Geoff In The Morning

Scribbles on a Page

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:07:46 GMT

The Written Word. Have you ever stopped to wonder about how what are essentially random squiggles on a page or a computer screen can suddenly take on so much meaning?

I've been guilty over the years of taking reading for granted. After all, I started reading when I was about four. Some of my earliest memories at school are of asking my teacher how to spell a particular dinosaur name and then looking at the word she gave me back and saying, “no, that's not spelled right.” I didn't know how to spell the word, but I recognised when it was spelled incorrectly. I knew what the squiggles meant, even if I couldn't remember how to create them myself.

These days, I'm forever reading and writing. I've had material published. I read stuff every day, whether it be old fashioned dead-tree books, or stuff that's purely electronic on the Internet. I take it as much for granted as I do breathing or walking. About a decade ago, I even did a speed reading course at work, and managed to get my reading speed up to about 900+ words per minute.

But recently, I've been forced to consider the whole process of reading. My son's struggling with his reading at school and I'm trying to find ways to help him out. I've even gone so far as to write a sight words computer program for him, so that we can practice his basic words and hopefully start to make things a little easier for him.

It's made me stop and think about what it is that I do so much about. How do I see the words written in front of me and instinctively know what it is that the author is trying to say?

Part of it is memory – I see a word and my subconscious mind remembers how to pronounce the word and even what it means. It does this so fast that I don't even realise what it's doing. I just recognise the word, understand what it means and just get on with the next thing.

But there's more to it than that. Somewhere along the line, lost in the sands of time, someone decided that creating particular shaped squiggles on a page was a good idea. Writing things down isn't particularly new – after all, the ancient Egyptians are well-known for their hieroglyphics. But somewhere along the line, someone decided to simplify the whole letter thing and we eventually ended up with the alphabet as we know it today.

The thing that gets me is who decided that the letters we write down and read back were to be shaped the way they are? Why are there 26 letters in the alphabet we use in English, and a distinct lack of accent symbols, whereas other languages and cultures use more? Heck, some cultures use a form of written symbology that doesn't even come close to resembling the alphabet that this piece is written in. You only have to look at scripts like Chinese, Japanese or Thai to recognise that different cultures put their emphasis on the written word in different areas.

It doesn't take much to destroy the meaning of the written word either. Try reading something in a language that you don't understand. If your only language is English, then reading something written in a language like French, German or Spanish is going to confuse you. You might be able to recognise some words as similar to the English ones, but much of it's going to look like gibberish. If you move away from the alphabet that we're familiar with and look at something like Cyrillic or Arabic, then it really is going to look just like scribbles on a page. And yet, there are people who can interpret those same squiggles and extract meaningful information from them.

Why is any given word spelled the way it is? How did that particular combination of letters come to be instilled with a special meaning, so that when other people see it written down, they understand what the author was trying to say. Who decides these things and why did they do it in the first place?

As Stephen King said in his autobiography, On Writing, writing is a form of telepathy – it's the transferring of ideas from one human mind to another freed from the boundaries of space and time.

This all blows my mind. The ultimate arbitrariness of the written word fascinates me. It all reinforces to me the concept that all systems are arbitrary, as Serge Kahili King once wrote. All it takes for a particular set of squiggles to gain or lose meaning is the ability of the reader to be able to recognise and interpret the shapes that they see. What might be unintelligible nonsense to one person might be a beautifully profound piece of poetry to someone else.

To me, that's a wonderful thing.

Those Things That Go Bump In The Night

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:00:40 GMT

Ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires, werewolves and all the things that just go bump in the night. What is it about horror stories that keeps us going back for more?

Since ancient times, people have been telling each other scary stories – or at least stories with scary elements in them – so there's got to be some part of the human psyche that is attracted to those sorts of things. Plenty of myths and legends have a supernatural element to them, with all sorts of mystical creatures that wanted to destroy the hero of the story, only to be vanquished by the end of the tale.

Even in modern times, horror novels and movies remain popular, with new titles coming out all the time. People like Steven King, Dean Koontz and Wes Craven have made careers out of trying to scare people.

So, what's the attraction? Why do we keep subjecting ourselves to things that are going to give us the creeps, or in some cases, even give us nightmares?

Well, I think some of it's got to do with the physical reactions our bodies generate when faced with a scary experience. When something spooks us, adrenaline and a bunch of other hormones are injected into our bloodstreams and our hearts start to race. It's a rush, pure and simple. It's the same reason why roller coasters and extreme sports are popular – it gives people a chance to get a natural high from all the chemicals that are circulating in their blood.

But I think there's more to it than just that. On a deeper level, I think we need scary stories to help us face our shadows. Every one of us has a dark corner of our psyche where we hide all the things that we don't want to face. It might not be particularly big in the greater scheme of things, but everyone's got some situation or thing that fills them with dread every time they encounter them – or perhaps even think about it.

Horror stories allow us a safer way to go into the darker reaches of our minds and explore the darkness. It brings some light into those corners where we normally fear to tread. They give us a way to explore our own mortality vicariously through the lives of the characters on the screen.

Going even further than that, I think there's plenty of life lessons that can be learned from horror stories. In just about every case, the hero of the story will overcome the evil forces by summoning their courage and dealing with the problem head on. For a lot of us, we don't do that with our fears. We bury them and try to pretend they don't exist, thereby giving a lot of power to those things to come back and scare the bejeezus out of us the next time. But if we face those fears and make a different decision about them, then we're going to be able to overcome them and lead a healthier, happier life in the long run.

Courage can come from the strangest places. It doesn't have to be a big, grandiose deal. It's just the point at which we decide to take back the personal power that we had previously surrendered to something that used to scare us. Once we make that decision and face the dark parts of our minds, the power those things had drains away and we find that our lives get better. It's like Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

So, maybe it's time to embrace the darkness within. Go watch a horror movie and keep an eye out for a chance to kick whatever scares you in the nuts.

We Don't Need Another Hero... Or Do We?

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:14:38 GMT

Is the world now bereft of heroes or do they still exist to show us the way? Are there people still out there who epitomise the essence of the hero archetype?

It seems that every time we turn on the news, we're inundated with just how bad the world is at the moment. We're constantly being bombarded with stories about death, war, famine, global warming and all sorts of other catastrophes that make life on Earth somewhat of a living hell.

Sometimes I wonder if all the doom and gloom is only causing us to nose dive into an endlessly self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we concentrate on the negative things in the world, the more likely we are to encounter them.

It seems to me that the world now is in need of some old-school heroes, people who can inspire the general populace and turn the world around again.

In the strictest sense, a hero is someone who goes on some sort of journey and learns some new ways of dealing with the world. The journey need not be a physical one, but can instead be an intellectual or spiritual one. The main criteria is that they learn to look at the world differently and in the end, they use their new knowledge to help their communities improve.

It seems to me that we've lost a lot of the community spirit that used to exist – or perhaps it's just changed shape. Whereas before we used to have a lot of local community groups and neighbours used to spend a lot more time together, these days people spend to find like minded groups of people to spend their time with. It might be things like church or sporting groups, or increasingly, you're seeing online communities form with people with similar interests all around the world joining together.

But the other thing you're seeing a lot of these days is endless squabbling and flamewars. People argue and fight over the most ridiculous things. They often don't even stop to think before they start typing and don't bother to even consider what the other person is saying.

It seems to me that we need now, more than ever, a new breed of heroes to come and inspire people to make their lives better. I'm not talking necessarily about superheroes or pulp heroes – although perhaps they might work to some extent – but simply people who can find a way to start changing the mindset of the general populace.

Changing the way you look at the world is hard enough. Changing the way that other people look at it is even harder, particularly when people have trouble realising that their own thinking needs to change. I think most of us would normally believe that there's nothing wrong with our current way of thinking and would react harshly to anyone who would suggest otherwise. I think that's why we need some new heroes who lead by example, and just believe in what they are doing so much that people automatically want to emulate them and their way of thinking.

