What is knowledge? What is it to teach someone? Can anything be learned if someone does not want to learn it? What can be learned with subconscious blocks against taking in a particular knowledge? What keeps people from wanting to learn? what blocks people from acquiring new information even when they tell themselves they want to learn. How do we teach ourselves to learn? Can we unlearn the bad habits that block our knowledge? can we form and shape ourselves, our personalities, our outlook the world, our way we take in new things? I have long believed in self-programming, in self-improvement, in self-education, in personally taking responsibility in forming a drive toward knowledge, in working on removing my barriers that block from taking in knowledge, in working consciously to unlock the deeper potential of the mind, of learning to introspect and analyze the ego, the mind, my actions, the way I view the world. This formed into my psyche through a variety of influences until it became a tangible and palpable concept formed as the logical conclusion of what I learned. In my young teenage years, I read an author, Dr. John C. Lilly, and became deeply interested in his work and writing, exhaustively reading every one of his books I could find. His work on the mind, sensory deprivation or isolation tanks, and pioneering work with dolphins included books such as "Programming and Metaprogramming in the human biocomputer", "The eye of the cyclone" and "Mind of the Dolphin". His work was endlessly fascinating as a young child of 12 when I first read his books, and his process and arrival at a system and method for self-programming was captivating, and yet, he did not shy away from featuring amongst the serious work he had undertaken, the scientific rigor and serious nature of his work, not hiding the spiritual side, the deeper philosophical side of his work, his books were very openly his synthesis of eastern and western philosophy interwoven deeply within the text, deeply influencing his path. When this research began, he was initially working with the federal government-sponsored National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) and was assigned a role by them to begin work with Psychedelic substances, indeed directly prompting him to combine the study with his existing work on sensory deprivation. This work led him to write the books "Programming and Metaprogramming in the human biocomputer", "The eye of the cyclone", extensively documenting his work and findings, and his spiritual and philosophical viewpoint arrived at through this work.
Education is a lifelong battle, it is an endless process. It's a natural phenomenon of our brains occurring when we open our minds focus of the moment. The process of learning is a natural response of the brain to help us interpret and understand our experience of the world on a deeper level. It occurs both when we choose to place our focus on something, or simply if something engages our attention, when our emotional response subsides and our focus tunnels inward through an open and deep outward focus. The process of learning is highly variable and must be adapted for each source of knowledge or information. The process of learning is unique for each individual and is dependent on our consciously or unconsciously chosen methods learned as metaprograms of acquiring knowledge. Learning and it's deep root with our perception is critical to understand to analyze how we interpret and view our experience, indeed the ability to properly analyze the way we elicit the formation of memories of our experience, without which the necessary emotional weight is lost, and removes the importance of the perceived event removing our facility for recording the memory, how would we differentiate it from any mundane experience of which we place no weight or emotional attachment or connection with, the experiences that fill the spaces of life with time, the moments between our memories that are lost to the winds of time as if they never occurred. Learning requires of us introspection to correctly place not just these memories into our minds amongst the rich tapestry of connections, but with the memory of the root experience or information, with it the ideas it brought into our minds, of the concepts we understood, the new ideas and concepts associated and how they are rooted from and deeply connected to the new information. All these additional streams in our experience help us to form the deeper knowledge to be understood, and in these connections assist us to acquire through the natural process of experiencing the world through our senses the information that is most relevant to be remembered from our experience. Through it is these very processes of connection and cognitive functions of learning that our minds have themselves learned over time, through an evolutionary learning process, through a process beyond the individual, beyond the lifetime of anyone being in a clear and diverse tree of life that brought each being to this moment, to this body, to this mind and this way of interpreting and viewing the world, only through our very deeply rooted connection with every being, every organism rooted together onto an endlessly divergent chain of life that has survived to bring our minds forward to view ourselves and our position within this chain so clearly, to sit still for a moment in a lifetime marked with only change, and to witness the endless flows of life around and within, the position as important and as ephemeral as any other, a moment of reflection on ourselves, on our society, on our position on this planet, in this ecosystem, in the world, in this universe. what limits bind us together
Technology has changed and improved our lives in such radical ways it would be difficult to imagine today without the technology that so shapes our world, our thoughts, our communication, our bond as a species, as a global citizen, as a human. I personally ascribe no positive nor negative properties to the technology itself, but it is easy to fall into either trap of either holding it high above or in disregarding it entirely, most falling in between the two extremes in the various incarnations of technology encountered in our life, generally bound to either our aptitude or the stress and anxiety being unable to use a given technology can elucidate.
