Celebrating deadly sins

The seven deadly sins:
Lust, Pride, Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Wrath.


Ryan pointed out to me that, on each of our major holidays, we tend to focus on a different deadly sin.
Valentine's day we focus on Lust (we usually use more romantic words).
Fourth of July is all about Pride.
Thanksgiving is definitely Gluttony
During the Christmas season, we focus on getting our kids to practice both Envy and Greed.

The above are strong connections. Sloth and Wrath have weaker connections.

We end the year with a wild party, the next day start the year Slothfully lazing in front of the TV, watching football.

Veteran's day we celebrate the people who bravely helped our country deliver its Wrath to other countries.

Anybody have better connections?
Or thoughts about why we tend to celebrate the deadly sins?

Why is attention the currency of life?

Tonight, at a meeting I attended, I was told that many spirits were present. It soon became obvious that the "teacher" was there with me. It seemed like every little thought in my head had an immediate answer. At one point I happened to wonder why attention is the currency of life.
The answer was swift...

The reason that attention is the currency of life should be obvious.
It has been established earlier that pretty much everything is a neural network. Neural networks are like fractals. They are self similar at many scales. On any scale, individual neural networks each act as a single neuron in the next larger scale neural network.

The intelligence and power of any neural network is in the quantity and quality of the connections between neurons. At a social level, every person is seeking to create new or better connections. Every time you pay attention, whether it is to friends, business dealings, or bed time stories; the process fine tunes your connections, it is you doing your duty as a neuron in the bigger brain.

It is programmed into the very nature of nature itself, that living beings will trade mainly in attention, for that is how higher life is formed.

I ran the math, He is more than right.

So Why Is Gas So Damn Expensive?

Written by Aaron Newton on his blog of

Tuesday, 22 May 2007

Well, actually its not. One gallon of gas does the work of one adult male working for six weeks (pretty cheap for the cost of $3)

Pretty sunset

The evening star and crescent moon
hang low over the fading sunset.
A beautiful sight,
They will be gone soon.

We may want a charcoal making setup

This weekend I have been focused on charcoal. I have always planned to use it for cleaning air and water. It adsorbs most organic molecules, removing most odor, taste and color. It is easy to make and when it is dirty, easy to recharge and re-use .

Lately I have been learning that charcoal is also an incredibly useful soil additive. It lasts many hundreds of years in the soil, hanging on to all kinds of organic molecules; so it captures and holds nutrients. Hairlike fungi in the soil tickle the nutrients out of the charcoal and feed them to the plants. In some tests it improves plant productivity by 880%.

Making charcoal creates additional heat and fuel while it uses up some of the mountains of sawmill waste we have around here. When it ends up in the soil, it acts as a carbon sink, taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and reducing global warming.

For us, making charcoal beats the heck out of a win win situation. If I counted right, this is a win win win win win win win.

more information...
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4

Simplicity isn't simple

There is a basic truth that I must deal with whenever I try to design something;
Simple only works from a given point of view.

Make something simple for somebody and it almost certainly makes things more complex for someone else. Often that is the value proposition to your customer. Whether you are selling goods or a service, you are saying "I am offering to make it simpler for you to get X, because I will handle the complicated details."

Of course, we often make things unnecessarily complex. Taking unnecessary complications out of your design (or your life) is like editing a movie or a well written essay. It takes a lot of attention, reflection and work to hone it down to be simple and elegant.

Much of civilization is about simplifying. We pave our land, and make buildings with smooth walls and floors because flat is simple. We create uniform laws and currencies. Every time we simplify something, it becomes a platform upon which we can build a more complex structure.

As civilization gets complex, we all eventually want to simplify our lives. When people attempt to return to the simple life, they often find out that nature is enormously complex to deal with.

It boils down to aptitude.
Whatever you are good at seems simple to you.
So, Follow your heart and life gets simpler and better.

