Some days all it takes to restores one's faith in the entrepreneur in the more creative of us is a quick visit to Ebay.
For example, this incredible 3 generation stone is fetching quite a price.
The item description says "this stone will bring peace to all parts of your life". If it doesn't, perhaps something like this would come in handy.
Some day I aspire to extract money from fools as well as some of the artists one encounters on Ebay.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Here it comes.
It is my believe that its too late.
Its not that we don't have the technological ability.
Its not that we don't have the economic ability.
Its just that we who care are too few, too late.
One fine summer day in the midwest when I was a child of about 10 a friend and I were walking down the street near my house when I saw that a man tending lawns had parked his truck and neglected to set the parking break. While the road was mostly flat, the very slight slope had allowed the vehicle to begin very slowly rolling backwards down the street, toward some unsuspecting trashbags on the curb. The owner of the vehicle was running a string trimmer and was oblivious to the situation as he could not hear my warning cries. I went to the slowly moving truck and mustered all the strength in my then-85lb frame in a futile attempt to slow its course. I was, of course, bowled aside, slowly. I then stood sheepisly by and watched as the truck continued on its way toward the hapless trashbags. A few moments before the collision, which was now as obvious as it had been inevitable, the owner of the truck came dashing down the street in a desperate attempt to stop his lethargicly rampaging equipment. Although he made a valiant attempt, sprinting through the late summer afternoon, he was simply too late. The vehicle collided with the turgid white bags, goring them with a sooty exaust pipe, slowly stretching and tearing asunder their filmy skins before dragging their distorted forms along the cooling black asphault, leaving behind a gory trail of damp coffee grounds and greasy black banana peels
The report.
If you don't feel like reading any of the 2500 pages of the report, which was compiled by 1300 researchers from 92 nations, don't feel bad. Nobody else will either.
Its not that we don't have the technological ability.
Its not that we don't have the economic ability.
Its just that we who care are too few, too late.
One fine summer day in the midwest when I was a child of about 10 a friend and I were walking down the street near my house when I saw that a man tending lawns had parked his truck and neglected to set the parking break. While the road was mostly flat, the very slight slope had allowed the vehicle to begin very slowly rolling backwards down the street, toward some unsuspecting trashbags on the curb. The owner of the vehicle was running a string trimmer and was oblivious to the situation as he could not hear my warning cries. I went to the slowly moving truck and mustered all the strength in my then-85lb frame in a futile attempt to slow its course. I was, of course, bowled aside, slowly. I then stood sheepisly by and watched as the truck continued on its way toward the hapless trashbags. A few moments before the collision, which was now as obvious as it had been inevitable, the owner of the truck came dashing down the street in a desperate attempt to stop his lethargicly rampaging equipment. Although he made a valiant attempt, sprinting through the late summer afternoon, he was simply too late. The vehicle collided with the turgid white bags, goring them with a sooty exaust pipe, slowly stretching and tearing asunder their filmy skins before dragging their distorted forms along the cooling black asphault, leaving behind a gory trail of damp coffee grounds and greasy black banana peels
The report.
If you don't feel like reading any of the 2500 pages of the report, which was compiled by 1300 researchers from 92 nations, don't feel bad. Nobody else will either.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
A New Season
So, its almost Easter again. As an athiest the Christian celebration of Easter doesn't mean much to me, but as a cultural point of reference it feels like something that I should be a part of. I've decided that from now on I'll treat it as a celebration of the changing of the seaons. Sometimes I wish I lived close to a place where those tree-hugging, earthy-crunchy people live, they usually have nice fresh perspectives on celebrations like this. So I think I'll starting having a small party at the times of the solstice and equinox. We'll offer burnt animal sacrifice, burn pungent incense and consume lots of beer. Yah, right, IOW, grill some steak, have some good cigars and drink beer.
Today was uneventful, but good. I played video games with the kids, took them to the library, skimmed through a book called '8 minute meditation' or something similar, colored Easter.. er, I mean, Vernal Equinox eegs with colored pencils and dye, printed some photos from Christmas.. er, I mean Winter Solstice vacation (I can see that this is going to take some getting used to), and made a short entry on this blog thing. As if anyone besides myself cares. But thats not really the point.
