The story of the grandfather’s energy.

Why did he have such energy, compared with is grandson?

Why is it such an important story?

Expansions:

-  In even the smallest movement and action there is physical skill, that when practiced, reduces the effort required.

Sawing wood for example seems easy; hold the saw and move it back and forth. There are, though, 10 to 20 different elements to the physical skill of sawing that if learnt and practiced will reduce the effort of sawing by 80%, which means you will be able to saw ‘5 times’ the amount with the same effort.

-  In even the smallest movement and action there can be complete attention to it. With the practice of attention tasks require less effort.

We rarely pay complete attention to what we are doing. Our mind is off somewhere dreaming, worrying, lazing around, unfocused. EVERY item on this list requires attention to the ‘present moment’ to have any effect. Attention is NOT about what you’re supposed to be doing, (like paying attention in class) it is about what you ARE doing. By complete attention to what you ARE doing in every moment you will maximise the benefits to you of that moment and minimise the effort in whatever you are doing.

-  In even the smallest task there is mental skill that, when used, reduces the effort required.

During a task hold in your mind all your experience applicable to the task and apply it imaginatively. Whatever you have done before there will invariably be something different this time around so you are doing this task for the first time. If you approach every task as if you are doing it anew you will learn more, find new ways and become more effective. And you will never get bored.

-  In and before every task there is mental planning that when practiced reduces the effort required for the task.

Before every task do it in detail in your imagination. You will see the potential problems, materials and tools you will need, changes you will need to make and alternatives that may save time and effort. You can do a job in any number of different ways in your imagination without lifting a finger where doing and changing in practice takes effort, time and causes frustration.

-  In every movement and action there is physical strength, that when achieved, requires less effort.

Lifting a 10Kg weight when you’re unfit takes a lot of effort but with exactly the same body but fitter it takes much less. Be physically fit and tasks will take much less effort.

-  Before and during every action there is time to worry about many things. Replace your fruitless worries with complete attention and they will take no effort.

People often spend a good deal of energy worrying about the past, the future, other people or other circumstances. Worry takes energy but achieves nothing. Observe lessons from the past and plan for the future, and leave other people and other circumstances until you next encounter them. Pay attention to what you are doing in the moment.

-  There is a time in every task when something may go wrong and you curse. Dispense with your curses. They bare no fruit yet steal much effort.

Cursing is like pushing your left hand hard against your right hand; you are spending energy fighting yourself and your circumstance. Every curse is based on a thought that “something is working against me”. ‘Things’ cannot think so have no ‘thoughts’ for you. It is you that is working against you. Involve yourself in achieving the result you want. If things go wrong use your energy to make them go right.

-  During every task feed yourself with the joy of being alive. Feed your heart to give yourself spirit, breath to feed your body with energy.

It is wonderful to have life and to be able to do things. Whatever you do and however well you do it you will be giving substance to the life you have been given. Do everything for the love of being alive. Reflect on this and remember to breathe well.

-  In your body there are many muscular tensions from past issues. Leave your tensions in history and the tensions will fall from your body, and your body will save the effort of overcoming them.

Your body holds emotion in the same way that emotional stress leads to physical tension. Tension is one muscle set against another causing greater exertion with every movement. When movement is required your muscles have to overcome these pre-existing tensions so moving requires much more effort. Your body will also be less fluid and less accurate. Consciously relax your body and pay complete attention to the moment

-  In your mind there are many tensions from many issues. Place them in abeyance until they become necessary and useful at their time.

Your mind is not constrained by physical circumstance. You can set it to work on issues and stresses of all manner of things that cannot be resolved by your mind alone. You are asking your mind to waste much effort in trying to achieve the impossible. Be considerate to your mind and use it to do what it’s best at; paying complete attention to what you are doing in the moment.

-  In every task you could ‘perform for others’, become your own puppet master controlling yourself by strings. Be yourself without performance and the task will take less effort.

