Category Archives: Model of the World

What Are Your Instincts?

Man – Know Thyself

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?

These Two Things Are Essential To Effectively Use The Law of Attraction

How To Properly Manifest Your Desires

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.

The Meaning Of Life (For Real)

Ok, Seriously, Why Are We Here?

There have been, are, and will be plenty of discussions regarding the meaning of life. From the spiritual to the metaphysical to the clinically scientific, there is no end to the plethora of opinions about why we are here. It is something that I have been particularly interested in, as a hobby more than anything else, so I’ve come across some very interesting viewpoints that I’d like to share. None of them are likely true, as we will not ever know what our true purpose is here. But the path of discovery is like no other.

The first thing I’d like to mention is the idea of “models.” When you take a look at reality, and it behaves in ways that you simply do not understand, the human brain has this capacity for creating a working “model,” some kind of organized structure so that we can depend on it. There is something about accepting reality as some random sequence of events that is particularly unsettling on a very deep psychological level.

As man progresses through history, and we find better ways to observe and measure our reality, we come up with more detailed models of the world. A great example is that everybody used to think the world was flat. It was a largely accepted fact, until somebody sailed around the world to prove it wasn’t. Literally overnight, people rejected the flat earth model and accepted the better, more realistic round earth model.

When humans first started coming up with “stories” about how the world worked, they were surrounded by mythology and characters much like themselves. When it rained, the gods of the sky were angry, when it was sunny and warm the gods of the sky were happy. Different societies have different myths that were largely based on their predominant environmental structures.

So what are some of the basic models in our society? Let’s start with religious.
The entire universe was created by some kind of conscious, super intelligent, perhaps infinitely intelligent entity. He or She knows all that ever was, and all that will ever be, down to the minutest of details. From what your boyfriend will say to you tonight about what you decide to wear, to the very moment of your death. There has been much discussion and essays by some very smart people that elaborate exactly how it is possible for a supreme entity to know everything, while still maintaining the idea of human free will. Your boyfriend certainly can choose exactly what he is going to say about that outfit tonight, but the Creator knows exactly what he will choose.

The purpose of the creation that we live in is a mystery, and only our Creator knows the purpose, and where we are headed. Some believe that we get one shot on earth, and the rest of our eternity will be determined by how we live this one shot, while others hold to the notion of reincarnation and the ability to improve on the last go through.

This model provides for a general guideline in the form of religion, and a loving, omniscient Creator who is watching our every move and rooting for us to make the right choices.

Many of the world’s religions, whether they be mono- or poly-theistic fall under this general umbrella model of the world.

The next model is similar, but the Creator lacks a specific identity. It is more a collective of human consciousness. A nameless, faceless infinite intelligence that exists somewhere, somehow that everybody is capable of tapping into. Generally it is believed that this creative, intelligent “force” is at the heart of all “energy” that permeates all matter in the universe. This “force” is generally good, and is the underlying energy beneath all human behavior. This force is ambivalent, and behaves like natural laws. Those that know how to tap into it and maximize its live lives of unlimited abundance and happiness. Those that are either unaware of ignorant of it’s existent are destined to live lives of destitution and struggle.

Many eastern religions fall under this umbrella, as it doesn’t require a human like entity at it’s core as the creator and guardian of all that. The central, creative force is just that, a force, like the wind. You can build sail and harness it’s power, or you can curse it as it blows your leaves around, or you can be completely ambivalent.

The next and final model is the purely scientific model. This holds that there is no intelligent, creative “force” in the universe. We are merely a collection of matter that has, through the course of billions of years and measurable, repeatable, and describable physical laws, organized itself somehow into feeling and thinking creatures that can write long winded posts about the nature of its own existence on the Internet, and hope that many other like minded, self organized blobs of matter will read this and find enlightenment from it. This view doesn’t hold that our meager human minds have the capacity to even begin to understand the incredible detail and depth of all these naturally occurring physical laws. It just holds that there isn’t some “spaghetti monster’ in the sky watching our backs the whole time.

Of course, these three views are not mutually exclusive, and by no means exhaustive. There is plenty of overlap. And many times you may find yourself believing in one more so than the other two, and then out of the blue, some even, maybe random, maybe not will completely and forever change your worldview.

But regardless of where you are on the spectrum of the many theories of existence, you certainly can appreciate the fact that we are here at all, living in a time where such massive communication between people is so easy.

It is truly wonderful to be alive. I hope you feel the same.

Do You Worship The Sun And The Moon?

The Secret of Personality

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.

What’s Your Model Of Reality?

