Check out Alexander Green’s 21 day challenge to quit complaining over at: www.SpiritualWealth.com
Seems like a really worth while challenge to take up.
And look out for the funny monk story at the end of his article – it really made me laugh out loud!
Swiss amateur skydiver, Olivier Vietti-Teppa, made a successful jump over the weekend using a parachute based on Leonardo da Vinci’s design from 523 years ago!
He jumped from a hovering helicopter at 650 metres (2,130 feet) on Saturday and the Leonardo da Vinci parachute opened as planned at 600 metres above a Geneva airport.
Da Vinci’s parachute design consisted of four equilateral triangles forming a pyramid and was featured in a notebook dating from 1485.
For full story: Leonardo da Vinci parachute jump
Just added my reply to Robert Alan Black, one of the top creativity trainers in the world. He’s got a mammoth creativity resource that all of you subscribed to my own Brain Squeezers will want to rush on over to check out.
See my reply here:
“A Zen master once asked an audience of Westerners what they thought was the most important word in the English language. After giving his listeners the chance to think about such favourite words as love, truth, failure and so on, he said, ‘No, it’s a three letter word; it’s the word ‘let’. Let it be. Let it happen.’”from ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ by W Timothy Gallwey
I don’t know about YOU but in a lot of my creative work and manifestation work, I’m in the mode of trying to GET. I want to get new ideas. I want to get more money. I want to get the life that I think will make me happier. I’m grasping for things from a place of lack.
When you change your mental frame and starting think in terms of LET, you release a lot of energy. Let ideas come to you. Let new wealth flow into your life. Let the life you want take shape before you.
Try it out. Play with both. Letting feels more powerful. You shift to a psycho-spiritual state of the already accomplished, the already perfected, where things can happen and have happened without force.
I feel like I’m at the back of the line when it comes to the uptake on web 2.0. But a quick survey of most of the people I know tells me they haven’t got a clue what Twitter is. To be honest, I haven’t either! 
But, as of yesterday, I’m on there now and seeing what possible value it has. Some people say it’s good for search engine rankings. I’m just playing with it, see what happens… if anything.
It must have had an effect. Went to sleep last night with a thunderstorm relaxation music track playing. Mrs Walnut was having difficulty getting to sleep and suddenly became aware of owl sounds on the thunderstorm relaxation music track. She hadn’t noticed those before. It took a while before she realised it was me snoring. The twit’s ta-woo!
I’m intrigued by the relationship of the concious mind, the so-called unconscious mind, and the hyperthetical superconscious or universal (and supposedly all-powerful) mind.
Recent brain research showed how our conscious thoughts emerge from the unconscious mind. Brain activity shows up before we are conscious of thinking the thought. This makes sense, but not to that part of us that likes to think it is consciously making decisions.
It’s a shock to the ego to realize that, actually, no, I’m not in charge!
The conscious mind that we know is little more than a pimple on the skin of the deep vast mind. It’s been called the tip of the iceberg. But I suspect that even that idea makes too much of it, as though the conscious mind is the pinnacle of mental achievement.
It’s worth questioning that assumption.
Unconscious mind. Unconscious means we are ‘not consciously aware of’… it’s happening outside of our conscious knowingness.
How are you beating your heart? Growing hair on your body? Repairing and replacing body cells?
You don’t know. What else don’t you know that is going on and being directed by the deep vast mind, the unconscious?
I like to explore by retracing thought trails back to their source. We’ve already established that thought originates at the unconscious level. So tracing thought backwards offers some hope of getting some kind of insight into the unconscious mind.
At least, that is what I am exploring.
I think it is problematic to have these ideas of conscious, unconsious, subconscious as it helps to create the sense of separation and isolation. You need to move into a state of mind in which you accept it all as the big YOU — even if you are not conscious of all it’s goings-on.
It’s like the body… when you start obsessing about one part of it, you create a sense of separation and disconnectedness from the body. But that disappears when you get absorbed in some physical activity like playing soccer or frisbee or something, and you are just in the body making use of it.
Tracing thought home does give you an opportunity to connect and merge with the deep vast mind. It’s like a meditation in that you have to go beyond conscious verbal thought and plunge into the vastness that is the core of your being.
