One lesson regarding life has repeatedly impressed itself upon me lately: the chains of entanglements society deliberately imposes upon us from birth and increasingly ensnares us in throughout our lives are systemic manifestations of "ego" and "death." These snares of ego-dominated society rob us of our life energy and freedom to live in peace, joy, and harmony.
From birth we are told who we are and what we are supposed to be and do as a person. We are given a name we did not choose for ourself before we were even born; a government we literally were incapable of consenting to being ruled by prints out a fancy piece of paper and generates a random number locking in and imposing that false ego-identity for the rest of our life; we go through childhood being bombarded by other people's ideas about what we should believe and how we should behave, robbing us of our own identity; public education gives us a sanitized, spoon-fed notion of what the world is like, suffocates our creativity and imagination, denies us the knowledge of how to think critically, and robs us of our conscience; as we go about our lives, our mistakes follow and haunt us because society tracks and labels everything you do, judges you for it, and never allows you to live beyond it once you learn from it and make amends (our mistakes are supposed to guide us, not imprison us); and, as adults, the need for money enslaves us into committing our invaluably precious time to corporate machinations that are destroying the planet and our fellow human beings, robbing us of our life-force and destabilizing our families and communities in the process.
Life and death are a dancing pair of dualities; they do indeed need one another. Yet, what we see in the delusional abstract layer of conceptualization humanity has imposed on its self is grossly out of balance with the ground layer of physical reality, dangerously favoring egotistical falsehoods and insatiable desires to a degree that threatens the totality of Life on this planet, and continues to cause immense and unnecessary suffering upon billions of souls. Our collective ego has become completely out of control, behaving like a mental parasite on a global scale. Whenever a duality is so out of balance, it is inevitably subject to a self-instigated correction that restores balance – this is karma (cause-and-effect within a dynamic system). In this case, a karmic correction will mean a mass-extinction of the human race.
(Transhumanism and the "technology singularity," which will inevitably lead to humanity becoming a Borg-like hive mind in which individuality is destroyed, are an unattainable mirage due to the systemic failures and societal decay exponentially increasing in parallel with technological advancement. We do not have the maturity and wisdom as a species to reach this evolutionary threshold without destroying ourselves one way or the other. Besides do we really want to lose our individuality and the creative power of diversity in the process of collective integration?)
The extreme manifestations of our collective ego, such as global capitalism (built upon a sociopathic ponzi banking scheme writ large), xenophobic nationalism, and ego-driven populist individualism are a "clear and present danger" to the People of the world, and the life-support systems of Earth which we all depend upon to sustain us. As I have increasingly urged myself, and urge all of you here and now to consider, we must have the courage and determination to dissolve the societally imposed entanglements that currently siphon our individual life-force into systems that are destroying humanity and the Earth. We must withdraw our consent to be subjects of corrupt socioeconomic systems. We must let go of all entanglements that no longer serve our best interests. We must relinquish our attachments to ideas that misguide as from seeing the "truth of what is." We must redirect our life-force, or precious time, to constructing a new and novel socioeconomic paradigm that is life-affirming and sustainable.
The infinite growth paradigm of our global culture has crashed into the finite limits of our world. No matter how hard we try, we will only serve to compound the problem (and accelerate our own destruction) if we continue to rely on and feed into the old socioeconomic order. It cannot be saved; it must be allowed to die conscientiously and in deliberate fashion, or we will all die with it. Only by collectively walking in balance and wisdom, built on a solid ground of life-sustaining values and systems, can we safely proceed in our technological advancements and noble ego-drive to explore and understand the universe, without destroying ourselves in the process.
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
March 28, 2017
January 12, 2015
Highlights of the History of Astronomy and the Basics of Solar System Astronomy
Historical:
- The ancient Babylonians kept vast written records of astronomical data.
- Since the 7th century B.C., the Chinese kept highly accurate records of astronomical data.
- Plato and Aristotle formulated a geocentric model of the solar system describing the Earth as the center, with the sun and other planets revolving around the Earth in perfect circular orbits and the planets simultaneously having epicyclical orbits about their solar orbits to explain "retrograde motion" of the planets observed from Earth.
- In the 2nd century B.C., Hipparchus improved the geocentric model slightly, made the first (relatively) precise observations of stars, and developed the apparent magnitude scale measuring the apparent brightness of a star on a scale of 1 (brightest) to 6 (faintest).
- In the 3rd century B.C., Aristarchus was the first to propose a heliocentric model of the solar system (in which the sun is the center, and the planets revolve around the sun) but his work was largely ignored.
- Ptolemy's sophisticated and far more detailed improvement on the geocentric model was so successful that it remained the near-universally accepted model of the solar system until the Renaissance.
