Tue 16 Apr 2002 15:55
Where they wash cars with a passion

knowing I will forget interesting memories if I do not write it down.
choosing to do so.
anthony this morning, in the sun.
difficulties
warmth
people

flying

change in weather change in emotional atmosphere. (self)

heat, or hide behind a/c?

eyes imbalanced

summer.

recently, momentarily, I have been considering spending more time as a programmer (and did in fact so spend more time, but not with the same intention).

I was sharing with hal that

as what work is best for me.

What of Dreamer, what of social focus?

vitality-

the awe that I most feel in my life is because of this technology.

a huge and visible impact. responsive, visible meaning it is affected.
grows and changes before my eyes.
a part of the process which does not need me but which I would like to participate in? and in which I can see myself participating in, but how?

a rejection and subordination of people
no, simply a re-allocation, and a more appropriate vision?

a future visualized how?

comparison with meditation?

Knowing a mind that is in the process of growing?

Intimately experiencing an organism that is in the process of coming to exist? and exists?

A system. fast, responsive, dynamic, becoming things I never could have concieved of? Built on ideas. Bootstrapped. autopoetic

a different sort of evolution? which will be has been mirrored in all areas which human action has significant effect?

we need displays we can look at 24-7- optik nerve hook up.

a sort of practice that is worshipping-- er, one-ing melding, a communion with
sandy
sliceanddice.


such a strange and non-physical, non directly social adventure.
yet I seem to have been bred for it?
an impatience for anything not immediately responsive, continuously and everywhere available. leaving nothing but myself, and to a lesser extent computers.
what of music?
affinity for silence.

a mind.
a non-visual

how, and how far will I go on this?
first reading on own, and then, if tenable, school?

What kind of work with this system could I see myself doing should I live endlessly, for, in a way, I shall, and more so, the more

the work is the work of experiencing, communicating with, building, and learning the system.--the mind.

the future mind of which past minds are memories.

what code shall I write? ping?

the medium.

2002-04-16-1853
p170, what really matters, tony schwartz
seeing the big picture- re betty edwards (drawing on the right side of the brain)
When the shift occurs, she found, the internal chatter that most us hear constantly in our brain quiets down. So, in turn, does the desire to engage in conversation. Instead, one becomes deeply absorbed in the task, often losing track of time entirely.

"In the deepest shifts," "what I experience is a feeling of oneness
"ram dass: "thoughts feed our sense of separateness and prevent access to our deepest level of connectedness."

this shift can occur when one becoms deeply immersed in listening to a piece of music, or begins to play "out of one's mind" during competition in sports...

gardening--loses one's self in the course of an afternoons of gardening.

"everything opens up momentarily, and you have an entry into some deep connected state of being that you find yourself wanting to hang on to forever."

p173
too impatient to see each strand of hair in all its subtle complexity, for example
any that require rote repetition, close attention to complex visual details, and open-ended time commitment. (left hemisphere avoids these)

right hemisphere, is comfortable immersing itself in whatever it sees and in carefully reproducing it.

upside down, focus on lines, edges.

I was aware that ethe experience was enjoyable in some relaxed, wordless way.

p176
If I find myself in an airport waiting area with an hour before a plane," "I'll take out my drawing pad and sketch the scenes around me. a wonderful way of recording my experiences deeply in memory, and of relaxing my letting go of active thinking."

she also enjoys driving long distances on the freeway when there are no time pressures, because this allows her to move in to a more imaginative realm.

draw negative space.

only by drawing unchairlike shapes.

As a writer, I was used to laboring endlessly and painfully over each sentence. Clear, evocative writing was the reward for hard, conscious work and a fair amount of suffering.

measure sizes and angles of objects in relation to one another.

from middle grey, using eraser and pencil, draw face.

the first self-portrait I did remains the most viscerally powerful and real. never since have I gotten quite as absorbed in drawing for its own sake.

p184: creative process
Helmholtz:
saturation - gathering of information
incubation: mulling over
illumination--sudden and spontaneous solution or breakthrough occurs.
1908- poincarÈ: verification--illumination framed in concrete terms and tested for accuracy.