A long time ago, in some basement laboratory, a bunch of physicists and mathematicians were trying to solve a particularly difficult problem. They were looking at some subatomic particles, and how they interacted with one other.

They had already figured out the math and the physics behind the interactions, and could accurately predict the behavior of two or three particles. In a closed system with five or ten particles bouncing around, it was pretty straightforward. The could use any number of statistical algorithms to figure out the motions of particles, say, x, y, and z, based on the motions of particles a, b, and c.

From that they could effectively extrapolate to the whole system. The only problem is that in nature, there is never a system with only ten or fifteen particles. There are systems with billions and billions of particles. When you go up to that same level, the same principles apply, but the sheer number of particles makes the calculations impossible. Even with a computer that is a billion times more powerful than any computer that can ever be invented, trying to calculate the motions of system with so many natural particles is impossible. (If you’ve ever wondered why they can never really predict the weather with any amount of scientific accuracy, this is the reason. There are just too many variables.)

Now this group of scientists was studying something called solid-state physics. This is where you have material that is really packed with particles. The particles don’t have very much room to move, so they are always getting in each other’s way, kind of like twenty people on an elevator. If the elevator stops on the fifth floor, and the person in the back needs to get off, then pretty much everybody has to move a little bit to accommodate them.

Same thing in solid-state particle physics. When one particle moves, just a little bit, it pretty much affects every other particle. These poor scientists were wracking their brains trying to figure out how to accurately predict the behavior of the system as a whole.

Then one guy had a brilliant idea. Why don’t they look at holes, instead of particles? In the elevator example, there are twenty people, and may enough space for one more person. So thinking of that empty space as a separate entity, you can reduce the math significantly if you only try and predict the movements of that empty space, rather than everybody else on the elevator.

So the scientists started looking at holes, instead of particles. And they gave holes the same properties that they normally give particles. Like weight, size, mass, density, spin, charge, etc. One of the cool things about scientists is that a value of zero is a perfectly acceptable value to give something. It is a number just like any other number. So they looked at a system with only few particles (holes) with zero mass, zero charge, zero spin and zero everything else they normally give to particles.

And lo behold, the math was much simpler, and it accurately predicted the behavior of the system. And solid-state physics was born. Solid-state physics is the underlying science behind all kinds of fascinating inventions that will help mankind for hundreds of years. To say solid-state physics is a significant development in human history would be a huge understatement.

And it was all based on a “model” of reality. They looked at a system, and figured out the easiest way to “frame” reality so they could predict it and utilize it the most. They ignored the traditional way of “looking at things the way they really are,” and came up with their own model. It didn’t matter one bit that they were looking at imaginary “holes” moving around in a space.

It’s been said that a musical equivalent would be to write a piece of music by ignoring the notes, and focusing only on the spaces between them.

The moral of the story? Reality is a finicky thing. You don’t necessarily have to buy into everybody else’s’ interpretation, or model of reality. You are allowed to observe things, give them whatever meaning you want, and see how that works out for you.

You ask a girl out, and she rejects you. Have you been rejected, or did you only meet a girl that has bad taste? You try a business venture and it consistently loses money. Did you fail in business, or did you find a way to practice and improve your skills so you’ll be better in the next venture? Did that person cut you off in traffic because they are an evil person with no manners, or are they suffering significant emotional pressures and are at their wits end?

Labels you give to reality can be helpful, or beneficial. They can make it easier for you to get what you want, identifying learning opportunities and resources, or they can make it difficult, only identifying obstacles and problems.

When you realize that you have complete control over how you label things, you’ll be surprised how many opportunities open up for you.

Join countless others and sign up for our email list! If you don’t join the crowd and join our list, you’ll be left out in the cold. You don’t want that, do you?

How To Model The Vietnamese Nail Salon For Massive Profit

I had a friend once who was taking this class in becoming a certified (I’m not sure what the right word is) nail salon specialist. She explained all the different certifications you need to work in that kind of shop. It’s a little similar to the kind of license you need to cut peoples hair, but not as intense. Meaning that you don’t have to attend as many classroom hours, or take a very difficult class to pass.

Having never been to a nail salon to get my nails done, I wasn’t aware of the different requirements for opening and running a shop. Because it is a health related industry (sort of) and there is the possibility of transferring germs, you need to follow certain health guidelines. That is basically the gist of the course, not the proper way to cut or polish nails, but to ensure that the equipment that is used over and over again remains clean and germ free.

And just like restaurants, those nail salon places are inspected (or are supposed to be inspected) on a regular basis. Because my friend is from California, and California is currently undergoing a huge budget crisis, I’m not sure if the have the money to send health inspectors out running around checking on nail salons.

