LastThursday

The Manifestation Manifesto I think I've talked previously about manifestation. To be honest, my journal is getting too long to try and re-read and refer directly to previous posts, I'm starting to need an index! It's a testament to some aspect of my memory, that I have a very good memory for stuff I've written about already - but there's probably a limit somewhere. I'd hate to be a bore and repeat myself. The crux of what I'm getting at in this post is: how flexible is reality? The thing we identify as being our body, is the interface with which we effect change in the world out there. It should be obvious to anybody that to get anything done at all, we have to use our bodies, whether this is using our hands, feet, or vocal cords. It is all fundamentally physicality. There's three broad types of doing. That is: rearranging things, recombining things or directing things. In more down to earth language: tidying things up, making things or bossing people. It's in the nature of doing that there's some sort of agency and intention behind it. Generally speaking there's a sense that there's a something (you) that decides and then the body carries out the action. In normal circumstances that linkage is immediate. You think to yourself that you'd like a cup of coffee, and the body then obliges and physically makes one. Even when it doesn't seem immediate, it still is; you think you'd like a coffee at 3pm and then 3pm comes and again, you remember that you'd like a coffee and then immediately make one. It is not as if you program the body in advance and like a robot it carries out the task unconsciously, and you think "woaa, why am I making coffee now? Oh yes, I thought about it three days ago", no, that isn't how it works. Can this system be hacked? Two ways of hacking spring to mind. The first is to remove the agent. In other words you stop attributing your thoughts and intent as being the motivator of your actions. This seems strange, but in fact it isn't. For every act of doing there are a hundred thoughts not enacted. So by that token, the probability that "you" are controlling action seems low; what is so special about certain thoughts and intentions that make you act, while other thoughts do not make you act? Attacking the other side of it, for those lucky thoughts that did result in action, who's to say that you're not retrospectively claiming ownership of the action? It's like getting a full house at Bingo and claiming, yes I did in fact make that happen. Forget agency. So what does agentless doing look like? Nothing special. If indeed we can entertain that other people are philosophical zombies, then there is no agency on their part in any case - but still nothing looks out of place. The fact is, is that doing is part and parcel of the normal churn of consciousness. Any act of doing is inseparable from the context it is done in, and it's ever expanding contexts until the whole universe is involved. In that sense nothing is done, it just happens, without agency behind it. What else? The other is to effect things without the use of your body. One proxy for this sort of action, is when you ask someone to do something for you: you go to a coffee shop and ask for a coffee. I mean you are still physically using your body (vocal cords), but it's closer to what I'm getting at. If you can't use your body, then what can you use? The only thing left is thought and intention. It's clear here that to make a coffee some sort of physicality is needed, otherwise we're in the realm of the supernatural. But it's not supernatural for someone to make you a coffee, and that's where things get interesting. Is it possible that agency by itself is enough to change the world? Is it a law of nature that all personal change has to be done by your body? This goes directly to the heart of the mind/body problem (the body in the context of this post). Maybe the mind interface to reality is broader than just the body? If so then, it behoves us all to crowbar open the possibility. Law of Attraction anyone? Is it also possible that the non-body parts of the interface, can behave in an immediate fashion? Is there an inbuilt delay to the Law of Attraction, and why should this be so? Ok. So we have agentless action and bodiless action. What about combining the two? It's abundantly clear that doing is happening everywhere, but we relabel that doing as happening. Stuff is happening constantly seemingly without agency and without bodies. In effect, that is exactly what materialism is about, it's matter acting without agency or bodies - instead we have a bunch of rules about how and if things can happen. So how does idealism appropriate agentless, bodiless doing? It says that the agent is just an illusion in any case, consciousness is "doing" itself. Any sense of agency is just another offshoot of consciousness deluding itself and is in fact unnecessary. What about bodiless doing? It would just say that a body is no different from everything else in consciousness, it is seamlessly integrated into it; a body in effect doesn't exist, because the boundary of the body is a fiction. In the end this type of thinking leads into non-duality, everything is one, and there are no boundaries at all. It's obvious that if everything is part of the same block of stuff (consciousness), then agentless, bodiless action is in fact the norm. Any sense that the agent has for being in control of reality through their body is complete delusion. Consciousness is the master, and we are at its whim. If consciousness wishes to cook the probability books to make it seem like we decided to make a coffee with our hands, then it's its prerogative. If consciousness cooks the books differently and turns you into a millionaire without seeming effort, then its up to it, but it will still delude "you" into thinking it was "your" hard work and good sense.

