, give or take. This ratio is also found everywhere in nature, as well as human constructions. The length divided by the width of the Parthenon in Ancient Greece gives you the golden mean. So do the width and height of any crucifix or Christian cross you see. Also your height and the height of your belly button, as well as your height and the length of your outstretched arms.

Now is there a connection? Is there a reason that a fundamental test for “human” language is it’s recursiveness, and that there are several recursive patterns that repeat themselves over and over again in nature?

I would suspect there is. If you look at flowers, they grow out naturally in the Fibonacci pattern. Our brains are comprised of neurons and dendrites that appear very much like vines, or plants growing outwards. So it would make sense that our language, which is a manifestation of our brains, would obey the same rules as various naturally occurring systems in nature.

There is another theory regarding the structure of the universe. This theory, which has been called the holographic universe theory, states that the structure of the universe is identical regardless of what size you are looking at. Taken its name from a hologram. A hologram is a specially etched piece of glass, and when you shine a laser through it, it will produce a three dimensional image. If you shatter the glass into a million pieces, they will produce not a shattered three-dimensional image, but a million smaller three-dimensional images.

The basic shape and structure of an atom is the same as the solar system. One center, and bunch of things spinning around the outside of it.

So the question I’ll leave you with is this:

Is the holographic theory of the universe accurate, does the universe really behave in the same way regardless of what size chunk you are looking at?

OR

Are we humans, with our limited capacity for measuring the physical universe based on the limitations of our sensory organs, merely seeing everything the same based on those constraints? If so, what really is out there?

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I was listening to the radio the other night, on the Internet. I wasn’t sure what station it was, I was kind of flipping through the channels while I was doing other things. A song came on that I hadn’t heard in a while, “Tom Sawyer,” by Rush. The particular album cover was pretty clever, from a linguistic standpoint. The name of the album is “moving pictures” which most people would take to mean movies. In the old days they called a movie a “picture” as in “moving picture.” which is where the word “movie” comes from, the root word (verb) “to move.”

But on the album cover, it showed a bunch of guys “moving” stuff out of a house an into a moving van. What were they moving? Several paintings. So they were “moving pictures” of a different sort. The “pictures” were being move by other people, as compared to the “movie” meaning given above, the pictures themselves are moving. For those language geeks out there, the verb “move” is an intransitive verb in one example (a verb that doesn’t require an object) and a transitive verb in the other (a verb that requires an object).

Where was I? Oh yea. The song I listened to, Tom Sawyer, has a verse that says:

“Though his mind is not for rent
to any god or government
always hopeful yet discontent
he knows changes aren’t permanent
but change is”

The first line got me thinking. Mind is not for rent. What exactly does that mean? What does it mean to rent out your mind? If you rent out a room, you let somebody stay there for a certain amount of money for letting them sleep in your house every night and store their food in your fridge and use your plumbing to bath and take of their waste. Is it worth it? Usually. Most often the biggest drawback is having somebody in your house. The additional financial burden of an extra person are usually not very much, certainly not close to the rent you’d likely charge. It’s usually a good deal for somebody that has an extra room and wants to save a considerable amount of money every month. Many people make a living by buying houses and renting them out. It can be very lucrative, even despite recent real estate and financial nightmares.

Back to the song. What does it mean to rent out your mind? Take thoughts that aren’t yours, and give them residence inside your brain. This can be very helpful, but it can be equally be as dangerous and destructive. Let’s first consider some of the benefits.

Unless you want to reinvent the wheel, Euclidian geometry and certain tasks like how to drive and how to hook up your cable TV, you’re going to have to accept those thought collections or mental instructions from other people. Humans are very social creatures, and the bottom line is that almost all of our thoughts come from others. Your name, phone number, driver’s license number, most of the facts and information you know (unless you are an independently wealthy research scientist living on a island studying esoteric biology) come from others.

Basic survival information, and useful things like how to do your job right, so you can earn a steady paycheck are welcome additions to our mental house. We hope those thoughts never check out, otherwise we’d be left babbling in the corner like idiots.

But just unhelpful and potentially harmful thoughts can enter into our brain and take up residence just as easily. Most of us are carrying around baggage from childhood without even realizing it. That statement from that second grade teacher who said, “Can’t you do anything right” may still echo whenever we try something new.

That statement by that child psychologist that you may have overheard when you were four years old that said, “Girls just aren’t wired to be as good at math as boys are,” may still reverberate whenever it comes time to calculate the tip at a restaurant.

Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that there are a lot of factors (due to long ago evolutionary elements) that let certain thoughts slip into our brains without much resistance. Authority is one. Social proof is another. If an authority figure tells us something (like that idiot third grade teacher or that moron on TV) we are much more likely to accept it as fact without questioning it.

Social proof is another powerful convincer. If a lot of people believe something, it can be a difficult thought to resist. (Purple kool aid anyone?)

The point is that we have evolved past the point of need to follow the herd, or listening to authority figures for our every day survival. Be like Tom Sawyer, in that song by Rush. Take inventory of your brain and kick out the thoughts that are doing you more harm than good.

Your brain, and your thoughts are the most important thing that you have. When was the last time you cleaned house?

It’s time to collect the rent, and evict the freeloaders.

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Once there was a group of birds. They were the kind of birds that migrated quite a long distance every year. They crossed oceans, rivers, mountains, and large flat areas that took several days to cross. They would instinctively leave their homes once the cold air of the winter signaled it was time for their departure. Once they arrived in the warmer areas, the boys and girls would hook up and make baby birds. Of course birds don’t pop right out fully formed, like people do.

They are not quite done when they come out, they need a little bit more work. So they finish cooking in the next inside their protective shell. When they are ready to face the world, they break out of their shells, and start to make noises. Usually these noises mean, “Give me food!” but sometimes they just like to make noise. It’s fun to learn to do things and watch how the world reacts to you.

Then, if all goes well, when everybody can fly on their own, and not get lost, they all pack up their stuff and head back home when the weather starts to warm up.

Now here is the curious part. While they’ve been studying the migration patterns of birds for quite some time, they aren’t exactly sure how they remember how to go back and forth. Some argue that because many birds make the same trip several times in their lifetime, they follow others the first time, and then remember if from there. But that would mean that bird have some kind of long term memory. While possible, some argue that that is unlikely. Another problem with that theory is that after the new birds are hatched and learn to fly, they can find their way back “home.”

It’s important to remember that “home” is sometimes several thousand miles away, and over various different terrains. How in the world do the baby birds know where to go? The most accepted theory is that they follow all the grownups.

But if you are like me, I can ride along shotgun with somebody several times and not remember how to get there. The idea that birds that get it right the first time on their own is mind-boggling.

But however it works out, this story is about one small bird who had some troubles his first couple of trips. His first trip was no problem. He just stuck with his group, did what he was told, and got back to his home (for the first time) safely. The next year came, and it was time to return and mate and nest.

That’s when the problem started. He was the kind of bird that was easily sidetracked. He couldn’t really focus on where he was supposed to end up. He kept noticing all the scenery around him. Several times he would be watching the hills rolling below him, only to look up and find that he was all alone. This panicked him, of course, and he flew as fast he could until he could see his group. Usually he found them within a couple of days, but sometimes he flew for several days without seeing anybody. This was terribly distressing for him. He would always chastise himself for being so stupid, and not paying attention.

When he finally caught up with the group, he felt happy again, and forget his mistakes. But then a couple days later, the same thing would happen. He’d be lazily watching the scenery pass by, and lose his way again. And the would yell and curse himself for being stupid, fly around in all directions out of fear for a few days until he caught up with group again.

Finally they arrived at their winter home. He, like all the other male birds, found a suitable female and knocked her up. When the eggs came, he started feeling a deep, gnawing fear in the pit of his belly. As they day of the great hatching came closer, the fear became bigger and bigger. One of the older birds noticed this and came over to speak with him.

