This article is about the inner workings of a human… that if you get it wrong, the price you pay for the error is your life.
Is a human like a assembled faucet? When it drips you have to replace the whole thing?
I energize my water in a 5 gallon (20 liter) plastic containers with a spigot.
The spigot is replaceable, but I am not strong enough to unscrew it. I have the replacement spigot… I bought it a year ago, but is still sitting on my kitchen counter. I still need to be mindful that the old spigot, which is just another word for water tap… still drips.
I am getting a lot of requests to teach people how to become people who live a life worth living, who excel in all four areas, all four pillars of the good life.
My answer is almost always: Sorry I can’t help you.
But why?
Today I got lucky and got my answer in a pristine form.
My University classmate, Panni called me. We talk once a month. She is, of course an architect: we were classmates in architecture school, a five year study.
I am sitting here at my computer, playing freecell. Somehow I find myself pondering the flowershop scene of the movie… and am taken visually and viscerally to the movie, City Lights with Charlie Chaplin. To the scene where he passes the flower shop where the girl whose eye operation he paid for works.
I saw that movie back in Hungary. I was young. And I didn’t understand the movie.
Today I realized: I didn’t understand the movie because I didn’t understand that the Chaplin character was poor.
I lived in a country, in a household where poor wasn’t a meme. We had what we had. And we were alive.
You could argue that poor isn’t a meme, that it’s a fact, but it isn’t.
You have what you have, and that is not a meme. But wha
This is probably the most shocking sentence in the whole 67 step program.
I literally don’t know anyone who lives that way.
People try to succeed, try a diet, try this and try that… while their plane crashes in every area.
So what is the difference between who are like that, who are on their way to become that kind of person, and others who never ever land their plane on the landing strip?
One type of memes that you honor as the truth are called a seemings. It is that way… but if you can change the saying: “It seems to me that…” then it becomes a seeming.
Why turn something into a seeming?
Saying “It seems to me” starts turning on the capacity of responsibility.
Responsibility, the way the capacity sees it, is a privilege. It is a way to look at the world where your power is intact, and you have access to it. Access means: you can feel it, you can use it. Power for what? Power to be well, power to change something, move something, create something.
When you say “It seems to me” you suddenly take responsibility, to start the process, by saying th
Both are context words. Neither talks about the stuff that is inside the context… inside the wrapper. The wrapper tells you how to look at the content.
It has nothing to do with the stuff, or the quantity of it. It can be great, it can be plenty… the context, scarcity or abundance will tell you what to feel, what to think, what to do.
Why? Because context is decisive.
You can have plenty inside the context of scarcity, and feel that you don’t have enough. Enough time, enough stuff, enough happiness, enough whatever…
…or the opposite, you can have little, but inside the context of abundance, you have what you have, and what you have is enough.
One of the signs of the overwhelming inauthenticity ((My definition of authenticity is that there is nothing in the unsaid that isn’t consistent with what is visible… Authenticity is one of those big words that no one knows what it really means… so they go by feeling. The simplest way to define authenticity is that there is no pretense, no façade, no game playing. The person is the same through and through, whether he/she is seen or not.
Most people smile a lot in their pictures, but I can feel their anxiety, their fear, their inner trembling.
One more thing that I haven’t said before, but given that we are working with memes: if you obey memes, if you repeat memes, if you try to fit in with memes, y
Yesterday I used the free community van to get to two stores I cannot get to easily on my own.
Note: in the illustrations I am not taking sides. I am illustrating that there is confusion and disagreement in what is race, what is racist, what is racism, and what it does is it makes people rigid, lie about what they think, and vote for Trump… ugh.
The driver of the van, PhD in sociology, asked if it bothered me if he continued to listen to NPR radio ((National Public Radio)) . It was a public debate in Trump and if he was a racist.
I listened for at least half an hour, and observed that no one bothered to define what they meant by
How to Get Your Mind to Read ((article by Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.” Republished from the New York Times
Photo: Credit Lilli Carré))
Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.
This article is about the inner workings of a human… that if you get it wrong, the price you pay for the error is your life.
I am getting a lot of requests to teach people how to become people who live a life worth living, who excel in all four areas, all four pillars of the good life.
I am sitting here at my computer, playing freecell. Somehow I find myself pondering the flowershop scene of the movie… and am taken visually and viscerally to the movie, City Lights with Charlie Chaplin. To the scene where he passes the flower shop where the girl whose eye operation he paid for works.
Make your plane go where you want it to go…
One type of memes that you honor as the truth are called a seemings. It is that way… but if you can change the saying: “It seems to me that…” then it becomes a seeming.
Both are context words. Neither talks about the stuff that is inside the context… inside the wrapper. The wrapper tells you how to look at the content.
One of the signs of the overwhelming inauthenticity ((My definition of authenticity is that there is nothing in the unsaid that isn’t consistent with what is visible… Authenticity is one of those big words that no one knows what it really means… so they go by feeling. The simplest way to define authenticity is that there is no pretense, no façade, no game playing. The person is the same through and through, whether he/she is seen or not.
Yesterday I used the free community van to get to two stores I cannot get to easily on my own.
How to Get Your Mind to Read ((article by Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.” Republished from the New York Times