compliments

now i am sitting at rendezvous watching the downpour with an old couple.  they are drinking coffee in small cups and smoking imported cigarettes.  i am not sure what language they are speaking.

it has been a long time since i have written on here, or anywhere, i suppose.  i am uncertain as to how i feel about the overall level of resolution in my life.  the rain is quieting, now.

i have a plan, though, a real one.  the other tendrils can curl unimportantly onward.  my attention is focused elsewhere.  the old woman shifted to english to ask the time.  it is a quarter to two.

let me tell you the things i am thinking when i am driving in the car.

flimsy file cabinets house

the dna samples I take

donated drops of blood

for every occasion the

ultimate memory I wanted

to see mutations in action

genetic impatience general

lack of

fitness for parenthood

neuroticism spanned perfect

method twinned from

meticulousness perhaps rather

a calved sect instead a

crumble of glacier punctuating

the warming arctic ocean

receding from itself in

every moment insane productivity

I’ll shut up now my

teeth are wearing down enamel

eaten out every last night

think sporadic organization

preferably divergent hierarchies

converse only in empty

libraries sleep only in

beds belonging to others

the imprints are comforting

everything has been done

and said and is being done

and said alongside crepe

paper cartilage panoramas

we’ll go back to the farm

together – memorandum

to self hello dear

weather you’re keeping me

company just fine

house fires kept it

dark at night I count

your possessions for

lack of sheep mitochondrial

movements

unidentified implies specifications

the rain came out my

muscles atrophied slowly

hold my by my shoulders

teeth glossing over the

webbing of scar tissue held

us close or so we thought
spiraling hum at seventy-five

positive psychology part one

Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly & Seligman, E., P., Martin.  (2000)  Positive psychology:  An introduction.  American Psychologist.  55(1).

Positive Psychology: An Introduction

The goal of positive psychology is to catalyze a change in the focus of psychopathology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities.  Prior to World War II, there were three distinct missions of psychology.  These were curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling, and identifying and nurturing high talent.

After WWII, the focus shifted towards curing mental illness (largely due to monetary distribution), and human beings were seen more as passive foci, experiencing external stimuli that elicited various responses.  As such, the disease model of psychology was formed, making it a scientific field focused on solving disorders; here, the second two goals of improving the lives of all people and identifying and nurturing genius were secondary at best.

A prominent researcher of the time, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, was troubled with such an attitude.  In his opinion, the science of human beings needed to understand both what was and what could be; psychology needed to be more than the study of pathology, weakness, and damage, but also the study of strength and virtue.  As it became clear that the disease model of psychology was not progressing towards prevention, there was a shift towards building competency rather than correcting weaknesses.  Certain buffers, including courage, future mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work-ethic, hope, honesty, and perseverance, seemed to mediate mental illness, fueling a movement intent on amplifying strengths rather than repairing weaknesses.

The resulting shift saw individuals as decision-makers with choices, preferences, and the possibility of becoming masterful, efficacious, as well as helpless and hopeless.  This movement served to restore psychology's briefly forgotten goals of making normal people stronger and more productive and actualizing high human potential.  Within this framework, the field of positive psychology began to flourish.

Positive psychology essentially consists of three guiding elements.  On the subjective level, the focus is on valued subjective experiences, which include well-being, contentment, satisfaction, hope and optimism, and the capacity for flow and happiness.  From a personal perspective, it is about positive personal traits such as capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom.  At a group level, the concern is with civic virtues and institutions that move individuals towards better citizenship, including qualities such as responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work-ethic.  In one sentence, positive psychology is about identifying and nurturing the strongest qualities and finding niches in which to best live out those strengths.

There are a number of other important forces guiding the progress of positive psychology.  One of these is the role of the positive experience, or the questions of what qualities make one moment better or worse than the next or what distinguishes happy from unhappy individuals.  A second concern is with the positive personality and how humans function as self-organizing, self-directed adaptive entities.  Lastly, there is the important consideration that people and experiences are embedded in a social context and the ways that individuals change and are changed by their environments.

A number of perspectives have emerged to explain how the above forces affect individuals.  From the evolutionary perspective, the primary barrier to positive states of mind is the difference between the ancestral environment from which we evolved and our current environment, as posited by David Buss and others.  In addition to this belief, he theorizes that evolved distress mechanisms, are often still functional; an example of this would be jealousy alerting individuals to make sure of their spouse's fidelity.