When I spoke to my dad recently, he was telling me about a druid he went and saw. Druid. Well anyway, the druid told my dad that he had had a curse put on him by one of his exes, and that most probably she was some type of witch. I must say I can't help myself here forgive me: my dad's ex hexed him - kind of flows of the tongue doesn't it? Anyway, the German word for witch is Hexen. There's definitely an etymological relationship there. Germans always capitalise nouns, strange lot, I find it an infectious habit though. Where was I? So yes, regardless of whether my dad had been cursed or not, and what exactly a modern druid does, it did raise in me a kind of curiosity. Can people's malicious intent harm you? I'm thinking pure intent here, and at a distance, well away from the intentee. Fundamentally can I make someone unwell just by thinking or wishing bad things on them? Maybe some of you witchier types are shouting at me now: yes! yes! Ok, but I'm learning here, don't think badly of me, yikes. Have some of the times I've been unwell either physically or mentally been due to being cursed or had venom discretely directed my way? I don't believe I've pissed off many people in my time, but there have been a few, and probably more than I think; I have been known to be blunt and direct at times. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly interested in seeing if I can affect other people at a distance. But the question does arise that when I do in fact think of anyone, it may have either a positive, neutral or negative undercurrent behind it. Am I accidentally affecting people this way? It's enough to make me paranoid, or at least feel as though I should be more responsible in what I'm thinking. The other side of the coin is, is there a way to undo or protect myself from both stray negativity or malicious intent? Do I have to perform a ritual, does it have to be that dramatic? Or can I simply just become aware that I've been cursed and tell myself to "calm down mate, don't worry about it", and poof! it's gone? Can I turn the curse positive in some way? One practice that I did try in the past to heal myself against people that I thought had seriously wronged me, was to sit and meditate and then imagine a bright white beam of light and love entering my body, let it build up, and then direct it through my heart and into the body of the wrongdoer. It can be incredibly hard to do this, evey fibre in the body can wrench this way and that, saying no no no; but you battle through with the white light and keep going until all the negativity is gone. Finally, I switched off the white light and imagined giving my enemy a huge friendly loving hug. So countering badness directed at me, with goodness directed at them. I must say, that bespoke exercise did help a great deal to heal my anger, frustration and feeling of being shat upon. And the person didn't even need to be there. Maybe in my own way I helped that person too? As for my dad, I hope he gets the curse lifted for his own sake, however he chooses to do it. I think that ex hexer Hexen gave him a lot of pain.

What about red Lego bricks and pansychism? Although, there's an argument for pansychism being TBS of idealism and materialism, so it's not pure.

There is no zoom without the mind. When we see images of atoms, we are looking with mind stuff: mathematics, computers, theory, machinery.

Poke a screwdriver through your eyeball and into your brain and see how long consciousness lasts? Ok, my point. Consciousness begets more consciousness. It unfolds second by second. How it unfolds is up to consciousness itself. Consciousness is like a lava lamp, it just keeps on bubbling away. Consciousness is a closed system. Screwdrivers and brains are part of that consciousness system, they a bits of blob in the lava lamp. Consciousness chooses to mess with itself according to its own plan. It turns out that some things within consciousness have a greater effect on how consciousness unfolds than other things. Shoving a screwdriver or taking a hallucigenic or whatever has a bigger effect than drinking a strong coffee. Messing around with someone's brain potentially has a huge effect on consciousness. So what? Stubbing my toe affects consciousness, but I'm pretty sure consciousness doesn't come from my big toe. Drinking five pints affects consciousness, but I'm also pretty sure that consciousness doesn't come from a sexy pint of IPA. Poking a screwdriver in your brain affects consciousness, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't come from there either. Correlation is not causation. Nothing is outside consciousness.

A lot of us are perfectionists. If we can't have it all, then we don't want it at all. Especially with self development it can be really easy to fall into a purity mindset, where if you don't do X to the exclusion of everything else, it's not worth doing at all. One way of having a purity mindset is to line everything up as polar opposites, one thing to be avoided and vilified and another to be embraced and loved. A more open way is to have an emphasis mindset. So, you don't exclude anything at all. Maybe you emphasise eating plants over meat. Maybe you emphasise water over alcohol. Maybe you emphasise gym work over smoking. The idea is to place your attention on and turn up the volume on the things which are currently important to you. Everything is then on a sliding scale from 100% to 0%. Over time you learn to adjust everything in a direction which suits your aspirations more.