When you ‘perform’ a task for the appreciation of others your consciousness is trying to perceive the consciousness of others and work via that perception so as to please them. This makes the task much more difficult. Do the task for yourself directly and then let others judge the result as they wish.

-  Every task has a right or wrong moment for you to start it. Only do a task at its right moment, and it will take less effort. But if the moment is not of your choosing find your ‘want’ that is asking you to do it, and do the task to fulfil your want, and it will take less effort.

Don’t mend your car in the cold and rain, do something inside instead. ‘Feel’ for a good time to start, when your want and enthusiasm is greatest. Equally don’t put off a task. A task not done at the right time will become bigger. A task that is embarked upon promptly in joy and comfort will take less effort.

-  Sing your skills, accomplishments and your progress and tasks will take less effort.

Aim for the maximum joy the task can give you in self worth, satisfaction and reward, and give yourself due recognition for your accomplishments. Play always takes much less effort than ‘work’ even if practically they are the same thing.

-  In every task there may be the intrusion of others. Leave them be, yet give to them your attention and love, and they will take less effort.

People circulate energy either positively or negatively. Check the nature of your own energy by observing how others react to it. Let your negative energy go but catch and circulate your positive energy. Circulate positive energy and it will come back to you and add to your energy, and more energy means less effort.

-  Every task will teach you new skills. Learn them with ease as they arise and the task will take less effort.

During every task you will find new ways of doing things, new skills, and new understandings. Be flexible and alert to these lessons rather than tied to your old ways.

-  Take to a task as little as you truly need and use up as little as is necessary to complete it and the task will take less effort.

This discipline reflects your use of your resources and yourself.

-  And finally, there are many tasks that aren’t necessary, and some that aren’t truly yours to do. Check with your heart the truth of a task before you begin it and you will waste no effort in untrue tasks.

Many, many tasks appear to need doing. Sometimes we invent tasks to avoid doing things that are more important but frightening to us, preferring the mundane to the courageous. Sometimes we get caught up in tasks that are rightfully other peoples. Focus on the tasks most important to you and forget the rest; you or someone else will do them if and when they become important.

All of these you know yet little practice. The grandfather did and the youth not.

There are limits to your mind and body and there are heavy and long jobs that will test those limits but with practice all can be done effortlessly.

If you find yourself tired, look to see where your effort is going. Your tiredness will be from your own wasted effort, not from the task.

Energy is a strange commodity. It does not follow the laws of mathematics. Energy shared, both positive and negative, is doubled. Energy has no sign; it is our choice to use it either positively or negatively or dissipate it with no results. Energy is a universal currency; it can go anywhere and come from anywhere.

It stems from our desire to love and be loved but it remains our choice as to how we use it.

Our weakness is almost always in the misuse of our intelligence. We use it to construct ourselves, our fears, our images of other people. We misuse it in fruitless attempts to change the past and control the future and all things that are not present. Its only true use is to exist in the present, exactly as our body and senses do. In the present our intelligence can usefully construct lessons from the past, ideas from information and make plans for the future but only in as much as it is ‘present’ in activity.

Info Bots.

I read a few years ago that one of Putin’s main advisors was a performance artist who specialised in confusion. He would do one thing then the opposite so you wouldn’t know what he’d do next. Evidence suggests Putin initially took this on board as part of his policy making. More recently it looks like he’s taken it a stage further. With the advent of multiple social media platforms confusion could be sewn directly in the minds of the west.  Bots' are automated software that send out social media messages that spawn extreme conflicting opinions. Initially false accounts place extreme opinions about for example stray dogs. Some say stray dogs are vermin to be exterminated and others that they should be homed, loved and cherished. Once seeded real people accounts favouring either extreme view are re-tweeted many times over and swamp the conversation. For the undecided it appears people are taking these two extreme views about stray dogs. They ask themselves, ‘Where do I stand?’ and choose the one that appeals to them most and join one or other of the extremes. This strategy empties the middle ground in favour of the two opposing views. The Face Book algorithm that gives you ‘what you might like’ only reinforces each side’s views. The resulting conflict gridlocks any rational progress and the factions for and against Trump and Brexit become a 50/50 split between stubborn bigots. Recent elections and interviews with supporters on both sides prove the point. So whether you’re for or against stray dogs it’s the Bots and their handlers that have won. 