Another realm involves positive personal traits, which include subjective well-being, optimism, happiness, and self-determination.  To a large extent, this area deals with how a person's values and goals mediate between external effects and the quality of experience.  As suggested by Epicetetus, it is not what happens to people that determines how happy they are, but how they interpret what happens.  Optimism, then, is seen as involving cognitive, emotional, and motivational components that intersect to affect an individual's view of the world.  In terms of self-determination, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci suggest that personal well-being and social development are optimized when the human needs for competence, belongingness, and autonomy are met.  Such people are intrinsically motivated, able to fulfill their potentialities, and able to seek out progressively greater challenges.  Barry Schwartz, though, warns that excessive autonomy may lead to depression and dissatisfaction, as the burden for autonomous choices can become too heavy.  He suggests that cultural constraints are necessary for leading a meaningful and satisfying life.

he's around

i know it.

after riding over to my aunt and uncle's lakeside house to film part of a project, they invited me to come out on the boat with them.  i agreed and soon i was in a borrowed bathing suit floating in a water chair tethered to the boat.  before i knew it, i had a five-year old girl named sangria on my lap, and she told me all about jesus.

time killerz

a home is not a house

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in; but if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." -I John 1:8,9


As I began reading the first chapter of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth, I began thinking about other theories that attempt to explain reality. In all those that I chose to explore, a common theme is self-deception and its detriments. Each theory offers a slightly different perspective, and all hold at least something useful. Once you've finished, I'd love to hear what you think.


Plato's Theory of Forms suggests the existence of a level of reality or "world" inhabited by the ideal or archetypal forms of all things and concepts. This is more or less his idea of Heaven, where the absolute form of everything exists. Under this theory, a form is the "common nature" possessed by a group of things or concepts, and is eternal and changeless, but exists with changeable matter to produce the examples we perceive in the temporal world. Additionally, the Analogy of the Divided Line distinguishes between lower forms, the real items of which ordinary particular items we see around us are reflections, and higher forms, characterized by priori, that knowledge of them does not depend upon experience of particulars or even on ideas of perpetually well-known particulars.


Here, the temporal world is opinion, as illustrated in the Allegory of the Cave; just as the prisoners observing shadows cast on the wall believe such likenesses are the actual objects or reality, we are seeing shadows of forms rather than the absolute forms themselves. When we have false beliefs about the nature of absolute reality in each thing or concept we encounter, Plato places us as unable to reason. The prisoners suffer this gap in reality because they are bound and unable to move, and although we may be physically unhindered, Plato explains our metaphoric chains with the Metaphor of the Sun.


He states, "when the soul is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason, but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts into opinions hither and thither and again seems as if it lacked reason."


Rene Descartes is perhaps most famous for reasoning, "I think, therefore I am." As far as he was concerned, Plato's concept of our experienced world as shadows of absolute forms is skewed. Descartes saw thinking as the only thing that cannot be doubted, and that through perception and deduction, the judgement of the mind is the only means of explanation and understanding of our environment. Even further, he saw Plato's argument for an external world as absurdly placing sensory perceptions as involuntary and external to the senses.


He uses the example of speaking, postulating that although, "most philosophers assure us that sound is nothing other than a certain vibration of air that strikes against our ears...if our sense of hearing were to report to our mind the true image of its object, then, instead of causing us to conceive of sound, it would have to cause us to conceive of the motion of the parts of air that then vibrate against our ears." With this premise guiding his work, through the use of mathematics and calculations regarding the properties of light, Descartes even attests "that the face of the heaven...must appear to its inhabitants completely like that of our world." We will get to heaven in a little bit.


In the segment of the first chapter entitled "Spirituality and Religion", Tolle's discussion of ego offers an alternative to both Descartes' and Plato's theories of existence and reality. Ego, he attests, is an identification with form, primarily those of thoughts. When we remain in the realm of our own thoughts, we are trapped from recognizing oneness, much less attaining it. The relative reality of evil is, then, "complete identification with form...physical, thought, and emotional."


Such an unawareness of oneness with all others characterizes the dysfunction afflicting the "normal" consciousness of most humans. This original sin, of missing the mark of human existence, this maya, the veil of delusion, and this dukkha, mind-generated suffering and dissatisfaction, all result from such egocentric ignorance. This is living in Plato's cave and treating shadows as reality.


Basic tenants of Christianity provide yet another set of insights. The Book of Common Prayer, contains "An Outline of the Faith: the Catechism". It begins by reminding us that we are part of God's creation and made in His image. As such, we have been given the freedom to love, create, and reason, but we are separate from each other and from Him because we have misused this gift. This disconnectedness is similar to Tolle's ego; in using our God-given reasoning, skill, memory, and logic to unintended, self-serving ends, we distance ourselves from the essential oneness we began with and perpetuate our own ignorance.


In this text, sin is defined as a "distortion of the will of God that compromises our relationship with all creation." When our relationship with God, the unifier of the world, suffers, we lose our liberty by becoming entrapped by our egotistical, individualistic pursuits. This tenant is reflected not only in Tolle's description of ego, but also in Plato's Allegory of the Sun; when we ensnare ourselves in false beliefs of reality, we lose our connection with the unifying absolute. In Christianity, because we have been made in the image of God, we are all a part of the communion of saints, the whole family of God, and as such, we must honor and love each other as we love ourselves.