The meditation book was interesting. The author claims that the daily 8 minute meditation sessions he advocates are sufficent to achieve the 'be here now' state (for lack of a better term. This could probably also be described as the Clear Light or any number of other terms). He spends quite a bit of time on the initial stages, wherein one is attempting to clear one's mind of subvocalized thought. Fortunately my on-again-off-again meditation practices have made me quite proficent with this already. The book describes this in terms of 'catch and release', but I found more effective the Buddhist concept of picturing oneself as a mountain and the occasional thought as a small cloud scuttling by. The mountain is unaffected by and soon left behind by the cloud. The author goes on with several other meditation techniques, most of which I found farily intuitive, or designed to allow one to more effectively disregard physical discomfort. Unfortunately I didn't get to the last section of the book in which he describes some possibly interesting combinations of techinques. I'll skim that section next time I'm at the library.
A few months ago I stopped by a local spa and took a half-hour soak in their flotation tank. This is basicly a bathtub 4 feet wide and tall and 8 feet long, filled with 96degF water that has been saturated with an epsom or sea salt solution to increase bouyance. The inside of the tank is black and sealed against external light and sound. When immersed in the water one's body floats like a cork, with the ears just submerged. The conditions are highly effective at isolating one from sensory input. By remaining still with arms over the chest or above the head (if left at the sides the elbows tend to rise and twist out at an awkward angle that quicks makes the sholders unconfortable) I found that conditions were perfect for deep meditation. It was interesting that I found it difficult to meditate with eyes open, although it was just as dark outside as inside my eyelids. Near as I can tell my brain knows when my eyes are shut and when they are what I percieve as visual input switches from what my eyes see to some kind of internal screen. Its hard to describe. The blackness I see with eyes open in a dark place is different from that of closing my eyes. I suppose its common, so I expect the reader probably knows what I mean. Since I always practice my meditation with closed eyes I found it impossible to achieve a deep state of meditation with my eyes open, even in this very isolated place. Eventually I started to get board. I generally don't meditate longer than 15 or 20 minutes, so I'd guess that no more than 10 had passed before I started to get ansy. I found that the body seems to start to get starved for input after a while. Not anticipating this I figited enough to give it the necessary input. I believe that next time I'll have to exert better control and remain absolutely motionless. The isolation tank did not assist in bringing about an easier 'clear-light' state (a state I rarely reach in meditation, I think I've reached it maybe 4 times in several years). I think that with some practice with the tank it would be a fairly powerful meditation aid (not to mention being a highly effective relaxation device). With more time I'm quite certain one would start to see the hallucinations or visions often attributed to isolation tanks of this sort.
It concerns me when people who experiance hallucinations, be they induced by drugs or physical rigors or isolation, take their visions at face value. Rather than considering that their mind is 'playing tricks' or is simply not working as they are used to, people frequently will leap to what I consider to be unfounded conclusions. For example, experiances of perceiving a god-like being are not uncommon. Some people take this as evidence of the existence of such a being. However, the same individual will disregard similar induced effects, such as 'breathing' of walls or crawling of the grain patterns in wood. Why accept one as real and one as imagined? A sense of the profound is also very common. Often this sense is taken as evidence that one is seeing 'Truth' or the divine. I rather think that it is this sense that takes even the most mundane bits of existance and lends to them the sense of profound truth. Often as one returns to normalcy one can't remember exactly what it was that was so profound. I believe it is because nearly everything was, and so there was no one thing to recall, no special thing one can point to and say, 'there, that is the thing that holds the Truth of the universe'. For some, this might point to the idea that it is indeed everything that holds this truth. I rather believe that it is an artifact of our mental processes. Sometimes these experiances are called 'mind expanding'. But I wonder. Might it be instead that they are mind reducing? Our normal mental processes are capable of grasping an incredible amount of information with very little effort on our part. But if one were to reduce that capacity to the point where only one single, fundamental fact could be retained, what would that feel like? I think it would be a single spark of being that hung on to that one defining property: 'I Am'. Beyond that point lies only the unconscious mind, capable of action and reaction, but not of self-awareness. Balancing oneself on the edge of this abyss this one single idea, 'I Am' fills everything and would be quite profound. I wonder if we as infants experiance a transition from unthinking thing to self awareness at some point.
Today was uneventful, but good. I played video games with the kids, took them to the library, skimmed through a book called '8 minute meditation' or something similar, colored Easter.. er, I mean, Vernal Equinox eegs with colored pencils and dye, printed some photos from Christmas.. er, I mean Winter Solstice vacation (I can see that this is going to take some getting used to), and made a short entry on this blog thing. As if anyone besides myself cares. But thats not really the point.
