Weekly Writing Prompt No. 67. I’m guilty m’lud of taking the world around me for granted. I look at the wonders of creation and barely give them a second thought. Of course, that tree is growing, my dog wants me to pat him, and a friend says hello.
Winston Churchill said something like. "Success comes from being able to go from one failure to the next without losing faith."
Thinking along those lines. Maybe the whole world is an accident.
Maybe somewhere at the beginning of time, there are two people with black faces shaking their heads and saying. "Maybe we shouldn't have struck that match. That was a much bigger bang than I expected."
The fact is that humankind generally learns by our mistakes. But we make so many of them! Every so often though, a Maverick thought pushes us ahead. You have to ask yourself where that thought comes from. Maybe all human thought forms part of a super computer, and every so often it coughs out something sensible, to help us survive. I personally, don't believe in any religions. I feel they cause too much fighting. I do believe however, that there is something more powerful than any one of us can dream of, ready to help the world if we are worthy or snuff us out if it gets fed up with our lack of working together.
I think the final test is not far off. We are so dependant on fossil fuel and there isn't enough for all of us. So we need a maverick idea to solve the problem. Has it already been solved and is it being sat on by the fuel companies?
There is a school of thought that suggests everything that happens out of love. Not the love of romantic films, but a radical kind of love that encourages us to learn the lessons we have often missed. And yes, the problem of energy has already been solved, it's just not been monetised to death by those who control, yet!!
To some extent the need to think has been taken from us already and we didn't even notice.
You don't believe me?
I will lend you my phone to dial your best friends number. Could you do it?
What is your credit card number? You used to have to quote it all the time. Can you remember your bank account number. No... Someone can.
I mentioned to my wife that I needed a new tape measure because the one in the forge has got the end burnt. Alex was listening, I guess.
When I turned on the laptop. There were adverts for tape measures on Amazon. There was an email from my coal supplier to ask whether I had enough coal for the upcoming job.
Artificial thought is everywhere. You want to order Pizza. It will remember what you had last time and what you had with it. How do you fix a broken oven door. Lets ask Google. Google knows everything.
The thing is, can we remember how to use a screwdriver. If not, when you order the £20 hinge the computer will note that you need a repair team to fit it for you. It would cost £90 plus parts. I did ask.. Computers do the basic thinking for you, but at a cost.
My Partner, who is 66 years old, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease last year. We noticed that he was experiencing hallucinations, slow movement, disturbed sleep, and twitchy hands and legs when at rest. He had to stop taking pramipexole (Sifrol), carbidopa/levodopa, and 2 mg of biperiden because of side effects. Our family doctor recommended a PD-5 treatment from naturalherbscentre. com, which my husband has been undergoing for several months now. Exercise has been very beneficial. He has shown great improvement with the treatment thus far. He is more active now, does more, and feels less apathetic. He has more energy and can do more activities in a day than he did before. As far as tremors I observe a progress, he improved drastically. I thought I would share my husband's story in case it could be helpful, but ultimately you have to figure out what works best for you. Salutations and well wishes
The idea of trying to think about 'not thinking' synchronised with a conversation I was having yesterday about blindness. Apparently most people 'unsighted' people have some light / dark perception - but some have totally absence of that perception. We imagine blindness as darkness, but total blindness is something else again, darkness ceases to have meaning. Thoughtlessness, then, the absence of any point of reference scales that up exponentially. My poetic response is on here https://www.lesleya.com
I tried to leave a comment on your poem for the prompt but couldn't work out how to do so. But the image it leaves in my mind is the truth of nothing and everything - both are one and dual. To have one is to have the other, but we can only see one by it's reflection in the other. Amazing.
Thanks Linda...my site isn't set up for that kind of interaction. On the blog page there is the potential to contact me, but the easiest way to feed back to me is on here or via Twitter @LesleyA_Mason
This is a deliberate choice of keeping things simple. The two sides of the site (Emergence / Reflections) are simply putting my words-work out into the world in the hope that some of it works for someone else.
I figure that if it lands well enough, people will find a way to tell me so (and that seems to be true) and if it doesn't then...that's just ok. I love it when people care enough to find me and comment or reply...but it has to matter enough to them to want to do so. I can live without the noise of people who comment because it's easy, and I don't want the work of maintaining channels, when I could be doing new work. Does that make sense?
I'm not "taking sides" on how any of this cyber-multi-verse operates; we do what works for us, and this is what works for me. I now have to hope I'm not coming across all defensive. {Wide Smile Face)
Thank you for trying and wanting to comment.