Now, it doesn't matter if those heroes are real people or not. People can learn just as much from fictional examples as they do from real life ones. After all, the subconscious mind really can't tell fantasy from reality anyway. But what we need are characters that people will want to emulate in their own lives, and in doing so, will make their own lives better.

Heroes don't do what they do to change the world. They often just do it to make their own lives better and in the process, inspire other people to do the same. That just makes things better for everyone in the long term.

Maybe all the world needs right now is a big, healthy dose of positive inspiration. Something to think about anyway...

The Power of Questions

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:35:55 GMT

How do people come up with certain ideas? What makes them think about things in a way that lets them come up with the answers? How do people learn new things in general, whether they be a small child or someone in the twilight of their lives?

The answer is actually quite simple: they ask questions.

Questions are perhaps one of the most fundamental building blocks of human communication. I don't know if you've ever sat in a group of people and just observed the interplay between the people involved, but you can pretty much guarantee that what's going to be happening most of the time is everyone who's actively involved will be asking questions, listening to the answers and then coming up with related thoughts. Others will then ask questions and from there, the conversation naturally flows.

But, oddly enough, questions are incredibly powerful things. You see, by simply asking a question, it focuses your mind on the topic at hand and immediately reduces your mental focus on anything else around. By asking the right questions, it helps your mind focus on creative solutions to the problems at hand.

A classic example is during the Apollo 13 moonshot. After an explosion in the capsule's service module left the crew with dwindling oxygen supplies, the engineers back on Earth were presented with every piece of equipment that the astronauts had at their disposal and were asked how the astronauts could rig something that would make it possible for them to get back home again. Through the combined genius of the people involved, they were able to come up with a solution and the three men made it home safely.

What would have happened if they the people on the ground hadn't asked what could be done? What if they had instantly gone into a blame-hunting mode and asking who was responsible for the problem? Would the three astronauts have perished in space?

Questions focus our thoughts. It's as simple as that. The sorts of questions that you ask yourself constantly can have a dramatic effect on your thinking. If you're stuck in an emotional rut and you're constantly asking yourself why this sort of thing keeps happening to you all the time, you're keeping your mind focused on the problem and how big it seems. All you're really going to do is make it seem all that much bigger.

But as soon as you start asking how you can get out of the situation that you're in, you'll find that things can start to change. Answers to the new questions will start to appear, often extremely quickly and if you take action and follow through on those answers, you can turn things around and make a new life for yourself.

Strangely enough, even the tone of question can have a major impact on the answers you're going to get. A question asked with a stern, angry tone of voice is going to get a very different response that if it was asked with a happy, carefree tone, even though the words might end up being the same. The intent of the question itself is as much a part of the question as the words themselves, because it helps focus people's minds in a particular way.

So, if you're not getting the answers you need in any area of your life, perhaps it's time for you to start asking the questions differently, or perhaps, it's time to start asking a completely different set of questions altogether. If you're having a rough trot, start asking how you can make things better. If you're actually in a good spot, ask how you can sustain the position that you're in for as long as possible.

It's like the old saying goes, “Ask, and ye shall receive.”

Where do thoughts come from?

Wed, 02 May 2007 14:07:29 GMT

Where do ideas come from? When I'm writing, what part of me comes up with the words to type?

Sometimes, it feels as though there's someone else trapped inside my brain, trying to find an opening to come out and be heard. There might be something in that, too. In her book, The Journey from Abandonment to Healing, Susan Anderson recommends giving free rein to the little voice in your head and having a whole question and answer session with it, in order to try to uncover where some of your emotional land mines are. I've tried it, and it does seem to work to some extent. Once you get stuff out in the open, it loses its potency.

Michael Domeyko Rowland once said that we often repress emotions and it's like holding a beach ball underwater. It wants to float to the surface and be released, but over time, we hold it down, repressing it because we think that facing that emotion is going to be too hard or too painful. In the process, we tie up a lot of extra emotional energy and end up making ourselves sick in the process.

Are our thoughts the same thing? Do we already possess and know all the things that we need in order to get us through life and if we'd just shut up for a second and let that stuff out, we'd find that life is actually a whole lot easier than we thought?

I know that in the past I've had times when I've been able to instantly recall all sorts of knowledge at exactly the right time, and then wondered where the hell it came from. It always freaks me out a little when it happens, because it shows me that there's more to my mind than the stuff I can consciously recall easily.

What else is trapped in our minds that we don't let out? I've heard that some people believe that we never really forget anything – that, under the right circumstances – we can recall everything we've ever experienced. You hear of people going under hypnosis and being able to remember all sorts of details about things that they've forgotten completely in their normal waking world.

Are we so afraid of succeeding that we subconsciously block certain information from our conscious minds in order to fail? It seems a little weird at first, but there are times when I do think that's precisely what we do. We downplay our own abilities and knowledge, so that we don't have to worry about making other people jealous, or so that we don't have to worry about what they might think of us. If we keep our mouths shut, then we won't upset anyone and we won't get into trouble.

Strange thing is, that sort of behaviour is remarkably self-limiting. It holds us back and strangles our creativity. It stops us from reaching our full potential in whatever it is we're trying to do.

So friends, maybe it's time for all of us to stop getting in our own way and to let out some of the stuff that's welling up inside us all the time. After all, once you give your imagination its head, it can often come up with some truly magnificent ideas. If even one of those ideas improves your own life or the life of someone else, then it will have been worth the effort.

Lest We Forget

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:56:52 GMT

Today, in Australia, is Anzac Day. More than just a public holiday, it's a time when the nation remembers the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who have found and died in the wars of the 20th Century.

On this day in 1915, the first wave of Australian and New Zealand troops landed on a beach on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey. They were there under the overall command of the British, who were trying to smash their way through to capture Istanbul. Young men who had gone off to war thinking they were going to have a grand old adventure were suddenly thrust into a hellish and largely pointless situation.

Over the next eight months, over 8,000 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders would die at Gallipoli. In the end, the Commonwealth forces abandoned their positions, having achieved nothing in the way over military significance.

By the end of the Great War, over 60,000 Australians had died. In terms of men killed as a percentage of the country's population, Australia suffered the highest casualty rate of the war.

It had a profound effect on what was still a young nation. As early as 1916, people back home were already holding commemorative services to remember those who had been killed in action. By the 1920s, Anzac Day services and parades were being held around the country to honour those who had served and to remember those who had died.

As the 20th Century wore on and more servicemen and women went off to fight in a collection of wars around the world, Anzac Day expanded to remember those as well. Over 100,000 Australians have died in military actions since Gallipoli. Anzac Day gets bigger every year, with more and more people turning out to remember the fallen. For me, that's a wonderful thing, because more and more people are really taking this seriously.

But who are these men and women who have died in combat? Are they just names on a roll of honour?

There's a little room in the World War II wing of the Australian War Memorial here in Canberra that commemorates the Australian soldiers who died at the hands of the Japanese in the Sandakan Death March in Borneo. But rather than just listing their names, the military id photos of every man – all 1,787 of them – are posted up on the wall, from floor to ceiling. None of the photos are particularly good. Every one of them shows a man who looks bored or even numb. They stare straight into the camera without a smile or often without any expression on their face at all.

For me, it's one of the most chilling things I've ever experienced. Standing in that room and looking at those faces, I realised that every single one of them died under terrible conditions and it touched me deeply. Their lives had been snuffed out, and with them, their memories, experiences and dreams. None of those guys ever came home from war. Sometimes I wonder if they knew they weren't that when those photos were taken. It's a lot more personal than just a list of names. Looking into the eyes of those guys almost lets them talk to you personally.

I know that every time I go into that room, I can't help but be reminded of how much of a senseless waste of human life a war really is. It might – eventually – stop injustice and bring change for the better, but at what cost? The people who make the decisions go to war don't see the real cost to those who actually have to put themselves in harm's way. All they see is the abstracted figures and it's too impersonal.

Even a list of names of the casualties doesn't hammer home the cost. It doesn't say anything about who these people were and what else they contributed to the world. It doesn't say anything about the loved ones and friends they left behind and the emptiness that their deaths must have caused. It doesn't bring home the fact that the world is now a little bit poorer because these guy aren't with us any more.