17 Shot Dead.

The news said the guy was full of remorse. Why? It might seem a strange question but he wasn’t crazy, he’d just decided to do it. So how can a cognitive decision be so far from its real world consequences? In the decision process he wanted to retaliate for being expelled, for the students thinking he was a jerk, not liking him, probably like at home. Society was happy for him to buy a gun; the guy in the shop was nice to him. And no one really dies in shoot-em-ups and TV shows. They’re just acting and the blood’s CGI. Social media’s full of anger and wild conspiracies, lies and truth all mixed into a soup of confusion. He was a decent human being that didn’t deserve all this shit. So he decided. It would be a duck shoot, bam, bam, bam like Call of Duty or The Wire. Even if he got shot he’d just go back to his last saved game or use the remote. Sure in the moment he enjoyed it, all these scenarios coming together to free him from his anger. But people died, the blood was real, the cries and tears were all real. Reality impinged hard on this maze of constructs killing them like bullets. So he felt remorse. Of course he did it but his constructs are all still in the air, in the US environment, for isolated young men like him to breath in; deadly noxious fumes that can continue to cause real people to be shot dead. 

Gone in Ten Seconds.

Last night I was tasked to watch Man U v Tottenham for Mothermouse but missed the first twenty minutes. The last seventy, in fact the last eighty-nine and fifty seconds of Tottenham- glorious and Man U- pathetic would have been inexplicable without those first few seconds. Imagine a boxer vainly attempting to reassemble his brain cells after an uppercut in the first round. The fear, the confusion was palpable, the exotic spice of supremacy intoxicating: Tottenham never better, Man U, hopefully, never worse. Tottenham’s ten-second goal somehow created an instant localised zeitgeist that Jones’s glorious own goal merely confirmed. This, as with most things recently, reminded me of Brexit, the whole country v Europe, stunned by something unexpected that happened so soon after kick-off all parties never really recovered from it. May/Lukaku, lolloping round aimlessly as Kane/Barnier confidently escaped every tackle. We’re playing a shit game because neither Leave nor Remain thought we’d even be playing this fixture. Sure we’re passing and running about but somehow unsure where the goal is. And somehow like Man U we’re banking on an American Glazer special relationship buyout and hoping we can afford Thierry Henry’s transfer fee to be our new manager. So as we forgo the Premiership for League 1 remember this unholy alliance between the League of (rich white) Gentlemen and redundant Yorkshire miners may have scored from the kick off but there’s still eighty nine minutes and fifty seconds yet to play. A couple of goals and late pen should do it. 

Money Flow

It’s common place to assume a company’s main responsibility for its profitability is to its shareholders. To this end it aims to use the cheapest labour, the most economic means of production and maximise its sales. Its shareholders responding to market forces would otherwise, by accepting a lower share price, reduce the companies worth. It’s like if people don’t like you your bank balance will go down. The diagram arrows show the relative responsibilities to and from a company and in effect show the influence the parties have over each other. As the vast majority of workers work for companies these influences dominate our economy. It’s clear the wider society and the company’s labour force have far less economic influence than the Directors and shareholders. As economic influence directs money flow it’s obvious the flow is from right to left. Shareholders demand profit “or else” and directors become grossly overpaid. This ‘money pump’ is also leaving society and the labour force increasingly impoverished. Health, education, the police, defence and infrastructure are all under funded and mean employment practices abound. In the past unions plus labour laws and higher and more unavoidable taxation restricted these flows but with avoidable taxation and little union pressure they’re escalating as never before. This is gush up not trickle down economics. But what will be the result? With a failure to invest in health, education etc the work force will become poorly educated, unhealthy, stressed and demoralised, an army marching on an empty stomach. Companies, the hub of our economics, will become stranded. A neglected workforce, a diminishing home market and, as profits fall, deserted by shareholders. It’s not some moral duty that companies pay taxes and provide fair conditions of employment it’s enlightened self-interest. It’s also enlightened self-interest that governments preside over a vibrant economy and an equally vibrant society. 