The Turquoise video should be (re)made into several Clips videos, might go under the radar that way. Devilish I know.

For the individual, I'd say it's a much more practical model than SD. That's great recognition @Leo Gura, you deserve it.

If you live long enough you get to go to many places in the world. My list so far is: UK, Ireland, France, Andorra, Monaco, Spain, Italy, Malta, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Czechia, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Iceland, USA, Japan, Thailand, India, South Africa, New Zealand. There are a number of places I'd like to still visit, the South Americas, more Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, Pacific Islands, Vietnam, Cambodia. Some places I'd definitely revisit and explore more: Japan, Thailand, India, New Zealand. There's beauty and culture everywhere. Some places I'm curious about, but not so sure: Russia, China, Pakistan, African countries. And of course I shouldn't forget about the country on my doorstep: the Netherlands. When I visited New Zealand it was both a chance to swan about doing not much for a few months, but also with half an eye to checking the place out to see if I could live there. I definitely fell in love with the beauty of the country, both North and South islands. Strangely, one thing that put me off was its sparseness of population. Towns and cities are small in European terms. I felt as though if I settled anywhere in New Zealand I would soon exhaust everything there was to see and do in any particular town or city. Also, ten years ago when I visited I was unable to detach from being my mother's carer. Another point not in it's favour is the remoteness of the place. Even Australia is a long flight away. Physically visiting friends or family would be out except maybe once or twice a year. However, they speak English, I have skills New Zealand may like, technology now is such that keeping touch is easy, and I could build a tiny house there a lot more easily than in the UK. If I changed career to photography, I would have endless material. The only other country were I think I could live is Spain, but that's nearly a default option. Certainly I'd have to live there for a year if I wanted dual nationality and get my Spanish citizenship. Spain is a beautiful country and stuffed full of culture, and of course I have a large amount of family in various pockets around the country. Also, living there would "re-balance" me. I have a deep affinity for Spain, it's literally part of my DNA and the older I get the more neglected it feels. It's an odd sensation, spirituality says to dis-identify with everything, and yet I want to identify more with certain parts of me - it's all a game. I could also do with somewhat improving my rubbish Spanish. A good long time ago my girlfriend and I toyed with the idea of living in Canada and we nearly moved there. I think we would have chosen places with more temperate climates such as Vancouver or thereabouts. If I remember rightly, what attracted was generally the high standard of living and their English speaking, by that token we were less interested in the French speaking areas. We also both had desirable IT and engineering skills. We were young and excitable. But in the end the idea quietly dissipated. Another place that I'm intrigued by is Scandinavia and specifically Sweden. Again they have a high standard of living, they generally speak good English, and they have an aesthetic I like (I know that's nebulous). I did begin to teach myself Swedish a few years ago. If anything the Swedes are even more reserved that the British, but I don't think I would feel out of place there. I guess the only off putting thing, is the low light levels and cold weather - I'm very much a sun and warmth lover.

Fifteen odd years ago I was the team lead in a small set of three developers - me included. We mostly wrote web software for the large further education college we worked in, we also did a lot of reporting. Managing people and their workload can be an irksome process. Each person has their habits and foibles and you have to cater to those one way or another. One of the guys loved his mobile so much, I had to tell him to lock it away it in the day lest it distract him from actually working! The other guy was different. This guy was keen and he would constantly ask me questions. Now, I didn't really mind it too much, it was for the best in the long run - the more I helped him upfront, the less help he would need in six month's time. But he had a unique manner in asking his questions. He would ask, I would answer, and then he would argue about it. This used to wind the other guy up. It didn't get to me so much though, I would simply explain my reasoning because often he wasn't seeing the bigger picture. I was a pragmatist he was an idealist. Occasionally, my reasoning about some bit of coding was too subtle to even explain, and I would simply say: "do it however you want, but I suggest doing it this way". He would flounder at having nothing to fight against. I've noticed this style of question asking often in some people, lets call it "combative questioning". I think there's several things going on here. One is that some people are naturally contrary, they see the world in opposites. I should know, I'm one of them. Whenever something new comes into my system, my instinctual reaction is to reject it or at least question it, and then to make up my own mind about it. Deep down I can't abide being in mindless agreement, it makes me feel like a sheep, and I'm not, I have my own mind and will. It's a style. Another thing that's going on is looking for agreement. The question sometimes is simply a smokescreen designed to find people who are in agreement with their point of view. If they get lucky, someone will echo what they were thinking and they satisfy themselves that the question has been answered. Of course, this sort of thing is not questioning at all, it's sort of the opposite. Asking questions requires an openness on the part of the questioner. The questioner needs to be open to the possibility of both getting conflicting views, and views that conflict with their own worldview. Instead of rejecting all answers that don't "fit" their worldview, they should say "thanks" and then go and contemplate on the answers at length. Usually the most unpalatable answers have the most truth to teach you. Finally, they should have enough courage to update their world view without a fight. Both guys never did change their ways in the time I was there. But I did get them back by leaving behind a bunch of impenetrable subtle code for them to "learn" from.

