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Sunday

Basic Field Theory

Introduction

As self-aware beings, we're not just some blind accident of evolution, thrown here to struggle and die. There is a Source in Consciousness, and we can learn to align ourselves with Its brilliant efficiency, boundless resources, and ingenious organizing intelligence. This intelligence turns the planets, directs the seasons and the tides, and sustains each particle in the Creation, everywhere, all at once, effortlessly.

Why should we find it so hard to believe that this intelligence could be relied upon to bring us the fulfillment of perfect work, prosperity, vibrant health, a wonderful partner, or whatever else has been given to us to desire?

What comes to us in life is not merely a matter of chance; it follows from who we believe we are and what we take to be real. Since we can change these beliefs at any time, we aren’t condemned to repeat the past unless we believe we are. A better reality is always available to us. Willingness, being still, receptive imagination, love for the ideal—these are the keys to the next better version of self and world.


Particle and Field

The idea that we create our reality is at least as old as the Vedas, which state that “Atman” [the individual soul] is Brahman [the Cosmos].” This suggests that the whole of experience somehow resides in consciousness, and that our consciousness actually shapes, informs, and organizes what seem to be random events. Field theory recognizes that our consciousness has the same multiple nature we see in electrons, indeed, all quanta, so our consciousness has “Particle” and “Field” aspects.

Most of the popular New Age material on reality-creating fails because it presumes, mistakenly, that the self that does the creating is the Particle self—our most local identity, the one that says “I” all day, that experiences itself as in the physical body, and so, separate from other “I’s." The Particle self is extremely limited in knowledge, resources, and efficiency, and by nature identifies with things and conditions, e.g., “I am a person,” “I am sorry,” “I am here,” and so on. As Particles, we tend to experience world as cause and the self as effect, and so live in continual reaction to outer conditions; as these conditions appear to be separate from us, we naturally exert our will to improve or avoid them. Our Field identity, on the other hand, is nonlocal; not bound by time or space; unlimited in knowledge, vision, and efficiency; and aware of itself as the cause of worldly experience. Its most fundamental expression is not "I am this or that," but simply, "I AM."

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Intention and Correspondence

Intention includes what we take to be real, which ultimately comes down to what we identify with. So, for example, the belief, “There isn’t enough money” is rooted in the belief, “I am poor.” This turns out to be a crucial point in Field theory, since our creating follows necessarily from identity, from who we believe we are. This is all we can change, and all we need to change.

The Self that creates reality is not the Particle self, a point that hardly can be overstated. Many people, caught up in popular oversimplifications of “we create our reality” thinking have tried affirmation, visualization, and other consciousness techniques to change their experience in the world, only to find themselves running into walls, because they were unwittingly believing in (intending) the very condition they wanted to change. As long as the I strives to change conditions rather than simply changing its self-definition, conditions have no choice but to persist. The I that would create reality deliberately cannot stand apart from its creation. Paradoxically, this means that we can’t change reality through an act of will, because the very attempt confers the status of reality on the thing it seeks to change. In trying to make real something that it regards as not real, it casts its vote wrongly and secures the very outcome it would overcome. When we try to create conditions, the results are likely to backfire and lead to disappointment. On the other hand, when we recast our identity, conditions change spontaneously and effortlessly as required by the law of correspondence. So, our work is only on ourselves. This is why in Field practice, the aim is alignment, and not manifestation.

Creation is the operating of the law of correspondence between Particle and Field. The Particle, by nature, must intend; the Field must correspond. Following the principles of chaos theory, intentions exert a nonlocal organizing effect, fulfilling themselves whether or not we’re aware of what we’re intending. As we start intending deliberately, this nonlocal effect shows up as happy coincidences, miraculous timing, and other synchronicities, As Field training deals directly with the most fundamental structures of Particle consciousness (identity and reality), conditions tend to improve quickly and dramatically, having no choice but to correspond to who we believe we are. When this changes for the better, everything changes accordingly.

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Is the Field the same as God?

Some students use these terms interchangeably, but the word God can be loaded with associations that may not be helpful. The Field is the totality and ground of Being, comprising all objects, events, conditions, and Particle identities in the same way that the ocean comprises waves. In expression, the Field demonstrates qualities of vast creativity, intelligence, and Self-giving attributed by most spiritual traditions to a Supreme Being. Still, Field training isn’t a religion or religious; one may belong to any spiritual tradition or none and gain much from its study.