“What seems to be troubling you?”
“I don’t know. This just doesn’t seem fun any more.”
“What doesn’t?”
“This whole thing,” he said motioning to all the expectant mothers sitting on their eggs.
“I mean,” he continued, “what if I get lost again, and people are following me? We could all die.”
The old bird paused.
“I suppose you could,” he finally said.
The young bird looked at him, his fear growing.
“Do you remember how you got here?” The old bird asked.
“Well, I remember when I got lost, and all the places I tried to find the group, and ..”
“No.” The old bird cut him off.
“How did you get here? Not how did you get lost. How did you get here? What do you remember?”
The young bird stopped, thinking. Suddenly his mind flashed with all the landmarks when he was overcome with joy at being reunited with the flock. He suddenly understood.
“All those points. Of course. Just go from one of those points to the next. It seems so easy now.”
“That’s the secret,” the old bird said, smiling (insomuch as birds can smile).
“You have a memory filled with many different events. Some are bad, some are good. Simply focus on the good memories, and you will always remember your way.”
“Will he lose his way?” the young bird asked, motioning towards his young sons and daughters, still wrapped in their protective shells.
“We all lose our way.” The old bird said.
“That is the only way we can learn.”

With that he flew off, and the young bird never felt fear again.

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Last week I went to a book signing at a local bookstore. Some guy was going to sign some books, and give some kind of lecture. I hadn’t planned on going, but a friend of mine dragged me along. I think there is a girl that works there that he would like to ask out, but he is too shy to go by himself. On the way there we ran into this group of kids that were having a semi organized race with their remote controlled formula one cars. Maybe that’s not the best way to describe them. They were cars that were designed to look like formula one cars. They were pretty loud for how small they were, and much faster that you’d expect.

I don’t know if they got special permission from the city, but they had designed a small course in a park. They had set up some markers to create the points on each side of the track. There were about fifteen kids in all. I didn’t see any adults, so I’m not sure if it was a sponsored event or some sort of school club.

So while we were hanging out and watching this race, this guy came up and stated talking to us. We had about an hour before the guy’s speech at the bookstore started, so we had plenty of time. Plus my friend promised me that if I went with him, he’d ask out that girl. So he was likely stalling for time.

The guy started talking to us about genetics and determination. It was quite a strange topic to just bust out of nowhere with. I thought for a minute that he was some homeless bum that walks around blurting out word salad to whoever will listen, but it turns out he is a university professor. Halfway through his impromptu dialogue, he stopped and apologized for coming in out of the blue with such a potential divisive topic. The nurture/nature debate never ends well. I suppose he could have been talking about which is the best manufacturer of shoe polish, and my friend would have eagerly listened. He was really getting nervous about asking out that girl.

It’s funny when that happens. The human brain has this powerful mechanism for self-protection and self-preservation that comes out in many forms. Whenever we perceive a threat, we will do anything to get away from it. If there is no getting away from it, we will ignore it at all costs.

I’m always reminded of biology class I took in college. We were studying various primates, and great apes in particular. There was some lady that came in to our class once that had actually gone to Africa and studied them up close. She said the trick in not getting beat to death by the silverback, the alpha male leader, was to never ever make eye contact. You can get very close to the group so long as you don’t make eye contact with the leader, or any of the other powerful members of the group.

People spend a lot of time pretending to be really interested in something, but in reality they are avoiding making eye contact with what they perceive as a threat. In the jungle of course, making eye contact with the silverback will get you a good thrashing. But in real life, staring your fears right in the face is usually the trick to making them vanish.

Which is lucky for this weird professor who was going on and on about the way the mind comes pre-wired for certain instincts. He was saying that people used to think that man was different from all the other animals, because animals have instincts, and we have to learn everything as we go along. That’s why they used to think that humans took so long to make it to adulthood compared to all other animals. That we were born like some computer with only a hard drive, and no software.

But in reality, we come with many more instincts that all the other animals, AND the ability to learn along the way. Making us extremely flexible and agile when it comes to surviving. Our instincts are just as strong as migrating birds who know exactly where to fly every winter, but ours are flexible, so we get to change the where they point. Of course, the draw back is that if you don’t consciously evaluate your instincts and where they are pointing, you’ll be covertly guided by all the messages and advertising we are surrounded with on a daily basis.

Of course this agility makes it very easy for us to come up with unique and interesting ways to avoid overcoming our fears and our problems, like pretending to be really interested to some blathering professor in the park, like my friend was doing.

I was finally able to pull him away from the “professor,” who apologized profusely when he checked his watch. I guess he had lost track of time as well.

Which was just as well, because by the time we got up to leave, the kids had finished their tournament. The kid that won was being congratulated by all the other kids as we got up to leave. I saw a school bus pull up, and some adults got off and pulled out some boxes, into which the kids put their cars. I guess it was a sponsored event after all.

And when we got to the bookstore, the guy that was signing the books was the guy that we just talked to in the park. I guess he had written several textbooks on evolutionary psychology, and this was his first book targeted at normal people. As it turns out, his dialogue with us in the park was practice for tonight’s, lecture. I guess he thought if he could get a bunch of random strangers to understand his theory, then he could explain it to some eggheads in a bookstore. He made sure to thank us for being his guinea pigs. His speech was actually pretty good.

And my friend finally asked that girl out. Sort of. He got her name, and phone number, and a vague commitment to “maybe do something together later, or something.” I guess that’s pretty much what we came here for.

Her phone number.

But this sure was a round about way to get here, wasn’t it?

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I used to watch this TV show when I was a kid, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. “I Dream of Genie,” was the title. I watched it for two reasons, one because the girl that played the Genie was super hot, and was always wearing these sexy genie clothes. And two because I thought it would be awesome to just cross your arms and blink your eyes and make something come into existence. To have some sexy genie dressed in skimpy genie clothes doing that for you is pretty much a secret (or not so secret) dream of all men.

That is a pretty common theme in human history. Much has been written about metaphysics and alchemy. Alchemy is a specific category of metaphysics where you take any metal, and turn it into gold. This would be similar to today’s “law of attraction” and other metaphysical manifestation techniques. Most people would like to attract more money.

The whole concept of metaphysics is interesting to me. I see it as kind of a vague placeholder in our imagination to describe things that are just outside our realm of understanding. They aren’t really magical or mystical or beyond our capabilities, just outside of our normal every day realm of the cause and effect reality that we think we live in.

A couple of examples. Most of our physical laws make sense, but only because we see them happening on a daily basis. When we see something that “makes sense,” what we really mean is that it matches our experience, so it doesn’t require any extra thought to describe it.

The first time kids study gravity in school, it can be a little bit unfamiliar, kind of like a fish studying water currents. When you show a diagram of planets and the sun, it’s pretty easy to make the leap. Of course the math, which is pretty complicated, is another issue.

It can take an extraordinary imagine to figure out laws that aren’t so obvious. Maxwell was a physicist who came up with a bunch of very complicated equations that described electromagnetic radiation. These are both light waves and magnetic waves. These can’t be seen, so you have to have a very highly developed imagination to play around with pictures in your head and then describe them with complex mathematical equations that actually prove to be true when applied to everyday things like electricity and photo voltage measurements.

One of my favorites is when quantum physicists and solid state physicists were having a hard time describing these small spaces that had an extraordinary large number of particles bouncing around. They could pretty easily describer one or two particles, but after that, the math got exceedingly complex.

Then one guy thought of an idea. Instead of thinking of the system of a boatload of particles stuffed in there, each with it’s own mass and charge and spin and whatever else properties particles have, why not think of it as a system with a couple of holes, with all the properties associated with particles assigned a zero value? (To physicists, zero is as just a valid number as 43).

Well, it worked. It described the system perfectly and made the math a lot easier. All by pretending there was this hole there bouncing around, with zero mass, and zero charge, and zero spin, and zero whatever else particles have.

Ok, back to metaphysics.

My own personal belief about metaphysical laws is they are very similar to the holes in the above example. The “law of attraction” and other metaphysical laws of manifestation are simple placeholders to make our thinking about complex issues much simpler, much like the math was made simpler in the hole theory.