Am I? Oh.

I'm blessed by not being ill very often. I think it may have been a few years, but this week I've been feeling under the weather. When it comes to the discomfort of illness the body will override thought and other things to get its own way. Even corporate culture can't dismiss illness, it's the one of the few "excuses" for being temporarily excused from wage slavery. Is there anything to learn from the body during illness? What illness does is to suspend normal activity and put you into a different state. We're very used to taking our bodies for granted and only notice them when there is some physical or emotional need. Even then, we try and ignore or misinterpret what we are being told: we carry on working or over indulge in one thing or another, and our bodies scream louder until we give in. If the body is ignored persistently and over time, then this will manifest in many different ways, either through attracting illness or through dysfunction. This dysfunction can then trigger mental illness as we try and battle with our bodies. Often, the different state illness puts us in has a dreamy or agitated quality. We feel like we've been taken out of ourselves and are incapable of normal thought processes or normal action. I wanted to take a long walk today, but I had to cut it short, the pain and weariness in my body wouldn't let me continue. And as I sit here, with a headache I just want to stare into space and not think at all and yet I don't feel tired enough to sleep. Often sleep is the only source of comfort and escape in illness. It is in sleep that our bodies recover and stop being abused by every day life: we are rewarded for it. Sometimes we don't know how to slow down and shut off our constant toing and froing, both physical and mental, we run ourselves ragged. Our bodies then either remind us or punish us for being so silly. Then we fight with our bodies with drugs and self medication and other dysfunctional behaviours. Doctors only treat the symptoms and not the causes, and they want quick results, it's what we want too. Illness has its own course however. It starts of at a whisper and then grows to a crescendo, before dying back down to nothing. We are powerless to hurry it along or to want to indulge it, it sucks, its painful, it makes us emotional and unstable. But when illness does disappear we have learnt our lesson and that is to savour every second we are not ill, and, not to abuse ourselves and our bodies.

If it never occurred is it all illusion? We're in a dream of nothingness where nothing happens.

Sometimes sweet, melodic, dissonant, quiet and in your face, just how we all should be:

Aha! How can there be an observer without consciousness? How can there be an observer without the observed? Are you the observer ever able to separate yourself from the observed?

I take that as a compliment. One person you can dismiss, two people you have take more seriously... I'm not talking about your character, I'm talking about the observer that is "you" thinking you're a body-mind complex. That thing will change and disolve. That is really what you're calling "experience". Consiousness itself is absolute, but the observer is relative and flimsy. Consciousness carries on, but the observer dies.

It's not yours, never was. The construct that is "you" will eventually change and disolve, it already has many times in "your" life. Just ask your five-year-old self.

Look at this thread for some thoughts:

Dealing With Ambiguity If there is one nearly universal law about life, it's the fact that so much is unknown. If there is a second law, it's that there is so much contradiction. How do we learn to navigate these two laws succesfully? By unknown I mean a lack of information or knowledge about a thing. We often have to make all sorts of decisions based on what we do know. But there are a lot of times when we can't know beforehand what the best course of action to take is - we don't have enough information. Nearly all situations we find ourselves in are novel in some way, and we are forced to make a decision there and then. The first system that kicks in is a kind of matching. We dip into our memories and unconsiously go "hey I was in a similar situation before", we then snap-to-grid and simply treat this situation as being the same as before. This is good enough for most mundane situations such as getting on a bus or buying something in a shop. This templating process helps because it ignores all the unnecessary details and simplifies things. In reality though, we don't know how the shop assistant will react to us, or if the bus driver accepts cash. Indeed if the situation unfolds and it doesn't match our template, it can be cognitively difficult to adjust or react appropriately. What to do if the situation is completely novel and we have no past experience to draw upon? We can ask. I remember being in Japan and wanting to buy a train ticket from the automated machine, but not reading Japanese I was clueless. I asked a passer by, pointed to a map and pointed to the machine, and they promptly helped me buy the ticket. Either you gather more knowledge, or you use someone else's knowledge. If your car breaks down, you get a mechanic to fix it or you can learn how to fix it yourself. Getting help from others, is our default mode in the West, we simply can't catch our food or build our own shelter. In the absence of both help or being able to get further knowledge, you can plump for what seems right for the situation. When I was going for university interviews, I was due up in Sheffield. My dad was based in Rochdale, which is a good two hour journey by train. It turns out, that when I left the interview, it had snowed very heavily, and no trains were running, nor was there any further information on what I could do to get back. In the end I waited several hours in the station in the hope that something would be running. My intuition served me well and they had managed to clear the line enough for a train to run back to Manchester at least - which took five hours. The point being that sometimes relying on instinct or intuition is the only thing left to use. And, we use this system of intuition a lot more than we let on, to make decisions. Even when planning for the future, we can only provide a rough skelleton of what we want to happen. The detail of the actual execution is unknown, in fact most of it is unknown, we simply defer to our future selves to take care of it. What about contradiction or ambiguity? With the explosion of information on the internet, we can be overwhelmed by the amount of contradictory advice on nearly any topic. Is eating butter good or bad for our bodies? Is alcohol in moderation ok or not? But outside of internet advice, there are still many contradictory situations we can find ourselves in. When is the right time to look for a new job? Should we start our own business? Should I text that special person back or not? Should I concentrate on learning and university now, or just learn on my own? A lot of contradiction appears because we want several different things at once. We are tempted by both contradictory possibilities and we can see the plus points of all of them. There are a few ways to deal with contradication. The first thing we can do, is to sit and make a kind of balance sheet of good versus bad against each possibility. This can force us to consider things we would not otherwise have and to make it easier to reject one possibility, resolving the ambiguity. We can also from the outset ask whether two possibilities are actually contradictory. Maybe we want to meditate all day to reach enlightenment, but we also want to socialise every day. Taking both as absolutes, yes, there's a contradiction. However, being more flexible allows us to do both. We can realise that nothing we desire is absolute, there is always some wiggle room. We can meditate for a part of the day and socialise for the other part. It's not purist (absolute), but it's practical (pragmatic). And, this is the main strength of pragmatism, it allows us to take multiple choices and to compromise between seemingly contradictory paths. Another thing we can do, is to ask ourselves "where does this desire come from?". It may be that we automatically think we need to get a mortgage on a house, without questioning it. Or that we think we should have children, but that clashes with our desire to travel round the world. Sometimes, the desire can expressed differently and that resolves our contradiction. Maybe we can travel when our kids are old enough, or just give up on the idea of having kids at all. Maybe we become teachers, so we can pass on our knowledge to kids, because that's what our desire really was, and go teach around the world. This process is simply re-framing our desires. Just the act of re-framing can resolve a seeming contradiction, but it requires imagination and some lateral thinking. Lastly, we can just accept the contradiction and not actually take action. Instead we let life decide for us: "if I have kids I'll be happy", "if I end up travelling, I'll be happy". This is the opportunist approach, an opportunity arises which matches one of our desires, and we take it, without concerning ourselves too much about not tending to other desires. We just give up on the contradiction and let external circumstances decide for us. But neither do we have to be passive, we can be active when the opportunity arises to grab it and fulfill one of our desires. This method requires us to be patient but attentive, and to live with the possibility that our desires won't be fulfilled at all. Indeed we secretly know that our desires will change over time in any case, and all our worrying about contradictions will evaporate.

