Newsletter - August 20th, 2015 - Volume 2, Issue 10
TSW Posts from the Past Week Links worth Investigating - Could the "sharing economy" help restore spiritual calm? | OnBeing
French company Kering has developed an innovative tool, the Environmental Profit & Loss (E P&L), which makes the invisible impacts of business visible, quantifiable and comparable: "Why? Because the world has changed. We can no longer see resources as infinite or ignore externalities. We needed a new approach, a way to see the reality behind our supply chains, to understand our environmental impact so that we can reduce it. Here we reveal how an EP&L can create value for businesses and the changes it is making to our Group. We are openly sharing the EP&L methodology we developed at Kering so that you too can discover the edge.” As the costs of climate change and its economic impact across various sectors becomes more apparent, this will need to become a requirement of all businesses. "It’s Not Climate Change — It’s Everything Change” is a stunning Visual Essay by author Margaret Atwood. She starts the article by showing three vivid post peak-oil scenarios in which the world (sooner than later) looks dramatically different based upon choices we make today about how we supply and use energy and the overall impact on the environment and our lives. The remainder of the essay goes into detail on how we are exceeding safe operating conditions in many of the earth’s natural systems as a result
of our lifestyle and economic choices and what we could do differently.
- Author and social activitst Duane Elgin provides five different ways of framing the issue of the mass media and the mental health of
civilizations."The American dream celebrated through advertising in today’s mass media is fast becoming the world’s nightmare. The bottom line is this: If we are to build a sustainable and compassionate future, it will require corresponding changes in our social mindset and the messages and images of “success” and the “good life” that are portrayed through the mass media. For the past thirty years, I’ve been exploring the process of “awakening” at a civilizational scale and I have
concluded that the mass media are the primary carriers of our collective “thought stream.” Follow up with 21 Ideas to Free Your Mind from Mass Media
- 3 Lessons IBM’s Watson can teach us about our brain’s biases.
Cognitive computing is transforming the way we work, it also offers a window to the limitations of the mind to help us overcome them.
- The Three Personality Types of Buddhist Psychology, by Sharon Salzberg. "We can
learn a lot about different aspects of ourselves as we explore these personality types — perhaps, most importantly, that these are impersonal tendencies that we don't have to rigidly identify with or have define us. Understanding these conditioned tendencies helps us see the tremendous relativity happening all of the time." - from OnBeing
- Scientists Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed
by Words and Frequencies. THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains
phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.
- How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One: "The more you practice a new thought or behaviour, the better you get at it, just like training a muscle. Paying attention to where you want to go is key. Become
aware of how automated (in terms of thoughts, feelings, and actions) your life really is. Keep what you like, and change the rest. Not all automated brain circuits are negative. Some of them are exactly what you want. Others are not. By withdrawing your attention (i.e. quitting to walk the established path) and thinking about how you would rather be (breaking into new territory and establishing a new path), you dissolve those old highways, bit by bit (they disconnect when focus is
withdrawn). Self-love is when you respond differently to what you’ve practiced all your life."
Proactive Access to Knowledge and Wisdom - Norway is hoping to become the “green battery of Europe” by using its hydropower plants to provide instant extra electricity if production from wind and solar power sources in other countries fade. Without building any new power stations, engineers believe they could use the existing network to instantly boost European supplies and avoid other countries having to switch on fossil fuel plants to make up
shortfalls.
- Consciousness for a New Generation : Introducing the University of Washington-Bothell Minor in Consciousness
- What Is The Significance Of The Number 9? Is there a divine code embedded in our number system? Vortex based mathematics says yes! This eye opening video reveals why the number 9 is perhaps the most
significant number there is.
- The designer of Intel’s first microprocessor, physicist Frederico Faggin, who went to on to start a number of other pivotal companies including Zilog, Cygnet, Synaptics, and Foveon has now turned his prodigious technical talent to reconciling spirituality with science and answering the question - What is Consciousness? Faggin has created a non-profit foundation to drive scientific inquiry into the foundations of consciousness and hopes to use his deep understanding of quantum science to more clearly understand the true nature of reality. This article lays out in a thorough
and clear fashion his understanding of what consciousness is and what science needs to tackle for further understanding.