- During the Renaissance, Copernicus developed a detailed heliocentric model of the solar system utilizing a great deal of mathematics that successfully predicted the astronomical patterns of solar-body movements, and whose work was built upon by Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler.
- Galileo, who developed the first relatively powerful telescope of the time, was the "father" of observational astronomy, and through his telescopically-collected observations discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter, that the moon had craters, the sun had "sunspots" (which he happened to correctly explain the nature of), observed that Venus (from the perspective of Earth) went through luminary phases similar to the moon, and used his observational evidence to directly support the validity of the heliocentric model.
- Later, Kepler used the couple decades of accurate solar observational data collected by Tycho Brahe and his own intellectual conceptual insights to develop his three law's of planetary motion (1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci, 2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time, 3. The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit).
- Then came along Isaac Newton, who developed the "universal law of gravitation," which very precisely explained mathematically the heliocentric model movements of solar-bodies and made extremely accurate predictions for the future motions and positions of solar-bodies.
Non-Historical:
- Only approximately a maximum of 2,000 stars are visible with the naked eye.
- The Earth's average diameter is 7,918 miles.
- The solar system has a diameter of approximately 9 trillion miles.
- 1 lightyear ≈ 5.88 trillion miles.
- The radius of the observable universe is approximately 14 billion lightyears.
- The apparent encompassing sphere of the heavens about the Earth is called the "celestial sphere."
- 88 constellations are officially recognized by the IAU; that star patterns not formally considered constellations are called "asterisms."
- The apparent path of the sun across the celestial sphere is called the "ecliptic."
- Modern astronomers use a "photometer" and an apparent brightness scale that ranges from -30 to +31? (+31 was assigned to the faintest object detected by the Hubble telescope) {each increment = a ratio of 2.5 from the next increment in degree of brightness}, the Sun measures -26.75 on this scale, and the next brightest star, Sirius, measures in at -1.44.
- Astronomers use "declination" (the angular measure above or below the celestial equator) and "right ascension" (angular measure in units of "hour" {1 hour = 1.5°} relative to the "celestial meridian" (0° in longitude) to define the location of astronomical objects.
- The point directly above (90° perpendicular to the horizon at your current location) is called the 'zenith.'
- A star is said to "culminate" (reaches its highest altitude in the sky) when it is on the celestial meridian.
- The daily paths of stars around the celestial axis are called "diurnal circles."
- To find the "North Star," Polaris, you can use the 'pointer' stars, Dubhe and Merak (which are at the end of the 'bowl' of the Big Dipper).
- The stars that never 'set' below the celestial horizon in the Northern/Southern hemisphere are called "North (or) South circumpolar stars" respectively.
- The band about 16° wide around the sky centered on the 'ecliptic' is called the 'zodiac,' which ancient astrologers divided into 12 constellations, or "signs," each taken at 30° increments of longitude.
- The Earth’s geographical equator remains tilted at about 23.4-23.5° to its orbital plane about the sun.
- The 'vernal equinox,' which occurs about March 20, is the Sun’s position as it crosses the celestial equator going north and is the point on the celestial sphere chosen to be the 0h measure of right ascension.
- The 'autumnal equinox,' which occurs about September 23, is the Sun’s position as it crosses the celestial equator going south.
- During the equinoxes, day and night are equal in length.
- The 'summer solstice,' which occurs about June 21, and the 'winter solstice,' which occurs about December 21, are the most northern and most southern positions of the Sun during the year in the northern hemisphere, and that at these times we have the longest and shortest days, respectively, in the northern hemisphere.
- There are two measures of "day": the 'solar day' (measuring the time interval of Earth’s rotation using the Sun for reference) and the 'sidereal day' (measuring the time interval of Earth’s rotation using the stars for reference).
- A sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds long, requiring the use of leap-years and leap-seconds.
- The Earth’s axis of rotation shifts extremely slowly around a imaginary 'cone' in space once about every 25,800 years (which is called "precession") and is caused mainly by the tug of the gravity of the Sun and Moon on Earth’s equatorial bulge.
- The Arctic Circle and Antarctic Circle mark the southernmost and northernmost latitude, respectively, at which the sun can remain continuously above or below the horizon for 24 hours (at the June solstice and December solstice respectively).
- The Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are the northern and southern latitudes, respectively, at which the sun reaches zenith only one time a year.
January 11, 2015
Wisdom Concerning the 'Self' (from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds)
[The following quote's are some of the ones that were compiled by Maria Popova in her article on brainpickings.org :]
Mindfulness in the Present Moment
"I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" — Henry David Thoreau ('Walking' - 1861)
"On the Shortness of Life" by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC – AD 65)
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it."
