Validate Your Life

…and not watching movies. (This is in reference to non-fiction books, btw — and quality reads, not crap).

1. Movies leave you under a spell; an illusory haze so you cannot see. Books give control of the haze others are under.
2. Movies manufacture illusion without you knowing it, while books allow you to choose experience illusion, without decoupling awareness from experience.
3. Books enable to you to explain and teach about illusions and reality, placing you at “cause” instead of at “effect” where you are a victim of illusion. You’re in the driver’s seat reading and writing books.
4. Books clarify and provide understandings. Movies merely create suspence and foreshadowing. Movies are hollow, they foreshadow and build suspense, but they leave you empty with no treasure, no gem. Books have the gem. Books, sure, create suspense, intrigue, and connection. I remember countless “on the edge of my seat” reads of Sherlock Holmes and bawling at the end of Where the Read Fern Grows in early elementary school. And just in 2008, I was completely engaged and in awe of the adventure created by Jules Verne in around the world in 80 days. Those fiction reads provided massive suspense, BUT BUT BUT, unlike movies, the books also provided incredible value and understanding!! I learned so many lessons from those books above. For example, inductive observational skill from Doyle’s book (Sherlock Holmes), the touching experience of pet comraderie (from Where the Red Fern Grows), and the necessity of time, precision, and the cool collected travel making things happen skills of Mr. Fogg from Around the World in 80 days. Because I READ those experiences as books as opposed to watch what was blasted at me with pixels from a movie, I experienced them more wholistically and I acquired the lesson and understanding, with the entertainment and fun of a very absorbing and exciting read!
5. You think more clearly with a book because your brain gets neurological activity firing that is congruent with the logic of the book. Kind of like a “mental-cerebral” version of “if you smile, you’ll feel happy”. If you read a smart book, you’ll think more intelligently. Movies trick and obfuscate intelligence.
6. Books, you have total control over the pace, and “order you read”, movies (unless you fumble with FF and RW buttons, you do not have the same control.
7. Books, your vision is the movie and you are the director; movies lack that customization.
8. Books teach and entertain and create more cohesive thinking; movies, merely entertain with an inkling of “teaching”.
9. Both movies and books inspire, but books provide an inspiration that is more enduring beacuse it is “your own version” of the inspiration.
10. Finally, books don’t need electrical outlets, high-tech dvd players, surround sound and the like. Books are portable; you can bring them anywhere. Laptops are fixing that with movies, but with a book, you use your “built-in” surround sound, imax, widescreen mental imagery vision, which is infinitely more crisp, alive, and exciting than a movie screen.

I’m a former movie junkie (thousands and reruns) and have rediscovered the joy of reading!

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I am not you, and you are not me.  That is the way things are.  I like that.  As you ponder that, let me explain to you why I find tremendous value in that distinction.

Distinctions create boundaries.  Without distinctions, everything would be porous and absorbing this information or that information would generate confusion.  But that confusion is instantly absolved when we utilize distinctions.

There’s a tendency for people with whom I communicate to think that we have some connection, as-if they “know me”.  The way they communicate and the advice they give comes from the perspective of “I know this person in every dimension and in every aspect”.  But then I mention something that I have done that the person with porous distinctions has not done, like ran multiple marathons,  the person shirks back and immediately says “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”.  Instantly their slurring and blurring of our distinctions of you being me, and me being you –gets mutilated when an element of capacity enters the conversation.

You see, as you listen to this closely and intently you realize that intention should govern our behavior (and often it does when we are not being persuaded, manipulated, or under a hypnotic trance by the media), but  many times our perception of capacity limits our behavior.  When I mention to someone actions I have taken that they deem outside of their capacity (for example having written 4 books, or ran multiple marathons, or any other task of which people are incredibly capable of doing, but don’t believe they have that capacity to do so) who has a ruptured their perception of boundaries, what happens in their mind?  First they recoil.  They instantaneously have a thought process of “this person is not whom I thought they were and there exists a distinction in our capacity”.  Such distinctions are good.  Because in many ways, what makes you you, and me me, is our logical levels, which of course, include beliefs, identity, capabilities, and behavior.  If I am talking to you in person, we share the same environment.  That is it.  I’d say environment is roughly 3% of “who I am” and “who you are” at best.   Without logical levels, we are all practically identical twins because our only differences would be blemishes on our epidermal layer of our skin, hair coloration, simple, trivial distinctions bound into the same sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid.  So it’s truly our logical levels that spark this kind of Lamarakian

For awhile in my junior year in college I engaged this belief that we were all this spiritual, interconnected, “Universal One” person.  I enjoyed entertaining that belief because of many reasons.  Reasons for entertaining the “universal one” delusion: (more…)