Too often I can't help but wonder why. I can't help but think that all those deaths really did mean nothing. But as the guys from Carbon Leaf sing in “The War Was In Color”:

What good did it do?
Well hopefully for you,
A world without war,
A life full of color.

Wars create pain, massive amounts of it. It might be emotional pain on the part of those who lost relatives and friends. But on a larger scale, wars create financial and humanitarian pain for both the winners and the losers.

And pain is one of the biggest motivators in human existence. The human mind is designed to move away from pain and towards pleasure. Wars ultimately change the minds of the human race and drive us to realise that such activities are ultimately pointless and need to stop. Sometimes it takes death and destruction on a mind-blowing scale to make that happen, because some people are just too stupid or too proud – or both – to look at things any other way.

So on days like Anzac Day, I urge you to remember those who have fallen. Not in an abstract way, but a personal one. Find their names. Even better, find their photos and look into their eyes. But more than anything else, honour their spirits, so that they won't be forgotten.

They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning.
We will remember them

Lest we forget

It's A Confidence Thing

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:28:39 GMT

Have you ever watched someone who's really good at something do whatever it is that they do? It doesn't matter what it is that they do, they all have something in common with one another: they all believe that they can do whatever it is that they're trying to do.

Confidence is something that's been on my mind a fair bit of late. I've been examining my own life and trying to improve on some of the things that I've done in the past. Basically, I want to increase the good stuff in my life and reduce the things that haven't been so successful for me.

One thing that I've realised is that things go better when I believe that I can do whatever it is that I'm attempting. If I'm plagued with doubts and fears, then I become self conscious, I over-compensate and end up making more mistakes. Either that, or I'm so paralysed by fears that I don't even know how to start tackling the problem. But once I start to believe that I can actually do something and internalise that belief, that's when things start to go right and I begin to make progress on my goals.

It's the belief thing that's caught my attention recently. The more I believe that I can do something, the easier it is for me to achieve. Basically, it's a matter of confidence.

There's that old saying that practice makes perfect. Sometimes you'll find that people can pick up something naturally and start to excel at it without much practice at all. Other times, you'll see people practicing for years and eventually mastering whatever it is their doing. What's the difference between these sorts of people? Basically, I think it's just a matter of how fast the person starts to believe that they can do it.

Perhaps a common mistake is that we set our sights too high to start with, and then give up too quickly when we fail. Not everyone's going to be able to smash a world record on their first attempt. Even those people who end up smashing the world records have to start with a much smaller goal in mind.

And that's the trick, people: don't try to achieve everything, all at once. Start with a much smaller goal and use it to build up some confidence in what you're trying to do. Once you've mastered the small stuff, you can then work on trusting yourself with something bigger. Push your boundaries out a little further each time you try something, and over time, you'll end up being able to handle a lot more than you ever thought possible. If you try to take on too much too early, all you'll end up doing is overwhelming yourself.

Now, I realise that this is probably self-obvious, but there are times — especially when you're struggling to achieve something huge — when this really isn't that obvious at all. All you can see is this huge mountain that you need to climb and it's too big. But if once you grok that you only need to climb it one step at a time, it gets a whole lot easier to deal with.

Marcus Garvey once said, “If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.” Wise words. Master the small things and soon you'll find that the big things are just a collection of small things to conquer.

So, when you set out to achieve something, just believe enough to get you one step closer to the goal. Do that enough times, and you'll already have developed enough confidence to finish.

Talkback Time

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:11:07 GMT

One thing that I've always done with this column is to treat it like a radio broadcast; I just send out whatever it is that happens to be going through my head and let people think about it. Most of the time, I don't want feedback. I'm not doing this for anyone else. I write all this mainly to remind myself what it's all about and to give myself time to ponder on some deeper stuff. For me, it brings me a great deal of joy and satisfaction. I often feel quite calm and centred after writing a column.

But it's been three years since I started this column. I haven't always written as much as I had originally intended, but this year I seem to have made some inroads into improving that situation and I'm hoping from here on out that I can put up a new column at least weekly.

But in honour of the anniversary, I'd like to ask: what does it mean to you, dear reader? Do my assorted ramblings strike a chord in your mind and get you thinking about things in perhaps a new way? Or are my columns just the insane ramblings of an eccentric mind?

And hey, if you got some idea about topics you like me to ponder and perhaps spend some time writing about, feel free to throw those up here as well.

So, enough of me, let me know what you think...

Round and Round The Mountain

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:05:42 GMT

Ever wondered why you seem to keep on experiencing the same sorts of events over and over? Or when you get out of one relationship with someone, you end up back in a relationship with someone just like the one you had trouble with last time?

It's often struck me as kinda funny the way life works. Just when you think you're finally over the pain of the last mistake you made, something happens which triggers off a massive explosion of emotion that brings all that old pain right back to the surface, as though it never left. I've done it, and I've been on the receiving end of someone else's explosion. Believe me, that's not much fun either.

So, why does it happen? Why do we torture ourselves with hanging onto this old baggage, only to have to come up at the worst possible time and screw things up for us when things are starting to look good?

Basically, it's because we haven't managed to learn the lesson that we were supposed to learn the last time. In our lives, we make certain decisions along the way that might not be beneficial to us. Sure, they might work out OK in the short term, but they might not be any good for us in the bigger scheme of things. We make our decisions based on thoughts and feelings that we have, ones that we hold to be true.

But sometimes, those thoughts might not be true at all. They might fit the facts as we know them, but often we're filling in the blanks with stuff that we just make up. A lot of the time, it may not have any basis in reality at all. Because of that, we can end up making bad decisions and that can have a negative impact on our lives. If we continue to hold those same thoughts as the truth, then we'll continue to make the same basic decisions over and over again, often with the same bad results.

So, what's the answer? I guess it's to become aware of when you're going around the mountain again. If you find that you're trapped in what looks like your own personal version of Groundhog Day, then it's basically the universe smacking you upside the head and trying to get you to change your mind about something. The best thing to do in situations like that to take a long hard look at what you're thinking and feeling and start looking for alternatives.

Often there's going to be one. Sometimes you'll see the alternative straight away and you'll be able to make a better decision and get past the problem quickly. Other times, you're going to need to have the universe clobber you a few more times before things become clear. Every time we fail and make the same mistakes that we made last time, it's an opportunity to learn a new way to approach the problem. Make some new, more beneficial decisions and you're life will change for the better.

We often find that we attract the same sorts of people into our lives, so that we can get another opportunity to learn the right way to do something. Sometimes we attract the people who can show us where we're going wrong, so that we can make better choices and get rid of some of the emotional baggage that we've been carrying around for years that's been – deep down – making us miserable. Once we finally jettison that baggage, we experience real freedom and life becomes a lot easier all round.

So, the next time you find yourself going around the mountain again, sit down and take a look at the scenery. Maybe you'll spot a new trail to take that will lead you down in the valley.

Strengthening connections

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 10:48:49 GMT

My writing last week about the global consciousness got me thinking. If we run with the idea that we do form part of a giant, worldwide neural network, then what part do each of us play in the global net?

The purpose of each node in an artificial neural network is to process the information coming in, and then pass the results onto another node further down the line. Now, each node has a bunch of different input values, and part of the way that the network works is that different weights are given to each of the inputs, meaning that some sources of information are given more credence in the calculations than others.

It's the same for us humans. Each of us puts different amount of weight on what comes into our minds, depending on the source of the information. We're more likely to take something more seriously if it comes from a friend or a trusted teacher than if it comes from someone we've never met.

Credibility is an important thing in the modern world; if you can prove your worth to other people, they're more likely to take you seriously and use the things you say and do more often in whatever it is that they're doing. In some respects, it's a measure of our worth to the network as a whole. The more people who take notice of what you do and benefit from it, the more credibility you have.

So, how do we go about getting more credibility? Well, it's pretty simple really. Just do whatever it is that you want to do, simply because you enjoy doing it. It doesn't really matter what you do – whether it be writing, fishing, darning socks, painting pictures, telling stories or whatever – so long as you put your heart into it and continue to try to improve the quality of your work, your credibility in that field is going to go up.