Example.

You are a salesperson. You’ve been around salespeople for a while. You’ve been around really good salespeople, and you’ve been around pretty cruddy salespeople. You are an average salesperson, but you’d like to improve your skills to become one of the best. You have two options.

Option One

You study sales book after sales book. You attend sales seminars. You take notes after every sales call, and analyze every sentence. You even ask some customers if you could bring in a video camera and tape yourself so you can later watch it and analyze your body language, your tone of voice, your inflection, the actual words that you use, etc etc etc. You buy some expensive statistical software and collect as much data as possible from every single sales call. From time of day, what color suit your wore, what color clothes your customer wore, where you sat with respect to North and South, the number of minutes that elapsed before you “asked for the sale,” every possible piece of data you collect, and plug into your software. Then on a weekly basis, you look at your sales, and tweak your performance to slowly and gradually improve your sales.

Option Two

You read a book on the law of attraction, and affirmations. Before going to sleep every night you tell yourself “I am the best salesperson at my company.” And just like all the books say, you put feeling and emotion into your affirmations. And just like the books say, when you go about your day, you release your affirmations to the superconscious, or whatever, and wait for the changes to take place.

So which do you think would work better? Believe it or not, method two would work much better. Not because of any mystical law or anything, but because of the massively powerful computational powers of your brain. When you tell your brain enough times that you want to be the best salesperson at your company, really program yourself to do that with powerful emotions, it will automatically do everything outlined in option one. But it will be doing it all unconsciously, so you won’t really notice. From a conscious mind point of view, you are only doing affirmations every night, and then magically in a couple months, you are the number one salesperson.

This requires a couple of things. First is a goal that is within your grasp based on your current situation. If you have sales experience, it’s pretty easy to go from average to excellent. Second, you are surrounded by some good salespeople, so you brain has something to model your behavior after.

This is the number one reason people fail when they “use” the law of attraction. They are either giving their brains some vague instructions, so it doesn’t really know what to go after, or they are giving specific instructions, but not exposing themselves to examples of how to get there.

When you make sure both of these are present, a clear objection, and sufficient examples of how to get there, with properly constructed affirmations, you can pretty much allow turn over any goals to your unconscious and let it soak up the behaviors from people around you.

Of course, this requires that you have the underlying beliefs that you are capable of actually performing the objective you claim you want, but that’s for another post.

For now, whenever you choose to do affirmations, remember the more clear you are the better, and the more examples you expose yourself to, in as many forms as possible, the better. That way you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals.

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Once I was reading a book about different personality types. It was pretty interesting. Of course, there are several personality quizzes online that you can take the claim to give you an adequate read on your personality.

I don’t know how accurate they are, or how accurate they claim to be. There are a lot of different schools of thought on personality, where it originates from and what are some of the factors that influence them.

One major factor that many people believe in is astrology. Depending on what year or month you were born in (depending in you believe in Asian or Western astrology) it has an impact on your personality, your characteristics, and even the kind of life you will have. One thing that I think is particularly interesting is that both Asian and western astrology is based on 12. In the west, there are twelve signs that roughly correspond to twelve months. In the east the twelve signs are for twelve different years.

One reason that some believe that the number twelve is important in astrology, and other belief systems that were developed before any kind of scientific method of objective observation of the universe is the cycle of the moon.

In one year, the moon cycles roughly twelve times. That is, a full moon appears about every twenty-eight days or so, or about once a month. Of course, there is the rare occasion, because the cycle of the moon is a little quicker than the length of the month that the moon catches up. And there are two full moons in one month. (Incidentally, this is where the expression “once in a blue moon” comes from. A blue moon is the second full moon in any given month.)

So here we have two belief systems, both centered on the number twelve, which in turn is based on the number of full moons that primitive men and women saw in a year’s time.
Its kind of hard to imagine nowadays, but life back then must have been incredibly confusing, and complicated. And much, much more precarious.
Today, if we need food, we just go and buy some. If we are sick, we go and see a doctor. If we have an accident, we call and ambulance, and somebody comes and picks us up takes us to the hospital.

But life back then was nowhere near as safe and comfortable as life today. The elements could easily kill you. If you messed up and didn’t plant our crops correctly, or at the wrong time, you and your whole family would die. If you were out hunting, and you slipped and broke ankle, you’d be likely left for dead, and the animals would soon come and eat you.

So it’s only natural that people developed this huge feeling of reverence for their natural environment. And not knowing anything about space travel or celestial mechanics, the sun and the moon were seen as all-powerful gods to be feared and respected.

So it made sense, back then at least, to base your life around the cycle of the sun and the moon. But does it make sense today?

I was talking to a friend of mine last week that went and saw a psychic. Not just one of those dudes who sits around on a street corner and reads your palms, a famous, several times televised, multi bestselling book writing psychic. This guy would do all kinds of mind reading, and communing with the spirits.

I asked if he was told any insights about his own life, and he said he was too shy to raise his hand and get a reading. He did say the guy was pretty amazing, and that he accurately read a bunch of people’s lives, telling them what they had experienced and what they should do in the future. He said a few things about people that had “crossed over” as he said, but nothing really specific.
Of course, I have another friend who says that is nothing but what she calls “cold reading.” Apparently this is the art of being artfully vague, and saying things that most anybody could agree with. Things like “you have had some tough times in your past, and often times you wonder if those times are completely behind you or not.” That could be true for pretty much anybody.

I guess people are always looking for some kind of guidance, or validation that everything is going to be ok. Or that if things to wrong, there is some bigger plan. Otherwise people might be inclined to just give up if they thought that they didn’t really have much of a choice, and everything was left up to fate. Or worse, we have zero choice in the matter and we are all part of some continuous expansion of universal randomness.

I’m not sure exactly where I fall along the line of mystical-astrological-psychic phenomenon, but some of that stuff sure is interesting, to say the least.

Maybe I need to be more open-minded.

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There is a famous quote that goes something like this: “kids today don’t listen anymore, and they don’t respect their elders, blah blah blah,” which sounds like a common enough complaint. When you realize that was spoken by some Greek guy over two thousand years ago, it becomes apparent that old people grumbling about kids is common to every generation.

But one thing that is different, at least in this particular situation is there are some statistics to back this up. According to several sources, there are less and less people getting and staying married. And there are less and less people attending religious services on a regular basis. Before you click off this page thinking that I’m some right wing family values religious nutcase, please understand I haven’t stepped foot in a church since my fathers funeral, and I think it’s absolutely fantastic that social pressures that keep people in otherwise unhappy marriages are crumbling, giving people freedom that they wouldn’t have enjoyed in other generations.

That being said, I think this is an interesting phenomenon from a scientific, societal standpoint. There are less and less marriages, and many more divorces, which many argue lead naturally to a less stable upbringing for kids. Of course there is the argument that kids are better of with separated or divorced parents than with parents together but at each others throat all the time.

Also, less and less families are attending any kind of church services as a whole. When you combine these two together, you have less positive role models for kids to look up to, which leaves them only with each other to learn how to behave and act in modern society.

Please keep in mind that I am not arguing for people to stay married if they hate each other, or get married if they aren’t ready. Nor am I advocating any church participation of any sort. I jus think it’s interesting to watch the dynamic unfold, and how it will affect society in years to come.

I am a firm believer in personal responsibility, and if you are of the persuasion that it is up to society to teach you morals and proper behavior, and then you are at the mercy of the ebbs and flow of societal trends, be they good or bad.

If, however, you are inclined to choose your own moral path, based upon your own choices and decisions for where you want your own life to lead, then there has never been a better time that right now.

Crumbling influences of society can be good, and it can be bad. Like any other system, those that depend upon it stand to lose when the system has problems. Those that understand the system for what it is, and use it to their advantage usually come out ahead, regardless of their social economic background and upbringing.

Crumbling social pressures to get and stay married may make finding and keeping a partner more difficult, but much more rewarding once they are found.

