Two different, not too different!

More Collective Journaling. Thank you, Peter Limberger!

Quotes of the Day:  "Write beautifully what people don't want to hear."  ~ Frederick Seidel

Prompt: What topic or theme that’s controversial or polarizing would you like to see expressed (or write yourself) in beautiful words that open minds and hearts to a more holistic way of seeing things?

Or: write about what’s alive for you now.
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Too often I want to change your opinion, as if by some magic my opinion was right and yours was wrong. And too often I have learned that my opinion was not right and yours had values I did not appreciate. Yet if I don’t talk about controversial or polarizing topics my opinions hear only my inner dialogue, one dominated by my ego and desire to be right.

I need the crucible of conflict to break through my biases, my stories, my way of seeing the world. Without your perspective I will be limited to my own. This is the power of the scientific method. Imagination and beliefs are shared, tested, and reinforced or challenged by the perspectives of others.

In science, the level of confidence required is very high. For imagination and belief to be accepted by science, the ideas must be reproducible, regardless of the unique perspective of the individual. We even believe that there is some science that is “universal”. This science, often called “hard” science, where “hard” means immutable across vast amounts of time and space, exists beyond my perception, beyond humanity, beyond life as we know it on this planet.

But what of my other stories? Those that are local to my own existence? Those that live in my head for only the brief moment of my lifetime? How do I “test” these ideas? My imagination overflows with beliefs, often driven by my need to feel in control of my life. My ego rewards me for believing I am right, driven by some evolutionary advantage of self-righteousness. But what if I want to know more? Be aware of more? What if I realize my perceptions are limited and the world is not?

If any of this rings true with you, then I commit to listen, to understand your point of view, so long as you commit to do the same with me. We will never have the same perspective. We cannot. And thank goodness! That is our power, our survival advantage! We are two different windows on the world. And I would like to see more than my pinpoint view allows.

And so it begins...

I'm thinking, not sleeping!

Another 8am Collective Journaling morning... Thank you, Peter Limberger!

Quote of the Day:  "If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week."
~ Harry Crews

Prompt: The “world don’t want you to do that.” Sometimes you have to just force the issue. What’s yours to do, big or small, that presently has no external encouragement?”

Or: write about what’s alive for you now.
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“World don’t want you to do that…”

I read a comment about the lifetime of an electron. You know, those tiny fireflies that zip around at near-light speed, always busy, orbiting the sedentary nucleus. Electrons are what I call “morning people”: those who are blessed/cursed with energy, awake at the crack of dawn, ready to go. My mother was a “morning person”. I am not.

The comment about electrons referred to a paper published in 2015. (You see, it took me 11 years just to find out about the paper!). The paper [ https://borex.lngs.infn.it/papers/articles/a-test-of-electric-charge-conservation-with-borexino/ ], done by scientists at the Borexino liquid scintillation detector (I want one of those!) tried to estimate how long an electron existed. They got tired of waiting, and said that the lower limit, the estimated lifetime of an electron was at least some five quintillion years times the life of our universe (τ ≥ 6.6×1028 years at 90% C.L.).

Now, I don’t know how long our universe is expected to live, nor how folks go about even guessing such a time, and I have to look up what a quintillion is (it’s a billion billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). I get tired just looking at all those zeros! But that’s a long, long, long time!

And all that time that electron is zipping around…

I like philosophers. They spend more time sitting around. Or as a poster from the 1960’s so aptly reminded me: Buddha says, “Don’t just DO something, SIT there!”

OMG! Where am I going with this? So many distracting lines of thought…

Oh yeah, time…

I was sitting around, thinking about the difference between these busy, beyond eternal, electrons, and me. I was trying to imagine what an electron might be thinking (or more precisely, do electrons have “choice”). You know, it comes from that long-discussed philosophical topic, “does choice exist”? Or is the world determined to be determined?

So, there I am, sitting, looking out my window, a wall of trees, oaks and maples and sourwoods, rhododendrons and mountain laurel… a typical window in the Blue Ridge Mountains at the edge of the southern Appalachia Mountains of North America… and I was wondering, what is it like to be a tree? A rock? An atom? An electron? Would I have “choice”? Would I be able to look into the future, see two options, and choose between them in a way that wasn’t determined by all the electrons flying around in my brain?