Selling it from Under You.

It’s worth studying white America’s treatment of Native Americans. Through massacres and countless broken treaties it has reduced them from a viable widespread people with a rich heritage to an impoverished depressed rump rife with drugs and alcohol. It has gone on to treat its own lower reaches to the same fate, and all in the name of commercial viability. This morning my Face Book page is a long list of petitions against closures of social amenities, road schemes requiring heritage demolition, crisis in the NHS etc all in the name of commercial pressures and the need to monetise our social assets. Interspersed with these are items on mental health, pollution and plastic waste. The world corporate via the government is creating a similarly depressed, pointless and neglect-able rump that appears to be bringing its own misfortunes on itself. It is not, it’s being thrown out of society and left to fester because it can’t monetise its position. Councils, education, NHS, police, libraries and social amenities are under funded and ordered to monetise or be sold off. Socially it’s the equivalent of selling your essentials, bed, cooker, even food for a little cash in hand, and cash without sleep or food is of little use. Spend it and you have nothing, only the seller has even more. Thus it’s vital the government governs the actions and values of society to maintain its vitality, to not give fruitless handouts or allow its assets to be stripped by powerful corporations but to maintain its viability, integrity, environment and well-being. A government that does not maintain this fabric of society is in gross dereliction of its duty and my Face Book page gives ample evidence of this being the case. 

Heart Story.

The speaker continued. “So we continued looking for these brain like cells around the heart and stomach of other animals. Gorillas have more than quadruple that of humans, dogs triple and even cows have double that of humans. It appears human development has not only increased our ‘head’ brain it has decreased these other areas of brain like activity. What might that suggest? From centuries human societies have referred to ‘heart felt’ and ‘gut feeling’: We say them without thinking. But people often experience visceral emotion in their chest, existential hunger in their belly. We don’t consider them evidence of brain activity yet we readily accept a headache is evidence of mental stress. Surely if you feel it in your chest it must be happening there, not in the heart itself but in its surrounding brain. I say ‘brain like’ because we don’t experience these responses as the usual cognitive activity connected to our outward senses; they appear just an indescribable sensation.” The audience took the speaker’s pause to re-comfort themselves. “The quite recent revelation that we do have outposts of brain activity in these regions has thus far been a novelty, an unexpected quirk of evolution, possibly located to help the organs function. But what if those colloquial sayings are accurate? What if they are the seats of our experiencing of love and primal hunger?” The speaker paused again before closing the circle of his argument. “If so our findings suggest animals have retained a greater capacity to experience and evaluate these essentials of life where human evolution has consistently bread out that capacity in favour of our conscious head brain.” He looked around his audience. Most were proving his point, evaluating it no lower than their necks, finding it interesting, novel, worthy or not of consideration. “Can you imagine that gorillas experience life four times as intensely as you, that as you play with your dog he loves you three times more than you love him? That you’re simply no longer equipped to love him that much? Of course you have no way of knowing. Our most recent research has returned to the study of humans. Our non-invasive scanning techniques have shown a strong correlation between heart-brain volume and how people are perceived by others, self-perception having proved too unreliable. People experienced as empathic, loving with a rich joyful life are in the higher percentile where egotistical, uncaring types with a self-serving lifestyle are in the lower. I leave you to ponder the consequences of following this particular evolutionary path.”