Similarly, releasing oneself from the restrictions of the two thousand year old religious moral authority may seem frightening at first, but when you realize you can make your own rules, (so long as you are prepared to live with the consequences,) you can gain so much more power.

What many come to realize is that when they choose their own path in life, they find that their own personal code of morals and ethics closely mimic the beneficial ones from religion. Don’t kill, steal, or covet, or lie. And as a bonus, some of the stuff is supposedly bad, isn’t so bad after all.

Like sex and money are perfectly fine so long as you make sure everybody is happy, and nobody gets hurt. Of course, if you’re going to make more people, then you need to be sure they grow up with the best resources, mental and otherwise, to achieve their dreams in life as well. Maybe that’s what my neighbor was getting at.

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It’s interesting the way things are looked at differently when considered from different angles. Especially when you throw history into the mix. Some ideas seem totally fantastic and obviously wonderful. Nobody can find any fault with them, as they sweep the nation with a wildfire rapidity usually reserved for deadly diseases. Then ten years later, you look back in time and think, “Dude, what were we thinking?” It’s interesting how a power of perspective can greatly give you expanded views of what you think is so obvious.

I took a seminar once on this very subject. We were instructed to sit in a chair, and imagine that we were a fly flying around our bodies. With our eyes closed, we imagined the fly looking at our hair, our ears, our legs and feet. Then we imagined looking at ourselves from the ceiling, the floor, and even through the window from the outside. Then we later tried during a normal conversation. We would sit across from somebody, and while we were talking and maintaining eye contact with the other person, we would imagine seeing and hearing ourselves from the other persons perspective. This is a lot more difficult than it seems. Quite often we would stop in mid sentence as we tried to focus on all these different things at once. One cool thing that happened is that after a few practice, runs, when we were finally able to maintain this new angle of perspective and hold a normal conversation, we found that our minds became very calm and quit. You don’t really know what all those voices are chattering on about in your head until they shut up for once. I really recommend trying this out next time you are having a not so important conversation. Hold off on doing this when talking to your boss, otherwise he or she might think you are a bit off. This takes some practice, but once you get the hang of it, it gives you an amazing clarity of concentration and focus.

The next step in the seminar was to look at our lives from different perspectives in time. From a newborn babies perspective, trying to imagine what it would be like before learning to walk and learn the alphabet. Looking at our present abilities would be astounding to an infant. Some things that we take for granted are really wonderful gifts that we overlook. Another exercise we did was to look at our lives from the perspective of our great great grandchildren. Some of the big problems that we think are so important looked absolutely tiny in comparison. Many people found that this simple exercise helped them to discover what is really important in your life. When you can release the small problems that are taking up valuable space in your brain, and sort out the three or four things that are really important, it can really give you a fresh enthusiasm for getting what you want out of life.

I would recommend doing this as often as possible, from as many different perspectives as you can imagine. The fly, the infant, the great grandchild, even of God, if you can allow yourself to do that without violating any of your beliefs.

People that do this on a regular basis find that your world will naturally expand and you will find yourself discovering new resources that you never thought were possible before. And all of this is possible with only a few minutes of imagination.

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We walked in, and there were several tables set up with different crystals on them. I went over and picked one up, and suddenly noticed a strange sensation. I turned around, and the shopkeeper was looking right at me. The other people in the shop were grinning, as if they knew what was coming. I suspected she pegged me as first time customer and decided to give me some hocus pocus sales pitch to try to get me to buy some crystals or incense or tarot cards or something.

The power of the spirit has found you! The crystals are a manifestation of the love of the universe! You think you have chosen them, but they have chosen you. You must listen to your intuitions and let them guide you! You must not forsake the wisdom of their advice! That which you see around you is but a representation of the glory of infinite intelligence that precedes all that is, was, and will be! Beware those who disregard these truths!

The people in the shop were grinning, as they had apparently heard her say this to others. I was impressed at her acting abilities, and chose a couple crystals. One rose quartz and one purple one (I forgot the name already.) My friend and me went on our way.

Later that day, we were in a different part of town. There is a government building, and sometimes on the steps people will come and preach. Usually from some type of Christian angle. They kind of remind me of my days in university, where some weird guy would stand on the steps in front of the cafeteria and go on and on about the dangers of fornication.

The guy that was there, I had never seen before. So we stopped to hear his monologue. As soon as we stopped, he looked directly at me, which was kind of spooky. Everybody around was smiling, I guess because they were glad it was me and not them he was aiming his sermon at.

The power of the Lord has found you! The Bread of Life is a manifestation of the Love of the universe! You think you have chosen it, but it has chosen you! You must listen to your soul and let it guide you! You must not forsake the wisdom of your soul’s advice! That which you see around you is but a representation of the glory of God that precedes all that is, was, and will be! Beware those who disregard these truths!

I felt a bit confused, as I slipped into an uncomfortable feeling of Déjà vu. Has that ever happened to you? So anyway, he had some basket that he was apparently asking for donations. Everybody was looking at me, as his sermon was directed at me. I didn’t have any change, so I put in the two crystals I had bought at the shop before. Everybody seemed to take that as hint, and began filling up his basket with red and purple crystals. Which was strange, because I think he might have been hoping for some money. I don’t know what he is going to do with all those crystals.

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What is this quality that they possess? Perhaps more importantly, how can you not only develop this quality, but realize that you already have it? How can you tap this power to make your life a bold statement of the eternal gift that lives in all of us? What steps can you take to easily realize and appreciate this latent power?

First, let’s explore exactly what it is. The one thing that these leaders and kings have is a solid belief that they are the ultimate creators of their life. They are responsible for everything that they achieve, or don’t achieve. Perhaps due to some quirk of their upbringing, perhaps due to a strong conscious choice followed through by strong action, these men and women have decided at some point that their lives were completely up to them. They didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t wait for their parents or teachers to tell them it was ok. They didn’t hear a booming voice through parted clouds that gave them a detailed plan to follow to ensure their success.

No, these powerful men and women learned that everything they wanted, they would have to create. They were able to release the need for approval, guaranteed safety, or the generous opinions of others. They made a choice, and followed through. Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.

How about you? What is holding you back? What are you afraid to release? Are you too concerned with the opinions of others? This can be a difficult thing to let go of.  A kind word from an authoritative figure an make you feel wonderful. A not so kind word can have the opposite effect. The secret to overcoming this is to view yourself as the ultimate authority on your life. You must give yourself the appreciation that you hope to receive from others. It can help to realize that no other person can fully know you as well as you know yourself. Any appreciation or kind opinions they express about your are really filtered through their own experiences and biases, so both good and bad can only have a limited amount of relevance.

When you learn to approve of yourself, your desires, your intentions, above all others, you will realize your power. You will be able to see the world as your playground, where you can enjoy life and create what you want at the same time. You will then learn the wonderful truth about reality that the quickest and easiest way to get what you want is to truly serve others. And not serve others in hopes of a quick, shallow, reciprocation. To truly serve others is to do so in secret, because it allows them to fully appreciate your gift, and it is a powerful message to yourself that you have all you need, and don’t need to rely on the opinions of others any more.

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We approached the beach with high expectations, because as the nice shaped waves kept rolling in, we suspected they were the norm, rather than the exception. We’d been to many beaches before where the waves were generally pretty lousy, and good sets came in only once in a great while. But this beach, however, was seemingly unlike that. This beach seemed to offer a fairly consistent supply of ridable waves. We both walked into the water, it was late spring so we weren’t wearing any wet suits, as this story takes place in San Diego. After putting on our flippers, we backed out until we were deep enough where we could swim without dragging on the bottom. It’s hard to walk out wearing flippers, you see.