Now, that takes courage in some cases. Most of us are plagued by doubts and fears that somehow we're not good enough, or even as good as the people who are already working in that particular field. Thing is though, most people are plagued with the same doubts when they start out, and it's only through continued practice that they come to believe that they're actually any good at whatever it is that they're doing.

This doesn't mean that if you're good at some really obscure area or thing, you're going to become a household name. But there will always be people who will come to admire whatever it is that you're doing, provided that you just keep on doing it and trying to get better at it. Eventually, people may even start paying you for whatever it is that you're doing, which gives you even more credibility, because now you're a “professional”.

Most of us don't put our hearts into what we're doing. It's kind of bizarre, but continuing on working on improving the quality of what we're doing takes time and effort and often can be a whole lot of hard work. There are plenty of times when we begin to wonder if it's actually worthwhile putting in the effort, especially when we don't seem to be getting anywhere with it. But if we keep our eyes on whatever it is we're trying to achieve in the long run, we'll find that other people will start to take more notice of us, and our level of influence in the global consciousness will continue to rise. Eventually, if we get good enough, we may even become a household name after all.

It's like Robin Williams said in Dead Poet's Society, “Carpe Diem. Seize the day. Make you lives extraordinary.” Put the effort into whatever it is you love doing and find a way to pass that information on to other people and you'll find that your level of satisfaction in life will automatically start to increase. Other people will start to take you more seriously and you'll find that you'll be contributing more to the global neural network in no time.

And that's got to be a good thing, right?

We're All In This Together

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:41:35 GMT

The late Douglas Adams, in his classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series joked that the Earth was really just a giant computer that was crunching through the numbers to try to come up with the answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything.” Had it not been destroyed by the Vogons, it would have come up with it as well.

People have often talked about the “global consciousness”, as a sort of buzzword for a larger group mind. Some people – particularly the New Age types – have even talked about things like a planetary intelligence, something that links us all together.

Years ago, when I was taking a machine learning course as part of my Master's degree, we were learning about artificial neural networks, computer programs modelled on the way the human brain works. Apparently they can be highly useful and adaptable little things, learning how to understand a particular problem space, and then being able to take a bunch of assorted inputs and make sense of them based on what they've learned in training. Don't ask me how; while I understand the concepts behind them, I still don't understand how they work.

The concept intrigued me. I started to wonder if someone could build different artificial neural networks to do different things and string them together. For example, build one to handle visual inputs, another to handle tactile inputs, a third to turn a bunch of tactile and visual cues into spatial information and so on. Then, once you'd trained each individual part successfully, I figured that if you connected up the outputs from one trained network to the inputs of another trained network, you could get it doing some seriously clever things.

So, one afternoon during the break in the lecture, I asked my lecturer if anyone had built a neural network of neural networks. He looked at me oddly for a second and said, “it'd just be a neural network.” That concept floored me, but I quickly realised he was right; a collection of joined neural nets is just a single, large neural net, one that has the ability to do a much cleverer job than each individual subnet. It's a very fractal thing.

Recently, I got to thinking about the human brain and how it processes information. Data comes into the brain through the various sensory organs and is processed in a variety of different ways. Each person then converts that information into something that they share with other people in different ways. It can be as simple as having a conversation about the weather over coffee, or it might be as complicated as a Nobel Prize winning physics thesis or a United Nations declaration on something or other. Each of us has one of the best neural networks that have ever existed, and it sits right inside out heads.

That's when the words of my old machine learning lecturer came back to me: a neural network of neural networks is just a neural network.

Suddenly, I realised that there was such a thing as a global consciousness. Every single one of us contributes daily to the world-wide intelligence. Each one of us takes in some information, processes it and then passes that information on to other people so that they can do things with it as well.

With the advent of things like the Internet, each individual person has the ability to influence a much larger number of other people, thereby allowing more information to pass quicker and be processed by a much larger portion of the population than was possible even fifteen or twenty years ago. We're all part of a single, enormous neural network.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that the global intelligence is a product of some divine being or anything like that. I'm not even saying that it exists for any particular reason other than it just evolved that way. I'm just pointing out that it actually does exist, at least from a particular point of view.

So, maybe old Doug wasn't so far off the mark after all. Maybe the Earth is just some sort of giant computer, trying to work something out.

A Star Fall, A Phone Call, It Joins All

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:02:49 GMT

Ever noticed those times when you've been thinking about something and not long afterwards you run across the very thing that you've been thinking about? Or perhaps you've been thinking about someone you haven't spoken to for a while and all of a sudden, you either run into them or they phone you up?

Welcome to the wonderful world of synchronicity. Carl Jung described it as an “acausal connecting principle”. By acausal, he means there's no direct cause-and-effect link between the two topics. And yet, to the subjective observer,there's very much a connection between the two.

Is it just a coincidence? Well, perhaps, at least from a logical perspective. But human beings aren't particularly logical creatures most of the time. We're often ruled by our emotions and feelings, and its through the filter of our feelings and beliefs that we see the world around us. If we're calm and relaxed, we're more likely to see the beautiful things in the world around us. If we're angry, we're not going to notice things that are calming and beautiful as much, but we probably will notice things that are going to upset us even more.

That's one of the good things that synchronicity can do for us: it can act as a barometer for what we're currently focused on. If you're starting to notice things that are ticking you off all the time, then chances are that you're holding a lot of anger or negative expectations. You'd be far better off if you found a way to relax. If nothing else, it's better for your health and it makes your day a whole lot more pleasurable.

But there's more to it than just that. Sometimes, when we're embarking on a new stage of our personal journeys, synchronicity helps us out. We meet the right people who can help us with things we need. We might read something that gives us the answer to a problem we've been wrestling with for a while. It can bring old friends – and perhaps enemies – back into our lives to let us clear away some old baggage or to perhaps give us the opportunity to share what we know in order for us to help them through a rough spot in their lives.

How does it work? Honestly, I have no real idea. I believe that world is what we think it is, and that by focusing on something, we can bring that thing into our conscious reality. It might actually take a while if it's something big that we're focusing on, but the law of attraction does seem to work. The more you focus on something, the more you notice it around you. On the other hand, if you're concentrating on something and it's not starting to show up in your life, then that's a sign as well that you could well have other issues that you need to deal with before you can manifest that reality.

Thing is, does it really matter how it works? I don't think so. For me, it's just a cool thing that happens. It's like the universe is giving you a sign. If you listen carefully enough, you'll hear the things that you need to hear and see the things that you need to see in order to get to your life's goals. Sometimes the universe shouts pretty loudly – and sometimes it just whacks you upside the head with the cluestick if you're really not getting it.

The other odd thing about synchronicity is that once you start to notice and go with the flow, it starts to happen more often. The more you concentrate on what you want, the more likely you are to notice things around you that will help. You may also find that things – like extra money – show up in your life right at the times when you need it the most.

So hey, if you're starting to notice little coincidences around you, enjoy it. It's a good thing.

Life Moves Pretty Fast...

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:39:55 GMT

A wise man once said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it."

It's struck me this evening just how true those words really are, and it reminded me why Geoff In the Morning came into being. It was for me to stop, look around at what's really going on around me and to find an outlet to express the appreciation I have for the small things in life.

But along the way, I forgot that. Life got in the way, as it has a habit of doing. It's been over a year since I've been on the air here. I had all the stress of a separation and divorce to deal with, stuff with work and getting used to being on my own again. It hasn't been easy, but it's been worthwhile. Somewhere along the road I've walked, I've started to discover me again.

One thing I've learned from the photography I've done over the past couple of years is that we don't often see the world as it truly is. We see what we think is there and that often blinds us to the reality. Robert Pirsig —in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — talks about how Phaedrus set a writing assignment for one of his students. He asked her to write a short essay about the United States. She found she didn't know what to say. So he suggested that she write just about the town she was in, and she was still stuck. So he said, just write about the main street of the town. She went away, then came back in distress, saying she still couldn't think of anything to say, so he said she wasn't looking and that she should start looking at one building in the street and just write about it, starting from the top left hand brick. She went away and started writing and kept writing and was able to finish the essay. She couldn't explain it, but it was a relief to her.