1960's--getzels--preceeding all: discovery or formulation of the problem to be solved.--first insight.

p185:
tolerance for ambiguity, complexity, and paradox; a reliance on nonverbal imagery and intuition; and a gestaltlike capacity to see both the whole and the parts.

the deliberate giving over of the problem---puts it out of conscious control.

p186
the actual moment of creative breakthrough typically occurs unbidden and spontaneous.
the pieces literally fall into place and you see the whole picture...

how?

for the right hemisphere to do its job open ended quiet time is required.

if the lh remains too outer focused, judgemental, and dominant...

getting started each day and becoming deeply absorbed remains a remarkably persistent challenge, even after 20 years as a writer. When I look at a blank screen, I still frequently confront myriad fears characteristic of the left ehmisphere: the undertainty that I'll produce any clear, comprehensible language; the powerful hunger to find simple solutions and quickly arrive at closure; and the chilling specter of failure in the end.

instinctively, edwards says
the lh tries to avoid these anxietis by looking instead for challenges it can readily meet.
My own methods of avoidance are nearly automatic.
Rather than write when I first sit down, I rearrange papers on my desk, make lists, catch up on phone calls, run downstairs for coffee.

all blocks- failure to permit the right hemisphere to take a more dominant role.

rather than simply sitting down before a blank page--
go back and edit the previous day's work.

as I became more immersed in the work-- I felt myself relaxing and shifting into the more relaxed rh mode that I recognized from drawing.

In this frame of mind, conceiving and writing new material became less daunting.

a voice forever urgin me to divert my energies, to take on something simpler and less open-ended, or at the very least to take a break.

the willingness to trust one's deepest unconscious potentials.

one becomes more creative by further developing that part of the mind that is so deeply involved in creative thinking.

adding visual skills to
stands a chance of increasing the overall power of the brain.

p188 elmer green
rather, it comes up from the lower brain centers by way of the right cortex--in the form of gestalts, and pictures, and feelings.

have to get the loud noise of waking consciousness turned off, because the information that comes up form the the lower brain centers is as delicate and subtle as the draft of a butterfly'swing. The instant you turn too much left cortex attention to it, it tends to slip away.

p189 edwards- dredge up the inner life of the mind

analog drawings

over a period of years, she asked hundreds of students to draw pictures of specific emotions, or of problems they were facing, without using any recognizable symbols at all. She permitted the use only of the language of lines and shapes. In time, edwards discovered remarkably consistendt patterns in the way certain emotions are depicted symbolically.

Joy, for example, mostly shows up as light, curving, circular forms that reach upward, while anger is typically jagged, dark, and pointed.

Peacefulness or tranquility is almost invariably expressed in horizontal lines or gentle waves, while depression is reflected not just by darkness, but by forms that are literally drawn low on the page.

p189
I've avoided the apect of the work that bears on the self. I've been healed by giving, not by looking within..

that is my left hemisphere talking-- "don't make waves'

p190
Drawing gives one a feeling of power--not power over things or people but some strange power of understanding or knowing or insight.

through drawing, one becomes more connected to things and people outside oneself...By looking outward and seeing the world around you in the artist's mode of seeing, you gain insights into yourself. Conversely by looking inward to find the artist within, you gain insight into the world outside yourself.

p191
as elmer green put it," the power of the left cortex is that it keeps us rational , helps us discard superstitions, gives us a way to analyze and sort through information. Without it, we'd be back in the dark ages."

edwards
the ideal role of the right hemisphere is to provide access to the deepest levesl of one's true experience and to serve as a reality check against the lh's tendency to make up stories when it doesn't really know the answers.

lh to be an articulate spokesperson for all the information that comes up from the right and to discriminate between what's important what what is merely trivial.

rh generative
lh communicative -protocol


2002-04-16-1956
emails with Joanna today-- no way to be perfect, to perfectly express desire-- yet also lack of need--- probably no way around it except familiarity. or phone calls.!