Changing the World There are many times when we wish things were different in our lives. The desire to want things to be different usually comes from a place of suffering. We have a right to suffer about many unpleasant situations: physical abuse, poverty, modern slavery. If you are in any of those situations, then there is a strong justification for that suffering. There may be nothing you can do about improving your situation in those cases. Most circumstances are not that severe though. More often, suffering is caused by a mismatch about how you would like things to be and how things actually are. The mismatch can be made worse by not being able to do anything about it. Let's have an example. You find that your partner is always working long hours, and you just wish she would work less and spend more time with you. This causes you some suffering, and you often vent to your partner about them changing their ways. Ultimately, unless your partner does change, you are powerless to get what you want. There are many situations that crop up were this kind of dynamic happens. You want things to be a certain way and think you have power to get what you want, but in actuality this is not true. It is a natural tendency to be outwardly focused and have an expectation that the world should match your inner desires. We all do it. Sometimes it works, we do actually have power to manifest our desires: we have enough time, money, influence or awareness to do it. In those instances there is an argument for empowering ourselves and getting what we want, it makes us feel good and it stops our suffering. What about when we are powerless, what should we do then to alleviate our suffering? When we are powerless our only option is to change ourselves. There are many forms of this. The main one is questioning ourselves and asking if what we desire is reasonable. For example, we may wish that we lived in a mansion with a gravel drive and two or three supercars parked outside. But this is unreasonable, and if the mismatch with reality is causing suffering, then we need to drop the desire and concentrate on more reasonable desires. Sometimes our desires are unjustified. We may have a desire to be loved and admired by everyone we meet, and yet the law of averages says that there will always be people you meet who dislike you, or even worse are indifferent to you. In this case the desire itself should be toned down or changed. Sometimes it's not to do with powerlessness, but simply with a stubborn rejection of reality. Maybe you have a self image as a party animal who is great with people and likes to have fun. But you are suffering because you are lonely and find it difficult because no-one wants to hang out with you. It could be that you are in fact an introvert and being with people for long periods wears you down. There is a mismatch between your self perception and reality. In this case simply having more self awareness will allow you to change your self image. Being self aware, and being open to changing yourself, really are the two keys to reducing suffering in the long term. This works even if you do have power to change your external situation. Most suffering is caused by having unreasonable desires or with your perspective mismatching reality. If you find yourself wanting people to change to suit you, or that you expect people are there just for your benefit, then this should raise a red flag and you should immediately start working on yourself to reduce your suffering. Working on yourself can be a long and difficult process and may seem unnecessary, but the liberation from suffering is worth it in the end.

@EddieEddie1995 what a great looking cat you have.

Mastery Is it possible to be objective about your own abilities? For example if I’m just starting out at chess, I’ve played a few games and I think I have a solid grasp of what it’s about. What do I know about my ability at chess at this point? It may seem obvious but I should really be calling myself a novice. But, if I haven’t watched many chess matches or only ever played one person, then I don’t have much to compare my ability against. It may be very tempting for me to overstate my level of skill in chess. We are all prone to over estimating our abilities. This happens because we are constantly competing with other people and we have a need to inflate our capabilities so that we can impress people. But also because we don’t have enough experience in order to guage our ability in a particular area. What happens as you do gain confidence and ability, is that you begin to realise how much needs to be learnt in order to become an expert in something. I need to talk about feedback here. Some things, especially physical skills give immediate feedback on how well you are doing them. For example, it’s difficult to overstate your skill in riding a bicycle, because you will fall off the bicycle if you don’t have enough skill. This immediate feedback becomes harder to judge the more abstract a skill is. How do you judge how good you are at spirituality for example? What do you do if the feedback you receive is someone’s opinion of your skill? And what if you choose to ignore the feedback anyway? As you become an expert in a certain field, you become confident about your own abilities and you no longer need to rely so much on external feedback to guage your abilities. You become self-correcting. You can rightfully start saying to other people that you are skilled and not fall foul of overstating your ability. As a side effect, you can also judge how skilled someone else is in your field of expertise. You can easily spot a novice and correct their over-confidence. You also don’t feel a need to brag about your skills, because you are not competing against people so much at this stage, your skill speaks for itself. How can you stop yourself from being deluded about your abilities? The first step is to be humble. Even if you are an expert there is always more to learn. You should think of yourself as always being ignorant of the extent of the skill you still need to acquire. This is what mastery is about, you are always ignorant about the breadth of a new discipline and that should make you humble. Second, is to listen to all feedback even if you think it’s just opinion. It’s easy to be emotional and take negative feedback personally, but if you truly are a novice, then you need all the feedback you can get so you can improve. Even if you are an expert, there may still be areas in which you are weak, and feedback is invaluable for showing you your weaknesses. This should spur you on to try and improve those weak areas. You should even actively seek feedback to improve at all stages. What happens if you don’t do any of the above? What if you constantly overstate your abilities, don’t listen to feedback or overreact emotionally to any feedback? Then simply, your rate of growth will slow right down. If you don’t listen to experts you’ll find you won’t be taken seriously, or worse they may be hostile towards you. To have a mastery mindset requires a constant hunger to learn, to accept being corrected without complaint, and to do the hard work of acquiring the skills to become an expert. And above all to stay humble.

