relax!
Most folks screw up their face when they blow their nose; have you noticed that? I used to do it, too. Reckon I saw someone doing it when I was a kid, probably a parent, and figured that was the way to go. Of course it's not.
It takes a good half-dozen screw-yer-face-up style nasal propulsions to achieve the same cleansing effect you get by simply
relaxing and breathing out strongly. In truth you
never quite get it
as clean. I discovered this catching myself in a mirror one day, blowing my nose with my face all screwed up; an achievement in itself; when your face is all screwed up, your eyes are barely open at all.
"why am I screwing up my face?" I asked.
"erm, in case you get bogey in your eyes?", replied the mirror.
So, with the water-sniffing trick I shared in a previous blog, you now have "corz complete sinus treatment". I don't charge for this stuff you know, it's all free. just help yourself.
Around about that same time, I came to understand that relaxation is the secret of a great many things, the key. Most meditation is impossible without it, as are multiple-orgasms (guys! I mean guys of course! you girls can just let it happen.) I realised that it was almost a panacea for the ills of modern living, the opposite of stress. Of course I'm not the first to notice this, it's old old knowledge. So here's my question..
Why isn't it taught in schools? More; how did a school curriculum evolve without covering any of this really basic, important stuff, the stuff all humans should know?
This irritates me. I wonder why I didn't get taught how to relax at school, or how to meditate, or a thousand and one other useful things I really, as a young human, should have known. Incredibly I know what a penny-farthing is, and also a marsupial; this information is completely useless to me. I know many many times over that our money used to involve shillings and penny's and farthings, but no one thought to tell me how to give my nose a really good blow, or relax my body, or remove stress, or anger, or hate, pain. They didn't know either, I guess.
Of course, when schools were first created, children didn't need most of this stuff, stress wasn't a major killer like it is now. But they're going to need more than ABC and the cat in the hat to survive this souped-up twenty first century. Do we need real kids snapping and killing each other before we consider maybe teaching them the
really important stuff? Oh, we already have that, don't we?
When I went to college, the first course we got was "Learning and study skills", where we were tutored in everything from speed-reading, to mind-maps and efficient note-taking. I thought, "Why didn't I get this stuff when I was five?". Crazy.
It astounds me, I mean completely blows me sideways, that the super-nutritious, amazingly delicious, versatile and finger-lickingly addictive
Tahini is a mystery food to almost everyone I meet. Calcium Extravaganza! Question: What do growing kids need lots and lots of? Clue: begins with "C", ends with "m", bones and teeth are made with it..
In the Middle-East they mix Tahini with honey, which magically turns into fudge, which kids love. Little do the kids know, they are consuming a health food! Ha! Trick your kids with Tahini!
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One day they will be adults, and adults always need this information, these tools, sooner or later. I wonder why none of our enlightened adult forefathers thought to spread them around freely. Stress is a big part of human life, and they apparently knew the answers. So they hid them in tomes, and riddles. Perhaps they were preserving them, for us.
I reckon if guys like Jesus and Buddha really wanted mankind to get salvation quickly, they'd have been handing out working tools, teaching folks how to deal with their instincts and emotions, their urges and inspirations, directly. So that's probably not what they were up to, then. Maybe that's up to us, and our internet. Maybe it's only now we're ready for it.
Johnny, 5, finds the new healing exercise a bit boring at first, but when his body's chemistry begins to rush, he forgets this. Years later, climbing a remote Scottish Mountain he experiences a heart attack. The technique saves his life, John walks home.
This the future. And maybe it's only now that we're really ready for it. Could Possibly Believe in It. Ordinary men empowered with Mankind's collective knowledge, walking like gods. Maybe we had to wait until we
had an internet. The trouble is all the other technology that comes with this great "advance".
[in the style of the American Metaphysical Circus - Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, circa early 70's] ...
John has just celebrated his 250th birthday, at a party thrown for him by several of his friends at Virtual Springs...