We suddenly realized why this beach was so sparsely populated. There was a huge amount of kelp just below the surface that you couldn’t see. The more we tried to fight our way through it, hoping it would ease up eventually, the more we realized that it just got worse and worse. Pretty soon it became clear that not only was it a nuisance, but it was dangerous as well. For anyone that has body surfed before will know what I’m talking about. When you wipe out, you are plunged under the surface of the water, in what my friend refers to as the “spin cycle,” like in a washing machine. Because of the rotating motion of the wave, when you are plunged into the water, your body continues with the spinning motion. Sometimes it can take a while to figure out which way is up. What makes it even more difficult is when you are struggling for breath. Add in the possibility of being tangled up in kelp, and drowning suddenly becomes a likely outcome of a wipe out.

No thank you.

We exited the water as quickly as possible, realizing the danger of this beach. The waves no longer looked like inviting sources of fun and pleasure, venus fly traps of death beckoning us, only to swallow us and kill us.

It’s amazing how the surface of something changes when you realize that just underneath are things that will grab you and cling to you and never let you go. It is lucky we found the kept when we did, and not on our first wipe out. That would have been quite dangerous.

We both learned that day to be very careful. Sometimes it’s important to tread carefully below the surface. What might appear to be enticing, may actually harbor deeper things that you can’t see that can grab you and pull you under. Never to let you see the light of day or take another breath of life sustaining fresh air.

I’m glad we decided to proceed cautiously. While it’s imporant to actively search for things in life that you can enjoy this, now, it is also important to check below the surface a little bit sometimes before you dive in.

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Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to rent skis. I don’t think I use them enough to warrant buying a new pair every year, but some people get away with it. It’s like when you decide to try something new, and you put all kinds of effort and energy into it, and make big plans, then later decide that it wasn’t something that was as good as you thought it might have been back when you first started thinking about it.

But my friend was telling me about these new neighbors that he has, and they are keep strange hours. Not that they are loud or anything, it’s that they seem to be up half the night doing odd things. My friend wouldn’t really elaborate, but I got the idea that it had something to do with a new business they might be thinking up. His father, the guy next door, was telling him that they hope to corner the market on the particular niche that they are hoping to invest in.

Anyways, I was more interested in hearing if my friend was still married, because last I talked he was having some problems. Something about not being able to communicate very well. A lot of times people that are in relationships say the other person doesn’t’ communicate, until they remember that in order to understand what people are saying, you need to really pay attention to them when they speak. And it can be a lot more deeper than just words.

For example, my friend kept telling me that she didn’t like unresolved problems. Now those are two words that can mean pretty much anything. If someone asks me if I have any unresolved problems, I’d say of course I do. Everybody has unresolved problems. The problem with unresolved problems, is that in order to solve them, you need to make sure you are talking about the same unresolved problems, otherwise you might solve something that wasn’t even a problem to begin with.

When she started going on and on about unresolved problems, I thought she was talking about how her father treated her when she was a little girl, and she had all kind of deep emotional issues to deal with whenever she got close to being intimate with somebody. It turns out that her unresolved problem, at least when we were having the discussion, were about a phone bill she had called to inquire about, and the person was rude to her and hung up on her.  But then again, that might be related to her childhood after all, you never know these things unless you can really communicate in such a way that everybody knows exactly what you are talking about.

I was at a seminar once, and the teacher was illustrating this very point. She told everybody to think of a duck. And then she went around and asked everybody what duck they were thinking of. Some were thinking about a rubber duck. Some thought of a duck flying home for the winter. One guy thought of the AFLAC duck.

The point was, that even when thinking about a simple noun like “duck” a room full of people came up with a roomful of different ideas.

Now that is something to think about.

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Other, more lofty goals, may require a different tact. These might be better left secret. There is an ancient law of magic that goes as follows:

To Know

To Will

To Dare

To Be Silent

Let’s break them down, shall we?

To Know.

Sounds simple enough. You want to do something. It helps if you know what you are doing. Skills. Techniques. Where to get resources. Many places can help you in this regard. Library. Friends. Mentors. Websites. Humans are by nature, very curious creatures, so finding information can be the easiest part of creating a reality that you desire.

To Will

This is where the fun begins. You have a vague idea of what you want. Happiness, wealth, sexual and emotional intimacy. To will you need to create a plan and make a decision to bring it into being. This is different from a wish, or a hope,  or a longing. This is a strong decision to create what you want, by hook or by crook. Or as the character in Apollo Thirteen put it so succinctly, you must decide that “Failure is Not an Option!”

To Dare

This is the scary part. You’ve decided you want to create a relationship. You’ve studied material on how to be socially adept, how to flirt, how to ask the right questions. You’ve made the decision to make this happen. Now there he or she is. You must walk over and introduce yourself. What separates the Bill Gates and the Tiger Woods and the Oprah Winfreys from the rest of the wanna be hacks is your ability to try and try and try again and again until you get it right. To be able to take action, over and over again, until there world is exactly how you want it. When you realize that life affords you as many chances as you are willing to take, this can be easier. The opportunity of a lifetime comes along just as often as you are prepared to take it.

To Be Silent.

This is where the metaphysical cool stuff starts. Some say that by keeping your goal silent, you build up psychic energy that will increase the your will and your ability to take action over and over again. Some say that you shouldn’t tell others about important goals, because they might give you reasons that you hadn’t thought of as to why you can’t achieve it. Sometimes this can be a blessing. When I was in high school I had decided to run a marathon. I told my best friend, and he told me, with as much good intentions as possible, that he didn’t think I could finish, and I might injure myself. I took this as a challenge, and allowed his disbelief in my ability to spur me on to finish. And hobble around in pain for a few weeks, but that’s another story. 

This is a rare case. Many times when you share your goal with somebody, unless you are a hundred percent decided that you will succeed, even the best intentions can derail you.  Another theory is that if you have a huge goal, even support can derail you. It works like this. Say you want to start your own company. You have this fantastic image in your mind with yourself being successful, with people giving you all kinds of props because of your great business. You use this visualization to pull you through rough patches of doubt. If you tell others, and they believe you and support you, their support and well wishes might take away the attractive pull of your visualization. If people in the present are giving you props for your dreams, the props you imagine receiving in the future might have less effect, and give you less incentive in those times of doubt.

So it boils down to the type of goal you want. If you want to lose weight, or give up a habit, it can help to enlist the support of others. If you want to create something fantastic in your life, be careful who you tell. Perhaps it’s better not to tell anybody until after you’ve already achieved success. If you are lucky enough to have a special relationship with somebody that will support you as much as you support yourself, teamwork can be a great asset. 

Otherwise, be silent. An powerful goal, unspoken to others, can grow to enormous proportions, giving you more power than you’ve ever dreamed. And you may be surprised how being able to tap this power will automatically give you an incredible mastery over reality unknown to most, and envied by many.

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English words, on the other hand, may require a bit of etymological investigation before breaking a word into parts (if that’s the kind of thing you are into.)
For example, ‘century,’ which means one hundred years, is based on the same ’cent’ which is one hundredth of a dollar, and the ‘cent’ in the centigrade that means one hundred grades (between freezing and boiling of water.) Also in centimeter, and centipede. ’Ped’ of course meaning foot, as in ’pedal’ and ‘pedestrian.’

These are just some basic examples, but words are really fascinating when you look below the surface. You can really discover interesting things if you stop and think of the story and history behind things.

Like when I was taking the bus the other day. I was sitting next to this really interesting older woman, who was telling me about her granddaughter who just became engaged to this guy from Bangladesh. And he comes from a very large family, I believe she said six brothers and four sisters, if I recall correctly. And one of the brothers was showing her recently how to make this really spicy Thai dish, but that’s another story. Anyway, this guy was saying that each moment in time space continuum (those are his words, not mine) is an opportunity to really dig underneath reality to discover what is really there.

If you take the time to stop and watch the ‘unfolding’ as he referred to it, you can catch the moment when your thoughts and reality merge. When humans give meaning to events. He said that it is a lot better to stay open as long as possible when interacting with reality, because once you give meaning to something, while it’s not set in stone, it’s a lot more efficient to create the possibility for a more resourceful meaning beforehand, rather than waiting until after the fact.