One interesting phenomenon that happened recently (or maybe not so recently depending on your time frame) is the massive increase in Vietnamese nail salons in southern California. Before, most nail salons were run and catered to upper class patrons.

But when the Vietnamese came in, they changed all that. They changed the target market, the operating procedures, and the profits. Soon almost every single strip mall contained a nail salon run by Vietnamese. And they were very profitable.

The thing to be learned from this is that no matter how saturated a market appears to be, there is always another way, always another angle to swoop in a dominate, even in a market that has been well established for many years.

Change Your Filters – Change Your Life

Filters are a very important and necessary part of life. Filters are used in a variety of ways, in a variety of situations. They can be extremely beneficial to sort out what you don’t want, but they can also keep out things that you do want.

Some examples are coffee filters, low bypass filters (used on stereo components, oscilloscopes and computer based audio software), and those pans that old timers used during the gold rush to filter the sludge from the river bed from the gold nuggets they were hoping to find.

Other filters are the filters that are in your brain. When you go to the store for example, if you happen to be a vegetarian, you filter out all of the meat products and focus only on those derived from plants. Or if you like to drink alcohol, and had a particularly painful experience with, say, tequila, then you’ll likely not spend too much time lingering in the tequila section of your local supermarket.

Some filters are completely out of our conscious awareness. One way to do a quick check of the filters that are operating in your head is to simply do a quick inventory of your life. What things do you have? What things are you experiencing on a daily basis? Whatever you have going in your life is a result of your filters. The people, jobs, living conditions, cars, everything you have is a result of a filter of some sort.

The interesting thing is that filters are operating completely below conscious awareness. And they were likely picked up, or learned below conscious awareness as well. Usually from parents, or teachers, we tend to pick up our major beliefs in life without even questioning them.

So how do you go about changing your filters? Practice filtering on a conscious basis. Just like any skill, when you elevate it to the conscious level, you can change it, and drop it back down to the subconscious level where you won’t have to think about it.

Take your golf swing for example, or any other sports related skill. Unless you have taken lessons, or focused on a specific component of it, you likely learned through trial and error. You kept changing your method without much thought, until you got a result that was acceptable to you.

But what happens when you take lessons from a pro? He or she will show you exactly what you are doing wrong, and exactly what to do to correct it. Then you must practice, focusing only on what you are supposed to be doing. This is slow and frustrating at first, but the more you practice, the more it becomes natural. Becoming natural is when your new behavior is slipping back down into unconscious behavior.

Filters work the same way. When you focus specifically on something that you are filtering, you can slowly change the things you filter automatically. Next time you go to a fast food restaurant, watch the people in front of you. They will likely not have any clue what they want to eat until they get to the front of the line. Even then they will usually take some time making a decision. They only know that they are hungry. They have put off sorting through their environment for what they want until the last possible moment.

Next time you go to the supermarket (if you don’t usually do this already) make a mental list in your head of exactly what you want. Get only what you chose, and nothing else. When you are shopping, pretend you are the terminator (from the first movie) where they show him sorting through looking for Sarah Connor. Pretend you are scanning the supermarket to get what you want as efficiently as possible. Don’t waste any time looking over things you are not going to buy.

Believe it or not, this is exactly what your subconscious is doing all the time. Sorting through your environment just like the terminator. When you are not able to make a decision, it is because you haven’t identified what is important to you.

When you make a clear and solid choice exactly what you want before you enter into any situation, you are practicing selecting conscious filters. Another way to practice filtering is go outside for a walk, and see how many red things you can mentally collect.

Most people never take the time to examine their filters and see if they are working for them. They have such vague filters that they end up in relationships that don’t serve them, jobs they don’t like, and life situations that are less than spectacular. By practicing your filtering on a conscious level, you will become more and more skilled.

And the more you practice, the more detailed you can get in your filtering. You’ll be amazed how well this works. Instead of filtering for red things, you’ll be filtering for jobs that pay you good money to do exactly what you want, or life partners that can satisfy you sexually and emotionally in ways you never thought possible. You’ll never again have to “end up” with anything. You can actually choose your life.

How The Church Became a Powerful Force In Europe

This morning I came across an old man that I see sometimes when I’m out walking. Usually he doesn’t say anything, he merely grunts, or sometimes nods his head a small fraction of an inch.

This morning, however, he was different. He stopped and said good morning, and his body posture indicated he wanted to speak to me. So I naturally acquiesced, realizing the opportunity to speak a perhaps wise old timer. Maybe he was going to let me in on some of the secrets of life only available after several decades of successful living.