The meditation book was interesting. The author claims that the daily 8 minute meditation sessions he advocates are sufficent to achieve the 'be here now' state (for lack of a better term. This could probably also be described as the Clear Light or any number of other terms). He spends quite a bit of time on the initial stages, wherein one is attempting to clear one's mind of subvocalized thought. Fortunately my on-again-off-again meditation practices have made me quite proficent with this already. The book describes this in terms of 'catch and release', but I found more effective the Buddhist concept of picturing oneself as a mountain and the occasional thought as a small cloud scuttling by. The mountain is unaffected by and soon left behind by the cloud. The author goes on with several other meditation techniques, most of which I found farily intuitive, or designed to allow one to more effectively disregard physical discomfort. Unfortunately I didn't get to the last section of the book in which he describes some possibly interesting combinations of techinques. I'll skim that section next time I'm at the library.
A few months ago I stopped by a local spa and took a half-hour soak in their flotation tank. This is basicly a bathtub 4 feet wide and tall and 8 feet long, filled with 96degF water that has been saturated with an epsom or sea salt solution to increase bouyance. The inside of the tank is black and sealed against external light and sound. When immersed in the water one's body floats like a cork, with the ears just submerged. The conditions are highly effective at isolating one from sensory input. By remaining still with arms over the chest or above the head (if left at the sides the elbows tend to rise and twist out at an awkward angle that quicks makes the sholders unconfortable) I found that conditions were perfect for deep meditation. It was interesting that I found it difficult to meditate with eyes open, although it was just as dark outside as inside my eyelids. Near as I can tell my brain knows when my eyes are shut and when they are what I percieve as visual input switches from what my eyes see to some kind of internal screen. Its hard to describe. The blackness I see with eyes open in a dark place is different from that of closing my eyes. I suppose its common, so I expect the reader probably knows what I mean. Since I always practice my meditation with closed eyes I found it impossible to achieve a deep state of meditation with my eyes open, even in this very isolated place. Eventually I started to get board. I generally don't meditate longer than 15 or 20 minutes, so I'd guess that no more than 10 had passed before I started to get ansy. I found that the body seems to start to get starved for input after a while. Not anticipating this I figited enough to give it the necessary input. I believe that next time I'll have to exert better control and remain absolutely motionless. The isolation tank did not assist in bringing about an easier 'clear-light' state (a state I rarely reach in meditation, I think I've reached it maybe 4 times in several years). I think that with some practice with the tank it would be a fairly powerful meditation aid (not to mention being a highly effective relaxation device). With more time I'm quite certain one would start to see the hallucinations or visions often attributed to isolation tanks of this sort.
It concerns me when people who experiance hallucinations, be they induced by drugs or physical rigors or isolation, take their visions at face value. Rather than considering that their mind is 'playing tricks' or is simply not working as they are used to, people frequently will leap to what I consider to be unfounded conclusions. For example, experiances of perceiving a god-like being are not uncommon. Some people take this as evidence of the existence of such a being. However, the same individual will disregard similar induced effects, such as 'breathing' of walls or crawling of the grain patterns in wood. Why accept one as real and one as imagined? A sense of the profound is also very common. Often this sense is taken as evidence that one is seeing 'Truth' or the divine. I rather think that it is this sense that takes even the most mundane bits of existance and lends to them the sense of profound truth. Often as one returns to normalcy one can't remember exactly what it was that was so profound. I believe it is because nearly everything was, and so there was no one thing to recall, no special thing one can point to and say, 'there, that is the thing that holds the Truth of the universe'. For some, this might point to the idea that it is indeed everything that holds this truth. I rather believe that it is an artifact of our mental processes. Sometimes these experiances are called 'mind expanding'. But I wonder. Might it be instead that they are mind reducing? Our normal mental processes are capable of grasping an incredible amount of information with very little effort on our part. But if one were to reduce that capacity to the point where only one single, fundamental fact could be retained, what would that feel like? I think it would be a single spark of being that hung on to that one defining property: 'I Am'. Beyond that point lies only the unconscious mind, capable of action and reaction, but not of self-awareness. Balancing oneself on the edge of this abyss this one single idea, 'I Am' fills everything and would be quite profound. I wonder if we as infants experiance a transition from unthinking thing to self awareness at some point.
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