I wasn’t sure I understood her when she was describing this too me, and I don’t she was able to completely understand it either, because it sounded a lot like some Eastern Philosophies that I’ve read about. I think the gist of it was to stay open, and make sure you don’t give away any meanings to events unless you are really one hundred percent sure you know what happened. And since we are almost never one hundred percent sure of what really ever happens, it’s best to keep an open mind.

Like when you pass by somebody in the hallway, and you say “hi,” and they don’t say ”hi” back, it would be best to give the benefit of the doubt, and not assume they are angry at your or something. Otherwise you might get your feelings hurt over something that was only in your head. 

Although the fellow described this in eastern philosophical terms which might have been a bit esoteric, I think we are all talking about the same concept. And because you are reading this, you are likely wise enough to have known about this anyways. I’m sure you already know that giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are most likely operating from some kind of positive intention is usually a good idea.

I just think that the concept of standing back and watching the unfolding of reality is a beautiful concept, one that we don’t take the time to really appreciate, since it is happening all around us, all the time.

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If you are like most normal people, you might start to imagine all kinds of things that will happen. And I’m sure if you take the time to think back, now, about those times before when you used to imagine things that might come to pass, you might realize that they never did. Like if you had a big golf game or something with your boss’s boss, you might have imagined accidental hooking the ball into his head or something. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you get the idea.

And I’m pretty sure that you’ve heard the old saying “Most of the bad stuff that you imagine never happens.” Well, even if you understand that basic principle about the human mind, it doesn’t really help when you are laying in bed and are unable to sleep due the horrific images your brain keeps delivering to you against your consent.

But I was listening to this internet radio show the other day, and there were these two guys talking about the human mind and how it works. Unfortunately I didn’t remember which internet radio station I was listening to, as I was aimlessly surfing like I sometimes do.  Like when you are surfing around the web and find this really cool blog, and you think, wow you really need to read this everyday, but then you can’t remember where it is, so you can’t come back and read it everyday like you’d like to.

So anyway this guy was saying that when people imagine all those horrible things that might happen in the future, it’s really an evolutionary manifestation of a brain early warning system. It’s thinking about all the possible things that might happen, and just kind of giving you a heads up, so you can prepare for the worst. Then he said that if you pay attention to the messages that your brain is giving you, you can kind of imagine how you’d handle whatever situation that you were afraid might come up. As soon as you imagine handling it from a few different angles, it satisfies the brains warning system, and your brain will settle down.

And the other guy was commenting that is evidence of the other old saying: ”If you can imagine it, you can create it.” Because why in the world would your brain imagine up something that wasn’t possible to come true? And that simply means, that you can use your anxiety as a starting point to create whatever future reality that you’d like. Just use your imagination to take care of whatever your brain is warning you about, and then just imagine the best possible outcome by preventing it from happening by doing the opposite.

For example, if you imagine your boss yelling at you for being late on a project or something, simply come up some really good reasons why the project is late, and then come up with a few benefits for the project being late, and then hit your boss with these benefits before he gets a chance to even remember that it’s late in the first place. He’ll not only see you as being proactive, which is highly valued in today’s economy, but he’ll think of you as somebody that he can depend on when things get rough.

And it all starts with  having a solid respect for the images that your brain delivers to you, all the time. Once you can tap BOTH the positive and the negative images, which you will start to realize aren’t so negative after all when you use this technique, your world will really open up.

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One of the drawbacks of this huge storm coming in is there has been a large door banging shut somewhere. Since I’ve only been in my building for about a week, I’ve been listening to it for the past couple of days without really being sure where it was. You know when you can hear something, but every time you think you’ve got the location pinned down, it seems to be coming from somewhere else? Or when you think you can find the source, you seem to have trouble being able to find your way to the beginning of something? 

So tonight is extremely windy, and the door was really BANGING shut every couple of minutes. And I thought to myself, there’s now way I’m going to be able to sleep soundly with all that racket, so I’d better go have a look.

Off I go to investigate. It seems that it is a big metal door that is on the stairwell on the west side of my building. The door is really big, and really heavy. My first thought was to just simply shut the door, and that will be that. But there are two problems with that. The first problem is that it only shuts with a latch from the inside, which is inaccessible from the outside. So if I were to close the door, it wouldn’t allow other people to come in. It would be great for me, but not so great for other people. 

Sometimes when the obvious solution to something doesn’t seem so great when you take time to think how it will effect other people. If you just take a little bit of extra time to think of others, you can really create more benefit. Of course most people, like you, understand this, but a few people don’t, so I think it’s important to always go the extra step.

Then I thought of something. If I opened the door all the way open, like it normally sits without any latches or anything, it would be fine. The problem was that the extra wind was somehow getting in behind it and pulling it shut. Normally it just sits open, inside of a sunken frame just slightly bigger than the door itself. Because it’s so heavy, apparently it never closes unless somebody (or a very strong wind) pulls it shut. So I had an idea. All I had to do was find something to jam in between the door and the sunken frame, so it would stay open, and it would work fine. There seemed to be about a quarter to half a centimeter space.

So I came back to my apartment, and looked for something to jam in. AHA! One chopstick. I grabbed a hammer, and off I went.

Perfect fit. I pulled to make sure, and it was solid. Held open. Wouldn’t budge.

Not only was the obvious solution inappropriate given the consideration of others, the best way to fix it seemed to be exactly the opposite of what I’d expected.

Funny how that works.

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The second thing I discovered about having so many supermarkets around is being able to discover what kinds of unique style each market has. Of course they all have the main ingredients, milk, eggs, peanuts. But different markets have different kinds of vegetables, and fish, and different kinds and cuts of meat. And I find it really easy to become curious about what this has, and what that has.

Like when you buy a new computer that has all kinds of pre loaded software. You can find it easy to develop a desire to want to know more. And the more you discover, the more it makes you realize how much there really is here. I bought a laptop a couple of years ago, and was in the unfortunate situation of having to be in the hospital for a few days. It wasn’t any big deal, I didn’t need surgery or anything, but being in the hospital sure is boring. And a friend brought my laptop for me to play with. And even though that at the time I had already been using it for almost a year, I was still able to get really curious about what I could find to help me have fun while I was laying in the hospital. And I found several games that I didn’t even know that I had, and they really helped me to pass the time.

It’s funny when that happens. You see something that you’ve seen before, and you think you already know everything there is to know about this. But the more you keep reading, the more you can really start to want to discover more and more. Like when you have a friend for a long time, and you discover something about them that you hadn’t know for a long time. I had a friend once, and we’d know each other for years before I realized she had a thing for Japanese Anime. Personally, I don’t really see the draw, but to each his own, right?

Of course because of all this, I’m going to need to go grocery shopping soon. I can’t wait to see how much I will become curious to see what I can discover something new, but I’m sure you’ve realized by now that that was something you knew already.

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So my friend was telling me about an addition he’s adding on to his house. He and his wife had been planning it for sometime, but they always think of a reason to not do it right away. Need money for this, have to buy that. You know how it is. And both are working full time, and trying their best to raise three kids. It’s no wonder they are so busy, they haven’t really been able to spend much quality time together. Which I think is a misnomer, because all time is really of the same quality, it’s how you can choose to spend your time is what really matters. Like you could spend time watching TV, or you could spend time working on a project that could make it easier for you to make money and improve yourself.

And he said that building the addition to the house was really turning into a special time for him and his wife. Both working together, on the same goal. Not that raising three kids isn’t working together on the same goal. I guess something happens when you spend time with somebody actually building something physical. It’s like you can stand back, and see the progress. You can look at your plans, and compare how you are doing with where you want to go. And my friend is actually not looking forward to finish the addition as much as he thought he would. He said he is really able to enjoy the process, rather than the expectation of an end result.

Like when I was a kid. I was in boy scouts, and every summer we’d go on these long hiking trips. Sometimes a week or longer. And although we went to some great, beautiful secluded spots with fantastic fishing, my fondest memories were hiking with my buddies, looking up at the mountain pass we were aiming for.