Phaedrus pondered this for a while and realised that until she wrote about the brick, she'd been trying to regurgitate all the things she'd been taught, because that's what she thought he wanted to read. It wasn't until she started writing about the individual brick that she had to look with her own eyes at what was really there and find a way to express her original thoughts on it.

That's what it's like for most of us too. We've been taught that the world is the way it is and we just go on regurgitating that day after day. And then we wonder why we get so bored and feel like we're stuck in a huge rut. It's because we're seeing what we think is there, and not what's really there at all.

When was the last time you went outside and just stared at the moon or the stars? When did you last go for a walk through the forest and enjoy the sounds, sights and smells of the bush? When was the last time you sat down and played the way you did when you were a kid?

Chances are, if you're like most of us, then the answer's probably going to be "years ago." And when you think about it, that's really a crying shame.

Maybe it's time for all of us to stop regurgitating what we've been taught about the way the world runs and found the time to actually take a long, close look at the world and to come up with some original thoughts about the things around us, and about our own lives. Start with the top left hand brick in your own life and take a long hard loook at it. If you closely examine the rut you're in, you'll start to see the footholes you need to climb up out of it.

So, do like young Ferris said. Stop and look around once in a while. Life really is too good to miss.

And while you're out there, say "hi" to the Moon for me...

On Friendship...

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:07:18 GMT

A friend of mine commented earlier today that he knew that people liked him, but he couldn't figure out why. So, I responded to my friend and said that the reason I like him is because he cares; he's one of the people who really has genuine concern for the emotions that I'm feeling, even if he doesn't quite grok where I'm at at any given moment. He just accepts me for who I am and where I'm at and to me, that's something damn important.

My friend's conundrum is one that I guess we've all struggled with at some point in our lives. I know I certainly have. I'm my own worst critic, because I know all my faults only too well and, to me, those things stand out above all the positive qualities that others might see in me. But I know there are people out there who do like me, despite my faults, even if I don't understand why sometimes.

It's all too easy these days to go through life thinking that there isn't anyone out there who cares about us. Life's become so superficial and shallow and the solid relationships between people aren't as solid as they used to be.

But I think if you stop and think about all the people who you consider to be your closest friends, they're the ones who care the most about you, and they're the ones who you can count on to support you when life starts to get a little – or a lot – tough. They're the one's who won't try to nullify what you're feeling, but they will give you a shoulder to lean on and offer counsel to help you see things from another perspective, hopefully one that will let you see the way out of whatever mess you happen to be in at the moment. They don't judge, they don't criticise, they just offer their support and their sympathy and offer to do whatever they can to help you get through whatever pain you're going through.

To me, that's what real friendship is all about. I've written before about the spirit of Aloha – to love is to be happy with. A real friend is one that is happy with you and loves you right where you're at. Sure, they may think that you could be doing things better than the way you're handling things at the moment, but they're the ones who don't make a big deal out of pointing out how wrong you are. A real friend's love is non-judgmental. They see past the mistakes that you make and appreciating the good things that you do.

If you stop and think about it, I'd bet there's a good chance the people you consider to be your closest friends are the ones you can see the good in as well. They're the ones you just accept, despite the flaws and despite whatever mistakes they happen to make. They're the ones you're prepared to help out when they call on you. And chances are, deep down, they love you for that, even if they can't articulate it that way.

So, friends, I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to make some more friends, go find people to care about. If you want to be a better friend to someone, accept them where they are at and let them know that you care. If you've got friends you haven't spoken to in a while, give them a call and let them know you've been thinking of them; I'm sure they'll be grateful for it and you might be calling at the precise moment that they need someone's shoulder to lean on for a while.

But if you can't just call them, for whatever reason, bring them to your mind and let them know there that you care and that you're thinking about them. Somewhere, somehow, on some level, they'll feel it and be grateful that you're on their side.

And you know what? It'll make you feel good too.

The Ruins of Babel

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 07:29:49 GMT

I should start by saying it feels good to be back on the air again. It's been a very long time since I sat down to write one of these, or even felt like sitting down to write one. Please accept my apologies for that; sometimes life just gets in the way of thinking.

But hey, sometimes life has to get in the way, just to give you some more stuff to think about. Maybe that's a column in itself for another day.

But not today. Today I want to talk about something that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a very long time indeed.

I'm sure all of us have heard the tale of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis in the Bible. It's the story that's always quoted as to why there's so many languages on Earth.

It starts out saying that at one time, there was only one language and everyone could understand everyone else. That's when some people decided that they wanted to build a tower to the heavens, so they could reach God. Now, God wasn't really fussed with this idea, so he apparently struck down the tower and caused everyone to speak in different tongues so they couldn't understand each other.

Now, naturally, because it says it was a tower, people have traditionally got to think that the building physically existed at some point and so people have been running around the Middle East for centuries, looking for the ruins of this once mighty tower.

Thing is though, I don't think that is a story about a physical tower at all. I think the story of the Tower of Babel is really a metaphor for human understanding.

Several hundred years before Christ was born, a Chinese sage named Lao Tzu penned the now famous Tao Te Ching, which went on to become the basis for Taoism and probably a bunch of other things besides.

Now, the Tao Te Ching is a collection of poems, containing some amazing wisdom. But it has always been the very first line that piques my interest: The Tao that can be written down is not the true Tao. To me, that always says that as soon as you try to describe something, you automatically miss parts of it. You can explain most of it, but if someone just read what you had written, they wouldn't have a full understanding of whatever it was you were writing about. It wouldn't be until they had experienced it for themselves that they would have a real chance of understanding, and they might not even understand it then.
Robert Anton Wilson, in his book Quantum Psychology, talks about the danger of saying something "is" something else. As soon as you put a label on something, it automatically narrows people's thinking about the thing in question and they can end up missing the point of whatever it is that you're talking about. They stop looking at it is it really is, and only look at it in terms of the label that you've stuck on it.

That's another problem with human understanding: no two people can understand exactly the same thing. They're both going to be filtering it through their own knowledge and understanding, which is automatically going to remove some or all of the nuances of what they actually talking about. If the subject is only small and they both have a good understanding of what it's about, then the differences aren't going to be big factor.

The problem comes when you're dealing with a complex and enormous problem. Like life, or even a subset of it, like religion or politics. People aren't going to be understand a sizeable portion of the subject matter and because of the reality of human nature, that's going to lead to differences of opinion, which can lead to ideology clashes - or worse.

That bring us back to the story of the Tower of Babel. Like I said, I don't think they were trying to build a physical tower at all. Instead, I believe it much more likely that they were trying to define and codify what God is. They wanted to make sure that everyone was on the same page, so to speak. But remember what good old Lao Tzu said about the written Tao: it's not the real thing. Even worse than that, people are going to have differences of opinion about such weighty matters and sooner or later, they're going to dig their heels in and not budge on a particular topic. Once that happens, it's game over, kids. Whatever thought structures you've created to help define your topic are going to come crashing down like a house of cards - or the Tower of Babel.

To me, that's why we have so many religions on Earth. If you can set aside your prejudices and look honestly at several of them, you'll actually find a large overlap in what they believe. There's a certain subset of beliefs that's common to just about all faiths across the world. They just differ in what you do with them, or the precise nature of what a worshipper is supposed to do. With humans being what we are, we get all caught up in the differences and miss the underlying commonalities. As soon as that happens, you get religious wars.

Go to any big meeting in a corporate environment where issues are being discussed. Or go visit any level of government or the United Nations. As soon as people start arguing over details, they're picking through the ruins of Babel again.

Expectations

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 12:32:45 GMT

You know, it's funny what people think sometimes. They have all these high expectations about how things are going to happen and how other people around them are going to act and all sorts of stuff like that. Thing is, life often doesn't turn out the way that we planned it, folks. Call it fate; call it God's sense of humour. Things just happen that throw a spanner in the works of whatever carefully laid out plans we have.