“You walk every morning, huh?” He said.
I nodded.
“How far?” he asked.
I replied that I wasn’t sure, but judging by the time, perhaps three or four kilometers.
“That’s good. You’ll live a long time.” He then described the neighborhood that I live in, telling me about the people that live here.

My neighborhood is surrounded by small, privately maintained rice fields, and apparently they have been in the family for at least two or three generations. Land is expensive, and usually a son will get married and then live with his parents, and eventually inherit the land.

It’s an interesting way to pass on wealth, through family bloodlines. Back in the old old days, it was important to from alliances with several families, and marriages were very strategic, in order to protect land ownership. Nowadays it doesn’t seem to be that way anymore, even here in Japan. Most people when they grow up don’t wish to inherit their families rice field. They’d rather move to Tokyo to get an office job.

I was reading an interesting book about land and wealth and families, and how it had a dramatic effect on the evolution of religion in Europe. Rich and powerful families would own lots of land, and do their best to keep it in the family. Quite often the most powerful landowners were often the same people that were in the government, so if you didn’t own land, you were pretty much at the mercy of those that did.

Marriages were strictly controlled, and the power and wealth of the time was effectively kept in the hands of the few. But when the Church became more and more popular, an interesting struggle began.

On the one hand, you had kings and monarchs that could protect their wealth and power through bloodlines, and marriages selected to keep the wealth in the family. Strategic marriages were extremely common in those times, and often times you had marriages between cousins to maintain the family power.

On the other hand, you had the Church. The Church had no method like bloodlines or arranged marriages to maintain its power. But eventually, the church became the de facto governing power in much of Europe.

This happened through the development of moral laws, primary to control the sexual behaviors of people. By controlling the sexual behavior of people, the church basically controlled those arranged marriages that he kings and nobles used to protect their bloodlines. The church enforced all kinds of moral laws regarding whom you could marry, effectively limiting the power of the monarchs to choose their own bloodlines.

Soon the church was dictating through its enforced moral laws, which families were marrying who.

An interesting way this happened stems from the idea of the “first son.” Generally, the first-born son was the inheritor of the father’s wealth, and the second son was generally left to the good graces of the first son, which generally weren’t very much.

So another interesting thing happened which gave the Church even more power. The groups, which entered into the monastery, or priesthood, and soon became the group that was dictating moral law to the rest of society, were these second sons.

The second sons that were being shut out of the family fortune, were collectively entering the church to create moral laws to diminish the wealth and power of individual families, and increase the wealth the and power of the church.

And that is how the Catholic Church quickly became the most powerful force in Europe. By effectively controlling the sexual behavior of others.

Killer Whales and Submarine Layers of Pleasure

The other night I was watching a documentary on Killer Whales, or Orcas, on TV. I don’t remember what channel it was on. That happens sometimes when you are channel surfing. You’ll come across something like this that you think is really cool, and you want to come back and see this again, but you can’t remember where you found it. I think maybe it was Discovery, or maybe Animal Planet. I can’t think of any other channels that would show a documentary on Killer Whales.

I couldn’t help but remember the move from many years ago called “Orca.” This fisherman accidentally killed a mother Killer Whale’s baby, and the mother made it her life mission to hunt down the fisherman like she was some angry ex-mafia contract killer who had been wronged and was using her whale assassination skills on him.

One of my favorite lines from the movie was when the fisherman was starting to realize what was up, that he was being hunted by an angry mother whale, and he went and asked the priest if it was possible to commit a sin against and animal. The priest (of course and Irishman) responded:

“You can commit a sin against a blade of grass.”

Naturally, being a kid when I saw that, I made sure to inform my dad of the horror of sinning against blades of grass, so I could get out of mowing the lawn. It didn’t work.

The other day I was in a new sandwich shop downtown. It had the appearance of a chain submarine store (submarine sandwich, not the Red October kind) but I was pretty sure it was privately owned. The specialized in this giant subs that were filled with all kinds of meat, and these really good looking triple and quadruple decker club sandwiches. There were a lot of people, and it smelled really good. They made their own bread, and their oven wasn’t so big so they kept pulling out trays of freshly made bread, which of course made people want to buy more sandwiches. An effective marketing strategy to say the least.

While we were waiting, my friend started telling me some weird convoluted story that he read in some dieting book. He said that the secret to discovering any solid weight loss plan that will serve you for the rest your life is to understand how you layer your pleasure. Some people only focus on immediate pleasure, how good eating will make them feel in the next few minutes. These people are only satisfied in the short term, and are always looking for a sugary fix. These people generally live off fast food and ice cream. Then there are people that focus way out in the future, and are considered by most to be health nuts. They put their pleasure just out of reach, so the present is always a means to and end, and not an end it itself. These people are usually found in the oatmeal and granola area of the supermarket, and wouldn’t be caught dead in a Baskin Robbins.