How is Field training different from other models that deal with consciousness-as-cause?

Field training acknowledges certain paradoxes of consciousness that other models do not, the most significant being that if we attempt to create conditions to fulfill desire, whether through acting on the world directly or through consciousness techniques such as visualization or affirmation, we’re immediately caught in a contradiction that interferes with the desired manifestation. Field training sidesteps this paradox by teaching that “the aim of intending is alignment, not manifestation.” The factual fulfillment of Particle desire arises spontaneously out of Field correspondence; it doesn’t have to be contrived. We simply remain aligned, and the facts take care of themselves. Rather than attempting to create a desired condition, we simply allow the version of the self that corresponds to that condition to come to the fore. The method is based solely on the creative power of identity, and on consciously recasting the Particle self.

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What is a “counterintention?”

Field training holds that we don’t get what we want; we get what we intend. Intentions comprise what we take to be real, and what we identify with. Often, these intentions are unwitting; we are not aware that we are embodying them. When an intention runs contrary to (or contradicts) what we consciously desire, it’s a “counterintention.” To the extent that we counterintend, we suffer. Releasing counterintentions frees us from suffering and allows us to embody the consciously chosen version of self with a sense of joy and relief. Field training provides many ways to clear counterintentions. It’s not necessary to know what a counterintention is to clear it.

What does the term “versions of the self” mean?

Field training borrows the Many-Worlds model from physics to provide a theoretical basis for believing that a desired condition is “already done.” As long as one believes otherwise (e.g., tries to create the condition, sees it as possible, etc.), one is not, strictly speaking, intending it. Television broadcast provides a good metaphor: All the channels exist now, in the air; they don’t have to be created. Because they’re already real, any of them can manifest (incarnate). One simply needs to be tuned to the right channel (version of self).

How do you know that these concepts about consciousness and reality are true?

The best approach for a student to take is to assume that the truth of these principles remains to be seen. Nothing should be accepted solely on the strength of another's authority. We invite all who are willing to make the great experiment to find out for themselves if Field training's ontological claims are true or not. An open mind and heart balanced by careful reasoning soon reveal the profound value of our unique approach.

Why did the Field manifest Itself as separate Particles?

We generally find "why" to be a distraction from the far more fruitful direction of attending to practice. Field training, while providing a thorough and precise ttheoretical model, is ultimately about practical experience, which is rarely improved by grand questions or metaphysical speculating..

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Saturday

The Ballad of Sheriff Joe

...no love lost in Arizona for Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio

Page the Village Idiot - "Sheriff Joe 'R Piehole"


Tuesday

The Deficit: Nine Myths We Can't Afford

Has the federal government run out of money? Will we have to slash Social Security? Will we have to borrow dollars from China for our children to pay back?

The national debate over fiscal responsibility and sustainability is entering a new, critical phase. Today, an 18-member bipartisan commission to examine the government's fiscal problem will meet for the first time. Everything is on the table, including Social Security and Medicare.

With so much at stake, the time has come to examine our fundamental assumptions about government deficits and debt. The danger of accepting oft-repeated orthodoxies has been clearly demonstrated in the recent financial crisis. For decades, free market fundamentalism went virtually unquestioned, and we've all seen the result -- an epic economic catastrophe. We can't afford to make the same mistake on fiscal responsibility. It's time to consider alternatives perspectives before we rush down potentially destructive policy paths that could compromise our future.

The Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 blog asked seven economic thinkers to address what they see as the most dangerous myths currently circulating on the deficit. Several of these experts will be on hand to educate the public on April 28, 2010 at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. at a "Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In."

Myth #1: The government should balance its books like a private household.
Reality: Our federal government is the issuer of the currency, which makes its budget fundamentally different than the average citizen's.

Discussion of government budget deficits often begins with an analogy to a household's budget. People say: "No household can continually spend more than its income, and neither can the federal government". But there are big differences between a household and the federal government. You don't have the ability to print money in your living room, do you? Well, the government does. So how it finances its own debt and spending is different from the way you do.