A few years ago, I was doing some meditating on the nature of anger. Back in those days, I was a seething cauldron of emotion, bubbling away under the surface, just waiting for the trigger that was going to cause me to explode. They were tense times. Even little things used to upset me, stuff that should have really bounced off had I had my screwed on right.

It took me a while, but I came to what was for me a startling revelation: anger is nothing more than the reaction you have when something you had been expecting doesn't come to fruition. I mean, think about it. Something you really want to happen does come out the way you wanted. It doesn't matter if that thing is wishing someone you care about would ring you, or something that you think is blindingly obvious that you think that the government should be doing. If it doesn't happen, you get upset or ticked off, right?

Anger is a natural reaction, friends. It's not a bad emotion, if you're using it the right way. It's there to make us aware that something we planned isn't working out, and to spur us into action to take steps to do something about it. It's an early warning system and when you use it like one, it's a very effective tool.

Thing is, people don't know how to use it that way. It's not something that we're taught how to do. Instead, when something doesn't go the way we want it to, we get the angry signal from our subconscious that we need to do something about the situation. But instead of doing something about it, most of us look at the situation through the original expectation that we had – the one that wasn't fulfilled. But as soon as we do that, we trip that emotional early warning system again, because our expectations aren't being met, and the anger increases. So we go round again, and look at the situation the same way again. And guess what? You just get angrier and angrier.

That's not how it's supposed to work and that was something of a revelation for me. Anger, like I said, is the subconscious' way of saying “hey, you need to do something about this situation, because it's not going the way that you want.” At that point, there's two things you can do. You can either change the way you're approaching the problem, and activate some sort of contingency plan so that you can work your way around the issue, or you change the expectation you have of the desired outcome. The first case is what you need to do if you're in a situation you can change; the latter is what you need to do if you're in one that you can't.

This is not to say that expectations are bad things. Quite the contrary. Unless we are able to believe that the choices we make are going to bring something to fruition, life becomes one great, depressing hopeless mess. If we the only expectations we have are negative ones, that something bad is going to happen to us, then that's all that's going to happen, and strangely enough, we're never going to be let down.

But people have the wrong sorts of expectations. A good expectation is a positive one that gives you a good outcome to focus on and work towards. A bad one has the same outcome, but it specifies precisely how that outcome is going to come about and that's where most people come unstuck. Like I said earlier, life has a habit of throwing obstacles in our paths when we're in pursuit of our goals. If your expectation includes the details of how something is going to pass, then if it doesn't happen that way, then you're going to end up disappointed and bitter, even if you get the end result you're looking for.

What you need to do is just keep your eyes on the end result and don't let things stop you from getting there. If something comes up that blocks one approach, then back up a bit and find another way of getting there. That way, the journey to your end goal becomes an adventure and you'll probably learn a lot more along the way.

Under cover of darkness

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 12:54:49 GMT

What is it about the night that makes people so nervous? You hear stories of people all the time who are afraid of the dark — or at least partially disturbed by it — and who have to have all the lights on all of the time.

Back in ages past, when life was much more of struggle for survival than it is now, being afraid of the dark makes a certain amount of sense. Human eyes are better suited to the ambient light levels during the day and at night we can only see in black and white. That makes it so much easier for predators to sneak in unobserved. When we lived closer to nature, this cautiousness was probably justified.

This evolutionary instinct isn't so necessary any more. In most civilised countries, we can stay safely indoors at night, locked away from the predators in a place where no one's going to disturb us. So why is it that so many people still can't handle the nighttime and they become edgy as soon as the lights go out?

I love the dark; it's my favourite part of the day and I look forward to sunset every night. For me, it is a time of introspection, when the inner world comes out to play. All of my best thinking happens at night. When I'm writing, I love to turn just about all of the lights out and just pace around the house in the dark, listening to music. Ideas just seem to flow better when there are less distractions around.

Night is also normally when people sleep and dreams are a usual part of the nightly sleep cycle. As Carl Jung postulates, dreams give the subconscious mind a chance to process repressed emotions and thoughts, and get them out into the open where they can have an effect on the person's consciousness.

So if the nighttime is when our subconscious mind has greater power over us, are people just afraid of what's going on inside?

Perhaps. It's something to think about anyway.

The Need for Mysteries

Fri, 30 Jul 2004 07:48:11 GMT

Have you ever wondered about some of those famous mysteries,things like the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs or Bigfoot? Are they real, or are they just figments of our collective imagination?

People have spent inordinate amounts of money trying to get to the bottom of these things and science is always looking for ways to explain them away rationally. But sometimes I wonder if there actually is a rational explanation and what it will mean if we actually find out what it is.

As technology develops, people are figuring out more and more about the world around us. For the most part, this is a good thing. We have better medicines, longer life spans and diseases that used to be completely fatal can now be recovered from. The Internet lets us communicate with people on the other side of the planet in real time, allowing solid friendships between people who have never even met. GPS systems let us know where we are in the world to within a few feet, meaning that people never have to be lost again.

But all this advancement does have a cost. Where is the wonder in people's lives these days? All this science and technology has completely removed the need to even think about what lies over the next hill. There's not much in the way of exploring to be done anymore either; just about every square inch of the planet has been mapped by satellite or aerial photography.

The thing is though, not knowing something is what has traditionally driven humans to explore and to dream new dreams. Trying to figure out what might be is actually more enjoyable than knowing what is. Exploring the possibilities of a situation with our imaginations gives us insights into other factors of our lives, and sometimes we can learn some surprising things about ourselves in the process.

I suspect that even if scientists manage to come up with explanations for nearly everything, other things will pop up to provide our imaginations with something to wonder about. UFOs are predominately a product of the twentieth century. Are they super-secret planes, or are they visitors from another planet? Even if the explanation for UFOs is found, I'm sure that something else will take its place.

After all, we're just one small insignificant planet in an awesomely vast universe. Once we figure out how to get off this rock, there's going to be a massive amount of exploration and explanation that needs to be done as we head out from our own solar system.

And I wouldn't be surprised if some of the maps that get produced have the modern equivalent of “here there be monsters!” on them.

Life changes

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 06:49:14 GMT

Sometimes, as we travel through our own personal journies, life can throw some really curly things at us. Most of the time, they're the sorts of things that can cause everything that you held near and dear to our hearts to come crashing down around our ears.

The vast majority of time, it's a normal human reaction to freak out and bitch and moan and generally complain that life's not fair and ask "why is this happening to me?", right?

The thing is, what happens to us in our lives are the direct result of the choices that we make. Sometimes we make good choices and find our lives enriched in way that blows our minds. Sometimes we make some not so good choices and find that we get into trouble. But the thing is, what we get out of any experience — either good or bad — depends entirely on the choices that we make when we're going through them.

Negative emotions like fear and anxiety aren't meant to rule our lives. Instead, they're actually there to wake us up and make us understand that the decisions that we're making aren't the right ones and that we need to change what we're doing if we don't want the end result to be bad.

But it's like I said a while ago &mdash an event, in an of itself, is neither good nor bad. Those values come entirely from the way that we interpret the event itself. It's the way that humans are programmed by our genetic makeup. How we interpret the event is usually a subconscious decision, although sometimes it can be a conscious one.

I'm not saying that disengaging from the emotions you're feeling in a particular situation isn't easy. On the contrary, it's often incredibly difficult when you're caught in the middle of a situation that's freaking you out. The trick is to realise that you're freaking out and trying to understand why. As soon as you can do that, you can normally find another alternative, another way of looking at the event which may not be as bad as you first thought. Sometimes it's a realisation that the changes the event is going to be bring are going to be better in the long term. Othertimes it may be that it's just a sense of relief that a not so good situation is over and you're actually free for the first time in a long time.

When a life change comes along, it's best to not to deny or resist it. It's here, and the sooner you can embrace it and move on, the easier your life is going to get. And really, an easy life is what we're all after, right?