What is the nature of distraction? what makes the mind get distracted so often? If I see myself as distracted, then, what is it that I am distracted from? what do I see my attention is pulled towards? why do I define my attention in the moment as either distracted or attentive? I can easily judge my current focus and negate my actions, by choosing to disregard my attention as unproductive, which is to judge my usage of time. This certain stress felt, the urge to feel 'productive', is arrived at through a personal choice to train the mind away from what I have perceived rationally as useless, disruptive or destructive focus or patterns of attention. What do I define as a destructive or disruptive focus? How do I judge myself in such a harsh light so often, yet at other points I am free from such self-focus, from such a harsh judgment of my own utility or place in the world? It is a kind of existential crisis, but a long-lasting one, a cold war of the mind, stretched over decades of self-immolation. It is easy to judge the self in such a way when the goal is clearly defined, then all that logically is counterproductive is easily seen as the "distraction", when writing, the distraction can be a song, can be a person, can be the urge to go to the bathroom, can be the urge or desire to eat, can be the urge to smoke another one, to browse online reading about some random stuff, to go into my email, to do anything but sit and focus on writing. It is funny how writing is so difficult when trying to pull it out, it is like pulling teeth when not in the mood, when not able to focus, when the stream of consciousness doesn't flow, things don't seem right, the right words don't come, the right ideas, the mind doesn't focus or concentrate but wanders, stuck in a loop that digs deeper and deeper with each thought. It jumps to listen to the lyrics of the music playing, the people talking around, the mess in the kitchen, that I need to feed the dog and the cat, that I need to ship a box or two, that Allan comes back soon. When focused, creativity flows naturaly, it pours outward effortlessly. It is easy to get lost in writing when it is heartfelt, but when it feels difficult to identify with my writing, when I find I can't embrace the topic at that moment, when it doesn't seem like the right use of my time in the moment, in these blocks it becomes so difficult to see through them that creativity doesn't come. I had gotten into the habit of carrying a notepad with me many years ago, and I have long found that if I cannot write down an idea when it comes to me, it rarely will come back again, never the same, never with the same clarity, the same connections, the same vividness and depth the initial idea brought into my mind. No, it might come back, it might form clearly again, it might have mostly the same connections, but why does something seem lost? the moment of realization is so fleeting, so ephemeral, to capture the essence, the nature of the moment, is so more difficult with the passing of time. It sometimes makes me get down knowing in the moment I am unable to record an idea. I feel a loss at the perceived 'death' of the idea, of it fleeting into history of my mind, just a distant and fleeting memory like so many others, not given the full respect of being recorded, of being captured and held, of being shared, of forever being a unique viewpoint that I may never console or share with another being. Of course, this is all in the downfall of the moment, the realization of a loss that is really just an illusion, for nothing is really lost but the recording of the moment, and there are far to many moments to hope to record them all, to even attempt such a vain feat would be ridiculous, the ultimate sentimental insanity, what use would recording every moment of one's life be? when no other person would ever be able to review or know such a work, what importance does one really hold? why would I ever think such a thing should be held indefinitely, for what in this world has the right to live indefinitely? no more then the ideas, for the moments never last, each one marked in history by their distance from the present. The idea is never lost, the concept never lost into the mind, but must wait to be unveiled, to be shared, in the more visceral and intimate act of talking and conversing with others it can be unleashed, it can escape, the door holding it within can be found and such idea as lost as it might have seemed in our minds, however distant a memory, even forgotten truly until the moment it becomes relevant, the moment we connect it back into our experience of the present, the moment the memory is brought forth again to be experienced as freshly as a newly held thought, this is one of the great joys in conversing with other people, of reading literature, of watching a movie or tv show, of experiencing the world, is the rich tapestry of the present and our past, interwoven together to form our experience of and interpretation of the world.