[…]
"You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!"
[…]
"Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
Knowing Who You Are
"There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out."
[…]
"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that 'I myself' is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. 'I came into this world.' 'You must face reality.' 'The conquest of nature.'
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin." — Alan Watts ('The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are' - 1966)
The 'Fixed Mindset' vs. the 'Growth Mindset'
"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
[…]
"There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training." — Carol Dweck ('Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' - 2006)
Never Cease to Ask Questions and Pursue Answers About the Unknown
"By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded…
While our thirst for knowledge may be unquenchable because of the immensity of the unknown, the activity itself leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of its world. The loss of this accumulation and of the technical expertise required to conserve and increase it inevitably spells the end of this particular world." — Hannah Arendt ('The Life of the Mind' - 1978)
On 'Perfectionism'
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
[…]
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing." — Anne Lamott ('Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life' - 1995)
On Evaluating the Validity and Usefulness of a New Idea
"The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method."
[…]
"1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result." — Carl Sagan (' The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' - 1996)
Get Lost to Find Yourself
"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"
[…]
"How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us."
[…]
"To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost." — Rebecca Solnit ('A Field Guide to Getting Lost' - 2005)
Be Like Water
"After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the birds flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."
[…]
"Water is so fine that it is impossible to grasp a handful of it; strike it, yet it does not suffer hurt; stab it, and it is not wounded; sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it. When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power to split the earth itself. When frozen it crystallizes into a mighty rock. First it is turbulent like Niagara Falls, and then calm like a still pond, fearful like a torrent, and refreshing like a spring on a hot summer’s day." — Bruce Lee ('Bruce Lee: Artist of Life' - 1999)
Making 'Good' Out of 'Evils'
"Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. Our greed, fear and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets, who are ourselves, to castigate our priests, who are ourselves. The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody, torturous Inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we’ve just been reminded of."
[…]
"To show you … how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, fifty sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allen Poe, all the poetry — never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling — I mean, it was catholic kind of reading, and catholic kind of storing."
[…]
"Out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness… And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself."
[…]
"We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable." — Maya Angelou (Documentary: 'Facing Evil with Maya Angelou' - 1988)
Living by Your Own Standards (the Basis for 'Happiness')
"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people."
[…]
"Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: ‘A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.’"
[…]
"It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being." — Eleanor Roosevelt ('You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life' - 1960)
Mindfulness in the Present Moment
"I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is — I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" — Henry David Thoreau ('Walking' - 1861)
"On the Shortness of Life" by Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC – AD 65)
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it."
[…]
"You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!"
[…]
"Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
Knowing Who You Are
"There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out."
[…]
"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that 'I myself' is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. 'I came into this world.' 'You must face reality.' 'The conquest of nature.'
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin." — Alan Watts ('The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are' - 1966)
The 'Fixed Mindset' vs. the 'Growth Mindset'
"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
[…]
"There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training." — Carol Dweck ('Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' - 2006)
Never Cease to Ask Questions and Pursue Answers About the Unknown
"By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded…
While our thirst for knowledge may be unquenchable because of the immensity of the unknown, the activity itself leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of its world. The loss of this accumulation and of the technical expertise required to conserve and increase it inevitably spells the end of this particular world." — Hannah Arendt ('The Life of the Mind' - 1978)
On 'Perfectionism'
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.
[…]
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing." — Anne Lamott ('Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life' - 1995)
On Evaluating the Validity and Usefulness of a New Idea
"The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method."
[…]
"1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result." — Carl Sagan (' The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark' - 1996)
Get Lost to Find Yourself
"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"
[…]
"How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us."
[…]
"To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost." — Rebecca Solnit ('A Field Guide to Getting Lost' - 2005)
Be Like Water
"After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the birds flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached — not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature."
[…]
"Water is so fine that it is impossible to grasp a handful of it; strike it, yet it does not suffer hurt; stab it, and it is not wounded; sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it. When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power to split the earth itself. When frozen it crystallizes into a mighty rock. First it is turbulent like Niagara Falls, and then calm like a still pond, fearful like a torrent, and refreshing like a spring on a hot summer’s day." — Bruce Lee ('Bruce Lee: Artist of Life' - 1999)
Making 'Good' Out of 'Evils'
"Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. Our greed, fear and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets, who are ourselves, to castigate our priests, who are ourselves. The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody, torturous Inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we’ve just been reminded of."
[…]
"To show you … how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, fifty sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allen Poe, all the poetry — never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling — I mean, it was catholic kind of reading, and catholic kind of storing."