- “Mentalist philosopher Paul Brunton stated that to arrive at a great certitude is to arrive at great strength. Truth not only clears the mind but also arms the will; it is not only a light to our feet, but is itself a force in the blood. So let us first recognize the truth in order to free ourselves from all present-day fetishes and to open our consciousness for
the great journey.” - Brazilian spiritualist - Jose Trigueirinho
- "Modern design is dominated by consumerism and while consumerism has been great for the U.S. economy it has also been bad for the planet and for the human psyche. If design were primarily a noble profession centered on the progress of humanity designers would worship Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller
instead of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. But we don't. Most design students today don't know either of that first pair, which makes me very sad. Most designers today, especially in the tech world, aren't making the world any better at all. They are paid very well to make shiny things that attempt to solve largely superficial first world problems of extreme convenience. Your role as
a designer is to leave the world in a better state than you found it. You have a responsibility to design work that helps move humanity forward and helps us, as a species, to not only enjoy our time on Earth, but to evolve.”-author and social commentator Scott
Berkun
"I define art as having nothing at all to do with painting. Art is a human act, a generous contribution, something that might not work, and it is intended to change the recipient for the better, often causing a connection to happen. Five elements that are difficult to find and worth seeking out. Human, generous, risky, change and connection. You can
be perfect or you can make art. You can keep track of what you get in return, or you can make art. You can enjoy the status quo, or you can make art. The most difficult part might be in choosing whether you want to make art at all, and committing to what it requires of you.” - Seth Godin
- "We’re buying less stuff, in part, because we have less money.
Consumer spending hasn’t returned since pre-recession rates in many categories. But there’s also a growing exasperation with how owning things, especially things we don’t need, affects our quality of life. The stuff-effort equation just doesn’t add up. We have to work harder, longer, to afford more stuff, and then spend time finding that stuff we’ve worked so hard to afford. The less durable the stuff, the faster we have to run on the wheel of earning and spending, accumulating
and purging. It turns out that stuff requires maintenance and maintenance requires time, and our time is one of our most precious resources. If we don’t do the maintenance, we trash our stuff, which is rapidly killing our other most precious resource: the environment.” - journalist Courtney Martin writing in OnBeing
- "Psychologist Carl Jung said that schizophrenia is a condition where “the dream becomes the reality.” Has the American dream of a consumerist lifestyle become our primary reality? Is this manufactured reality increasingly out of touch with the reality of nature and our soulful existence? Are we building the foundation of our global consciousness literally upon a schizophrenic base? Are we implanting a deep, and unnecessary, conflict into the
structure of our collective psyche? The American people (and much of the rest of the world exposed to American television) are being placed in an impossible double-bind: the mass media that dominate our consciousness tell us to buy ever more while our ecological concern for the planet inclines us to consume ever less. We are literally creating a schizophrenic civilization that is divided against itself.” - author and media activist Duane Elgin writing in
his article “Transforming Mass Media and the Social Mind"
- “Consumerism was on the rise in America, but still in its infancy, when Thorstein Veblen coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in the late nineteenth century. Wars and the Great Depression kept it in check, but it sprang into
its adolescence in the 1950’s. That’s when the economist and marketer Victor Lebow wrote his article “Price Compeition in 1955” in the Journal of Retailing. With stunning frankness, Lebow laid out this vision for the shopper society: ‘Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions,
in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today [is] expressed in consumptive patterns.’” - from Enough is Enough by Rob Dietz *As the saying goes, the rest is history...
- "The mind is like a parachute - it works only when it is
open." - Unknown
Question to Ponder for the Week If you could re-design capitalism to work better for more people, what changes would you make?
I call this shot “The Unexpected Visitor”. Circa 2008 from a trip to San Francisco.
Have a Great Week, Stay Positive, and Proactively Choose Your Thoughts to Create Your Desired Reality.
Follow:
|
You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up at www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com |
|
|
|