And then, finally... I love the comment you were trying to make! Thank you. (Heart)
That in itself is perceptive and chimes with the question about how to explain to someone with no sight about the nature of colour. I had never considered the nature of darkness vs blindness before, so thank you.
Yes. It was new to me too. The colour thing is one we can approximate with people who have lost their sight, but how to do it with those born sightless? But I have a whole other ongoing thing around colour and our inability to know what someone else sees.
By this I mean that we can both agree that grass is (assuming new growth & healthy) green. Therefore we have a certain shade that we see and agree is 'green'. By reference to it - or to other leaves, or carpets, or salad, or whatever - we agree is the colour we call green. However, I cannot know that what YOU think is green, is the same visual perception that I call green. For all we can ever know, I might be seeing something you would call blue, or purple, or brown or orange or red. The words are labels that mean we agree that these are shades of something similar, greens, because we've agreed to call them green - but it doesn't mean we're "seeing" the same shade, interpreting it the same way.
I'm fascinated by this question because I don't believe we can find an answer to it.
Or maybe because I also don't think the answer matters very much, but it is interesting in a QI kind of way.
And I think I wrote a post about this very topic maybe last year or the year before. It equates with the phrase 'you never know what goes on behind closed doors', and someone else's experience is always a closed door to us as we only ever experience the world through the lens of our own experience.
When your journey leads up ahead but you’ve forgotten the destination and even the start point has vanished from view, do you continue to follow the white stones along the centre of the path or take the beaten earth trail between the tall trees? Does it even matter? Is it always necessary to think and plan ahead?
Maybe for once why don’t you let the path be a path? Don’t try to analyse. Don’t give in to thought. Just enjoy the journey.
Very insightful Denarii and nice to see you here. And of course, a path is always a path, but I'm no further forward on the choice between the path or the earth beaten down by the inhabitants of the forest. It seems to me, the latter might be more challenging, but much more fun.
It's still a path, but beware...as I discovered one year walking alone in Scotland, a path which turns out to be a deer path, might lead only to the edge of the loch - a beautiful place, but then what? What if you're not the kind of brave soul that will say, ok, sleep here, figure it out tomorrow....which, as it turned out, I'm not.
I am tempted to turn from the road into the trees...but I have a batch of memories reminding me, that sometimes there is a reason for the road being the less-travelled one.
How would we survive without thought.
Winston Churchill said something like. "Success comes from being able to go from one failure to the next without losing faith."
Thinking along those lines. Maybe the whole world is an accident.
Maybe somewhere at the beginning of time, there are two people with black faces shaking their heads and saying. "Maybe we shouldn't have struck that match. That was a much bigger bang than I expected."
The fact is that humankind generally learns by our mistakes. But we make so many of them! Every so often though, a Maverick thought pushes us ahead. You have to ask yourself where that thought comes from. Maybe all human thought forms part of a super computer, and every so often it coughs out something sensible, to help us survive. I personally, don't believe in any religions. I feel they cause too much fighting. I do believe however, that there is something more powerful than any one of us can dream of, ready to help the world if we are worthy or snuff us out if it gets fed up with our lack of working together.
I think the final test is not far off. We are so dependant on fossil fuel and there isn't enough for all of us. So we need a maverick idea to solve the problem. Has it already been solved and is it being sat on by the fuel companies?
There is a school of thought that suggests everything that happens out of love. Not the love of romantic films, but a radical kind of love that encourages us to learn the lessons we have often missed. And yes, the problem of energy has already been solved, it's just not been monetised to death by those who control, yet!!
To some extent the need to think has been taken from us already and we didn't even notice.
You don't believe me?
I will lend you my phone to dial your best friends number. Could you do it?
What is your credit card number? You used to have to quote it all the time. Can you remember your bank account number. No... Someone can.
I mentioned to my wife that I needed a new tape measure because the one in the forge has got the end burnt. Alex was listening, I guess.
When I turned on the laptop. There were adverts for tape measures on Amazon. There was an email from my coal supplier to ask whether I had enough coal for the upcoming job.
Artificial thought is everywhere. You want to order Pizza. It will remember what you had last time and what you had with it. How do you fix a broken oven door. Lets ask Google. Google knows everything.
The thing is, can we remember how to use a screwdriver. If not, when you order the £20 hinge the computer will note that you need a repair team to fit it for you. It would cost £90 plus parts. I did ask.. Computers do the basic thinking for you, but at a cost.