[…]
"Out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness… And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself."
[…]
"We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable." — Maya Angelou (Documentary: 'Facing Evil with Maya Angelou' - 1988)
Living by Your Own Standards (the Basis for 'Happiness')
"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people."
[…]
"Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: ‘A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.’"
[…]
"It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being." — Eleanor Roosevelt ('You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life' - 1960)
January 10, 2015
Homosexual Equality (the Lessons of History & Clarifying the Concepts of "Marriage")
[Originally Posted 9/24/09; edited and expanded 1/10/15]
Despite being 100% heterosexual, I find choosing to support homosexuals having equality of social status, as well as rights and protections provided under the rule of law, in amazingly simple decision to reach given the constitution and lessons provided by history. I realize large social changes take time, but how can so many of us still be so blind to the lessons of the past? It wasn't so long ago in the annals of world history that the majority of men struggled vehemently to deny women equal rights to own property and participate in the voting process of democracies. Not so long ago the majority of whites in this country so passionately fought, either through force or active bigotry, to deny blacks genuinely-equal social status and legal rights. And now, our society once again finds itself socially polarized, this time on the topic of homosexual equality. Well, let us be honest with ourselves. As past generations had their social revolutions, this generation is, too, experiencing a social revolution, and I would argue success in overthrowing the current social status-quo with regards to granting homosexuals equal social status and legal rights is as every bit as inevitable as the successes hard fought for by blacks and women over the last couple hundred years.
I was told a story recently about a black man who was obliviously broadcasting his side of a cellphone conversation about homosexuals to a small crowd sitting nearby him. Needless to say, his opinion of homosexuals was passionate, egregiously unfavorable, and, quite simply, astoundingly hypocritical. Past generations of this man's family, as recently as his parents undoubtedly, poured their blood, sweet, and tears into fighting and struggling against that very same prejudicial attitude towards blacks—simply because they were "different" in some relatively benign way compared to the majority. Nevertheless, there he was, as blind to the absurdity of his irrational attitudes towards homosexuals as whites' attitudes had been towards his ancestors. It just goes to show that personal self-awareness and rational reasoning can be absent in anyone, even someone whose heritage should have made him realize what a hypocrite he was being that day.
We all must always be on guard against and actively fight against prejudice and hatred, especially within ourselves. We each harbor a degree of stereotypical thought processes in our daily lives, usually without being consciously aware of its subconscious influence on our thinking and behavior, and occasionally have what would be deemed by our own self to be 'undesirable' emotional responses to certain circumstances we encounter. To provide a relatively clear-cut example: if you were a middle- or upper-class white, who genuinely believes they do not have a racist "bone in their body" thanks to a non-racist upbringing, walking through your nice, mostly-white family suburban neighborhood at dusk and see a young African-American male heading towards you on the sidewalk wearing a hoodie that hides all but part of his face and sagging, baggy jeans, there is a really good chance you are going to have an instinctually negative emotional reaction upon first recognition of those circumstances, such as a degree of anxiety, even though your conscious belief system reminds you seconds later that you should not judge that person and their potential threat to you based on a stereotype; despite this rational reminder you may continue to feel tense until you pass him without incident. This example was constructed to maximize the understanding of the general concepts, but countless, less clear-cut real life examples exist in practically everyone's daily life in which the brain is naturally, inherently, constantly interpreting and evaluating the things in its environment at a subconscious level, using probability as its guide in prioritizing how it evaluates what things should receive what percentage of the finite resource of one's attentive awareness at that moment, and judges what the safest instinctual interpretations of the things going on in that person's environment are. Because of the way the brain automatically processes information about its environment based on probabilities, which are determined by patterns recognized in past life experiences and engrained "background information"/knowledge, stereotypes we know about, whether we consciously object to stereotyping or not, factor into how the brain instinctively reacts to its environment. To a large extent, instinctual responses are unavoidable at the moment they occur, and can only be overridden through conscious evaluation of a given situation using good reasoning. Thus, the path towards social prosperity and harmony, which benefits us all in the end, must begin with a thorough, objective self-evaluation of the quality of one's own rational and moral reasoning and knowledge-base which forms one's established worldview, belief systems, and values.