I'm thinking about how to raise the quality of my journal entries. There are several reasons for wanting to do this: Going meta (which I love) and improving my writing ability More succintly expressing what's on my mind: some of the things I write about I feel have deep value for me, but somehow I often feel I don't quite get the point over well enough Providing greater value to others. This journal is public for a reason, because as well as helping me to organise my thoughts, I'd like others to get something from it too - even it's just entertainment Improving my enjoyment of re-reading my own material, much further down the line I like competing against myself There is a slight amount of concern that in forcibly trying to improve my entries, I lose the off-the-cuff and spontaneous nature of my writings. I may edit for wording and typos generally, but I never re-arrange paragraphs, I seldom remove or add paragraphs. I don't treat it like an essay. This works, insofar as I am learning to write improvisationally rather then deliberately, which can give things a certain fluidity. I believe that my journal entries have improved over time, albeit through sheer practice. Ok, how should I go about it? Some thoughts: Simplify language and syntax - I really enjoy using all the vocabulary at my disposal, but almost always there are simpler words to use. This improves readibility for a wider audience, and makes parsing sentences easier. This doesn't mean dumbing myself down, but just using more straightforward language. If I'm talking about personal stuff I should be more relaxed and informal in my writing. Have a beginning, middle and end, i.e. narrative. So: what am I going to talk about, the talk about it, the summary and conclusion or punchline or revelation or cliffhanger. This is just easier to digest, than an unstructured or incoherent arrangement. Every sentence or word should refer to something that has already been introduced. Obviously, if I'm talking spiritual language then I don't need to explain everything, because I'm on a spiritual forum. But if I'm referring to things in my life or non-spiritual matters (e.g.) then I should set things up first, before I go waffling on about them. For the more complex stuff, have a plan. Introduce all of the relevant players in the topic, explain how they interplay with each other. And, use that interplay to work towards the point I'm trying to convey. Simply spend more time editing and chopping and changing stuff around. This should be done offline so that there is just one final reading of the journal entry. Do some research around the topic. Again, I have aprehension around this, that doing any amount of reading will "contaminate" my thought processes, or I'll lose my spontaneity. Or worse, I end up just copying Wikipedia. On the other hand it may make my entries more coherent. It goes without saying that I probably don't need to research if it's just about my own history or experiences. Ok that's it. Let's try it out now and see what happens.