I'd love to say Johnny achieved this ripe old age with brown rice, oats, honey, and regular meditation, but alas, he got lazy after the turmoil of the TwentyTeens and his heart gave-out completely aged 45 (though of course the organ had been naturally completely replaced at a cellular level many many times in those years). it's cybernetic replacement however, didn't break down once; its nano-scale regeneration wasn't at all governed by how he
felt. Which is just as well, because he felt dreadful, and With the Aid of Technology, felt that way for a very very long time.
[contains spoiler!]I wonder if the five-point exploding heart technique was Tarantino's way of saying (amongst other things),
anything is possible. After all that celluloid, when she actually bloody does it, Kills Bill, at last; it's not some arcing decapitation, or shotgun blast to the tonsils or bullet-time power-kick, nothing big and macho, just the graceful application of a science. All the information we need is out there now, the science, just grab what you need.
I feel the need to construct a pendant (I don't, it's just a story). I'll need a particular set of tools, and materials, and so I click. I enter my credit card details and order everything I need. I google and study the Kabala, the readings of Cayce, meditate on the matter and pick a suitable gem
2. A week later I am working with metal and solder and, and as I set the gem, I understand why I felt the need to construct the thing. Like Idries Shah says, (I'm paraphrasing) "Most people imagine they need Knowledge, or Wisdom or some such thing, but really they just need good information". I know that while a book can't give me knowledge,
practicing things from books
can.
it's all out there now, everything we need to master the science of being human, and no excuses. With all the time we get from machines doing our labour, and having this incredible communication system, these amazing information tools, the storage and search engines to locating what we need; I can see us going all the way, and en masse, too. But that's up to us, evolution I mean. Technological advance on the other hand looks unstoppable, even when it amounts to suicide.
This is why its getting hard to relax these days. it's a race against time, the war of good technology over bad, maybe of good over evil. And like the Tahini, almost no one seems to know about it, or they don't care. I watched i-robot recently and hardly spoke for days. I knew there was a reason I'd avoided anything but the odd short story by Isaac Asimov, it's just too bloody scary.
No one wants to know. Bill Joy proved this a few years back when Wired Magazine pulbished his masterly essay on our new technologies, "Why the future doesn't need us". I imagined it would be a mighty catalyst in some kind of world-wide "common sense movement". I was wrong; folk just moved onto "the next thing", like goldfish. Or else they dismiss the notions with "the government wouldn't allow anything bad to happen"...
We hear of nanotechnology and think "neat!". Possibly you have a idea of what "grey goo" means, more likely you've never even heard of it at all. Nanotechnologists avoid the subject. But that doesn't mean we have to. It goes: Crazy Amateur Scientist creates nano-vegitation. vegetation "escapes" from garden-shed-lab, vegetation self-replicates over the face of the whole planet, crowds out all our natural vegetation. Or is it the one about the water-eating nanite medicine? Either way, we die.
I don't know the future, and unless something is done pretty quick, it's looking like I might not get that chance, and I really do want to.
I really want a Nikon eye, for starters. (I prefer old Olympus lenses, sure, but for some reason, whenever I think about the eye that I will own in the future, how it will capture and relay images, video, experiences, it's always a Nikon eye that I imagine, it's in the heads-up display.) If you are working in this field, tapping the optic nerve, I'll guinea pig for you for free, and my own vision is perfect, I just want that eye, how handy would that be!?!
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We are getting close, real close to having some truly amazing technologies in our daily lives, and almost no one is asking the big important questions. Could my future eye actually deceive me? Be used against me? Wilfully kill me? What about my replacement nano-organs? What happens if the manufacturer goes bust? Or goes bad. At what point do we need to start building in the three laws, or something like them? Robots building robots building your next replacement kidney. it's a thought, isn't it.
As much as I want to embrace these enhancements and prosthetics, plug-in skills and languages, and all the rest, I'm uneasy about the lack of in-built three-laws safety. When my spleen calls home for software upgrades, I don't want that to be a call to Microsoft. Until all sorts of questions are answered I'll be keeping my organs healthy the old-fashioned way. I'll do my own housework, too, thanks.