Some people look at life itself as a long process, ever changing, ever growing. The moment we begin to lose interest, or lose that spirit of wonder is when we fool ourselves into thinking that we have arrived. We get tricked into thinking that our everyday, day in, day out routine is what life is about.

One way you can jump start yourself off the same old same old routine is to look at experiences with fresh eyes. Ask yourself before falling to sleep every night, “What did I learn today?” And let the answers come in your dreams. You may be surprised to find that you knew the secret all along, you just needed to remember. 

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How about in your family? Have you ever sat down as a family and discussed what was important to you as a group? Or maybe your Mom or Dad ‘laid down the law’ so to speak. What was important then? Kids doing their homework? Coming home before curfew? A good education?

What about at work? I’m sure you’ve heard or read about or have been involved with creating a ‘mission statement’ for a company at one time or another.

“Our company shall strive to provide real time solutions to emerging problems in a timely manner with respect for the environment and the community.”

“Company XYZ envisions a future where everybody uses XYZ products for the enlightenment of man and the realization of life’s purpose.”

How about this one: “McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.” No kidding.

What about the mission statement for the leaders of your country?

What do you think the three most important values of the entire human race are? Well, let’s have a look, shall we?

One way to look at what’s important is what are the most widely spoken languages in the world today. Perhaps they can give us a clue.

The most spoken language today is Mandarin Chinese, with about a billion speakers. That’s a lot of people. How’d they get so numerous? Well, most of them live in China, so they didn’t invade surrounding countries to spread their language. So one conclusion is that they got to be number one in terms of language spoken by sheer reproductive success and effectiveness. So the most spoken language in the world is spoken by the people that made the most people.

How about the second most spoken language in the world? English. And how did English get to be so popular? Maybe it might have something to do with the fact that up until a couple hundred years ago, “the sun never set on the English empire.” So English, then, was spread around the world because the English themselves spread it around the world. For what purpose? Namely trade. Business. So the second most spoken language in the world was spread because of worldwide interest in commerce.

How about the third most spoken language in the world? Spanish. And who spread the Spanish language? Spain of course. And what was the underlying motivation for Spanish people in the old days roaming the planet and spreading their language? Religion. Generally speaking, first the priests would come, and then the conquistadors.

So there you have it. A quick study in how different languages were spread around the world yields a quick and dirty look into the three most important things that have generally been important to the human race over the last thousand years or so.

Sex.

Money.

God. 

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Not as far fetched as it sounds when you combine two simple but fascinating concepts. You’ll see why in a minute. But first I want to say thanks for all the positive responses I’ve received so far for other articles. It always feels good to get nice feedback.

The first concept involves a study that was done in a university class. The professor was doing an experiment to see if pair bonding in humans follows the rule that like generally attracts like. That is, high status people attract high status people, medium status people attract medium status people and so on. Keep in mind this is not any law of nature or anything set in stone. It was just a simple experiment to show a simple phenomenon.

What they did was give a bunch of students some Popsicle sticks (or something resembling Popsicle sticks) with a number written on them. The numbers ranged from one to thirty, as there were thirty members of the class. The goal was that they all had to pair up, but they each had to pair up with the highest number that they could. The trick was that nobody could see their own number. So the unfortunate folks that had low numbers kept going around trying to pair up with high numbers, and were rejected over and over again. The people that had high numbers suddenly found themselves surrounded by people begging for their attention. All they had to do was to pick the highest number of the group clamoring for their attention.

So then, here is concept number one: 

People tend to set their level of status, at least in part, based on how others treat them.

Now we move on to concept number two. The self fulfilling prophecy. Imagine you are going a party. You are in a bummed out mood, you don’t think anybody will talk to you. So you already have a belief that you are uninteresting. You don’t put on your favorite shirt, you don’t spend too much time getting dressed. When you walk into the party, since you’ve already determined that nobody wants to talk to you, you keep your eyes lowered, you mumble a lot. And guess what? Nobody wants to talk to you.

Have you ever experienced the opposite? You do something really well, and because you are in such a fantastic mood, people treat you like a king. Even people that have never met you before, and have no idea you’ve just done something really awesome.

So then, here is concept number two:

People will treat you, at least in part, based on the level of status you give yourself.

Now imagine if you have these two working against you. You think you are a terrible loser. You walk around, acting like a terrible loser. Because you are acing like a terrible loser, people treat you like a terrible loser. Which makes you feel even more like a terrible loser, which makes people…..  You get the idea.

Now imagine the opposite. Nobody knows you from Adam. But because you feel really good, you walk upright, straight posture, smile on your face, and people naturally treat you kindly and with respect. Which makes you feel better, so you act bolder, more outgoing, with more charisma. Which makes people even notice you even more, and so on and so on.

So if you notice yourself in situation number one, how do you bust out and move into situation number two? Give yourself and others the benefit of the doubt. Briefly turn your focus in on yourself, and cheer yourself up. Give yourself a pep talk. Say nice things to yourself. After a few minutes of this, go out into the world and give others the benefit of the doubt. You smile at somebody and they don’t smile back? No problem, they’re too busy. They’re worried about something. Feel kindness for them, and silently wish them luck. You sit down and somebody fidgets a little bit? That’s ok. That just means that you made them a little nervous because your charisma is naturally growing. Be kind to them.

The trick is once you start paying attention to other people, simply allow yourself to interpret their actions in a favorable light. Who really knows what’s going on in their mind. They more you look for and expect positive feedback from others, the more you’ll naturally be able to see it and appreciate it for what it is.

Proof that you are incredibly charismatic and irresistibly drawing the uncontrollable desire of all those around you.

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But in the realm of solid state physics, matter starts to behave a little differently. Because the atoms are packed in so tightly, there is a lot less space. And when scientists try to describe the matter, using the language of physics and mathematics, it gets incredibly complicated, incredibly quickly.

Add on top of that subatomic particles have characteristics that are completely out of the ordinary experience of what you see everyday. Size, shape, color, density taste, and all other descriptions we use to describe what we can see don’t apply on the sub atomic level. So they need to come with descriptive names like spin, charge, charm, strangeness and other goofy names, not goofy because the scientists are goofy, but because the nature of matter itself is goofy. And when you think about it, the only reason things we can see seem normal, is because we are so used to seeing them all the time.

Of course everything behaves just like it is supposed to, according to the laws of physics, but that which we are not familiar with seems strange and magical.

So these scientists are trying to study this system of particles, all packed closely together. When they try to describe the movement of one particle, they have to take into account all of it’s neighbors. And of course for each neighbor, you need to take into account all of its neighbors. You can see how this can fry the world’s fastest computer in a jiffy.

Until one scientist had a fantastic idea (which is what scientists do.) He suggested that instead of looking at each particle, with all of its strange qualities, and use that to describe the system, he had a better solution. Why not look at the holes instead? Why not assume that instead of  a kajillion particles bouncing around off each other, why not just look at the movements of the few thousand holes that are in there? And assume the holes have zero mass, zero spin, zero charge and zero whatever other characteristics that are used to label the particles.

What? His fellow scientists asked him. Are you crazy? Study the movement of holes? But holes don’t move! Holes are only there because of the other particles!
Try it, he persisted. So they tried it. And it worked. Beautifully. By describing the holes, which made the math incredibly more simple, they were able to describe the particle system to a T.

Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in. These guys, these highly trained physicists, decided to describe something in terms of something that they knew wasn’t true, and yet it still worked to describe the system so they could predict how it would behave under various situations.

What they did was create a new model of what they were looking at. A model is something that you come up with when you aren’t sure of the rules. You can use different models, and see what works best.

People do this every day. In fact developing models is so ingrained in our neurology, that we do it all the time and don’t even know it. In the movie “The Jerk” with Steve Martin, there was a scene where some crazy sniper had decided to kill somebody at random. Of course, he chose The Jerk. When he missed, and starting hitting a stack of oil cans, The Jerk looked at the situation and decided “He hates these cans!” While that was pretty funny, and obviously wrong, it illustrates what happens. Something happens that we don’t understand, so we immediately make up a reason to explain what is happening around us.