So thinking is remembering? That's an interesting juxtaposition and one that definitely requires a further discussion sometime :-)
My Partner, who is 66 years old, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease last year. We noticed that he was experiencing hallucinations, slow movement, disturbed sleep, and twitchy hands and legs when at rest. He had to stop taking pramipexole (Sifrol), carbidopa/levodopa, and 2 mg of biperiden because of side effects. Our family doctor recommended a PD-5 treatment from naturalherbscentre. com, which my husband has been undergoing for several months now. Exercise has been very beneficial. He has shown great improvement with the treatment thus far. He is more active now, does more, and feels less apathetic. He has more energy and can do more activities in a day than he did before. As far as tremors I observe a progress, he improved drastically. I thought I would share my husband's story in case it could be helpful, but ultimately you have to figure out what works best for you. Salutations and well wishes
To like this is not quite what I mean, but it sounds positive that things are improving Caroline.
The idea of trying to think about 'not thinking' synchronised with a conversation I was having yesterday about blindness. Apparently most people 'unsighted' people have some light / dark perception - but some have totally absence of that perception. We imagine blindness as darkness, but total blindness is something else again, darkness ceases to have meaning. Thoughtlessness, then, the absence of any point of reference scales that up exponentially. My poetic response is on here https://www.lesleya.com
Beautifully thoughtful...or not in this case!
I tried to leave a comment on your poem for the prompt but couldn't work out how to do so. But the image it leaves in my mind is the truth of nothing and everything - both are one and dual. To have one is to have the other, but we can only see one by it's reflection in the other. Amazing.
Thanks Linda...my site isn't set up for that kind of interaction. On the blog page there is the potential to contact me, but the easiest way to feed back to me is on here or via Twitter @LesleyA_Mason
This is a deliberate choice of keeping things simple. The two sides of the site (Emergence / Reflections) are simply putting my words-work out into the world in the hope that some of it works for someone else.
I figure that if it lands well enough, people will find a way to tell me so (and that seems to be true) and if it doesn't then...that's just ok. I love it when people care enough to find me and comment or reply...but it has to matter enough to them to want to do so. I can live without the noise of people who comment because it's easy, and I don't want the work of maintaining channels, when I could be doing new work. Does that make sense?
I'm not "taking sides" on how any of this cyber-multi-verse operates; we do what works for us, and this is what works for me. I now have to hope I'm not coming across all defensive. {Wide Smile Face)
Thank you for trying and wanting to comment.
And then, finally... I love the comment you were trying to make! Thank you. (Heart)
You're always welcome Lesley. I am still hoping that at some point you may .... big drum roll please ... consider publishing with us .... ;-)
I will bear that in mind...maybe come back to you.
That in itself is perceptive and chimes with the question about how to explain to someone with no sight about the nature of colour. I had never considered the nature of darkness vs blindness before, so thank you.
Yes. It was new to me too. The colour thing is one we can approximate with people who have lost their sight, but how to do it with those born sightless? But I have a whole other ongoing thing around colour and our inability to know what someone else sees.
By this I mean that we can both agree that grass is (assuming new growth & healthy) green. Therefore we have a certain shade that we see and agree is 'green'. By reference to it - or to other leaves, or carpets, or salad, or whatever - we agree is the colour we call green. However, I cannot know that what YOU think is green, is the same visual perception that I call green. For all we can ever know, I might be seeing something you would call blue, or purple, or brown or orange or red. The words are labels that mean we agree that these are shades of something similar, greens, because we've agreed to call them green - but it doesn't mean we're "seeing" the same shade, interpreting it the same way.
I'm fascinated by this question because I don't believe we can find an answer to it.
Or maybe because I also don't think the answer matters very much, but it is interesting in a QI kind of way.
And I think I wrote a post about this very topic maybe last year or the year before. It equates with the phrase 'you never know what goes on behind closed doors', and someone else's experience is always a closed door to us as we only ever experience the world through the lens of our own experience.
When your journey leads up ahead but you’ve forgotten the destination and even the start point has vanished from view, do you continue to follow the white stones along the centre of the path or take the beaten earth trail between the tall trees? Does it even matter? Is it always necessary to think and plan ahead?
Maybe for once why don’t you let the path be a path? Don’t try to analyse. Don’t give in to thought. Just enjoy the journey.
Very insightful Denarii and nice to see you here. And of course, a path is always a path, but I'm no further forward on the choice between the path or the earth beaten down by the inhabitants of the forest. It seems to me, the latter might be more challenging, but much more fun.
It's still a path, but beware...as I discovered one year walking alone in Scotland, a path which turns out to be a deer path, might lead only to the edge of the loch - a beautiful place, but then what? What if you're not the kind of brave soul that will say, ok, sleep here, figure it out tomorrow....which, as it turned out, I'm not.
I am tempted to turn from the road into the trees...but I have a batch of memories reminding me, that sometimes there is a reason for the road being the less-travelled one.