Then, without thought, you can really only operate on intuition (perception and aperception), experience through being, and pure awareness.
I think the verbal conscious thought stream is a very thin and limited bandwidth data-stream from the unconscious. We need to create or become aware of other channels of data emerging from the unconscious mind. So far one of the best ways we’ve identified to do this is through something like Win Wenger’s image streaming process which taps into the same sort of data stream as we experience in regular night time dreaming.
Photojournalist Bonnie Schupp wrote to me to share her 10-Step Program to Creative Thinking, which formed part of a wonderfully lucid and thought-provoking essay she wrote on The Birth of Ideas.
She kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. So here’s Bonnie’s CLANG DELTA formula:
CLANG DELTA
Bonnie’s 10-Step Program to Creative Thinking
Create solely for the joy of it.
Let curiosity drive you.
Abandon your need to fit in.
Nourish the child in you and let this child come out to play.
Give yourself permission to be eccentric, even outrageous.
Dismiss the judge in you that sets rules and boundaries.
Experience something new each day.
Look at the world as if you were an ant, egret or alien.
Take time to vegetate without being afraid you are wasting time.
Ask what if.
Here are some links to Bonnie Schupp’s work as a creative photojournalist, with her comments:
“Many of my portfolio images are typical “stock” photos without a creative edge. They sell. But some (my favorites) lean more toward the creative side of concepts:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5804006
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=2924887
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=3484871
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4830859
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5267743
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5166395
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4033577
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=5148291
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4482494
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4578997
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4281933
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=2329243
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4343206
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=3724183
“This one shows ‘SCHUMAN’ name cut off to read ‘HUMAN’ just by moving a little to one side while composing the photo.”
Click the image above to go to Bonnie’s main business site
I’ve been reading ‘Be The Pack Leader’ by Cesar Millan, star of TV’s The Dog Whisperer.
Do I have a dog?
No.
Am I planning on getting one?
No. Not anytime soon.
Then WHY am I reading a book about dog psychology?
Well, I think Cesar Millan has stepped into the area of genius in his natural understanding of dogs, and the way he re-habilitates them. Like the wonderful Monty Roberts, the Horse Whisperer, Cesar Millan doesn’t try and force human ideas of doing things on the animals he works with. Instead, he understands dogs, and the pack mentality, and trains humans (dog owners) in how to provide the circumstances that a dog needs to be healthy.
If you’ve seen any of the TV shows (I haven’t — just the clips on his website), you’ll know how he takes on cases where dogs are seriously disturbed and through strong leadership (being the pack leader) he allows the dogs to become healthy and sane again.
I grew up with dogs, and am very sentimental about dogs and other animals. Probably, my natural way of treating dogs would be to project human qualities on them. That, I now realise, is unfair on the dogs and can lead to canine behavioral problems (in the dogs, not me! I have enough problems of my own!). Cesar presents a very different, kinder way of relating to dogs and I find the psychology fascinating.
My parents live 2000 miles away (they say it’s nothing personal!) and have a big menagerie of cats and dogs. I let my mum know about the book but it turns out she is already a big fan.
She says: “I have watched all his shows and not only is he a great dog handler-he is also a great people handler-I was quite smitten-even though he is rather short!”
Ooer! I guess being the alpha male works on humans as well as mutts!
As American Idol judge Randy Jackson would say, “You go dawg!”
Cesar Millan’s website: http://www.cesarmillaninc.com/
Kasper, a reader of this website, writes to ask about underwater swimming and it’s affect on the brain. Here is his question:
hi Wily,
i have a question on held breath diving. have you done it? if yes did you notice any gains in intelligence or mental clarity?
it sounds very interesting and i wanna say that i really enjoy your website
thanks,
kasper
Here is my reply: Underwater swimming - intelligence gains or better mental clarity?
Hey you!
You might be interested in my answers to Dustin’s questions on Remote Viewing prompted by my earlier article on remote viewing the future to steal creative ideas!
This is a two-part conversation on remote viewing as it relates to creativity, so be sure to continue to the end of the page to read it all.
Here’s the link:
Getting clarity on remote viewing the future
Ciao,
Wily