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John Kuczmarski

11/16/05

Professor Coleman

Hinduism

Hold Your Breath or Embrace the Process:  The Bhakti and Moksha Feast of Rama, Rhada, and Ramprasad

In March of 2002, “vengeful Hindu mobs burned Muslim homes” and ended up killing over three hundred people in Gujarat, India (Dugger 1).  In 2002 Muslims launched a terrorist attack on a Hindu train traveling to Ayodha; Hindus responded with retaliatory riots.  These Muslim attacks on the Hindu train, however, were retaliatory in themselves; because Muslims were responding the demolition of a “16^th century mosque that was razed by Hindus in 1992” (Dugger 1).   This ping-pong game of back-and-forth retaliatory destruction has become detrimental to both religions by destroying the presence of safety as well as sanctified temples and buildings.  Is it possible that such violent outbursts could be prevented with a greater emphasis on dharma and, more specifically, bhakti in the Hinduism faith?

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The Necessity of Emotional Authenticity: Gabriel’s Deteriorating Sequence in The Dead

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John Kuczmarski

Beginning Fiction Writing

Beginnings 250 (Perspective w/light)

June 7, 2005

Rekindle the Rapport

The reflection of the office lamp on the window made it nearly impossible for Rebecca to see out into the ghostly summer night.  Not that she was concerned with the arid desert evening; she was fervently pecking away at the conclusion to her “Metaphors of Sexuality in American Society” thesis.  Because there was no way for her to see out as he looked in, the one-way window transparency did, however, benefit her colleague, the spying Samuel Gervin, whom she knew before she moved to the vacant desert of Montana.  His hesitation before entering wasn’t voyeuristic.  Instead, Samuel — nervous about rekindling any relationship, be it business-related or long-time friendship — had paused in awe of the strokes of undulating reminiscence that bombarded his conscience when he saw her assiduously typing away.

Samuel and Rebecca had been friends for almost all of the two-year experience at the small Stone Child College near Box Elder, Montana.  Samuel had always considered their relationship as something more than companionship, but was complacent with their rapport, which was generated by doing field research for their ecological final, studying for finals, and attending most classes together.  The waves of college memories — from getting lost in the Appalachians during their research project, to surviving the car crash on I-191 near Harlowton, to Rebecca’s graceful smile of gratitude whenever he reminded her to take her insulin – almost made him dizzy with glee to see her.  Taking a deep breath, he balanced one crutch against his hefty body, opened the screen door, inched his broken leg inside the doorframe, and was about to rap upon the window-pane of the door, but paused.  An uncertain, icy panic besieged him; “maybe I shouldn’t visit her,” he thought at the last minute.  “Maybe she doesn’t even want to see me in the middle of her work”.  Too late — the squeak of the screen door had alerted Rebecca, who twisted in her chair, squinting out into the dim night to determine the source of the disturbance.  In an embarrassed fluster, Samuel simultaneously realized his impending obligation to, now, knock and enter and his desire to bolt away from the porch and abandon the visit entirely.  He awkwardly wheeled around his body, wrenching his leg forward, and rapped twice on the door, only to snag his crutch on the screen door, tripped, and fell into a pathetic heap on the porch just as Rebecca opened the door.

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Question. You’re drinking a cup of lukewarm tea? You want to have it taste warmer. How do you make it taste warmer without a stove, microwave or anyway to heat the tea??

Think about this. It’s a riddle.

Now the answer to our riddle as you may have guess. Answer: You drink a cup of frigid icewater!! Seriously, try this is it’s amazing. The contrast principle seriously does work on a neurological level as well as perceptive level. If you have a bowl of lukewarm water that you want to “feel colder” douse your hand in hotwater for 60 seconds. The lukewarm water will feel frigid now compared to the hand that was in cold water (or the hand just at body temperature)!

What about hottubs. A jacuzzi is a very warm water physical shift, so things outside of the jacuzzi that may have felt hot, will now feel lukewarm, and the lukewarm temperatures may feel even chilly!

Cold showers. Taking cold showers will make everything feel warmer! You want to “increase the sensual perceptive temperature of the jacuzzi” but don’t want to wait 4 hours for the water temperature to change? Simple. Take a frigid cold shower! Then jumping in the Jacuzzi will genuinely perceptively feel 10° warmer!

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An excerpt taken from Mark Twain’s Autobiography. I don’t think it’d be possible to experience a harsher or more bemusing critic than the iconic American wordsmith, Mark Twain himself.

Amongst. Wasn’t “among” good enough?

Next half-dozen Corrections. Have you failed to perceive that by taking the word “both” out of its proper place you have made foolishness of the sentence? And don’t you see that your smug “of which” has turned that sentence into reporter’s English? “Quite.” Why do you intrude that shopworn favorite of yours where there is nothing useful for it to do? Can’t you rest easy in your literary grave without it?