A government is the issuer of the currency. The household, on the other hand, is the user. Households are restricted by the need to somehow get money into their bank accounts, or their checks will bounce. The federal government, by contrast, doesn't "have" or "not have" dollars. There is no vault or lock box where it "keeps" its money. In fact, it makes all of its payments simply by electronically crediting private bank accounts and there is no practical limit to which it can change those numbers up. Spending by the federal government always creates new money in the system, while taxation destroys it. When households and firms pay taxes, the money does not go anywhere; the government simply debits those private bank accounts by electronically reducing the amount of reserves they hold, i.e., by changing the numbers in those bank accounts down.

Government is constrained only by the inflation it can create by over-spending, but its ability to spend is numerically unlimited. Households are constrained by their ability to get dollars from some form income and from borrowing, and both of those have real limits.

~Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Assistant Professor, Franklin and Marshall College

Myth #2: Fixing Social Security and Medicare will require "tough choices."
Reality: Social Security and Medicare are not facing a financial crisis.

A new poll by the Pew Research Center suggests that nearly 80% of Americans don't trust the federal government. Unfortunately, we appear all-too-willing to trust the government when it tells us that Social Security and Medicare are heading for bankruptcy. Indeed, the same poll shows that fewer than half of us now hold a favorable opinion of the Social Security Administration (down 13% from a decade ago). No wonder. The drumbeat over the so-called "crisis" facing Social Security and Medicare has reached a fever pitch.

The government's message is clear: Both programs face significant trouble ahead, due primarily to the aging of our population. In order to deal with the looming problems, we will have to make "tough choices." Not everyone can have the money they were promised.

If you've been around a while, you've heard this all before. Remember the Greenspan Commission? This is the group that President Reagan appointed to "fix" Social Security in the early 1980s, the last time the system was on the brink of "collapse." Thanks to the "reforms" that were enacted in 1983, Americans are working longer (they raised the retirement age) and paying more (they accelerated increases in the payroll tax rate). And now we're being told it was all for nothing -- the system is broken again?

The truth is, the system was never broken in the first place, because the government's ability to pay benefits does not in any way depend on the balance in the Social Security or Medicare Trust Funds. Benefit checks come directly from the Treasury, and, as Alan Greenspan has admitted, "[A] government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency."

And so the question is not whether the government needs to make "tough choices" in order to keep these vital programs afloat. The question is, will politicians make the toughest choice of all and tell the American people the truth: Social Security and Medicare face no financial crisis now or in the future.

~Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri

Myth #3: We are passing on debt to our grandchildren.
Reality: Payments on Treasury securities are a matter of data entry, not a financial burden.

Most people don't realize that government debt -- Treasury securities -- are nothing more than savings accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington.

There are about 13 trillion dollars in Treasury securities at the Fed. Collectively, these savings accounts are known as the national debt. The national debt represents a portion of the combined savings of US residents, corporations, banks, and foreign governments. And most folks probably don't know that when a person buys them, the Fed simply transfers the dollars from her checking account to a savings account at the Fed called a "Treasury security."

Tens of billions of dollars of these Treasury securities come due every week. When that happens, the Fed pays off that "debt" simply by transferring the dollars, plus interest, out of these savings accounts and back to the holders' checking accounts.

In the future, when our grandkids make payments on Treasury securities, they will simply credit accounts at the Fed-just as we do today, and as our grandparents did before us. It is a simple matter of data entry, and not a financial burden.

If the government spends and taxes wisely today, our grandchildren inherit roads, dams, parks, public buildings, and, most importantly, an educated and healthier workforce. These things are admittedly hard to value precisely-but there can be no doubt that our grandkids will be much better off having been born into a society that has modern infrastructure and services that our government policies can help to provide.

~Randall Wray, Professor of Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri

Myth #4: What we don't tax we have to borrow from the likes of China for our children to pay back.
Reality: Paying our debt holders back consists of transferring funds between accounts.

One constantly hears that the Chinese (and other external creditors) "fund" our deficit. The folklore is that when China finally sells off its US bond holdings, those yields will sky-rocket. The dollar will then crash, no one else will want the debt, and it will be the end of America as we know it.

To debunk this myth, you need to know two things. First, all foreign governments have checking accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank called "reserve accounts." Second, US Treasury securities are nothing more than savings accounts at the same Federal Reserve Bank.

How does China get its dollars? It sells things to us. And when China gets paid, those dollars go into China's checking account at the Federal Reserve Bank.