The Legacy of Eden

Thu, 27 May 2004 20:11:17 GMT

A few years ago, I received a copy of Sting's Brand New Day CD. Like most albums, I quickly gravitated to a couple of tracks on it, and in particular, the second track, Desert Rose. As is my wont with such songs, I put it repeat on the stereo and just lay back on the lounge room floor, closed my eyes and soaked up the song's atmosphere.

Now, those of you who are familiar with the song will know, it's quite an atmospheric number. It didn't take me too long before the song had my imagination picturing myself out in the desert at night, staring up at the stars with my arms flung out wide, as the "camera" just circled around and around.

That's when one of the last lines of the song struck me as being particularly significant: it says, "the legacy of Eden haunts us all." That one line intrigued me and got me wondering just what the legacy of Eden really is. It also brought to mind a revelation I had had several years earlier.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the story of the Garden of Eden in the Bible, and in particular the story of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. We often hear of the "original sin" of how Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit that God had specifically forbidden them to eat.

Back in about 1995, I'd been mediating on this story for a while, looking at it not in its literal sense, but seeing if it was worthwhile examining it as a symbolic parable for the state of the human psyche. That was when I had what was for a startling revelation.

You see, if you look at the story before the serpent convinces Eve that it's OK to eat the fruit, both Adam and Eve are blissfully happy in the Garden. If you read on a bit further after they eat the fruit, you find that's when they develop modest and try to cover their nakedness and their imperfections.

The difference is because of the fruit itself: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." (Gen 2:17, emphasis mine). It's the name of the tree that struck me as being the most significant part of the whole story. Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they had no knowledge or even understanding of the concepts of good and evil, but once they ate the fruit, they started to make value distinctions.

A person, when they are completely mentally, physically and spiritually relaxed, is able to roll with the punches easily and to accept whatever life throws their way without being fazed by any of it. They just adapt to the change of circumstances without worrying and just continue on without getting hung up about it. To my mind, this is pretty much indicative of what the mental state portrayed by Adam & Eve before they ate the fruit.

But as soon as you start putting labels on the experiences we have, and classifying them as either "good" or "bad", that's when you can start to run into trouble. You can tend to get blinded by your own beliefs, particularly when you're in the middle of a negative experience, which can prevent you seeing any other way of looking at the situation.

The problem we all have is that the habit of evaluating everything as good or bad is so ingrained into our psyches that it may even be hardwired into the way our brains actually function. Being able to just accept everything that happens is an extraordinarily difficult thing to constantly achieve, and I think that the people who have actually managed to attain that transcendent level of though would normally be looked on as "enlightened." While I'm not sure if it's possible for most of us to ever achieve this in our everyday lives, it is possible to practice conscious awareness of what we're thinking and how we can change our thoughts to change the way that we see the world.

So for me, the "legacy of Eden" isn't so much the way the original sin is normally viewed as disobedience against god, it's the ingrained habit we all have of evaluating everything as either good or evil.

And Sting was right; it does haunt us all.

Memory

Sat, 15 May 2004 23:03:14 GMT

Have you ever stopped to wonder how we remember something? Is it more than just a random connection of neurons firing in our brains, or is there something else to it? And where is all the information stored?

I find mysellf constantly amazed with some of the stuff that I can remember. Somehow, information gets stored away in such a way that I can often bring back to my consciousness almost instantly when I need it.

This fact came to my mind when I was wandering a shopping centre last week. I saw a guy I hadn't seen in probably three or four years. He's not a friend, but I know him from the gaming conventions I used to go to. As soon as I saw him — which literally was just in passing in the supermarket — his name leapt into my mind.

How does that happen? I started thinking about how information can be stored in such way that even when it isn't accessed for several years, it's still available for split second recall as soon as it's needed.

But there's more to it than that. Somehow, I can remeber people's faces and even if I haven't seenthem in many years, I can still remember their names even if they have changed physically in the intervening time.

Trivia's another thing that I find pretty easy to remember. I have no idea how I can remember this tuff, but I do find that certain words trigger recall of bits of information that do come in handy at times.

But there's a lot of stuff that I find very difficult to remember. Shopping lists and small mundane day-to-day stuff just doesn't seem to stick.

Is it just a function of importance? Are the things that we can remember easily tied to the things that we put the most stock in? Sometimes people wander through their whole lives without realising what's most important to them, never connecting the fact that the most important things to them are the ones they have the most mental connections to.

Computer Science in recent years has developed artificial neural networks, computer programs that are created in the same way that the human brain works. Each element in the program takes a number of inputs and depending onthe values coming in makes some sort of decision and sends one or more values to the output. If you string a bunch of these objects together you can get the program making some intelligent decisions all by itself.

But is that all there is to memory? I'm not so sure. It seems to me that if memory was just a function of connections between neurons then eventually all of the connections in a human brain would be filled up and you couldn't remember anything else without forgetting something. But that doesn't seem to be the case. People, with the right prompts, can apparently remember everything that they've ever encountered; it's just a matter of doing enough digging to be able to get the information out again — the right set of inputs if you will.

We've all got a precious thing in our minds, so regardless of the actual mechanics of how it works, let's tip a glass to the mysteries of the human mind and how it can manage to remember stuff for us, whenever we happen to need it.

Abandoned Places

Fri, 14 May 2004 04:26:14 GMT

Why is humanity so fascinated with abandoned places? Throughout history, people have been building structures and eventually abandoning them, leaving them to be swallowed up by nature, often leaving few clues about why these things were built and even fewer about why they were just left to rot.

Just about all over the world you can find examples. In the Middle East you have all of the Egyptian temples and monuments of the Ancient Egyptians. In Iraq there is the famous Rose Temple at Petra. In Pakistan, there are the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley. In Central and South America there are the remains of the once powerful Aztec and Inca empires, with places like Teotihuacan and Machu Picchu. Then you've got the castles and standing stones and the like all through Europe, or the ruins of the Native American populations in the deserts of the Southwestern USA.

Regardless of where these places are, sooner or later, someone stumbles across them and starts to wonder about life there. Excavations begin and scientists start sifting through the remains, trying to piece together what life was really like back when these places were inhabited.

Some people travel halfway round the world to visit the most famous of these places. But normally you don't have to travel that far to come across abandoned structures. Normally, in any decent size city there are places that have been boarded up and left to rot, simply because it isn't cost effective to keep these places open any more. Here in Brisbane, I can think of an abandoned power station and an old disused gaol.

In Canberra, around the corner from where I've been staying there's what's left of the Macquarie Hotel. When I first moved to Canberra, back in 1992, I stayed there for nearly three weeks before I found somewhere more permanent to live. Sometime in the past couple of years, the Macquarie has closed down. There's a chain link fence all around it and nearly all the windows and window frames have been removed. Fallen leaves have started building up in the doorways now that no one is bothering to keep the place clean. As you walk past, there are noises from inside the building as though someone is in there demolishing the place; whether this is a legitimate demolition or just the work of vandals isn't obvious.

There's a certain sadness about the Macquarie now, something that certainly wasn't there when I stayed there 12 years ago. Every time I go past it, I feel like jumping over the fence an exploring the empty corridors. I don't expect to actually find anything, but there's an ambience in an old building that's has an attraction of its own.

Why do people give up these places and just leave them to rot away? Is it just a matter of economics, or do they fall victim to people's desires to always have the new and exciting? Do people stop going to these places because they've found somewhere else to go that makes them feel better? And given that real estate is becoming so expensive in big cities these days, why is that these sites can often be left abandoned for years at a time without anyone bothering to do anything about reclaiming the site and doing something else with it?

Sometimes I wonder if these abandoned places are a metaphor for the dusty corners of our own minds. Each of us has memories and experiences that we've forgotten about. Sometimes it's because those memories are too painful to look at any more and we've walled them up rather than dealing with them; sometimes it's just because we've just moved on and simply forgotten about them. Being in one of these old building can sometimes stir up those memories, which can be useful if you need to deal with something that you've suppressed for a long time.

So the next time you're out and about, keep an eye out for these little abandoned places. They're all over the place, and most of time we don't see them because we don't bother to stop and look. Take the time to soak up the place's ambience and pay attention to the feelings that being there brings up. Perhaps it could be the past speaking to you.