Education and Focus, learning and distraction, these topics are one and the same, the placement of our focus is how the mind acquires new information or chooses to not, how it consciously or unconsciously chooses to forget, how we filter our experience, our focus is carefully placed in the present moment by our minds to maximize our comprehension, our understanding, of a given situation, relevant to ourselves, our natural state is one of a deep focus, like a child it is both open yet so limited, so deeply focused on what is seen, what is touched, lost in the trance of the world, understanding on a basic level, but blind to our placement in the world, blind of understanding the deeper connections of their experience as no connection is to be made, taking in all experiance as equal as much as our focus is drawn to it, as an animal exists and lives in this pure state, despite expeirencing the world in a pure state, neither attached and not repeled, but witnessing openly, yet this state is blind to the deeper connections we understand with our minds, blind to the awareness of our position, blind to a deeper philosophical understanding as we as humans hold. As the slaves in chains in the parable of the cave, forever trapped in believing our experience is not only valid, but it is the whole of experience to be known, ignorant of the fact that our view of the world is constrained as it is by the sensory organs, unable to see just how limited our viewpoint is from body, from our limited geographical position we hold, by the limited space and time we are capable of traversing or experiencing in this lifetime. For as limited as we may be trapped inside these bodies, as the parable of the cave, only the philosopher is freed from this fate, freed from blindly existing independent of our interpretation, unaware of the filter we draw of the world, of the limitations we have to overcome to clearly see, to know as vivid and compelling as our personal experience is, it is not the whole truth, our experience in these bodies, in this ego, in this manifestation is inherently a limited one, and will never know more then what it is capable of intellectually or conceptually understand of a deeper knowledge. For we can only use this intellectual understanding to further use logic to improve ourselves, to logically determine our best application of ourselves into the world we perceive around us. If our view is one of trying to understand, of yearning for knowledge, of a desire to know more about the beautiful world around us, to better understand our place and position, our duty to fulfil in this world, to hold this desire is all that is needed for knowledge to not only come easily, but to stick easily, to be remembered, to be truly understood, to not stop until it is understood, to continue our path as it unfolds, as it is made clear through the knowledge we receive, as many distinct and divergent paths appear there is no wrong choice in the pursuit of knowledge, of understanding. Whether of the sciences, of humanity, of psychology, of the mind, of biology, of the universe, the cosmos, the stars, of physics, of the unknown, of mathematics, of spirituality, of ethnography, of culture, of religion, of language, of people, of society situations, of other individuals, of wanting to know how they see the world, of wanting to share our knowledge, to teach, to help understand, to move humanity, society, culture, the arts, the sciences, politics forward. to have a viewpoint of not simply progress, but of improving the human condition, the world, of not blindly pushing forward for profit, not only for immediate gain, not for personal satisfaction, not for personal pleasure or wealth, but selfless and with a goal to only help improve our mutual understanding of the world and anything within it, or simply helping to lift the weight of the world, the pains, the economic constraints, the very real anxieties, fears, worries, strife and hardship required of so many still in this world, despite the many gains the western world has known in the past hundred years it has often come at the expense of those living in the "third world" or the "developing world" as we have come to know it, the people living in distant lands, whose direct and hard labor for minimum pay is the direct cause of economic and political structures set in place to ensure the constant supply of cheap goods to the open market, ensuring economic stability for those living in "first world" nations. Our global supplies of food, of electronics, of natural resources and minerals, of raw materials, are often the directly economically affected by these inequalities of labor and wages internationally, and further hardened by economic policies and systems put in place to ensure the quality of life that people in the western world have come to expect, yet results in rapid overconsumption, huge inefficiencies in the utilization of said resources, and the generation of large amounts of waste, trash and industrial effluent that is often disposed of incorrectly or again shunted on the developing nations to handle.
