Body of bliss

If you go walking through the woods on a warm autumn day, feeling the fallen oak leaves under your feet, smelling the ripe, dank earth, and watching the October light as it plays in the branches overhead, you are experiencing the world through your DNA. It imposes a definite selection on things. You are not smelling the argon and xenon gases in the air or seeing the sun’s ultraviolet emissions. You can walk through leaves but not through the wood of the trees. The incredible complexity of green moss registers on your mind as a patch of fuzz; and of the pollen, spores, bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that fill the air by the hundreds in every cubic centimeter, you register nothing. The reason for this special focus resides in you. Those are humanized leaves, trees, smells, and light.

Deepak Chopra: Quantum Healing

About Vanda Scaravelli

The most wonderful thing about being with her was her lightness of being, her self-contained contentment. Vanda invariably found a way to go with events so that resistance was never created.

http://www.estheryoga.com/vanda.html 

We eat words

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think”, said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog’s head and the words “Dog Cookies”. The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. “You see, ladies and gentlemen”, Korzybski remarked, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself. (Source: R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

Beautiful words from G. Bateson

Information: each difference that produces a difference.

Contextual shaping is another word for grammar.

On walking

Carry your body, but please do not let your body carry you! Walking in the streets one can see people heavily following their bodies. Their heads lean forwards, pulled by their necks, on their insecure legs, their feet scarcely touching the ground. It is evident that they are slaves to their bodies, following the whispering of their chattering minds.

We must walk well like animals do.

Put the heels down first placing the feet straight in front of you. Then expand the sole of the foot, allowing it to receive the weight of the body, moving towards the toes. While the other leg moves forward, continue to keep the back foot on the ground, so that the back of the knee remains extended and open until the last movement before lifting the foot for the next step.
This way of walking will help you to re-establish order, if your body has developed bad habits.

We are always in a hurry, we run, we run, we run, in order to be able to do as many things as possibile: to achieve, to become, to obtain. To run is a symptom of fear, to run after something, after somebody. We are slaves not only to others, but to ourselves, to our ideas, to our ambitions, to our projects, and even to our mental projections. This is a miserable attitude that life doesn’t deserve. The slave runs, but the king keeps quiet and remains still in his place.

Vanda Scaravelli, Awakening the Spine

A thought about war in Iraq

The US spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to every person in the planet.

J. Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The karma of G. Bateson

The shape of what happened between you and me yesterday carries over to shape how we respond to each other today (G. Bateson).

Il Buddismo insegna che la causa e l’effetto sono, in sostanza, simultanei. Nel momento in cui viene creata una causa, viene registrato un effetto, come un seme piantato nella profondità della vita. Benché l’effetto si produca nello stesso istante in cui è stata creata la causa, esso non può apparire immediatamente. L’effetto si manifesta solo quando si presentano le circostanze esterne adeguate.

Il nostro karma è come un saldo bancario di effetti latenti che sperimenteremo quando la nostra vita incontrerà le giuste condizioni ambientali.

The Laws of Simplicity

John Maeda’s laws of simplicity. I especially like the number 5.

1. REDUCE
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

2. ORGANIZE
Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.

3. TIME
Savings in time feel like simplicity.

4. LEARN
Knowledge makes everything simpler.

5. DIFFERENCE
Simplicity and complexity need each other.

6. CONTEXT
What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

7. EMOTION
More emotions are better than less.

8. TRUST
In simplicity we trust.

9. FAILURE
Some things can never be made simple.

10. THE ONE
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

A classic design principle

Make simple things simple and complex things possible.

On Data Mining

3 characteristics of an intelligent data mining system: connectedness, organization and adaptiveness, so that patterns can emerge from the feedback loops among data sets (Steven Johnson’s Emergence).