Experiences Vs Things Quotes

People don't read anymore. And, when they do, they don't read books like this one, but instead read books that depress them, because those books are seen as important. Somehow, the Librarians have successfully managed to convince most people in the Hushlands that they shouldn't read anything that isn't boring. It comes down to Biblioden the Scrivener's great vision for the world — a vision in which people never do anything abnormal, never dream, and never experience anything strange. His minions teach people to stop reading fun books, and instead focus on fantasy novels. That's what I call them, because these books keep people trapped. Keep them inside the nice little fantasy that they consider to be the 'real' world. A fantasy that tells them they don't need to try something new. After all, trying new things can be difficult.

It is wise to ask questions. The only way for anyone to experience truth is to find it on their own through their own seeking, experience(s), and inner knowing. The depth of knowledge a person obtains through experiencing something firsthand, and by it resonating as truth within one’s heart, far exceeds a belief taught to them using mere words.

From personal experience, I know for sure that the number one thing that saddens the dead more than our grief — is not being conscious of their existence around us. They do want you to talk to them as if they were still in a physical body. They do want you to play their favorite music, keep their pictures out, and continue living as if they never went away. However, time and "corruption" have blurred the lines between the living and the dead, between man and Nature, and between the physical and the etheric. There was a time when man could communicate with animals, plants, the ether, and the dead. To do so requires one to access higher levels of consciousness, and this knowledge has been hidden from us. Why? Because then the plants would tell us how to cure ourselves. The animals would show us their feelings, and the dead would tell us that good acts do matter. In all, we would come to know that we are all one. And most importantly, we would be alerted of threats and opportunities, good and evil, truth vs. fiction. We would have eyes working for humanity from every angle, and this threatens "the corrupt". Secret societies exist to hide these truths, and to make sure lies are preserved from generation to generation.

The one good thing about pain is that while you can remember it, you can't recreate it; you can't truly think it into recurring. You can rate it in retrospect—a toothache vs. banging your funny bone—but it doesn't work the way words or music do. You can hear things in your head, voices, music, over and over. You can close your eyes and visualize a place. But pain, the experience of it, either is or isn't. You are in pain, or you aren’t.

It's an arbitrary thing if you're born with an XX or XY chromosome, but it can determine your experience of the world. It's about whether you are physically intimidating vs. being physically intimidated. It determines whether you are the one to take an active role in sex and society.

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear.

Practice Hesitating Less Look for small ways to practice hesitating a little less than you usually would. Over time, this will help increase your psychological flexibility: You’ll get better at choosing when you want to let a decision marinate vs. when you want to make a decision swiftly, take action, and move on. You’ll start to learn from experience that you can move out of thinking mode more quickly without disastrous consequences. For example, if you tend to put off buying things that, in reality, would be a good investment, give yourself some criteria for making quicker decisions. You might commit to making decisions about purchases that are under $50 in less than 48 hours. Choose the level that suits your situation and preferences.

The years move forward and everyone is attending to their life’s priorities, focusing on how to be happy, make a living, raise a family. The years turn into decades and sooner or later, (hopefully later) sickness or accidents happen and all are again confronted with the big questions: Why? What’s next? What has this life that I’ve lived been about? As one begins to consider their own eventual departure: What have I been able to do to make things a little better? What have I passed along to make others’ lives more beautiful?

There is a taboo in the psychology world, to ask a therapist what their cure rate is. Though the therapist knows what the person means in asking, and could give an answer, they typically dislike the question, because it is a way of measuring the psychologist on something that depends ultimately on their patients. To add to that the therapist doesn’t typically see a struggle in their patient’s life not being a struggle, but that a person gets better at not letting it get to them. I would say that our experience in life will always be in reference to our weaknesses, but that isn’t a bad thing. Our weaknesses plague us until we decide to really face them, and then they become strengths as we change them. I think it is a matter of maturing, and not curing in psychopathology, we’re naïve not broken. Alcoholism for instance, once it is overcome, the person doesn’t forget all the intricacies of the cost-benefit of alcohol once they become sober. They still know exactly what problems alcohol seemed to solve, and when faced with those problems, they cannot completely exclude it as a possible remedy. Why? For example, I personally don’t drink alcohol, but I know many people who see it as a normal part of their life, and have set what they feel are appropriate bounds for its use. It is a lot easier for me, who has not experienced any benefits, but knows several disadvantages, to not see alcohol as worth it. However, similarly in my life, fully knowing both the advantages of things like soda, fast food, sleeping in, not exercising and whatever else, in the cost benefit analysis, they sometimes still win. Every asset has associated risks, and when making a decision, while trying to optimize value, we are not picking between correct or incorrect, or right or wrong, but cost vs benefit in safe bet vs the risky bet. Whether I can study or write better while drinking a caffeinated soda has yielded inconsistent results, but sometimes the gamble seems worth it, however drinking a soda before going to the gym has yielded consistently negative results. This is the process of maturity, and the only way to help someone mature faster, is to help them remember and process the data they have already gathered or are currently gathering. One thing that slows down this process is false information. Many cases of grave disability due to psychopathology are caused because of the burden of an overwhelming amount of counterproductive information, and limited resources of productive information.

An important lesson can be learned from Robbins’ experience on the race track. If your focus is constantly on what you don’t want, then guess what you’re going to get more of? What you don’t want! Change your focus to what you do want, but not only when things are easy and your anxiety is at a reasonable level. It is more important to do this when you are feeling like you’re in a tough situation and there’s no way out. Those are times when you need to say to yourself, “Ok, I’m not feeling great and I feel like my anxiety is rising to an uncontrollable level. I have a choice: to focus on stopping it quickly (which doesn’t work) so I don’t have to go through this cycle again, or to focus on how these feelings have not killed me in the past and won’t kill me this time either.” This way the fear starts to fade and along with the fear, your negative thoughts and bodily sensations with it.

