Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Abundance

On another blog I noted this line...
Random Quotes: Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage. ~ Anais Nin

I read it out loud and Lynn added; "And selfishness."
"How so?" I asked.
She replied; "When you are selfish, life shrinks. When you are generous, life expands and is abundant."

I guess selfishness and courage are related. It takes courage to share.

Silver Ion Tooth

It is an interesting experiment. Last week one of my upper molars was starting to rot. It was sensitive to touch, and even smelled rotten. As the weekend progressed, the tooth got worse. Sunday I decided to try something new. I built an oral version of a silver ion injector.

A little history…
Silver kills bacteria. Silver colloid (nano sized silver particles in water) is commonly sold in health food stores. If applied topically, it generally doesn’t penetrate the skin. A few years ago I learned that if you have a tiny current flowing from a silver wire into your skin, it carries atoms of silver into the tissue, where it stays long enough to kill local bacteria.

I started doing web research and running experiments. Soon I knew how to not make it too strong or too weak. I learned that it works wonderfully on bacterial infections, but not on fungi. I marveled that all the little pimples and other long time skin infections just disappeared. Chronic pimples stayed away for over six months. Some other infections never came back.

The following Christmas I made a dozen silver ion injectors from miniature flashlights and gave them to friends. Over time I learned that most of them get lost because they cure all the problems and get put in a drawer. It is a year before another infection pops up and they can no longer find the silver ion injector.

So, Sunday I whipped one up with a special shaped silver wire to fit between teeth. I started injecting those ions. I had never tried this in my mouth before. Two days later the tooth doesn’t smell and doesn’t hurt. It will be a few weeks before the dentist can see me. I’m hoping that my tooth is healthy and cleaned up by that time, with super fit gums as a bonus.
If that happens, this gadget will have a permanent place of honor in my medicine cabinet.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

May I have your attention please!

We are entering a fascinating new era where people are finally paying attention to attention.

If you google “attention economy” you literally get over 100 million hits. One of them sums it up quite well. “Attention is a new level in the massively multiplayer game known as Western culture.”
Michael Goldhaber

There is a lot of talk about what it is, where it is going and when it started. Some say it is starting now and some say it started in the 1980s. That is where I beg to differ. While it is true that the attention economy is a new level in our cultural game, it is also the most basic level in the game of life. It is so basic that every baby knows how to use it; and every pet dog.
(I even have some hints that attention is the basis of time, space and physics. But that is for a different blog.)

In this basic economy, you and I are given roughly the same amount of capital to invest, or waste. Like our muscles, our attention can be exercised and made strong, but within limits. This means that our attention is a critically limited resource, and it happens to be the most important one we have. We literally become what we attend to.

We need other people’s attention. So, just like corporations spend money trying to get more money, much of our attention is spent trying to get other people’s attention. That is investment. A balanced portfolio would include investing in ourselves so that our attention is interesting to others.


True wealth is having enough to be comfortable, but not be owned by it.
This is true with attention or dollars.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Dream Speak

This morning I was sound asleep when the phone rang, interrupting an ongoing dream. It was like walking into a room where suddenly the conversation stops because you weren’t supposed to hear it. It was obvious that this dream was just background processing and was never intended to be remembered or analyzed by consciousness.

The central plot involved a (fictional) lackluster farewell party from a recent employer. It was set in the neighborhood I was raised in as a kid. It included several former bosses and partners from wildly different times in my life, and employees, and even neighborhood kids where I grew up. It included bedrooms and certain hills and furniture and foods. When this dream was suddenly exposed to the light of day, it was loaded with so many anachronisms that it made no sense.

However, there was something compelling about the power of every little component of this dream. Suddenly I realized that the food, the location, every person, every little background element were all big things that I identified with. They made up my identity over the years. It was a little like having my life flash before my eyes, but completely in the language of dream speak.

A person’s identity is always changing. You can’t stay in the same role as little kid, or high school student, or parent, or worker. The zillions of individual components that make up your brain and mind all buy into your identity to some degree, so it makes sense that they need to do some processing to adjust to those constant changes.

I feel like I just got an unexpectedly intimate look inside myself.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Wish for good stuff

Be careful what you ask for. When manifesting is in high gear it could happen faster than you expect.

This past week has been busier than a beehive in a fresh field of clover. Last week, our old (as in not controlled by us anymore) business, Hunt Technologies inc. was sold to the most ideal buyer under what seems to be the most ideal conditions. It was exactly as we had been defining it for the past year.

A few hours after the big announcement, Lynn and I were unwinding our slightly overexcited nerves. (I was surprised at how much that affected us.) Anyway, Lynn was thinking “Now there is only one more big thing in our lives that I would really like to clean up. I would like to help Cat.”

Cat is our niece. She lived with us for eight years while her parents were dealing with their messed up lives. Deep unresolved anger consumed her life. At 15, she ran away from us, staying with each of her parents in turn. She ended up on drugs, homeless, and refusing any real help.

One hour after Lynn’s defining thought, Cat called us, begging for help for the first time in years. She stayed with us over the weekend and agreed to enter treatment on Monday. I hope she can find a good path.

At HUG, we had been interviewing several people for the job of Machine Shop Wizard. I was beginning to see a pattern. It resulted in my fervent wish that I would find somebody who really spoke our language; somebody who loved doing something to make our world a green and sustainable place; someone who could understand enough engineering to take a concept and run with it.

One hour after that fervent wish was formed, we received an email. A man, wife and kid, all fit our culture and our needs to a T. Forty eight hours later (after talking for over 15 of those hours) they were virtually hired.

These three stories are each a big deal in our lives, and they all happened in the same week. We have to be careful about allowing for time and energy when we make a wish.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Attention; the currency of life

To work with money, it helps to see it for what it really is.

Today I met Doug. He is very cool to talk to. For a while the topic turned to learning how to invest. He pointed out that a good investment is better if you invest in something that you really want anyway.

Later we got to talking about how money is just a substitute for the real currency… attention. We give somebody our attention and they give us a token (money). We give our token to someone else for their attention, or a product of their attention.

Money takes our basic currency (attention) and abstracts it, allowing us to save and trade conveniently.
Money is also convenient for governments and corporations to snatch a piece off the top.
: It is easy to tax (income tax, sales tax, inheritance tax, etc)
: It is easy to add fees (markups, interest, service fees, handling, etc.)

Money makes precise accounting possible; allowing us to obsess about just exactly how much is controlled by whom. That obsessing has us spending a great deal of our resources on accounting and legal services to help keep things straight.

Easy credit is another thing that turns the convenience of money into a tool for predators to enslave people. Like good predators, they study the habits of their prey (you), set out bait that you really want, and make it easy for you to enter their trap.

Every time you handle a piece of money, I estimate that you lose at least 60% for the reasons listed above. You focus on money because money is convenient and it is easy to quantify what you “own”.

Now, consider the advantages of shortening the loop. Don’t deal primarily in the tokens. Invest in the primary currency; attention. Build wealth by investing your time and talents in your neighbors (however you define neighbors). It is fun and satisfying, giving you immediate dividends. You can afford to NOT account for your investment because you can afford lots of losses and still be better off than dealing in just money. This frees up your soul and makes you more productive (and more fun).

Invest in everybody around you (some are better investments than others). Your wealth will not be easily measured, or taxed, or stolen or depleted. This kind of wealth is not portable or convenient to spend, but it is efficient and satisfying, and very real.