We need to recognize that marriage under the law and marriage 'under God' need not, and should not, be considered one and the same thing in this debate. I myself was legally married in a court of law to my wife almost five years before we married through the church. The argument by the majority of religious people, who improperly entwine the concepts of legal marriage with "spiritual" marriage, and, in so doing, believe that allowing such legal marriages some how sullies the 'sanctity of marriage' ("sanctity" being a term that, by definition, can only be associated with religious marriage 'under God'), that legal marriage should be prohibited for homosexuals, despite the fact that our constitution specifies the necessity of recognizing a 'separation of church and state,' is simply untenable. Measuring how sanctimonious a marriage is has everything to do with how faithful, loving, and selfless the behavior of the two partners towards one another is, and has nothing to do with what is in their underwear—in similar fashion to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s belief that a person should not be judged based on the color of their skin, but "by the content of their character." There is no doubt in my mind that there are countless homosexual couples whose behavior is far more laudable than many heterosexual couples. Let us leave the religious side of the debate to the religious establishments and stop letting conservative religious arguments unconstitutionally influence our government from obeying its own constitutionally established protections. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution states, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This constitutional amendment did not happen by accident. It was one of the most consequential and direct results of the Civil War and the overall social struggle to restore the human dignity of, and establish legal rights and protections for, blacks. It will take time but it is certain that the 14th Amendment, and the same kind of revolutionary social attitude that gave birth to it that exists today, will earn homosexuals equal social status and protection under the law across this country in the years to come.
[The prediction I made nearly five and half years ago, when I first published this post, concerning the social progress that would occur to provide for equal social status and application of law for homosexuals turned out to be correct, though the good fight against prejudice continues....]
Despite being 100% heterosexual, I find choosing to support homosexuals having equality of social status, as well as rights and protections provided under the rule of law, in amazingly simple decision to reach given the constitution and lessons provided by history. I realize large social changes take time, but how can so many of us still be so blind to the lessons of the past? It wasn't so long ago in the annals of world history that the majority of men struggled vehemently to deny women equal rights to own property and participate in the voting process of democracies. Not so long ago the majority of whites in this country so passionately fought, either through force or active bigotry, to deny blacks genuinely-equal social status and legal rights. And now, our society once again finds itself socially polarized, this time on the topic of homosexual equality. Well, let us be honest with ourselves. As past generations had their social revolutions, this generation is, too, experiencing a social revolution, and I would argue success in overthrowing the current social status-quo with regards to granting homosexuals equal social status and legal rights is as every bit as inevitable as the successes hard fought for by blacks and women over the last couple hundred years.
I was told a story recently about a black man who was obliviously broadcasting his side of a cellphone conversation about homosexuals to a small crowd sitting nearby him. Needless to say, his opinion of homosexuals was passionate, egregiously unfavorable, and, quite simply, astoundingly hypocritical. Past generations of this man's family, as recently as his parents undoubtedly, poured their blood, sweet, and tears into fighting and struggling against that very same prejudicial attitude towards blacks—simply because they were "different" in some relatively benign way compared to the majority. Nevertheless, there he was, as blind to the absurdity of his irrational attitudes towards homosexuals as whites' attitudes had been towards his ancestors. It just goes to show that personal self-awareness and rational reasoning can be absent in anyone, even someone whose heritage should have made him realize what a hypocrite he was being that day.
We all must always be on guard against and actively fight against prejudice and hatred, especially within ourselves. We each harbor a degree of stereotypical thought processes in our daily lives, usually without being consciously aware of its subconscious influence on our thinking and behavior, and occasionally have what would be deemed by our own self to be 'undesirable' emotional responses to certain circumstances we encounter. To provide a relatively clear-cut example: if you were a middle- or upper-class white, who genuinely believes they do not have a racist "bone in their body" thanks to a non-racist upbringing, walking through your nice, mostly-white family suburban neighborhood at dusk and see a young African-American male heading towards you on the sidewalk wearing a hoodie that hides all but part of his face and sagging, baggy jeans, there is a really good chance you are going to have an instinctually negative emotional reaction upon first recognition of those circumstances, such as a degree of anxiety, even though your conscious belief system reminds you seconds later that you should not judge that person and their potential threat to you based on a stereotype; despite this rational reminder you may continue to feel tense until you pass him without incident. This example was constructed to maximize the understanding of the general concepts, but countless, less clear-cut real life examples exist in practically everyone's daily life in which the brain is naturally, inherently, constantly interpreting and evaluating the things in its environment at a subconscious level, using probability as its guide in prioritizing how it evaluates what things should receive what percentage of the finite resource of one's attentive awareness at that moment, and judges what the safest instinctual interpretations of the things going on in that person's environment are. Because of the way the brain automatically processes information about its environment based on probabilities, which are determined by patterns recognized in past life experiences and engrained "background information"/knowledge, stereotypes we know about, whether we consciously object to stereotyping or not, factor into how the brain instinctively reacts to its environment. To a large extent, instinctual responses are unavoidable at the moment they occur, and can only be overridden through conscious evaluation of a given situation using good reasoning. Thus, the path towards social prosperity and harmony, which benefits us all in the end, must begin with a thorough, objective self-evaluation of the quality of one's own rational and moral reasoning and knowledge-base which forms one's established worldview, belief systems, and values.