Hebrews 9:24 explains that, "Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are figures of the true; but into heaven itself." In this pointed distinction between the trueness of heaven and its contents and the world we experience, the parallel to Plato's World of Forms is uncanny. When we transcend our bodies, we are subject to the everlasting life that comes with ascension into heaven, "a new existence in which we are united...in the joy of fully loving and knowing God and each other."


I'll leave you with some words from Descartes.


"I..aspired as much as any one to reach heaven; the way is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead to heaven are above..the impotency of my reason. In order competently to undertake their examination, there was need of some special help from heaven, and of being more than man."


Regardless of route, the pursuit of heaven seems to require being more than man and his ego. On spiritual pilgrimage, the search for home is anything but physical or esoteric; to play with an old adage, a home is not a house. Coming home is a return to the inherent oneness unfettered by the ignorance of ego.

we need innernet now

..so i don't kill time in the fishbowl doing things like this

transport of matter

Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness (2010) – Dong Shen

This article discusses the experiment in which a small piece of paper was transported out of a plastic vial by the means of human consciousness. The phenomenon of solid matter penetrating solid matter is attributed to a second consciousness state (SCS) that differs from the first, normal consciousness state of everyday thinking. Chinese research has suggested the involvement of a third-eye screen, which is essentially an image of an object created on a virtual “screen” in the middle of the forehead when a practitioner spends about an hour thinking deeply about the object. Psychokinetic (PK) transportation of the paper from the vial requires an image of the paper to be held stably on the screen by the SCS so that the first consciousness state can visualize moving the paper out of the vial; findings suggest that the paper image on the screen is able to receive information from the practitioner.
The methods used in this experiment were derived from Chinese research that began in the 1970s. These early studies were fueled by findings regarding Exceptional Function of the Human Body (EFHB), first seen in a boy who could “read” Chinese characters written on a piece of paper placed next to his ear. Shouliang Chen at Beijing University sought to determine whether or not EFHB was a physiological function of the body, and his studies found numerous other children and adults who were considered to have EHFB. The resulting source of practitioners served to advance research on this topic in a number of other programs.
For this particular experiment, practitioners were recruited from the Fudan University workforce. Individuals were selected to voluntarily undergo ESP and PK training without compensation and were generally 16-22 years old with little education. Results showed that success was often predicted by individuals’ level of mental flexibility and lack of preconception; approximately 60% of participants were successfully trained in ESP, with lower rates for PK success.
In this study, the canister was a standard-sized, opaque black plastic, 35-mm film cartridge container with its cap. A slip of paper 65mm by 90mm had a number written on it before being placed inside the canister. Although the practitioner, a 17-year old male, had no ability to achieve SCS initially, after six months of psychokinetic training, the experiment began. After the practitioner spent two days preparing, the experimenter wrote the number 830 on the paper, folded it four times, then passed it to a second experimenter who placed it inside the canister. The practitioner was seated one meter away from the table and told the paper was inside but not what was written on it.
Approximately forty minutes passed in silence as the practitioner stared intently at the canister. Moments later, the practitioner stated not only that the paper had moved to the floor near the wall, but also that it had the number 830 written on it in blue ink. None of the experimenters described seeing the paper leaving the container or flying across the room, but upon further inspection, there was in fact the very same paper on the ground near the wall, still folded.
The researcher provided the manner in which the practitioner described his experiment as follows, “during the experiment he concentrated on the black catridge container and got it deep in his consciousness while entering into the SCS. Then an image of the container appeared on the third-eye screen located in front of his forehead. He saw the image of the paper in the same way. At the very beginning, the paper image was not stable and not clear. After he focused on the image for a while, it became stable and clear on the screen. The number on the paper could then be easily read, that is, 830 written in blue, even though the paper was folded inside the capped container. When the image of the paper was clear on the screen, he started to use his mind to move the paper out of the container. At a certain point, he “saw” in his mind that the container was empty and saw in the room that the paper was on the floor near the wall.”
This research found that second consciousness state images on the third-eye screen have a number of remarkable qualities. When the practitioner is in the SCS, he can see the folded paper on his third-eye screen, and even has the capability to mentally examine it to determine its parts and characteristics, which was the number 830 in blue ink. Studies have also shown that an individual can focus on a given page of a closed book and read it while the book remains closed. This is possible because the image of the object on the third-eye screen is actively connected with the actual object; merely reading the third-eye screen is simply ESP. Psychokinesis results from the SCS focusing on the image and working with the normal, first consciousness state, which can then instruct the object to move.
According to the author, there are three requirements for psychokinetic activities. The first is that the image of the object actually appears on the third-eye screen. Second, the image on the screen must be stable to ensure it is intimately connected with the real object such as that between an object and its reflection in a mirror. This is achieved by maintaining concentration on the object. Finally, the image receives its “instruction” from the normal, first state of consciousness. When the position of the image on the screen changes, the real object will follow the position change simultaneously, similar to a tunneling process associated with a quantum mechanical wave function. These traits can be trained, with children 8-12 years old and young adults 15-22 years old with limited education showing best results.