Welcome to your HAPPINESS JOURNAL 2012! This is an archive-in-progress of resources to motivate, inspire, encourage and support you in your 2012 journal adventures: dreaming, thinking, creating, writing, being. If you are a Storyteller, consider posting your Stories on Cowbird, “A small community of Storytellers:
www.cowbird.com Please note that my original material in this blog is protected by all national and international Copyright conventions.
Brent Phillips was a successful MIT-trained engineer who experienced a miracle change when his arm (immobile and frozen at the elbow after a surgery) healed in an instant after a single session of the holistic technique Theta Healing!
He was so transformed by this experience that he gave up his career in technology and dedicated all of his science and engineering talent and experience to master instant healing and personal holistic transformation. Today, he shares the magic and miracles of Theta HealingTM with his students and clients around the world.
Full Information About Brent Phillips, Theta Healing, and Available Programs at:
Theta HealingTM is a holistic healing technique which directly addresses your subconscious mind to fix the "bugs in your software", allowing miraculous instant healings and profound transformations. Whether you seek to transform your health, your finances, your relationships or your spirituality, Theta is a surprisingly fast and easy way to make permanent, lasting, and effective changes in your life.
Assignment: Make a list of the three most important choices you can make right now to add more joy to your life. On a blank journal page, (use one page for each choice you have selected) write down three headings: PLUS, MINUS & INTERESTING. Fill in as many thoughts that come to you for each category, and be honest. Almost always, it is the items in the INTERESTING column which will be the most determinative of the choice you make. Write Now! GO! And make the choice!
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Dr. Shad Helmstetter on Choices
1 “No one else can ever make your choices for you. Your choices are yours alone. They are as much a part of you as every breath you will take, every moment of your life.”
2 “You may think that in life, a lot of things happen to you along the way. The truth is, in life, you happen to a lot of things along the way.”
3 “Choosing to live your life by your own choice is the greatest freedom you will ever have.”
4 “It is only when you exercise your right to choose that you can also exercise your right to change.”
"If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?"
"I strongly urge you to read this truly epic interview with Jaron Lanier at Edge. ... It's an extraordinary interview, packed with insight and often grimly funny." Matt Zoller Seitz, Salon.com
"Fascinating conversation with Jaron Lanier, influential computer scientist. On economics of the Internet – implications of networked technology, destruction of middle class and dark side of new media". — Writing Worth Reading, The Browser.com
Scientists' greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called "beautiful" or "elegant". Historical examples are Kepler's explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr's explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and Watson and Crick's double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it "was so beautiful it had to be true."
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?
Since this question is about explanation, answers may embrace scientific thinking in the broadest sense: as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, including other fields of inquiry such as philosophy, mathematics, economics, history, political theory, literary theory, or the human spirit. The only requirement is that some simple and non-obvious idea explain some diverse and complicated set of phenomena.
[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and George Dyson for their ongoing advice and support.]
Father of "Eternal Chaotic Inflation"; Professor of Physics, Stanford University
Excerpt: To summarize, the inflationary multiverse consists of myriads of 'universes' with all possible laws of physics and mathematics operating in each of them. We can only live in those universes where the laws of physics allow our existence, which requires making reliable predictions. In other words, mathematicians and physicists can only live in those universes which are comprehensible and where the laws of mathematics are efficient.
One can easily dismiss everything that I just said as a wild speculation. It seems very intriguing, however, that in the context of the new cosmological paradigm, which was developed during the last 30 years, we might be able, for the first time, to approach one of the most complicated and mysterious problems which bothered some of the best scientists of the 20th century.
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Why Is Our World Comprehensible?
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." This is one of the most famous quotes from Albert Einstein. "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." Similarly, Eugene Wigner said that the unreasonable efficiency of mathematics is "a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." Thus we have a problem that may seem too metaphysical to be addressed in a meaningful way: Why do we live in a comprehensible universe with certain rules, which can be efficiently used for predicting our future?
One could always respond that God created the universe and made it simple enough so that we can comprehend it. This would match the words about a miracle and an undeserved gift. But shall we give up so easily? Let us consider several other questions of a similar type. Why is our universe so large? Why parallel lines do not intersect? Why different parts of the universe look so similar? For a long time such questions looked too metaphysical to be considered seriously. Now we know that inflationary cosmology provides a possible answer to all of these questions. Let us see whether it might help us again.
The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.
All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.
Writing Assignment: As you watch this video, and read the overview of Alone Together below, reflect on your current relationship to the tsunami of digital technologies that threaten to overwhelm us. How are all these tools affecting your life? Are they adding to your sense of peace and happiness, or detracting from your quality of life? Are you wanting more connections via these many options, or are you starting to unplug? if you are serious about being a writer, or even about being able to think clearly about your life and make intelligent decisions, you will need to create boundaries for yourself in terms of how much time you spend absorbed in the brave new Orwellian digital world. Write Now! GO!
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Sherry Turkle's New Book:
Alone Together: Why We Expect More of Technology and Less of Each Other
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Facebook. Twitter. SecondLife. “Smart” phones. Robotic pets. Robotic lovers. Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for. Now the question is what don’t we use them for. Now, through technology, we create, navigate, and perform our emotional lives.
Challenge yourself to think in terms of 10,000 years in the future. How about just 1000 years? If this opportunity inspires you, do some imaginative thinking about how we and our home planet might change, what values will endure, how we will live, what kind of communities we might have, and whether or not we will be able to reverse the destructive patterns that are now in play. Take notes on what you would LIKE to see here in 1000 years, and then stretch out to 10,000 years. Write Now! GO!
The Clock and Library Projects
Below is an essay by founding board member Stewart Brand on the need for, and the mechanism by which, The Long Now Foundation is attempting to encourage long-term thinking.
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis :
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