We need to recognize that marriage under the law and marriage 'under God' need not, and should not, be considered one and the same thing in this debate. I myself was legally married in a court of law to my wife almost five years before we married through the church. The argument by the majority of religious people, who improperly entwine the concepts of legal marriage with "spiritual" marriage, and, in so doing, believe that allowing such legal marriages some how sullies the 'sanctity of marriage' ("sanctity" being a term that, by definition, can only be associated with religious marriage 'under God'), that legal marriage should be prohibited for homosexuals, despite the fact that our constitution specifies the necessity of recognizing a 'separation of church and state,' is simply untenable. Measuring how sanctimonious a marriage is has everything to do with how faithful, loving, and selfless the behavior of the two partners towards one another is, and has nothing to do with what is in their underwear—in similar fashion to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s belief that a person should not be judged based on the color of their skin, but "by the content of their character." There is no doubt in my mind that there are countless homosexual couples whose behavior is far more laudable than many heterosexual couples. Let us leave the religious side of the debate to the religious establishments and stop letting conservative religious arguments unconstitutionally influence our government from obeying its own constitutionally established protections. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution states, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This constitutional amendment did not happen by accident. It was one of the most consequential and direct results of the Civil War and the overall social struggle to restore the human dignity of, and establish legal rights and protections for, blacks. It will take time but it is certain that the 14th Amendment, and the same kind of revolutionary social attitude that gave birth to it that exists today, will earn homosexuals equal social status and protection under the law across this country in the years to come.
[The prediction I made nearly five and half years ago, when I first published this post, concerning the social progress that would occur to provide for equal social status and application of law for homosexuals turned out to be correct, though the good fight against prejudice continues....]
January 4, 2015
Press Release & Background Info. on My Album
First: a mass, global press release for my music album and my record label has been published to over 500+ media and industry outlets, as well as the blogger-sphere and social media which you can check out here!
Second:
[Transcript from my Kickstarter project video presentation.]
"Hello Everyone!
My name is Matthew Morgan, though I usually go by Matt, and I am a 30 year old partially-disabled army combat veteran who is currently nearing completion of my college degree. There is a major abundance of detailed information about me on my Kickstarter project page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wisefromwithin/wise-trip-eptm-album-completion) and especially my blog pages, so I won't bother covering all of that here....
On the internet and when referred to as a music producer I go by the alias "WiseFromWithin." This alias is simply a reminder to myself and others that true wisdom concerning anything (even right down to the very nature of existence itself) must be rooted and developed forth, first, from a genuine and deep understanding of 'thyself.'
I am seeking your support in investing in the completion of what is my debut album as a music producer, called Wise 'Trip' EP, which is currently in the "demo" stage. There is plenty of detail about my project on the project's pages, including where to go to listen to all of the songs, but I'll give you some background information on the concepts and meaning behind the album itself and a couple of the songs--information that you will not find anywhere else.
Both in the album's title and the 1st track's title, Destiny 'Trip,' the word "trip" has a double meaning, which is why it is in single quotes. It both means a trip, as in a journey, and also a "trip," as in a mental high that the music is intended to induce in the listener. The album concept is to explore the different, important aspects of human life through the use of music that serves as accurate metaphors for conveying those ideas in a way that is more emotionally engaging, more intuitively understandable, and more enveloping of consciousness for the listener, than could be achieved through words.
Destiny 'Trip' is a song that does not follow a standard musical song structure, as most of the songs on the album do not. Destiny 'Trip' is structured musically to be a metaphor for the human lifespan, with each of its stages represented in the proper, relative proportions. It begins with early childhood (which is the piano intro). It suddenly builds up, transitioning with a crescendo into the song section representing the phase of later childhood and adolescence.
The point in the song where there is only a duet of intertwining countermelodies, represents the transition in a person's life between adolescence and adulthood--a time when they retain their excitement for life, but, as a person, feel considerable uncertainty about who they are, what direction their life should head in, and also is the time when the person often feels alone in terms of not being able to understand their destiny through what advice others have to offer them--only they, them self, can figure all of that out use their intellectual conflict plays itself out (represented by the two countermelodies). When the rest of the music reenters, the person is a young adult, still filled with a sense of discovery and excitement about the world around them and how they are just beginning to understand how they fit in to it all.