Education is a lifelong battle, it is an endless process. It's a natural phenomenon of our brains occurring when we open our minds focus of the moment. The process of learning is a natural response of the brain to help us interpret and understand our experience of the world on a deeper level. It occurs both when we choose to place our focus on something, or simply if something engages our attention, when our emotional response subsides and our focus tunnels inward through an open and deep outward focus. The process of learning is highly variable and must be adapted for each source of knowledge or information. The process of learning is unique for each individual and is dependent on our consciously or unconsciously chosen methods learned as metaprograms of acquiring knowledge. Learning and it's deep root with our perception is critical to understand to analyze how we interpret and view our experience, indeed the ability to properly analyze the way we elicit the formation of memories of our experience, without which the necessary emotional weight is lost, and removes the importance of the perceived event removing our facility for recording the memory, how would we differentiate it from any mundane experience of which we place no weight or emotional attachment or connection with, the experiences that fill the spaces of life with time, the moments between our memories that are lost to the winds of time as if they never occurred. Learning requires of us introspection to correctly place not just these memories into our minds amongst the rich tapestry of connections, but with the memory of the root experience or information, with it the ideas it brought into our minds, of the concepts we understood, the new ideas and concepts associated and how they are rooted from and deeply connected to the new information. All these additional streams in our experience help us to form the deeper knowledge to be understood, and in these connections assist us to acquire through the natural process of experiencing the world through our senses the information that is most relevant to be remembered from our experience. Through it is these very processes of connection and cognitive functions of learning that our minds have themselves learned over time, through an evolutionary learning process, through a process beyond the individual, beyond the lifetime of anyone being in a clear and diverse tree of life that brought each being to this moment, to this body, to this mind and this way of interpreting and viewing the world, only through our very deeply rooted connection with every being, every organism rooted together onto an endlessly divergent chain of life that has survived to bring our minds forward to view ourselves and our position within this chain so clearly, to sit still for a moment in a lifetime marked with only change, and to witness the endless flows of life around and within, the position as important and as ephemeral as any other, a moment of reflection on ourselves, on our society, on our position on this planet, in this ecosystem, in the world, in this universe. what limits bind us together
Technology has changed and improved our lives in such radical ways it would be difficult to imagine today without the technology that so shapes our world, our thoughts, our communication, our bond as a species, as a global citizen, as a human. I personally ascribe no positive nor negative properties to the technology itself, but it is easy to fall into either trap of either holding it high above or in disregarding it entirely, most falling in between the two extremes in the various incarnations of technology encountered in our life, generally bound to either our aptitude or the stress and anxiety being unable to use a given technology can elucidate.
What is the nature of distraction? what makes the mind get distracted so often? If I see myself as distracted, then, what is it that I am distracted from? what do I see my attention is pulled towards? why do I define my attention in the moment as either distracted or attentive? I can easily judge my current focus and negate my actions, by choosing to disregard my attention as unproductive, which is to judge my usage of time. This certain stress felt, the urge to feel 'productive', is arrived at through a personal choice to train the mind away from what I have perceived rationally as useless, disruptive or destructive focus or patterns of attention. What do I define as a destructive or disruptive focus? How do I judge myself in such a harsh light so often, yet at other points I am free from such self-focus, from such a harsh judgment of my own utility or place in the world? It is a kind of existential crisis, but a long-lasting one, a cold war of the mind, stretched over decades of self-immolation. It is easy to judge the self in such a way when the goal is clearly defined, then all that logically is counterproductive is easily seen as the "distraction", when writing, the distraction can be a song, can be a person, can be the urge to go to the bathroom, can be the urge or desire to eat, can be the urge to smoke another one, to browse online reading about some random stuff, to go into my email, to do anything but sit and focus on writing. It is funny how writing is so difficult when trying to pull it out, it is like pulling teeth when not in the mood, when not able to focus, when the stream of consciousness doesn't flow, things don't seem right, the right words don't come, the right ideas, the mind doesn't focus or concentrate but wanders, stuck in a loop that digs deeper and deeper with each thought. It jumps to listen to the lyrics of the music playing, the people talking around, the mess in the kitchen, that I need to feed the dog and the cat, that I need to ship a box or two, that Allan comes back soon. When focused, creativity flows naturaly, it pours outward effortlessly. It is easy to get lost in writing when it is heartfelt, but when it feels difficult to identify with my writing, when I find I can't embrace the topic at that moment, when it doesn't seem like the right use of my time in the moment, in these blocks it becomes so difficult to see through them that creativity doesn't come. I had gotten into the habit of carrying a notepad with me many years ago, and I have long found that if I cannot write down an idea when it comes to me, it rarely will come back again, never the same, never with the same clarity, the same connections, the same vividness and depth the initial idea brought into my mind. No, it might come back, it might form clearly again, it might have mostly the same connections, but why does something seem lost? the moment of realization is so fleeting, so ephemeral, to capture the essence, the nature of the moment, is so more difficult with the passing of time. It sometimes makes me get down knowing in the moment I am unable to record an idea. I feel a loss at the perceived 'death' of the idea, of it fleeting into history of my mind, just a distant and fleeting memory like so many others, not given the full respect of being recorded, of being captured and held, of being shared, of forever being a unique viewpoint that I may never console or share with another being. Of course, this is all in the downfall of the moment, the realization of a loss that is really just an illusion, for nothing is really lost but the recording of the moment, and there are far to many moments to hope to record them all, to even attempt such a vain feat would be ridiculous, the ultimate sentimental insanity, what use would recording every moment of one's life be? when no other person would ever be able to review or know such a work, what importance does one really hold? why would I ever think such a thing should be held indefinitely, for what in this world has the right to live indefinitely? no more then the ideas, for the moments never last, each one marked in history by their distance from the present. The idea is never lost, the concept never lost into the mind, but must wait to be unveiled, to be shared, in the more visceral and intimate act of talking and conversing with others it can be unleashed, it can escape, the door holding it within can be found and such idea as lost as it might have seemed in our minds, however distant a memory, even forgotten truly until the moment it becomes relevant, the moment we connect it back into our experience of the present, the moment the memory is brought forth again to be experienced as freshly as a newly held thought, this is one of the great joys in conversing with other people, of reading literature, of watching a movie or tv show, of experiencing the world, is the rich tapestry of the present and our past, interwoven together to form our experience of and interpretation of the world.