And when China buys US Treasury securities, what happens? The Fed transfers China's dollars in its checking account at the Fed to its savings account at the Fed. We call that "borrowing from China" and "going into debt to China." But it's not really "borrowing" in the sense of creating an external constraint whereby we have to defer spending to "pay back" China. The Fed simply pays off China's "debt" by transferring the dollars, plus interest, back to the holder's checking account, which it can create at the stroke of a keyboard as the monopoly issuer of dollars.

The dollars are nothing more than data entry on the Fed's computer. They have no other existence. And it has no impact on the government's ability to spend as to whether China's dollars are in their checking account or savings account.

All we owe China is a bank statement that shows them where their dollars are. Sadly, they know this. But they also know that we think we are dependent on them, and take advantage of our error.

~Marshall Auerback, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Warren Mosler, President, Valance Co.

Myth #5: The government must tax or borrow to get money to spend.
Reality: Government spending is not constrained by revenue.

As explained above, the Federal government neither "has" nor "doesn't have" dollars. The government spends by creating new money and taxes by destroying money, which simply involves changing numbers in bank accounts. Suppose the government pays Social Security benefits to a retired teacher, Mrs. Jones, in the amount of $1,500 a month. At the end of the month, the checking account of Mrs. Jones is credited by $1,500. Did the government need your tax revenue to pay Mrs. Jones? No! It simply changed the numbers up in Mrs. Jones's bank account, basically creating new money. On April 15 Mrs. Jones sends a check to the IRS to pay her taxes. When the government gets the check, what does it do? It simply changes numbers down in Mrs. Jones's bank account, destroying the money.

What about selling government bonds, which is mistakenly called borrowing? These are simply interest-earning assets, similar to a savings account. Suppose Mrs. Jones has $1,000 dollars in her checking account on which she would rather earn interest. So she buys a Treasury security. What happens? Basically a bond sale involves moving funds from checking accounts to savings accounts (Treasuries) at the Federal Reserve Bank.

So if the government doesn't need to tax to be able to spend, why does it tax at all? There are two reasons. First, the government creates demand for its currency through taxation. If the public didn't need the dollars to pay its taxes, it wouldn't be willing to sell goods and services to the government in return for pieces of paper (or numbers in a checking account). Taxes, then, are what give value to money. Second, the government uses taxes to control the public's spending power. When the public has too much spending power, government taxes some of it away to avoid inflation. When there is too little spending so that unemployment results, it lowers taxes to boost private spending.

Any and all financial constraints on government spending such as issuing government bonds dollar for dollar against deficit spending, debt ceilings, and restrictions on the Fed's ability to buy treasury securities are purely political and necessarily self imposed, because they are imposed on us by our chosen institutional arrangements and not by something inherent in our economic system.

~Yeva Nersisyan, Doctoral candidate in economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri

Myth #6: Deficits and government borrowing takes away savings.
Reality: Deficits add to income and savings.

The truth is that deficits add to the total monetary savings held outside of government. To the penny. That's right, if the government deficit was 1 trillion dollars last year, then total net savings of everyone outside of government went up by 1 trillion. Not a penny more or a penny less.

Let's look at a simple transaction where the government deficit spends $100. Say the government sells US $100 of new treasury securities. We buy them and our bank account goes down by $100 when we pay for them, but we have the $100 of treasury securities we bought. Are we any poorer? Of course not! In fact, since we bought the securities voluntarily, we probably did it because we think that purchase made us richer. All we did was exchange $100 that was in our checking account for a $100 Treasury security.

After we pay the $100 for the Treasury securities, the next thing that happens is the government then spends $100 by buying something from us. So we now have both the $100 the government just spent and the $100 of Treasury securities we just bought.

So because of the $100 of deficit spending, we got our $100 back in our checking account, and we also have $100 in Treasury securities. Our monetary wealth is now $100 more than it was before.

The deficit spending of $100 added $100 to our savings. Yet all of our leaders insist that deficits take away from our savings.

You can now understand the reason our savings went up so much last year. It was because the government deficit was so much higher. Now you know more about that than anyone on TV.

~Warren Mosler, President, Valance Co.

Myth #7: We'll end up just like Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe.
Reality: Hyperinflation in both countries was caused by circumstances far different than ours.

The minute you challenge the assumption that the government should not spend when it has a large deficit, out comes the charge that we'll get some horrible hyperinflationary outcome like Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe.