Alice in Suburbia A large majority of us live in cities. I live in a purpose built flat in a large town not a huge distance from London. I can go for a walk into town and buy myself a coffee (decaf latte) at Nero's. Other services are available, I can get my hair cut for example, or I can go and by some new clothes. The clothes are good quality, hard wearing and relatively cheap compared to my income. There are many other non-survival related services available, I can go buy a holiday for example. Everyone works for an employer who pays them some sort of regular wages that they are free to choose how to use. Some portion of those wages goes into paying rent or mortgage for shelter from the elements, and to provide sanitation, an area to cook and eat, an area for sleeping and a leisure area. Some of the wages will have to go into paying for food, which can be obtained from a local shop or supermarket. Yet more of the wages goes into paying for other services such as rubbish removal, protection by the police and smooth running of the local environment, such as sewage removal, good drinking water and keeping streets clean. All the survival related services takes up a large chunk of wages. But there is usually enough money left over for more "frivolous" stuff, such as electronic equipment, games, holidays, eating in restaurants, drinking alcohol in pubs, or maintaining and running a vehicle. Cities are created as a complementary set of living quarters and a means to access those living quarters. Access is by means of effectively one dimensional conduits called roads, which allows the living quarters to all be connected up effectively with each other, but also allow some amount of spacing between them. This type of access allows for high density of occupants, but easy movement. Most movement of people happens either from walking, or using vehicles propelled by gasoline or increasingly electricity. For very large cities distances are too great for walking and a vehicle is essential. Some bigger vehicles have lots of seating and can be used by any body for a charge - another service provided by a city. Most vehicles are privately owned by the people that use them, with the unspoken rule that close friends and family can share these vehicles without charge. Nearly all urban roads are tarmaced, which provides a smooth and hard wearing surface in all weather conditions. This provides a smooth ride for the people driving vehicles using it. Roads are also marked with all sorts of lines and signs and signals, to both direct and provide safe conditions for its users. Along most urban roads there are pavements, which allow for the free movements of people on foot. Again like roads, pavements are one dimensional conduits. This idea of one dimensional conduits, is also used for sewers, electricity cables, gas pipes, water pipes, telephone cabling, and internet fibre cabling. Some cabling is carried on wooden poles. Roads are lit at night time, to increase safety. Normally they are lit from above on tall metal posts using neon gas lighting or increasingly bright L.E.D. lighting. This allows people to see when otherwise it would be pitch black. This also allows activities to carry on beyond daylight hours or in parts of the world with low light levels especially more northerly lattitudes. This idea helps some districts of cities to continue their services for 24 hours every day. The cities are complemented by being surrounded by areas of countryside. These can also mostly be manmade and haphazardly designed. There is usually a lot more plant life and the density of roads and housing are markedly lower. Instead there will be privately owned fields were food crops are grown or livestock is left to pasture. Also there will be non-food related areas such as golf courses (especially in certain countries). Depending on the country there are rules that allow people on foot to traverse the countryside, but only on designated tracks - which are not formally paved or even. Most bigger cities will have an airport on its periphery, in which large metal flying vehicles can land and take off. These vehicles can transport several hundred people at a time very long distances, of a thousand miles or more in just a few hours, they can fly up to 12 kilometres above the surface. Most of these vehicles are propelled by kerosene combusted in a jet engine, which works by sucking in air in large volumes and burning it. The airport if it is a major one, will be structured like a small town in itself. It will have its own services, roads, temporary living quarters (hotels) and a large covered area of shops and facilities for transferring people safely to and from the aircraft. Other forms of transport are available, namely trains, which again run along one-dimensional conduits, made of thin metal rails. Trains are designed to stop at designated places, which connect up with roads. They can hold several hundred people and are designed as carriages which are connected up with each other, so that they can have capacity, but flexibility to run on track and around bends. Most trains are propelled using electric motors or occasionally diesel. In the early part of the last century they were driven by coal burned to produce heat to expand water into steam. The main sources of energy to drive the infrastructure of a city are petroleum products made from crude oil extracted from the ground or from deep in the sea. Other sources are coal burned in large factories which is used to create steam from water which then drives a turbine, which is an inverted motor, producing electricty, which is further used by cities for things such as lighting, electronic equipment, factories, and transportation. Whilst shops directly provide people focused services, most of the products made for shops are mass produced. Mass production creates large numbers of nearly identical objects by using one set of machinery. This is both efficient and allows large populations to be supported. Objects are primarily made of plastic which is a petroleum product, wood, glass or clay and some amount of animal products such as leather. Some objects are extremetly intricately designed such as laptops and cars, and a premium is paid for these, but nevertheless are still mass produced. To allow people to communicate very effectively together, there are many different networks in place. Most communication networks manipulate electricity to encode information. Originally the main communication network was the telephone, which assigns a unique number to each device using it and allows for one-to-one communication. As computing power increased it was possible to use digital encoding of electricty, which greatly expanded the capabilities of communication networks, to be able to send video, text, images and sounds to large numbers of people simultaneously. The devices using these new inter-networks (internet) are themselves extermely sophisticated and can be used for a great number of different tasks. A huge number of services from around the world are available through this internet. The phones of the last century have been turned into computers which are no longer physically tethered to the network, and can be carried around. This allows for instant information retrieval and communication to anyone in the world. Any type of music or video or product is available for purchase at any time. Cities need a large number of laws and regulations in order so that people can live safely together, and can be kept in line for the greater good. And indeed a government and their legal arms oversea and keep the piece. People are generally free to volunteer to work for any of these types of organisation. Cities will be connected up with each other within a nation, via roads, rail, air, or sea. Large container ships made of metal will transfer people and good in containers in large quantities between nations.