Next sentence. You have made no improvement in it. Did you change it merely to be changing something?

Second Paragraph. Now you have begun on my punctuation. Don’t you realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art like that, with your limitations? And do you think you have added just the right smear of polish to the closing clause of the sentence?

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Thus begin the first installment of the Productivity & Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Stay tuned for the next 5 (or more) installments detailing everything from organizational mastery within email, on the homefront, within your office, how to douse email insanity, and get clear and stay clear on your todos…

This may be one of the most curmedgeonly posts in the history of blogging. Okay, that’s a little extreme, but this does have a critical flavor to it.

One of the most brilliant “insulters” of the 20th century was Roald Dahl.

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Well, iPhone continues it’s assault in knocking off numerous other electronic devices. Along with GPS devices, household-wide remotes, now it’s the killer device for the Amazon Kindle Kindle.

It’s also going to slaughter the less popular Sony Reader

eReader.com released an elegant and intuitive eReader app on the app store. The app itself and the ereader.com account that let’s you download full books are both free. Sure you pay for modern books, but I just downloaded Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days” for free (most all classics are free) and can view it with the beautiful flip technology on the iPhone. If you can find a book on project Gutengerg, it will most likely be on eReader.com from which you can view it on your iPhone with eReader’s cool “page-flipping” software.

Here’s some photos I took utilizing iPhone 2.0′s image-capture technology.

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135 years ago, Jules Verne Published Around the World in 80 days. The geography of the globe is roughly the same, but the economy and global boundaries have changed.

Phileas Fogg navigated the globe with 20,000 pounds or roughly $40,000 with currency conversion. Factoring inflation, however, one realizes good ol’ Mr. Fogg circumnavigated with the equivalent of #### modern pounds or $$$$.

Great. Now that we are up to speed on the economics of 1873, we can launch into the story.

Recently read this great article and it sparked some interesting ideas. Superheros are only identifiably heroic when they can connect to other humans! Otherwise, they’re just alien. The most secure way of making that connection, honestly, is flaws. Batman’s troubles over his dead parents, Ironman’s drinking problems, Maxwell Smart’s stupidity and bumbling, all those flaws make their great deeds identifiably humanly heroic. Cool stuff. Otherwise they’re just mythological!

Yeah, that’s awesome. Superheroes who are perfect without flawed are just myth. The stories of Neptune and Jupiter from Ancient Rome helped Romans understand their mysterious world and answer some of the questions that could only be answered with scientific breakthroughs millenias to come. Same goes for the Zeus, Posieden, Athena stories from greece. Those mythologies embodied flawless, “inhuman heros”. A star contrast from the very human and flawed, but exceptionally heroic characters in many of todays films.

Maybe we have re-invented mythology into a global flawed mythological superhuman superhero. The kind that is a little bit closer to us than Zeus on Mount Olympia, or Neptune beneath the sea. Modern culture has crafted “gods” (superheros) that blends the myth into our reality because we recognize elements of each of us in the our 21st century heroes.

Alas, I cannot speak from the “literary front lines” of PDK as I have not read Androids nor Scanner, but have seen both film interpretations (Blade Runner and linklater’s). If I ever get around to reading PDK amidst the hundreds of other books on the to-read list, I think I’ll like Scanner the best, it was written almost 10 years later, maybe his writing craft more honed, but I didn’t realize how PDK owns (or net speack pwns!) the book-to-sci-fi-film area. He wrote minority report, too? So that’s scanner, minority, blade runner, total recall, paycheck– pretty big sci-fi selection. Sure, asimov set in motion the robot movies, but that’s only really “one big movie” (just a bunch of remakes, bicentennial man and i,robot some of the most recent). PKD spawned Totally unique films from his books.

Total Recall and Blade Runner are some of THE most epic film sci-fi renditions (save 2001). I loved all those movies, and gravitated to all of them, but only just now discovered that the common vein between total recall, blade, scanner, paycheck, and yes, even screamers was PKD. I’ve seen all of those movied and loved all of them and only just realized the common denominator is PDK. far out! That’s like doing problems over and over and then abstracting out to see a larger, framework formula. cool!

And talk about prolific. Prolific is an understatement for this guy. 121 published short stories and dozens of published books, nine of which were turned into Sci-Fi movies!!! Who else has done that? What other writer has achieved that much book to film coverage? Dickens? Not really, his works get clumped in that 18th century pile of the same flicks. It’s shocking at how unique all of PKD’s works are. Almost like multiple authors (or a multiple-brained single author) wrote the wide-ranging complex variety of works!

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