By the numbers

Google constantly impresses me. It keeps getting easier to verify wild claims that someone throws at me. So tonight I looked a few things up and, by golly it is not hard to imagine man being capable of messing up the earth.

Let's take it up close and personal.

First we take all the land area in the world, then divide it by the human population; we each get about 6 acres.
Your personal 6 acres is about 1 and a half city blocks. Less than 1/4 of that is suitable for farming. The rest is largely mountain and dessert and frozen tundra.
It is real easy to see how I can affect that much land in my lifetime.

According to Winona Duke, each American's direct and indirect contribution to solid waste is one million pounds per year and 5 million pounds of contaminated water every year.
That sounds impressive, but I am not seeing support for her million pounds per year. The best number I can find is closer to 1500 pounds per year of landfill waste, plus about 40,000 more pounds of CO2, and about 3 million pounds of water.
Ahhh, but that is only on American soil. Add in the stuff we buy from other countries because we prefer that they do the dirty work and create pollution over there. Then add in transporting that stuff around the world. Winona's numbers are pretty close after all.

So...
Imagine if you dump all your 6 million pounds of waste on your own 6 acres.
Without careful management and reuse, you end up living in a smelly garbage infested pig sty.
As long as we buy into our consumer lifestyle, this is what we are doing, but it is mostly in someone else's back yard.

Wisdom of the language

Hopefully this will become a series of entries because there are so many examples of where our language may be harboring a collective wisdom distilled through millions of people over thousands of years.

One example that struck me this morning is "Ignore".
In current usage; "ignore" means "disregard" or "pay no attention to", yet "ignorance" means "to not know".
So does "not knowing" mean that we are actually "not paying attention"?

The teacher was impressing on me this morning that all knowledge is available. We choose to pay no attention to most of it. Some level of ignorance is necessary to play the game we call life on earth.

The take home lesson is that we truly do have the awesome power of knowledge available to us, and it is ok to ignore most knowledge.

Our challenge and our position in the big picture is to make some of that knowledge practical in the here and now.

Thanks, Aina

Truth lies at the point of paradox.

That little message was brought to me by a new friend last week. It elegantly expresses a truth I have been trying to express for years.

Tell me a story

Throughout human history, story tellers have been among the most important and revered people in every culture.
Be good at telling stories.
It will serve you well.

Things people buy

People don't buy things.
People buy stories.

That is a lesson from recent months. It holds true, and is powerful wisdom;
and it can stand to have additional light shine on it.

People also buy function; Such as a house cleaning service, or a tool to drive screws.

If you sell only the function, where the story is not important, you are selling in a commodity market where prices are low, competitive and out of your control.

People need to buy the function of transportation, but the car dealers know better than to sell function. They provide the function, but they sell the story; the sex appeal, the muscles, the fantasy.

Sometimes the only function is the story; such as an autographed baseball. Without the story, the ball is worth a few bucks. With the story it is worth maybe a million bucks. Value in antiques is more story than function. TV, movies, books and fame of all kinds are all about stories. Art and crafts usually have some aesthetic value, but they command big bucks if there is a good story about the artist.

The food pendulum has swung way to the commodity side; cheap with no story you would want to talk about. Now food is swinging toward the story side. You want to know the ingredients, know it is organic, even who grew it and where.

The ideal items to sell would...
a: provide superior functions
b: have a very interesting and compelling story that fits the times.

Informing the giant

Lately I have been studying lessons about communications, perception of reality, and guidance. It has been occupying some of the best hours of the day.

Some of the lessons from this morning's bath, while staring into the water...

Whether they are objects, or ideas, or emotions, the only things we actually observe are the surfaces of neural network energy topologies.

Similar to seeing the world as it is reflected in a pool of water, everything we observe is reflected in the topology of our personal neural network. The dynamics that we observe around us are often ripples in our own surface. A tiny ripple can create enormous distortions.