When the song reaches the point where it modulates to a new key, speeds up, and is beginning to fill with even more energy--this represents the stage in a person's life when, who they are as a person, is stabilizing and settling into an identity the person at least partially understands. At the same time, the person finally has some degree of grasp on what meaning and purpose they want their life to have--in other words, what their destiny is; and they move forward with the next phase of their life that roughly spans between their late 20's and late 50's (the phase in one's life that begins musically at the point in the song when the "bridge" transition ends with the energetic drums entering and landing in the next section of the song).
At this point in a person's life, they are fairly confident in themselves and what they want out of life, and they also are applying--through their actions, not just their words--the values and ideals they identify with in most everything they do. The heightened energy and slight swagger of the music in this section intends to represent these ideas.
Finally, in the music (with the moderately loud atmospheric splash and instant drop in tempo), as in a person's life, a point of "old age" is reached, where everything seems to suddenly slow down while the person still retains a sense of dignity and identity that they had during the previous phase of their life. As the song ends, like the end of one's life, their is a last moment of uplifting melody--the last beats of the heart. As the person's heart, and the music, sounds its final note and their breath slips away, so too does the music, gently and brightly fading into the rest of the universe....
The piano melody that can be heard repeating throughout the song is like a spiritual "marker" that uniquely identifies that particular person's consciousness, regardless of the countless changes it goes through throughout their life. Destiny 'Trip' is, overall, positive in its portrayal of the human life, not to ignore the negative realities and experiences that exist in real life, but because the whole purpose of my music is to uplift and inspire the listener to make the most of their life in the most positively-minded way possible--in part by reminding them of the common experience all humans have in life and in death. Keeping in mind that death as a part of life for us all helps a person realize that one day, all that will remain of them is their legacy--the memories others have of them and the influences they had on the world around them during their life, which will reverberate throughout all eternity. Keeping this truth in mind motivates a person to make better, more positive choices in how they live their life and in how they interact with others and the world around them.
The last song I will explain here, to further show that every song on the album has a strong conceptual basis that drives each songs' theme and motifs, is "A Brief History of Memory." Even though this is one of the songs I wish to expand on in terms of its length, the theme and motifs, which are already represented in the song, are based on the concept of a person, who could be anyone, and probably has been all of us at some point in our lives, who is quietly reflecting back on the memories of their life history. The positive and negative emotions associated with each of those memories is heard in the harmonies of the first, quiet section of the piece. As the song transitions into the second section, the music is composed to convey the sense of wonder, mystery, and uncertainty that that same person feels as they try to make sense of how those memories relate to their life in the present and how those memories should influence the way they move forward with their life in the future.
If you would like to learn similar background information on the other songs, you can be rewarded with a 30 or 60 minute phone conversation with me (among other incentives), depending on your donation amount. Be sure to check out all of the incentives; they are all good rewards for your support, regardless of the amount you choose to donate. The truth is, even the smallest investment on your part will make a big difference and will be greatly appreciated.
I sincerely thank you for your time and careful consideration. I know there is a lot of information to digest about myself, my music, and my record label. It's up to you how deep you want to go into the details of these things, but if you choose to dig deep, you won't be disappointed--I am an "open book" as they say, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I have always been a kind, loving, considerate person who is grateful for every achievement and contribution I have been able to make to benefit my fellow human brothers and sisters. I offer you all my best wishes. ONE LOVE..."
Second:
[Transcript from my Kickstarter project video presentation.]
"Hello Everyone!
My name is Matthew Morgan, though I usually go by Matt, and I am a 30 year old partially-disabled army combat veteran who is currently nearing completion of my college degree. There is a major abundance of detailed information about me on my Kickstarter project page (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wisefromwithin/wise-trip-eptm-album-completion) and especially my blog pages, so I won't bother covering all of that here....
On the internet and when referred to as a music producer I go by the alias "WiseFromWithin." This alias is simply a reminder to myself and others that true wisdom concerning anything (even right down to the very nature of existence itself) must be rooted and developed forth, first, from a genuine and deep understanding of 'thyself.'
I am seeking your support in investing in the completion of what is my debut album as a music producer, called Wise 'Trip' EP, which is currently in the "demo" stage. There is plenty of detail about my project on the project's pages, including where to go to listen to all of the songs, but I'll give you some background information on the concepts and meaning behind the album itself and a couple of the songs--information that you will not find anywhere else.
Both in the album's title and the 1st track's title, Destiny 'Trip,' the word "trip" has a double meaning, which is why it is in single quotes. It both means a trip, as in a journey, and also a "trip," as in a mental high that the music is intended to induce in the listener. The album concept is to explore the different, important aspects of human life through the use of music that serves as accurate metaphors for conveying those ideas in a way that is more emotionally engaging, more intuitively understandable, and more enveloping of consciousness for the listener, than could be achieved through words.