The trick, he said, was to layer out your pleasure in even amounts between now and the future. You need enough pleasure now so you can enjoy what you are eating, but you don’t want so much that you will rob you of your future pleasure. Conversely, if you rob your present pleasure and put it all out there in the future, it will always be out there in the future, simply because the nature of the future is that it is never now. When you can effectively layer you pleasure between now and then, you will really be able to enjoy your food in a healthy, constructive way.

I got this huge pastrami sandwich, which was really good. The only drawback was that there were so many people there; we couldn’t find any place to sit, so we had to eat standing up. I’ll definitely be hitting that sandwich shop up several times in the future, when hopefully it won’t be so crowded.

I think my favorite part about Orca was the very beginning. They showed these swimmers that were in danger of getting eaten by some sharks. Then out of nowhere, a killer whale came and head butted (or nose butted) the shark and sent it flying out of the water. I guess it was to frame the movie to show that Orcas are really friendly, and won’t hunt you down unless you murder their children. The term “killer” whale is really a misnomer. I’ve heard from more than a few people who’ve been on Alaska cruises that they are one of the main draws. They look really beautiful when they are swimming together.

Models of the World and Quantum Physics

When I was a kid I used to build models. Cars, airplanes, a few ships, even some famous buildings, like the Empire State building, and the Sears Tower in Chicago. I never built any models of ships or boats, but I had few friends that did. One thing about some of the models I built, (especially ones that took a long time,) was the incredible amount of detail that each model had. All the way down to some of the movable engine parts of some of more intense models.

Despite how accurate they appeared, they were only models of the real thing. The planes couldn’t fly, the cars wouldn’t drive, and the buildings wouldn’t hold any little people. They were only approximations of something larger and functional. And they were always built after the real thing. There weren’t ever any models of things that hadn’t been built yet.

Not all models are like this, however. In the early days of the twentieth century, physicists were trying to wrap their minds around something called Black Box Radiation. They had this black material, and when they heated it to very high temperatures, they would measure the spectral characteristics of the light it emitted as it cooled down. At first they thought they understood the physics behind what was happening. They came up with a model, and it worked.

The problem is, their model didn’t work at all levels. At first it only worked at the higher temperatures, but it broke down completely as they cooled off. They kept trying to update and change their model, and although they got a little bit closer each time to approximating the actual behavior, it still didn’t work at all levels.

Many famous scientists of the day were involved in this project. Bohr, Einstein and others were among those that tried and failed to accurately model the behavior of this mysterious phenomenon.

The interesting thing about models is how easily some people can be convinced that they are undisputed truth. Anytime there is an approximation of the physical world around us, it is only a model. Which is fine so long as people understand that it will always need to be updated and expanded on, or even discarded completely if somebody comes up with a better one.

The basic structure of our world and our solar system is a prime example. Long ago, people used think the world was flat. Those that claimed it was round were burned at the stake. Until Magellan circumnavigated the globe, the concept of a round Earth was foreign to most people.

The sun is another example. Those in authority used to believe, until fairly recently if you compare to the length of human history, that the Earth was the center of everything, and the sun and all the stars moved about the Earth. It wasn’t until Copernicus posited his theory of the Sun being the center and the Earth revolving around it did people start to see things in a different light.

It’s only when you take your model as unshakeable truth can you get into trouble. Burned at the stake, being held under house arrest for life, and other punishments are what has happened to people in the past for questioning the model of reality held by those in authority.

Sometimes one’s model of reality is held so tightly as absolute truth that people will fight, even die to protect it. The crusades are a prime example of this. The streets literally ran with the blood of heathens simply because they did not buy into the currently held model of the status quo.

Models are a great way to approximate and refine your view of reality, so long as you realize that they are just models, and should be readily exchanged with those that offer a better description of what we think is going on outside of our heads.

And this guy Max Plank, then a young twentyish something physicist stepped forward and offered his idea of this black box radiation. He said that instead of emitting energy in a continuous stream, the energy was being emitted in discreet entities, or quanta. They tried his model, and sure enough, it described the phenomenon beautifully. And so was the beginning of quantum physics.

The problem that baffled Einstein and his contemporaries was solved by young, almost unknown physicist. Had the older, established physicists been unable to realize that their models were only models, where would we be now?