We can calm our internal ripples and thus get more accurate observations.
We can set up our internal ripples to make us perceive more life, love and good intent than may actually be the case. We can set up our ripples to make us perceive more inertness, hate and mal intent. In either case, we react accordingly. Every other neural net observes us, making our attitude part of their reality. Thus, our attitude ripples through the larger neural landscape that we call reality.

We can apply this knowledge by minimizing emotions, pre-conceptions or body cycles that distort our perceptions when we are dealing with people.
Another way to apply it is to be generous when we think of people. Assume the best of them. They are human and will react accordingly. They will occasionally lash out in anger, or fail in other ways, but they will eventually rise to meet your expectations.

Moving my Giant

I have been emotionally moved lately by watching well done works of animated art.

Last night we watched The Little Mermaid for the first time in many years. I was struck by how smoothly the story flowed and how well it was told. When we watched the "how it was made" feature, it brought tears to my eyes. I was left wondering what it was that affected me so. The best answer I could come up with... It was the story of teams of genius coming together to create something great.

Tonight we watched Spirited Away. There was no need to watch how it was made. The teams of genius showed through in almost every scene.

The emotion is still strong. I am inspired to believe that we must pull our team together and commit an act of genius.

Judging from the animated examples, an act of team genius includes...
Keenly observing mundane details of the world around us.
Inspiration on many fronts and from many talents.
Years of dedicated hard work.
Much practice and focus and editing.
Appropriate public relations.
Spirit guiding us to time things right.

Reduce cholesterol, good side effects

If properly administrated, this way to reduce cholesterol can only have good side effects.

It is a small study that showed a reduction in cholesterol when people wrote affectionate notes about someone in their lives; An even bigger reduction if the note was to your loved one, rather than writing in third person.

Finding my giant

Last weekend, at an impromptu time, Amber guided me on what became a spiritual vision trip.
It was powerful.
I am still absorbing the feelings and the ramifications.
I am changed.

In my paper journal, I wrote details of images I saw. I find myself periodically writing additional thoughts about it; like a list of ingredients that helped make the experience work so well.

In the experience...
Some early images included pagodas and many variations of eastern temples. Then I was traveling towards a radiant ball of energy, like a portal. The ball became a sun rising over a lake. Soon I was traveling on the lake, almost at a right angle to the sun.

The lake was getting narrower and I passed several iconic dead critters.
The lake got narrow like a canyon, then almost like a cave. As I entered, there were waves traveling vertically; up. I could sense that they were alive. Two different streams of undefined energy were also traveling up. I ascended with the energies.

The first thing I saw in this new space was shapes. Clear, simple geometric shapes that I could not define or name. After a few other images that I could not define, I saw simple happy creatures. Clearly these were not any life form known on earth. The feeling was that my guides were very happy to see my arrival. They were showing me that I was now experiencing additional dimensions and it is going to take a while to learn the territory.

Soon I was looking down on sand and pine trees (home). I was able to move around freely while viewing from above. The view was slightly curvy, a little like a fish eye lens except as I moved I could sense the macro view and interior micro details at the same time.

I viewed around me and everywhere I looked the landscape quickly turned lush green. I laughed. Soon I was traveling (like walking 100 feet high) fast enough that I could see the curve of the earth. I was looking everywhere and making much of the continent turn green and lush and productive. I liked the implied message.

Later I saw a storybook opened up to a picture printed across both pages. It was an ocean with a ship on it. The ship sailed out of the two dimensional pages into the three dimensional world. It sailed into a narrow area with land on both sides (similar to the lake in the earlier part of my trip). Crowds of people cheered jubilantly and confetti was in the air everywhere. A closer look revealed that the confetti was actually bees and butterflies.

At the start of the vision trip, I had traveled alone in a small canoe sized boat going North, past iconic dead critters. At the conclusion, I was traveling South through the same passage way; but now in a ship; and abundant, jubilant life was celebrating on all sides.

It took me hours to bring my mind back into this (normal?) world.
I feel larger,
and guided,
and supported,
and more confident that we are successful and doing the right thing.