Buddha realized the advantages of NOT having choice, of just being in the moment. There is no suffering.

So there I am, a rock, maybe on the edge of the creek bed, the creek that is less than a 100 yards from my window, yet invisible, unheard, because there is such a wall of plants. I’m a rock, perched on the edge of the slowly eroding creek bed… Should I go for a swim? Roll down the hill and plop into the creek? Maybe go surfing (though, I am pretty heavy, and might just sink to the bottom). Shall I go? What shall I do?

And it occurred to me that the rock, an atom, an electron, doesn’t “think” like that, isn’t conscious (even in a panpsycho way). To be able to have “choice”, there must be memory (recording the past), and imagination (recording the future). Choice adds two dimensions to the universe: the past and the future. We humans tend to call these two dimensions “time”. But “time” doesn’t exist, really. Time is just a side-effect of observing the difference between “now” and “then”. Time doesn’t exist if there is no memory, no recording of “then”. And the future only exists in my mind, in my imagination. The future is only a virtual reality.

I’m starting to wake up… Just a few more moments in bed, Mom, please, I’m not sleeping… I’m thinking...

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I still haven’t read Philip Goff's Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019). Maybe tomorrow, when I have the time...

Let Your Fingers Do The Thinking

Another morning beginning with Peter Limberger's Collective Journaling Zoom Call...

Quote of the Day:  "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." - Isaac Asimov

Prompt: Free write today and let your fingertips do the thinking.
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I read an article last week, about the possible origin of fingers. I never really wondered, though I have wondered why we have 10 (or 8 and 2 thumbs). And then there are the toes…

“Fish Buttholes May Be The Reason We Now Have Fingers, Study Finds”
[ https://www.sciencealert.com/fish-buttholes-may-be-the-reason-we-now-have-fingers-study-finds ]

Sometimes, editors have too much fun coming up with catchy headlines. And in today’s “fake news” environment, I double-checked the source, a Nature article.

“Co-option of an ancestral cloacal regulatory landscape during digit evolution”
[ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09548-0 ]

It’s science at work, that investigative process of finding that which resists bias (can be confirmed by all). Now, I love science. I love the idea that, as a species, we share knowledge, especially knowledge that helps me survive. But aside from how this knowledge will help ME, I was disturbed by a line in the abstract of the Nature article:

“We genetically evaluated the function of the zebrafish Hoxd regulatory landscapes by comparatively assessing the effects of their full deletions. We show that, unlike in mice, deletion of these regions in fish does not disrupt hoxd gene transcription during distal fin development. By contrast, we found that this deficiency leads to the loss of expression within the cloaca…”

Full deletions? Loss of expression within the cloaca? I think this means that these scientists genetically altered zebrafish so they didn’t have buttholes. NOT COOL!

 

 

When I was 12, I had a fish tank. Zebrafish were a favorite, along with angelfish. I loved my fish. They were always happy to see me. I’d read about "Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys(1)" in comic books, so I enjoyed training my fish to swim to the top of the tank whenever I waved my yellow-brown plastic containter of “TetraMin” over the surface. I never got the fish to follow a flashlight, but they sure loved that yellow-brown TetraMin container. The food in the container was flaky, flat wafers of flattened flies? Later in my life I would notice that nori, the thin, flat, rolled sheets of dried seaweed used to wrap rice for sushi, felt and smelled a lot like my TetraMin. I never tried eating TetraMin. Kept thinking about those smooshed flies…

My fish tank needed to be cleaned regularly, a discipline I was not happy about. If I didn’t clean my fish tank, the glass would gradually turn green with algae. I was told this was bad for the fish, but in my mind, it was part of the ecology (I planted trees during the first “Earth Day” in April, 1970). But my mother had a ways of convincing me (aka my father), so I religiously cleaned my fish tank when it took on a green tinge.

Just an aside about fish and fish tanks, when I cleaned the tank, I had to replace all the water. I took great care to make sure the new water was at room temperature before putting the fish back in. I knew what it was like getting into a cold bath!

And what a happy day when I found a sucker fish, Otocinclus catfish, that would eat the algae off the glass! I still had to clean the fish tank, though, when it started to smell too much like fish.

My point is, getting back to this experiment, that I loved my fish. The idea of genetically altering a zebrafish so it had no butthole seems cruel and unusual. I know I’m different than zebrafish, but I wouldn’t want some alien species to come to Earth and decide to genetically alter me! Does the golden rule (or platimum or silver for that matter) not apply to other species?