Yes, once the economy gets to full employment, then extra government deficit spending can start driving up prices. But what happened in Weimar Germany was very different. During that time, the government was forced to pay extremely large war reparations in foreign currencies which it didn't have. So it had to aggressively sell its own currency and buy the foreign currency in the financial markets. This relentless selling continuously drove down the value of its currency, causing prices of goods and services to go ever higher in what became one of the most famous inflations of all time. By 1919, the German budget deficit was equal to half of GDP, and by 1921, war reparation payments represented one third of government spending. And guess what? On the very day that government stopped paying the war reparations and selling its own currency to buy foreign currency, the hyperinflation stopped.

In Zimbabwe, the situation is also very different from ours. There, the conditions for hyperinflation were caused by the destruction of nearly half of the country's domestic food production via misguided land reforms, plus a civil war which eliminated much of the economy's productive manufacturing capacity. In response to food shortages, the Bank of Zimbabwe used valuable foreign exchange reserves to buy imported food, leading to a lack of foreign currency to purchase essential raw materials. Manufacturing output collapsed, but the government used much of the remaining foreign exchange to dole out political favors, rather than adding to the country's productive capacity. The end result was inflation and then hyperinflation.

In the US, hyperinflation will not be an issue if the government spends while it has a large deficit because with high unemployment and unused yet functioning factories all across the country, there is plenty of room to cut taxes and/or increase spending to get us to full employment. This is true no matter what the size of the federal deficit. Ultimately, inflation (and then hyperinflation) is about competing distributive claims over real resources, such as oil, gas, water, etc. A "sustainable" fiscal policy, especially with respect to hyperinflationary risks, then, is really about both the establishment of full employment and the implementation of well-crafted policies which deal with the constraints created by, for example, depleting natural resources.

~Marshall Auerback, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Rob Parenteau, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge

Myth #8: Government spending increases interest rates and 'crowds out' valuable private sector investment.
Reality: Banks can lend essentially without limit, and the Fed can hit any interest rate target it chooses.

Ask an economist what determines the interest rate, and she'll probably mutter something about supply and demand or "market forces." Ask the same economist what determines the level of saving and investment, and the answer probably won't change very much. This is because most economists were trained using textbooks that have not been rewritten since the United States went off the gold standard after WWII.

Back then, we had a monetary system that really did limit the growth of the money supply, and too much government spending really could force rates higher and crowd out other forms of spending. It is all based on something economists know as Loanable Funds Theory, which describes a market in which there is some limited pool of savings available to satisfy the demand for credit. Thus, deficit spending required the government to compete (with private borrowers) for a portion of these limited resources. Because the capacity to lend was constrained under the gold standard, the added competition could drive borrowing costs (i.e. the interest rate) higher.

Decades later, the monetary system looks completely different. But economists continue to treat governments as if they are the users of the currency (as opposed to the issuers) and to treat banks as passive money lenders -- there simply to broker deals between savers and borrowers. In truth, banks can lend essentially without limit, regardless of what the federal government is doing, and the Federal Reserve can hit any interest rate target it chooses.

~Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri

Myth #9: The money spent paying interest on the national debt could be spent elsewhere.
Reality: Interest rates can easily be brought to zero and are not an obstacle to federal spending.

Government spending is not operationally constrained by revenues (as outlined above). So interest payments are not an obstacle to any other payments. Further, the Fed (a branch of government) sets the overnight rate-thus, it is a policy variable and can be set wherever policy wants to set it. Right now short term rates are set near 0%, and the Fed could leave them there permanently, which would bring down interest on Treasury securities to near 0%. Finally, Treasury can elect to issue only 3 month bills, which would bring government interest payments towards 0 over time.

Conclusion: Interest on the debt is not currently an obstacle to increased federal spending and/or tax cuts. And it's a very simple matter to bring interest payments down to 0 in any case.

~Randall Wray, Professor of Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.

Wednesday

Seth Godin: We All Need A Tribe

...
Enjoyed this conversation with Seth Godin around tribes
and why we all need one,
&
how we should be the best in the world
at what we do.
...
-- Seth also answers why he is not on Twitter. --

Monday

Flies Turn in Mid-Air with Shoulder Shrug

A new analysis shows that the flies’ aerial gymnastics are driven by wing joints that act like wind-up toys, letting the bugs whirl around almost automatically.

Insights from the study, which was published online April 5 in Physical Review Letters, could someday help build better flying robots.