And we have much to learn.

Another kind of sychronicity?

Again, I need to rethink my theories about the cause of that inner drive that sometimes makes me feel a need to be tied up. That feeling has been extra strong the last few days.

Earliest theories had to do with socially inhibited sex drive. Last year came a realization that this drive doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex. Recently I had been drifting back toward updates of the old theory.

Today I was surprised by 4 year old Ian when he brought me a piece of rope, put his hands behind his back and politely asked me to tie his hands. In light of the theories that had been on my mind lately, I was so surprised that I didn't really answer him. He asked me at least three times. Later I found that he asked his dad the same thing last night.

Obviously, Ian's wish to be tied up does not spring from socially imposed restrictions on his sex drive. It pokes a big hole in that line of theories. It leaves me really curious why sometimes, some of us want to be tied up. I will be looking for answers, data, research, and your input.

Separation synchronicity

I'm not sure I have ever seen stronger synchronicity in a lesson of the week. Perhaps the teacher is working overtime to get us in alignment.
This week it seems like everyone in the family is dealing with separation issues that are coming to a head.
Lynn and I were dealing heavily with estate planning.
Amy's best friend died.
Ryan working his way out of Green Range Energy.
Raya working her way out of Round Belly Clothing.

Each one contemplates great change.
Each one requires learning to release; to let go.
Each one requires the student to examine who they are, who they might have been, and who they want to be.

In those around us we observe that great change brings great emotion. It tends to progress; Early stages often include anger, then greed. Those emotions need to be accepted as real, but if we act on them, they can trap us in a recursive whirlwind of misery.

If we learn to minimize those parts, we focus on asking "How can we make this the best possible outcome for everyone involved?"

What is your population?

According to Discover magazine, your body is a planet; population 100 trillion cells. However, 90 trillion of them are not your cells. They are bacteria, viruses, yeast and other critters that keep you functioning. Most of them also help defend you from the occasional bad bugs that hurt your walking ecosystem.

Our modern society tends to think that the only good bacteria is a dead bacteria. We tend to focus so much on our fear of the bad bugs that we forget about the good ones. It is not good to eliminate bacteria. It is important to keep a high ratio of good to bad.

Bacteria are everywhere. One teaspoon of soil may contain up to 10,000 species of micro-organisms and billions of individuals. There are specialists for just about every situation that might come up. By changing the ecology, we can encourage certain specialists to flourish. For instance; after an oil spill, the oil eaters take over and help clean up.

When we try to kill bacteria without understanding the ecology, we are likely to set up a situation where the bad guys have no competition, with disastrous results.
The bottom line is two part action...
Clean up anywhere you expect bad bugs (around meat etc.)
Encourage good bugs (healthy soil, yogurt, kefir, etc)

Perfect

I was listening to an interview of the author of The Square Foot Garden on TV last night. As part of his speech habit, he likes to use the word "perfect" a lot.
Later, Ryan and I were contemplating... That is a pretty good philosophy. When something is adequate, it is "perfect".

Eventually, that made us wonder...
What is the difference between mediocrity and moderation?
Mediocrity is moderation in an area in which you like to excel.

Powerful Friends

Let your friends do your work for you.

Time is one of your friends.
No force on earth is more powerful than time. Get to be buddies with it and it will be happy to do you favors, both big and small.
One small example; I have learned to ask of time to help wash the dishes. I used to work hard, using lots of soap and elbow grease to try to scrub baked crusty stuff off of a dish, mostly because I didn't want to spend a lot of time at the task. Now I put the crusty dish under water and let time do most of the work. I come back and help once in a while. We make a good team.
There are many big examples too.

Bugs are friends.
What I loosely call "bugs" do most of the biological work in the world. Getting comfortable with them is important to being comfortable on earth. As we encourage the most helpful bugs, they will help clean and recycle and defend us from unhealthy bugs.