It wouldn't bother me so much if this leap forward wasn't based on so much false premise. I mean, do we really
need all these technologies. When we get a headache, that doesn't mean we need a bigger better more powerful painkiller, or some nano-synaptic-stimulator, it means we need to relax, or take time out,
do something about it,
adjust our life in some way.
Pain is part of our body's in-built early warning system. Removing it is like taking out the brake light in your car because "it wouldn't stop flashing". Instead of teaching kids to spot unease in their body and mind, teaching them how to deal with it, we train them to ignore it, generally until it's too late. This madness has to stop.
Same with genetic engineering; having a tomato that can deliver all the known vitamins does no more than destroy the tomato's natural nutrient matrix. That something that took mother nature millions of years to perfect can be so easily decimated, possibly to the extinction of the genuine article gives me the willies.
Seed-Banks of the world! Time-Capsule a dozen of everything! DO IT NOW!
When I was a kid I saw some hippy dude on the telly, one of those wee channel four short filler things, and he was speaking about how an orange was filled with light, and how all the light went into you when you ate it and I just thought what a nutcase. I ken better noo, and I ken about enzymes, and bioflavonoids; which is probably why I couldn't get the hippy out of my mind all those years.
that's how I feel about robotics and artificial intelligence, they nag at me. I'm happy about those big powerful factory robots; they are safe, so long as you don't get too close; they don't "think" and they don't make decisions, they don't chase after you and self-replicate, and all the other "wonderful possibilities" that these technologies offer.
But teaching the kids about all this may be pointless; by the time they are old enough to do anything about it, it may be too late. Someone needs to be telling the
adults of our planet what all these greedy corporations are up to, because if we want to do something about it, we're going to have to act quickly. If you expect the governments of the world to act in our favour without a
lot of pushing on your part, you are deluded, because a) they don't fully understand these technologies, b) have no control over the companies evolving them anyways, and c) they also see those dollar signs.
Tarantino's right, anything is possible now, if that's what he was saying. A cybernetic hand could be programmed to never miss those five points, ever, if they really do exist, the info will be out there
somewhere, or alternatively, squish your head to a juice. I'm not sure about the five-point exploding heart technique, but the cybernetic limbs are a certainty.
Okay, deep breaths.
for now..
:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org
ps.. the Johnny 5 reference was completely unintentional.
references:
- I'm working on advertising slogans for a Tahini. I believe I have cracked it, I mean figured out why Tahini isn't the most popular food on the planet, and I plan to setup a company, or at last fantasise about setting up a company, that utilises this discovery to bring about a Tahini renaissance, all over the planet. But really I'll probably not get around to it, and the idea, along with the perfect health of our world's children will perish when I die. Or maybe some big food company will contact me and say "Hey! what was this Tahini thing you were talking about in your blog? (cuz a friend of a friend of a friend swears he does actually read corzblog) and they say "We'll give you a percentage of all future T******* revenue (the name's important and doesn't even have the same number of characters as I typed asterixes, just to throw ya) if you share your Tahini secret with us. Then everyone's happy, see? Oh, I can stop typing, that file's encoded now, sheesh, I need a faster computer... tum-tee-tum..
- I overcame the problem of distance by asking the gem dealer to pick the stone at exactly 10pm CET, at which time I would meditate on the qualities of the exact stone I needed. It turned out to be a perfect match, just like I'd chose it myself!
- I'm thinking right now that I could keep both my perfect eyes, and the camera itself could be mounted somewhere on the head, very very small, like those nano-camera's footballers of the future wear (ms-digital get all the best players, damn them!), it would simply have to follow my eye's focus and direction. Some mechanism, perhaps a facial muscle movement starts and stops the recordings. I'd miss the h.u.d, though. hmm.
Though I have to admit that most of it is unintentional, that doesn't make me any less thankful. Spider away!