Fruit flies beat their wings about once every 4 milliseconds — much faster than their neurons can fire — and can turn 120 degrees in 18 wing beats. This made study co-author Itai Cohen of Cornell University wonder, “How much of the wing motion is being controlled by the insect, and how much is going along for the ride, being controlled by aerodynamics?”

To investigate, Cohen and his colleagues set up three high-speed cameras trained at the center of a box holding about 10 flies (see video below). A fly crossing the center of the box triggered the cameras to start rolling at 8,000 frames per second. At the same time, a disk of LED lights projected a rotating striped pattern on the inside of the box to trick the flies into making a U-turn.

“The flies see this, and it makes them dizzy,” says study co-author Attila Bergou of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who helped perform the experiments as a graduate student at Cornell. “It generates very reliable and repeatable turns in these flies.”

The physicists analyzed the videos to extract detailed information on the wings’ positions with respect to the body.

“I was surprised that they were able to get it to work as well as they did,” comments Ty Hedrick of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Getting the uncertainty of these measurements low enough that you can see what you need to see is difficult.”

The team found that when the fly turns, one wing tilts more than the other, similar to the way a rower pulls one oar harder than the other to make a boat turn. Thanks to aerodynamics, a wing-tilt difference of just 9 degrees is enough to send a fly off in another direction.

“Essentially these insects are swimming through the air, using drag forces to row themselves in whichever direction they want,” Cohen says.

Further analysis using computer models of the fly and aerodynamic simulations showed that the fly’s wing joint acts like a torsional spring, the kind found in wind-up toys or old clocks. To change its wing tilt and set up a turn, all the fly has to do is twitch the muscle that controls the spring.

“The insects don’t have to do any thinking whatsoever,” Cohen says. “They have a natural system that provides just the right amount of torque to the wing.”

The physicists are planning comparative studies in other flying insects, like bees and dragonflies. Cohen hopes the findings could help design more-maneuverable flying robots that take advantage of insect aerodynamics.

“Really the idea is, how do we start to build more efficient and smaller robots that take advantage of aerodynamics to do the things they do, rather than brute force the way we usually do these things?” Cohen says. “We’re in the dark ages as far as building anything like that. We’re nowhere in the ballpark.


Friday

We Forget About Whatever It Is We Wanted to Forget About


“Forget about it.” This is the slogan that made it on to the tee shirts we gave out at our recent Waves of Change Conference. Of course, it took mere minutes for somebody to start reciting the line in his best New York accent a la Joey Tribbiani in the Friends television series. All well and good. The humor is part of the forgetting, since “Forget about it,” more than anything else, reminds us to take our mind’s hands off whatever project concerns us, and give the Field right of way.
Like so much in Field training, this little slogan, taken as instruction, poses the problem of how you deliberately forget about something, but the paradox, as usual, is resolved in practice, since forgetting about something means getting on with other things, those things that are, in the language of the Course, “before us to do,” and as we do this, we forget about whatever it is we wanted to forget about, and we forget that we forgot. Our attention naturally follows the natural course of events as they arise, releasing all agendas, willfulness, and attempts to manage or control outcomes. Forgetting, in this sense, is a by-product of getting on with other things. This is why Field training students who practice what they know come across as people grounded in the living present. They have released themselves from the endless distractions of willful living.
 
There is more to the story, however, and that is how the Field responds when we “forget about it.” Giving the Field right of way in our affairs does more than return us to a more attentive, mindful, and therefore efficient engagement of the present. It also evokes nonlocal efficiency, for the Field takes up our cause the instant we put it down. In this lies another paradox—that we can have what we want if we can walk away from it. Some may think this means that we have to come to a point where what we want doesn’t matter to us anymore, but this is far from the truth. Rather, we have to come to a point where what we want doesn’t rule us anymore. We have our desires, but they no longer have us. We stop being obsessive, having seen through the Particle assumption, unsupportable on even cursory examination, that nothing will happen if we don’t make it happen. In forgetting about it, we discover the extraordinary efficiency of letting things happen, of getting out of the way so that something greater can come into play in our behalf.

There is a surprising surge of confidence that comes with this getting out of the way, a confidence rooted in delegating to that intelligence that created and sustains the universe each moment, and the sense that the Field is working on whatever we have released. The willingness to have what we want goes hand in hand with the willingness to let it go. To be willing to “forget about” is to take up our authority as co-creators, for what we forget in this way, the Field remembers for us, and remembers with the efficiency that set the stars burning.



 http://www.fieldproject.net/realities/?s=field+theory

The More Joyful You Are


The Universe
is not punishing you
or blessing you.