Destiny 'Trip' is a song that does not follow a standard musical song structure, as most of the songs on the album do not. Destiny 'Trip' is structured musically to be a metaphor for the human lifespan, with each of its stages represented in the proper, relative proportions. It begins with early childhood (which is the piano intro). It suddenly builds up, transitioning with a crescendo into the song section representing the phase of later childhood and adolescence.
The point in the song where there is only a duet of intertwining countermelodies, represents the transition in a person's life between adolescence and adulthood--a time when they retain their excitement for life, but, as a person, feel considerable uncertainty about who they are, what direction their life should head in, and also is the time when the person often feels alone in terms of not being able to understand their destiny through what advice others have to offer them--only they, them self, can figure all of that out use their intellectual conflict plays itself out (represented by the two countermelodies). When the rest of the music reenters, the person is a young adult, still filled with a sense of discovery and excitement about the world around them and how they are just beginning to understand how they fit in to it all.
When the song reaches the point where it modulates to a new key, speeds up, and is beginning to fill with even more energy--this represents the stage in a person's life when, who they are as a person, is stabilizing and settling into an identity the person at least partially understands. At the same time, the person finally has some degree of grasp on what meaning and purpose they want their life to have--in other words, what their destiny is; and they move forward with the next phase of their life that roughly spans between their late 20's and late 50's (the phase in one's life that begins musically at the point in the song when the "bridge" transition ends with the energetic drums entering and landing in the next section of the song).
At this point in a person's life, they are fairly confident in themselves and what they want out of life, and they also are applying--through their actions, not just their words--the values and ideals they identify with in most everything they do. The heightened energy and slight swagger of the music in this section intends to represent these ideas.
Finally, in the music (with the moderately loud atmospheric splash and instant drop in tempo), as in a person's life, a point of "old age" is reached, where everything seems to suddenly slow down while the person still retains a sense of dignity and identity that they had during the previous phase of their life. As the song ends, like the end of one's life, their is a last moment of uplifting melody--the last beats of the heart. As the person's heart, and the music, sounds its final note and their breath slips away, so too does the music, gently and brightly fading into the rest of the universe....
The piano melody that can be heard repeating throughout the song is like a spiritual "marker" that uniquely identifies that particular person's consciousness, regardless of the countless changes it goes through throughout their life. Destiny 'Trip' is, overall, positive in its portrayal of the human life, not to ignore the negative realities and experiences that exist in real life, but because the whole purpose of my music is to uplift and inspire the listener to make the most of their life in the most positively-minded way possible--in part by reminding them of the common experience all humans have in life and in death. Keeping in mind that death as a part of life for us all helps a person realize that one day, all that will remain of them is their legacy--the memories others have of them and the influences they had on the world around them during their life, which will reverberate throughout all eternity. Keeping this truth in mind motivates a person to make better, more positive choices in how they live their life and in how they interact with others and the world around them.
The last song I will explain here, to further show that every song on the album has a strong conceptual basis that drives each songs' theme and motifs, is "A Brief History of Memory." Even though this is one of the songs I wish to expand on in terms of its length, the theme and motifs, which are already represented in the song, are based on the concept of a person, who could be anyone, and probably has been all of us at some point in our lives, who is quietly reflecting back on the memories of their life history. The positive and negative emotions associated with each of those memories is heard in the harmonies of the first, quiet section of the piece. As the song transitions into the second section, the music is composed to convey the sense of wonder, mystery, and uncertainty that that same person feels as they try to make sense of how those memories relate to their life in the present and how those memories should influence the way they move forward with their life in the future.
If you would like to learn similar background information on the other songs, you can be rewarded with a 30 or 60 minute phone conversation with me (among other incentives), depending on your donation amount. Be sure to check out all of the incentives; they are all good rewards for your support, regardless of the amount you choose to donate. The truth is, even the smallest investment on your part will make a big difference and will be greatly appreciated.
I sincerely thank you for your time and careful consideration. I know there is a lot of information to digest about myself, my music, and my record label. It's up to you how deep you want to go into the details of these things, but if you choose to dig deep, you won't be disappointed--I am an "open book" as they say, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I have always been a kind, loving, considerate person who is grateful for every achievement and contribution I have been able to make to benefit my fellow human brothers and sisters. I offer you all my best wishes. ONE LOVE..."
January 1, 2015
Happy New Year Everyone!
I wish everyone a wonderful 2015, filled with love, happiness, laughter, great music, positive progress, a growth in personal wisdom, good health, family unity, supportive friends, and a genuine sense of fulfillment with all that you accomplish! I love you all...
One Love,
Matt
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