One interesting fact about disgust is that it is a piece of human psychology that does not sit easily on either side of the traditional nature–nurture divide. On the one hand, the capacity to be disgusted, together with a small set of things that appear to be universally and innately disgusting, is a part of the species’ typical psychological endowment. These are a part of human nature; one does not have to learn how to be disgusted, and one does not have to be taught to be disgusted by certain things, either—like the pungent smell of rotting garbage on a hot summer day, for instance. On the other hand, the variation evident in what different people find disgusting reveals a considerable role for nurture as well. In other cases, people do learn what to be disgusted by through individual experience, through social interactions with others, and through the type of education that constitutes the refinement of their moral and aesthetic sensibilities.

Along the way, though, I was always careful not to get greedy or to go for the quick buck--despite the temptations in the early days. Financially, it was hard saying no to big appearance fees from TV shows like I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here or Survivor--but I always had the long goal in mind and tried to keep the main thing the main thing. And not get distracted by fluff. Instead, know your strengths. I also tended instinctively to shy away from both TV and the whole concept of fame--partly, I am sure, because I didn’t have the self-belief to feel I deserved either fame or money. (Time and experience have since taught me that fame and money very rarely go to the worthy, by the way--hence we shouldn’t ever be too impressed by either of those imposters. Value folk for who they are, how they live, and what they give--that’s a much better benchmark.) So I resisted TV quite heavily--even ironically spurning the offers of the original Man vs. Wild producer, Rob MacIver, some three times, before finally agreeing to do a pilot show. But what a dope I was. Bear, didn’t you listen to your grandma when she wrote: “When the ball rolls your way grab it. We so rarely get a second chance. (Although miraculously, this does sometimes happen, too.)”? But I just didn’t want to be pushed into TV, I wanted to keep focused on my strengths, and trust those skills. My father always used to say that if you focus on doing your job well, then money will often follow. But chase the money and it has a habit of slipping through your fingers. I always liked that. But learning that I could do both things--TV, as well as my core skills--was a big lesson. Maybe it would be possible to do programs without having to be a smiley media person. I wondered. Grandma? “Indeed--when the ball rolls your way--grab it.

Humphrey had lost his hand in the first Gulf War and now had a phantom hand. As is true in other patients, whenever he was touched on his face, he felt sensations in his missing hand. No surprises so far. But with ideas about mirror neurons brewing in my mind, I decided to try a new experiment. I simply had him watch another person—my student Julie—while I stroked and tapped her hand. Imagine our amazement when he exclaimed with considerable surprise that he could not merely see but actually feel the things being done to Julie’s hand on his phantom. I suggest this happens because his mirror neurons were being activated in the normal fashion but there was no longer a null signal from the hand to veto them. Humphrey’s mirror neuron activity was emerging fully into conscious experience. Imagine: The only thing separating your consciousnesses from another’s might be your skin! After seeing this phenomenon in Humphrey we tested three other patients and found the same effect, which we dubbed “acquired hyperempathy.” Amazingly, it turns out that some of these patients get relief from phantom limb pain by merely watching another person being massaged. This might prove useful clinically because, obviously, you can’t directly massage a phantom.

It is the easiest thing to know God. Lay your head at the lotus feet of the Divine. And just become naught.

The Spotlight Framework 1. User Experience Issues ​● ​ How do I ...? ​● ​ What happens when ...? ​● ​ I tried to … 2. Product Marketing Issues ​● ​ Can you/I ...? ​● ​ How do you compare to ...? ​● ​ How are you different than ...? ​● ​ Why should I use you for/to ...? 3. Positioning Issues ​● ​ I'm probably not your target customer … ​● ​ I'm sure I'm wrong but I thought ... Using this framework, we can see that a question like “How do I integrate this with Trello?” fits into the user experience category. Because clearly the customer already knows that the integration is possible. It’s not a discoverability thing. They’re not asking if it’s possible, they know that it’s possible, they expect that it’s possible, but they just don’t know how to get it done. In contrast, customers could be asking, “Hey, can you guys integrate with Trello?” or “Can I integrate this part of your app with Trello?” Once again, the important part to focus on here is not the Trello part, it’s the “Can you ...?” or “Can I ...?” And what that tells you is that you have some level of product marketing issue. Because if you can integrate with Trello, the fact they’re asking you that and that they don’t know means that they weren’t educated properly along some part of the sign-up or getting-started path. (It could’ve been a features page on the website where it wasn’t clear, or it could be that you need to do a better job of calling it out inside of the product.) So that’s how I think about user experience issues vs. product marketing issues. But there’s also a third category in my framework: Positioning. Positioning issues are when someone gives you feedback, and they’re usually trying to be nice, and they’ll say something like, “I’m probably not your target customer, but ...” Now, if you know that person is your target customer, there’s probably something wrong in your positioning that’s leading them to believe they’re not a good fit.

One of the most important – and sudden – changes in politics for several decades has been the move from a world of information scarcity to one of overload. Available information is now far beyond the ability of even the most ordered brain to categorise into any organising principle, sense or hierarchy. We live in an era of fragmentation, with overwhelming information options. The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016. At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.* What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors. Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people. Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.

The traditional world saw reality itself, at all levels, as a sacred experience. There was no level of activity that was not permeated by some higher significance. Everything was connected in a concentric circles, at the center of which sat transcendence, and this is why even crafts such as saddle-making had "theologies" and "initiations" for guild members only. 'These practices sprung from their perception of reality and not from the dictates of a religious power imposing them where they did not belong. For men of this mentality, there was no such thing as "spiritual life" vs. "ordinary life," with the two cleanly separated into a dichotomy.