The Universe is responding
to the vibrational attitude
that you are emitting.

The more joyful you are,
the more Well-being
flows to you.
...
And, you get to choose
the details of how it flows.


Abraham-Hicks

Keith Richards: Books, Blues & Screwy Dewey Hooey


>SHHH! Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.

He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in Sussex and Connecticut, according to publishing sources familiar with the outline of Richards’s autobiography, which is due out this autumn. He has received a reported advance of $7.3m (£4.8m) for it.

The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” He has opted instead for keeping favoured volumes close to hand and the rest languishing on dusty shelves.

Richards has also acted as a public library, lending out copies of the latest Bernard Cornwell or Len Deighton novels to friends without much hope of getting them back. And, like the Queen at Balmoral, he leaves favoured books by the bedside for guests staying at Redlands, his moated Elizabethan farmhouse near West Wittering in West Sussex and in Weston, Connecticut.

In his autobiography, Life, due to be published in October, Richards will reveal how, as a child growing up in the post-war-austerity of 1950s London, he found refuge in books before he discovered the blues.

He has declared: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.”

Richards has signed up to the Little, Brown Book Group and will share writing duties with James Fox, the author of White Mischief, which charted aristocratic excess in pre-war Kenya.

Keith Richards: Books, Blues & Screwy Dewey Hooey


SHHH! Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.

He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in Sussex and Connecticut, according to publishing sources familiar with the outline of Richards’s autobiography, which is due out this autumn. He has received a reported advance of $7.3m (£4.8m) for it.

The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” He has opted instead for keeping favoured volumes close to hand and the rest languishing on dusty shelves.

Richards has also acted as a public library, lending out copies of the latest Bernard Cornwell or Len Deighton novels to friends without much hope of getting them back. And, like the Queen at Balmoral, he leaves favoured books by the bedside for guests staying at Redlands, his moated Elizabethan farmhouse near West Wittering in West Sussex and in Weston, Connecticut.

In his autobiography, Life, due to be published in October, Richards will reveal how, as a child growing up in the post-war-austerity of 1950s London, he found refuge in books before he discovered the blues.

He has declared: “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.”

Richards has signed up to the Little, Brown Book Group and will share writing duties with James Fox, the author of White Mischief, which charted aristocratic excess in pre-war Kenya.

Thursday

Nassim Taleb: Climate Change and "Too Big" Polluters


I have been asked frequently on how to deal with climate change in connection with the Black Swan idea and my work on decision-making under opacity. The position I suggest should be based on both ignorance and the delegation to the wisdom of Mother Nature since it is older than us, hence wiser than us, and proven much smarter than scientists.


We do not understand enough about Mother Nature to mess with her --and I do not trust the models used to forecast climate change.


Simply, we are facing nonlinearities and magnifications of errors coming from the so-called "butterfly effects" we saw in Chapter 11, actually discovered by Lorenz using weather forecasting models. Small changes in input, coming from measurement error, can lead to massively divergent projections --and that, very generously, assumes that we have the right equations.


We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks (they resemble those "risk experts" in the economic domain who fight the previous war) --these are the ones now trying to impose the solutions on us.


But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the same conclusions as the ones endorsed by anti-environmentalists, pro-market fundamentalists, quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, super-Green, since we do not know what we are harming with now. That's the sound policy under ignorance and epistemic opacity.


To those who say "we have no proof that we are harming nature", a sound response is "we have no proof that we are not harming nature either" --the burden of the proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system.



Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.


One practical solution I came up with, based on the nonlinearitities in the damage (under the assumption that harm increases disproportionally with the quantities released), and using the same mathematical reasoning as the one that led to my opposing the "too big" concept, is to spread the damage across pollutants --should we need to pollute, of course. Let us carry a thought experiment.


Case 1: you give the patient a dose of cyanide, hemlock, or some poisonous substance, assuming they are equally harmful (and no synergetic, superadditive effect



Case 2: you give the patient a tenth of a dose of ten such substances, for the same total amount of poison.

Clearly we can see that Case 2, by spreading the poison ingested across substances, is at the worst equally harmful (if all the poisonous substances act in the same way), and at the best close to harmless to the patient.