Education and Focus, learning and distraction, these topics are one and the same, the placement of our focus is how the mind acquires new information or chooses to not, how it consciously or unconsciously chooses to forget, how we filter our experience, our focus is carefully placed in the present moment by our minds to maximize our comprehension, our understanding, of a given situation, relevant to ourselves, our natural state is one of a deep focus, like a child it is both open yet so limited, so deeply focused on what is seen, what is touched, lost in the trance of the world, understanding on a basic level, but blind to our placement in the world, blind of understanding the deeper connections of their experience as no connection is to be made, taking in all experiance as equal as much as our focus is drawn to it, as an animal exists and lives in this pure state, despite expeirencing the world in a pure state, neither attached and not repeled, but witnessing openly, yet this state is blind to the deeper connections we understand with our minds, blind to the awareness of our position, blind to a deeper philosophical understanding as we as humans hold. As the slaves in chains in the parable of the cave, forever trapped in believing our experience is not only valid, but it is the whole of experience to be known, ignorant of the fact that our view of the world is constrained as it is by the sensory organs, unable to see just how limited our viewpoint is from body, from our limited geographical position we hold, by the limited space and time we are capable of traversing or experiencing in this lifetime. For as limited as we may be trapped inside these bodies, as the parable of the cave, only the philosopher is freed from this fate, freed from blindly existing independent of our interpretation, unaware of the filter we draw of the world, of the limitations we have to overcome to clearly see, to know as vivid and compelling as our personal experience is, it is not the whole truth, our experience in these bodies, in this ego, in this manifestation is inherently a limited one, and will never know more then what it is capable of intellectually or conceptually understand of a deeper knowledge. For we can only use this intellectual understanding to further use logic to improve ourselves, to logically determine our best application of ourselves into the world we perceive around us. If our view is one of trying to understand, of yearning for knowledge, of a desire to know more about the beautiful world around us, to better understand our place and position, our duty to fulfil in this world, to hold this desire is all that is needed for knowledge to not only come easily, but to stick easily, to be remembered, to be truly understood, to not stop until it is understood, to continue our path as it unfolds, as it is made clear through the knowledge we receive, as many distinct and divergent paths appear there is no wrong choice in the pursuit of knowledge, of understanding. Whether of the sciences, of humanity, of psychology, of the mind, of biology, of the universe, the cosmos, the stars, of physics, of the unknown, of mathematics, of spirituality, of ethnography, of culture, of religion, of language, of people, of society situations, of other individuals, of wanting to know how they see the world, of wanting to share our knowledge, to teach, to help understand, to move humanity, society, culture, the arts, the sciences, politics forward. to have a viewpoint of not simply progress, but of improving the human condition, the world, of not blindly pushing forward for profit, not only for immediate gain, not for personal satisfaction, not for personal pleasure or wealth, but selfless and with a goal to only help improve our mutual understanding of the world and anything within it, or simply helping to lift the weight of the world, the pains, the economic constraints, the very real anxieties, fears, worries, strife and hardship required of so many still in this world, despite the many gains the western world has known in the past hundred years it has often come at the expense of those living in the "third world" or the "developing world" as we have come to know it, the people living in distant lands, whose direct and hard labor for minimum pay is the direct cause of economic and political structures set in place to ensure the constant supply of cheap goods to the open market, ensuring economic stability for those living in "first world" nations. Our global supplies of food, of electronics, of natural resources and minerals, of raw materials, are often the directly economically affected by these inequalities of labor and wages internationally, and further hardened by economic policies and systems put in place to ensure the quality of life that people in the western world have come to expect, yet results in rapid overconsumption, huge inefficiencies in the utilization of said resources, and the generation of large amounts of waste, trash and industrial effluent that is often disposed of incorrectly or again shunted on the developing nations to handle.