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 19, partly because of the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", where aliens come to Earth offering peace and advanced technology. The aliens invite humans to join them on their further journey, and leave a book on Earth for the other humans. Initially, the title of the book is translated: "To Serve Man", but it is later discovered that the book is a cookbook!

Well, enough s!*% out of these fingers for today! Love always!





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(1) Here is what Gemini AI had to say about Sea-Monkeys:

The comic book advertisement you are referring to is for 
Sea-Monkeys. The ads, which ran heavily in comic books during the 1960s and 70s, promised "Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys" that could be trained and would follow a flashlight beam. 

Key details about the advertisements and the creatures themselves:

• The real animals: Sea-Monkeys are actually a specialized breed of brine shrimp (scientific name Artemia NYOS).

• The marketing hype: The comic book advertisements, often illustrated by artist Joe Orlando, featured highly personified, cartoonish characters with crowns and smiling human-like faces. The ads promised "a bowlful of happiness".

• The flashlight trick: While the ads claimed you could train them, the shrimp's habit of swimming toward a light source is not a learned trick but a natural biological reflex called phototaxis.

• The inventor: The product was invented by Harold von Braunhut, who also created other novelties like X-Ray Spex and Invisible Goldfish.

• The reality: Many customers were disappointed to discover the creatures were tiny, translucent brine shrimp that looked nothing like the illustrations and often died quickly.

My Discovery of Self-Discipline

Another blog post inspired by Peter Limberger's Collective Journaling!

Quote of the Day:  “Indeed, discipline means nothing other than this, whether it is of the priestly‑ascetic kind directed toward abnegation or of the warlike‑heroic kind directed toward hardening oneself like steel. In both cases, it is a matter of maintaining complete control over life, so that at any hour of the day it can serve a higher calling."- Jünger

Prompt: Enkrateia: meaning a state of self-control and self-mastery, especially over one’s passions. In modern parlance: discipline. Xenophon referred to it as “the foundation of all virtues.” We might call it the “first victory,” since all spiritual traditions view something like it as a prerequisite for advanced practice. Modern men, depending on their worldview, flex enkrateia in the spectacle in their own ways.

Is enkrateia a worthy aim or misjudged? And what might be gained by having more of it?

As a child, I was “disciplined”. And as a father, I “disciplined” my own children. It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s that I began to consider “discipline” as something that might be important, even necessary, for me to demand of myself.

That's not to say that I hadn't practiced many disciplines in my life. My life was not undisciplined. Instead, I thought of disciplines as demanded of me, enforced by others. In high school I joined the football team and was given the discipline of cutting off my hair, surviving the verbal abuse of my coaches. After my best friend broke my arm in football practice, I switched to cross-country and learned the discipline of running even when I felt I was going to vomit. And all through my life I was taught the discipline of waking, getting ready, going, to arrive at some location by a specific time. I hated THAT discipline most of all… being on time.

I was smarter than the average bear, so I didn’t have to be very disciplined  about homework or studying. And my father was a university professor, so the discipline of learning was bred into me. School was easy (except the “on time” part). College was easy, too, since I had no discipline around getting good grades, just around learning. By the time I got a full-time job, I’d learned I could handle it without too much struggle, as long as I got up, got dressed, caught the bus, and arrived on time.

I got married, had a child, got a better job, had another child, got fired, started my own company, had a third child, got a divorce…

It was my divorce that disturbed me. I began to question my understanding of the world around me. But it wasn’t until a second woman left me that I finally broke down. What was I doing wrong? Why did the women I loved leave me?

I found an answer in the most unusual place: an EST-based weekend for men about relationships. Here, in the late hours of shared sleep-deprivation, I heard about the value of self-discipline.

I joined a men’s team (not to be confused with a "be-kind-and-nice" men’s "group"). Our commitment to each other was to poke and prod, dig and delve, to kick each other’s butts to force clarity about who we were – who I was – versus who I wanted to be. The men would not leave me alone until they felt I was being honest, and that I was committed to “being the man I always wanted to be”.

It was during those late-night, three-hour, weekly outdoor meetings, 8-14 men, circled around an open fire, that I discovered the value of self-discipline. It was a hard lesson to learn.