Normally what people do is see something, and then quickly and automatically come up with a model to explain how what they are seeing fits into their already pretty well defined version of reality. Unfortunately, a lot of times the model is not created to come up with a beneficial way of looking at the world, or even an accurate way of looking at the world, but to protect our ego and our feelings.

And we almost never stop, take a step back, and see if our model is really accurate or supportive of how we would like to experience life.  Many people can see the same thing, and come up with vastly different meanings for what they see and experience.

Think of what the physicists did in the experiment above. They purposely created a model to make life easier. They purposely created a model that made it easier to understand what is going on. It didn’t matter to them at all that the model was obviously not correct according to reality. All they cared about was how their model was able to help them get what they wanted out of the experience they were looking at.

Of course we don’t live in a physics laboratory. The life that we experience on a daily basis is a million times more complicated that a test tube filled with particles. But if you can just take a step back, from time to time, and see if you can come up with different explanations for things you think are set in stone, you’ll be amazed at how incredibly more rich and abundant your reality becomes.

Because I find the concept of models and trying on different models so fascinating, I’ll be posting several more articles on different specific models for the nature of the universe and life in general. So when you read them, you’ll at least have a couple different ideas as starting points to choose from when you decide to create your reality the way you like it.

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How about the odds of hitting the random button on wikipedia and hoping to get an article on the Klingon language? About one in a million?
What about the odds of winning the California state lotto? About one in 13 million.

Of all the billions of people that have lived in the world, are living in the world, and will live in the world, what are the odds that you happened to have been born in an age of unprecedented communication technology which allows you to read blogs like this one? A billion to one? More?

Of all the of planets that exist in the universe, how many can support life? How many of those can support human life?

Starting from just before the big bang, when all there was was a pure concentrated focus of pure consciousness, what were the odds that it would explode and trigger  billions upon billions years of interstellar and planetary evolution to create that which sits and reads these words? They are to staggering to even begin to try to comprehend.

The miracle of the universe is not the unlockable secrets of physics that make it all simple to understand and predict. It is not the incredibly improbable events after improbable events that led to life on this rock we call earth. It is not the connection of machines spanning the world that can send messages between citizens of different countries at the speed of life. It is not even the message itself.

The miracle is you.

Of all the possible outcomes that could have resulted from all the interstellar and biological activity since the dawn of time, here you sit. Reading these words. Having thoughts in your head. Thoughts that can create wonder if only you direct them in the right way.

You are constantly on the cusp of eternity. Reality is continuously being created before your eyes. You have two choices. Watch it unfold, or make it unfold.

Which do you choose?

All it takes is to just project your thought out, just only a little bit. Go into every situation and imagine the outcome just a few seconds ahead of where you are.

For example, you are walking down the street. You see a cute girl or guy. Instead of wondering if you should smile, or hoping that they smile first, all you need to do is hold a powerful image of them smiling. Only just a second before you would normally smile. This will naturally make you smile, which will naturally make them smile to match the image you created. If you create a strong enough image, it will become reality.

Try it. You will be amazed at the results you’ve easily created.

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For example, think of something in your past, something that happened, say five or ten years ago. And imagine as you were, just before that situation took place. And now imagine yourself as you were going through that situation. How does that feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

What meanings do you choose to give the events unfolding around you, now, as you remember what happened to you in your past? What was the one element of that experience that you chose to define it for you? Was it the way something appeared, or what somebody said, or something about the way somebody looked at you? Perhaps it was the way you felt afterwards?

For example, once I saw a guy talking into a mirror at the gym. He was standing really close, and he was really animated.  Talking with fluidly changing and almost chaotic facial expressions, arms flailing around. The meaning that I chose to give to that situation was that the guy was crazy. I could have given another meaning, since I really didn’t know what was going on, but that was my best, my quickest guess.

Now what happens if you take your earlier situation, and then move forward in time  a couple of years, or even right up until recently. Can you find another similarly structured situation, but with a completely different meaning that you decided to give it? What was different? Why was the second situation, which was similar to the first, different in the meaning that you gave it? Were there different, more familiar people involved? Was the setting more comfortable? Had the weather changed for the better?

In my situation, I saw another guy talking to himself in the mirror. I didn’t know him, but I surmised he was practicing for a performance, because he was standing outside of a theater that I go to sometimes. I saw two different guys, that I’d never met before doing the same thing, but I gave them two different meanings. One guy was loony, and one guy was a professional actor practicing his craft.

What was different for you?

One of the more interesting things about this, is that as you increase your understanding of your experience, and naturally apply different realizations, it follows that you can vastly increase your potential for flexibility in your perception. And when you can apply this flexibility in real-time, so you discover different choices for the meanings that you used to give automatically, your world will astoundingly open up.

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Frozenwater would sit on the mountaintop, relaxing, waiting for his other friend the sun to come and thaw him out. When it came time to thaw out, he would run down the mountains, and separate himself out into many streams, and rivers. Eventually he would go back and rejoin himself in the lakes that spotted the various high mountain plains. Every year they had a long discussion, actually a discussion with himself, about which part would go up into the sky, and become air, and then become snow, and which part would stay behind and freeze itself under it’s own skin.

Of course, the part of himself that had the most fun was the small part that every year got to flow all the way down to the ocean. It was kind of like a cultural exchange of sorts, set up long ago by who knows what or who. The freshwater would allow a small part of himself to flow all the way out to the ocean, where he would see different fish, and animals and creatures that he would never see up on in the lake or the sky or the mountaintop.

And every summer, the large ocean would send a small part of himself, up into the air, and would make it up to the mountain, and then back down into the lake. Where he could play with new friends that he hadn’t seen in a while that belonged to his other self, which of course was all part of the same self.

This continued, season after season, year after year, millenia after millenia. Until one day, the part of freshwater that was chosen (usually with a couple rounds of rock scissor paper) to go down to meet with it’s other self, the saltwater self, couldn’t. Almost couldn’t. There was some kind of a giant wall that was keeping the freshwater self from meeting his saltwater self. So he had to go back, but when he turned around to go back, he was already back. There was a giant lake, a new lake, where there wasn’t one before. The freshwater looked around. The trees looked different. The sky looked different. He stuck his finger up into the air and checked the temperature, and decided that he wouldn’t be able to freeze that year. Oh well, he decided to make the best of it.

A few hundred years passed. No freezing. No mountaintops, no splitting into stream and river and many small lakes. It was no big deal to freshwater, because he was still together with himself. Freshwater laughed. It wasn’t like he would ever be apart from himself, despite wherever this weird wall came from.

It’s like when you have one of those days, and you can just see yourself in all other people. For some strange reason, you just feel connected. Like when you see somebody, you kind of have a feeling, that you know this person. Even though you’ve never met, you just feel something. And despite how much you feel wonderful when you notice this feeling, it never is able to stay long.

Then one spring, when the snow part of itself was melting, and flowing into the new lake part of itself, (although by this time the new lake was rather old,)
the strange wall had dissappeared. So the freshwater just kept right on flowing. Down. Down. And a lot of the other freshwater selves wanted to join itself on the way down, since there was so much of it.

And then a funny thing happened. Because the freshwater had been apart from itself for such a long time, he kind of forgot that he was a small sliver of the larger saltwater part of himself. So when the freshwater self greeted his saltwater self, for a moment, it seemed as if he were a small child meeting with an old grandparent. Of course the feeling lasted only a flash, as whenever freshwater reunites with the saltwater, you can remember who you are. All is well. Because water never really is separate from itself, as any scientist will tell you. Always flowing, never static. And despite having the allusion of being separated, you are always together.

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Please come back often to read tips and insights and other explorations into the structure of thought for your personal improvement and entertainment. And please share this site with your friends, as many others have done.

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