Playtime

Sun, 02 May 2004 03:34:04 GMT

Is there natural value to playing that we as adults have somehow managed to forget? Does it serve some higher function, other than just learning?

Kids seem to figure out play all by themselves. All over the world, young kids will invent games and stuff, playing with whatever they happen to have handy and go at it for hours on end. In the process, they have a lot of fun and happiness, regardless of how crappy the rest of their lives are.

But as adults, we seem to lose that childish spirit and pretty much stop playing games the way we used to when we were kids. If we do play something, it's often some form of sport, or some other board game that often limits the imagination by having a defined set of rules that has to be followed. More and more these days, people are turning to things like video games, which while they are fun to play, don't force us to use our imaginations at all.

Kids don't seem to need to worry about that sort of thing. They're happy to run around, playing soldiers or cowboys and indians or whatever happens to take their fancy at the time. If they have toy cars, they'll build elaborate roads and drive the cars around for ages, often with nothing more important than just driving around.

What purpose do these sorts of childish games serve? I think it's got something to do with developing and using our imaginations. Kids find that creativity comes naturally to them. They'll build stuff out of whatever happens to be around, or they'll invent elaborate stories for their games and everything that goes along with that.

Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, talks about his own experiences with play in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He writes:

As soon as I was through eating, I began playing, and continued to do so until the patients arrived; and if I was finished with my work early enough in the evening, I went back to building. In the course of this activity my thoughts clarified, and I was able to grasp the fantasies whose presence in myself I dimly felt.

Naturally, I thought about the significance of what I was doing, and asked myself, "Now, really, what are you about? You are building a small town, and doing it as if it were a rite!" I had no answer to my question, only the inner certainty that I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning. It released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down.

This sort of thing has been consistent with me, and at any time in my later life when I came up against a blank wall I painted a picture or hewed stone. Each such experience proved to be a rite d'entrée for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it.

I think what Old Carl here is saying is that the value of play is that it seems to unleash something within our own minds that helps us in our day-to-day existence. It may be that it just fires up our own creativity and helps us be more open to different ways of thinking about things. As adults, we stop doing such things and find our minds closed to new ideas and our creativities hampered by rigid thinking and habits, which is usually to our detriment.

So maybe we should all take some time and do what Jung did: get out and start having fun the way we did when we were kids. Throw away the rules and start inventing stuff again, simply for the sheer joy of it. If nothing else, it might help you relax.

The Seventh Principle: PONO - Effectiveness is the Measure of Truth

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 10:34:08 GMT

Truth is a funny thing. It's something that a lot of people can get quite bent out of shape over because they believe that they have to defend the "truth", sometimes to the death. The thing is though, "truth" is a completely relative concept. Whether or not something is true depends entirely on how you look at something.

To give you an example, let's take the rain. Some people would say that rain is good. It provides the plants with moisture that encourages them to grow. It also allows people to have water to drink they have a way of collecting it. So, you could say that "rain is good" is a true statement.

But what happens when it rains torrentially for days on end and the everything is flooded: buildings are destroyed, roads and other infrastructure are ruined, lives are lost. Is rain still good? Most people would argue that, no, this sort of rain isn't that crash hot.

Now, even though this was a particularly inane example, I'm hoping that it shows that the truth of a given statement is only valid when it's taken in comparison to something else. If you look at something in an entirely different way, it might not be true any more.

That's what this principle is all about. If you want to determine if something is true or not, you need to figure out how effective it is in comparison to your frame of reference. If it answers your hypothesis successfully, then you could say it was true. If it doesn't then you could say that it was false.

But even "true" and "false" are relative terms. For the past couple of thousand years, mankind has laboured under the belief that things are either true or false. It has to be one or the other and it can't be both. But this in itself isn't a particularly effective position to take, because there are a whole range of situations where something is partly true and partly false at the same time, when it's measured in a particular way.

Aristotelian logic calls these things "paradoxes" and they tend to break systems based on bivalent logic. But in recent years, there is a new field emerging in computer science — the traditional bastion of bivalent logic — fuzzy logic.

Fuzzy logic says that something can be both true and false at the same time (when compared to a particular premise) and it's the degree of truth that's what's important, not whether it's true or not. Fuzzy logic systems have been able to achieve amazing things that until now have been impossible with traditional programming techniques. Fuzzy logic has been most widely accepted in Asian countries where it is closer to traditional Buddhist and Taoist modes of thinking.

This brings us back to the corollary to the first principle: that all systems are arbitrary. In order for you to measure the truth of something, you need to have some sort of a system or frame of reference to measure it against. But the choice of a measurement system is basically an arbitrary decision at the end of the day. If you arbitrarily choose a completely different frame of reference, then something that was true before might not be so true any more.

This is a bit of a tough concept to come to grips with, because it implies that there is no one Universal Truth. As soon as you define a frame of reference, you're automatically limiting your scope to make something false.

What it does mean is that if something isn't working for you, then it's usually a sign that perhaps your frame of reference isn't being particularly effective at the moment and you might be better served by looking at the situation from another angle. By being flexible and choosing the most appropriate frame of reference in different situations can make your life a whole lot easier.

There are good and bad aspects to everything, regardless of what it is. Change your viewpoint and you change what is and isn't true.

The Sixth Principle: MANA - All Power Comes From Within

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 23:43:14 GMT

A lot of traditions — particularly the New Age ones — have the idea that there is an energy that flows through us all and it can be used to achieve all sorts of things. Some people might call it magic; others might call it the Hand of God.

The principle of Mana is closely related to the first and third principles. If the world is what we think it is and energy flows where attention goes, then Mana is the energy that helps to create the world that we see.

I don't think that it's worth arguing that mana is a measurable energy force like electricity or heat. It may just a case that we haven't actually developed an instrument that you can measure it with yet.

I find it much more useful to think of mana as faith or confidence in something. People who have a lot of faith in their own abilities are able to achieve wonderful things. If someone else is lacking in self-confidence, they will tend to give up before they achieve whatever it was they set out to do.

If you've ever met someone who has a lot of passion for something, you can usually sense the energy that they have. They seem to be almost radiate power and confidence, and it's often infectious. Anthony Robbins is a good example. So is Adolf Hitler, who was a master orator and who's energy could whip a crowd into a frenzy, albeit with a very negative focus.

This is what I think Serge means when he says that all power comes from within. Faith comes from a revelation that something is possible and the more you believe that, the easier it is to achieve something. It's faith that sustains you when things aren't going the way that you want them to.

Faith is not something that can be given; it must come from inside you. Other people might say or do something that triggers that initial realisation that you might be able to do something, but in the end, it's still all up to you.

What often happens though is that people choose to believe what other people tell them. To the individual, it makes more sense to trust someone else than it does to trust their own intuition and instinct. When this happens, you're handing the power to someone else, particularly if the influence is negative. One of the meanings of the Hawaiian word "mana" is, after all, authority.

It's also important to realise that when more that one person believes something — particularly if they all believe it passionately — then it's even more likely that the goal is going to happen. Look at the Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. JFK promised the American people that an American would walk on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Enough people believed that message and got to working together and in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin achieved that goal.

So how do you get this confidence and energy? Simple: through choosing to have it. The more you can convince yourself that something is possible, the more likely it is that that thing will eventually come to pass. Your subconscious mind will eventually put all of the right pieces together in the right order to allow you to do something.

Of course, you're going to run into a whole bunch of other beliefs that are going to make it harder to keep your focus on your goal. Some of those beliefs come from other people who can't accept that you're actually going to achieve what you're setting out to achieve. Some of the limitations are going to come from within your own subconscious mind, as you start to run into your limiting beliefs that have held you back in the past.

The first problem is easier to overcome; be careful who you choose to share your vision with. By listening to the wrong people at the wrong time, you can often strangle your faith before it's had a chance to take root properly. Overcoming your own doubts and negative self beliefs is a lot harder, and that's when it's good to have someone else who is on your side who is willing to offer support and encouragement when you need it the most.