“Do you want to be a man who keeps his word?”
“Yes!”
“Then why don’t you practice that discipline?”
“I do.”
“Did you give your word to be here on time?”
“Yes.”
“And you were late!”
“Not by much…”
“Were you here by the time you said you would be here?”
“Well…”
“You were late! Late is not being here on time!”

Oh, the pain of self-discipline! I HATED to HAVE to do ANYTHING! Yet, here was a man, in my face, about being late to a meeting. I continued my self-defiant behavior… and was late more times than I wish to remember.

“You are not a man who keeps his word!”
“Well, I keep my word for the important stuff.”
“You are NOT a man who keeps his WORD!”

How many times did I just want to say “F-U!” to those “A-holes”!

But I didn’t. Deep inside me I knew that I had something to learn.

“You’re late, again!”
“I’ll do 20.”

My team also practiced the discipline of forgiveness. I could get back my honor by doing some push-ups. I’d gotten very good at doing push-ups.

“No. That’s not helping you. Instead, this week, ask everyone you know if you are someone who keeps his word.”
“Okay.”

He heard my distrust, the hesitation in my voice.

“Will you give me your word.”

His eyes bore into mine. I refused to look away, met him eye-to-eye.

“Yes,” I said, “I give you my word,” and it felt different.

That week, I asked people I knew if I kept my word, if they could depend on me. Everybody said, “Yes.” Then I asked my children (aged 13, 10, and 6).

“Do I keep my word with you? Do I do what I say I’m going to do?”

My oldest said, “Yes.” My two youngest said, “No.”

And it pierced my heart. Not the word, but the way they said it. Not angry, not condemning, not spiteful. Just straight up child honest.

“What do you mean?” I answered, my face incredulous.
“You’re always late picking us up at school.”

There it was. Late. Again. And this time it was my own children that knew me better than I was letting me know myself.

At the next men’s team meeting, NOT late, I asked for some time.

“I want to be a father my children can trust, a man who keeps his word.”

The concept of self-discipline was growing inside me. A man offered his advice.

“This week, keep a journal of all the times you say you will do something. Keep track of what you said and when you would do it by. Add a column that says when you actually did what you said you would do. Bring the journal to next week’s meeting.”

The next day I began my journal.

It was awkward, and embarrassing, but every time I told someone I would do something, I took out my journal and wrote it down, including the delivery date and time.

“What’s that?”
“It’s my commitment journal. I’m keeping track of my commitments.”

When the person didn’t say anything, but seemed pleased, I offered why I was doing this.

“I want to be someone who keeps his word.”

I was surprised at the supporting reaction I got, whether a smile, a nod, or a verbal, “Good idea!”

That week I discovered, to my horror, that I had NOT done what I said I would do for some 30% of my commitments. THIRTY PERCENT! If I had an employee who did that, I’d have put them on notice. If I had a car that did that, I’d have junked it!

For three weeks I kept my commitment journal, until I reached the 100% success rate. To achieve this, I also had to learn the discipline of saying, “No.” I had to choose between being nice or being honest, being accepted or risking rejection, satisfying my ego or my discipline.

I learned that self-discipline is about doing something that might hurt in the short run (being on time, for instance) for something I value in the long run (my word). I learned that giving my word wasn’t really about me. My commitment to my word was for my community, so they could depend on me. I learned that it wasn’t up to me to choose which commitments I keep. I had to keep them all, even the tiniest, even being on time. I had to accept that I didn’t know how important my commitment was to the other person, and by NOT keeping my commitment, I was disrespecting the value THEY got from me keeping my commitment.

In the end, discipline is all about being a good member of my community. If I am trusted, others can rely on me. If I hold commitments as being critical to my community, and others in my community do the same, I know my community will be more likely to survive, more likely to thrive.

I also learned that there is great power in keeping my commitments! And I don’t mean my sense of self (though my ego is pleased), nor do I mean a sense of power in my community (though my community did come to rely on me, giving me more responsibility). What I’m talking about is the power I gained by making commitments I thought I COULDN’T achieve, commitments that scared me, commitments that seemed beyond my reach. I learned that my commitment to do what seemed impossible, which gave me the power of "no-ifs-ands-or-buts", was often all I needed to succeed. As my team told me, "You'll never know the shots you can't make if you never try to make them!" But that is another story...