2002-04-16-2252
p194 what r m
John Sarno at New York University's Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.
nothing structurally wrong with back.
physical symptoms masking unconscious emotions that I resisted acknowledging, and fear itself played a key role in perpetuating my chronic cycle of pain.

p196 - 98 men and women with no backpain MRI's ~2/3ds evidenced spinal abnormalities, bulging or protruding disks, herniated disks, degenerated disks.
an abnormal disk has no apparent relationship to pain.
a great deal of unnecessary back surgery is performed.

various forms of tension--conscious or unconscious--cause constriction of blood vessels that lead to the muscles and nerves in the back and often in the shoulders and neck.
deprivation of blood and the oxygen it carries ultimately leads to painful muscle spasms and nerve pain.

fear of more serious injury creates more tension in back.
tension myositis syndrome.

p197 anger is the emotion that is most often responsible for back pain.
make patients aware that repressed anger--or fear--ultimately shos up disguised in the form of physical symptoms.

p198
ingrained fear about back leads to more anciety.

that shows you that just thinking can affect your physiology and your pain.

p199
two emotions most consistently correlated with illness are depression which leads to hopelessness and isolation; and chronic anger, which is stressful and alienating.

the two emotions most associated with physical health are the capacity for love, which prompts feelings of security and intimacy; and hope or faith, which leads to a sense of meaning and resilience. In effect, emotions that encourage more connectedness and awareness appear to be health, while those that prompt sparation and alienation are unhealthy. At a slightly more metaphorical level, the research into the mind-body connection suggests that the fewer the parriers we erect--between conscious and unconscious, between ourselves and others, and between personal and universal concerns--the healthier we're likely to be. Conversely, the more narrowly we define ourselves, the more separate we feel from others, and the more disconnected we get from our own deepest needs, the more vulnerable we become to disease.

(the more we welcome it)

[howard bloom's 'each life is an hypothesis']

imagery--

p202
the first pattern LeShan unearthed was that the overwhelming majority of cancer patients had suffered a devastating personal loss in the year before being diagnosed with cancer. These losses ranged from the death of a spouse, to losing a job, to having a child leave home for college. Whatever form the loss took, the result was that the patients uniformly felt they'd been robbed of their central reason for living. This led, in turn, to feelings of isolation, worthlessness, despair, and a deep sense of hopelessness about ever again leading a satisfying life.

the second patter:
a lifelong difficulty in openly expressing their needs and a tendency to repress stron negative feelings such as anger.
tended to be cooperative and seemingly easygoing, deferring automatically to others even when doing so meant setting asid their own needs.

p203 if responsibility and self-control are rigidly maintained at the expense of the expression of geinuine feelings.

p203 what if he could get these to fight for their lives(to value them again)

p204
directed his crisis therapy to helping his patients identify what was right about their lives rather than what was wrong.

self-acceptance and self-approval.


most of his patients had given up the battle for authentic expression of their own being, and that their most urgent need was to reembrace life.

he encouraged patients to explore any action that had the potential to reignite their will to live and to pursue this goal with total commitment--even if it meant changing careers, ending a marriage, or moving to a new city.

if patients could be helped to discover passion ,even joy.

nothing can be more important for them than to discover their own particular song and to learn to project it loudly and clearly.

p206 Friedman and Rosenman, type a, type b,
first scientific demonstration that thoughts and emotions can directly influence cholesterol levels-- accountants and april 15.

failure to replicate
intense competitiveness, rushing, doing several things at once, can be exhilarating and energizing.

hostility  predicts mortality better than any other specific cause ..williams

p210
finding new ways to give and receive love;

looking for ways to get beyond their immediate concerns and to be of service to others.

p210
love intimacy and social support.

oh, this is dismal-- I shall have cancer any day now/hear attack, you name it! but then, I've been cheering on death and decrepitude...not consistently.

Bernie Siegel
"peace of mind sends the body a 'live' message, while depression, fear and unresolved conflict give it a 'die' message."

siegel's message oversimplified and potentially misleading "why do you need this illness?"
to die, duh.

siegel vs. spiegel and yalom
spiegel and yalom kicked ass

the key we've found is to allow people to ventiliate and deal with strong emotions, whatever they are, and to experience strong social support in the process.

p217
most well documented Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Buddhist practice of mindfulness--in which one learns to observe without attachement whatever arises and passes in the field of awareness.

Developing the capacity to simply witness thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations gave patients a way out of the vicious cycle of pain and anxiety that feeds and exacerbates their suffering.


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