My War Days

I turned 17 in 1972. A few months after that I joined the US Coast Guard. I had earned enough credits to get out of high school after the first semester of my senior year.

The fondest memory of my military service occurred in April of 1973 as I traveled from boot camp in Alameda, Calif to Governor’s Island, New York.

I had to ride the subway from JFK airport to South Ferry in lower Manhattan in order to get to Governor’s Island, while wearing my dress uniform.

During that ride on the subway, some guy came up and spit on me. People clapped. I served in a different era.

But memes change, and unfortunately the US government and Hollywood have introduced more palatable military/war memes since then.

Dream Signs

I think of Dream Signs as a Homer Simpson D’oh!

You wake up from a dream, and as you try to recall the details of the dream, you realize it contained all sorts of “cues” that could have clued you in to that dreaming realization

I used the section on Dream Signs in Stephen LaBerge’s “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”

To create this Dream Sign study aid:

E-Books to Mind Maps

For some of the books I converted to e-Books, I also created MS Word Headings that allowed me to create a linkable Table of Contents.

It also allowed me view the book in an outline format.

But really, as you might have guessed, I love mind-map like formats. This allows me to see a lot more information all at once. Even outlines have a “linear” limitation. I think mind-map organization takes outlining to a higher level.

>

More 10x Counting

For a couple of years I would try to pause every 15 minutes and count out 10 breaths. Sometimes I would go for more than 10 breaths, sometimes I wouldn’t even make it to 3 before my mind had wandered. I would jot down the number of breaths with blue ink.

Sometimes I would forget completely. I would use red ink to mark that.




Eventually I went to a 20 minute interval, and the color coding scheme, because I noticed that when I looked back at my logs, I generally focused on the red and blue, not the actual data written in blue.

Al-Muhsî gone awry?

(the counter, the appraiser, the reckoner)

Transpersonal Ads

So the whole idea of printing off my schedule and to-do list each day kept changing.


In then end I just liked to print off a page of pictures.


However, I had also gotten into the habit of collecting aphorisms, quotes, and other tid-bits of information.



So, I decided I would try and create advertisements for myself.


Instead of selling myself a product, I would sell myself ideas.


I called them transpersonal ads.

I created at least one a day for several years and ended up with over a thousand before I finally stopped.

Life Cycle

Some thoughts on what happens between birth and death:

This gave me a chance to use artwork from my favorite album cover of all time (The Moody Blues "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour") :

Developing Memory Fitness

aka Raymond Lull's Art

For me this tool falls into that area where if you can’t momentarily set aside your emotions, intellect and judgements, and just execute the instructions, you will get nothing.

I initially found this whole Ars Infusa thing a bit odd, and the religious orientation somewhat uncomfortable, so much so that the secret nearly remained invisible. But luckily I managed to get past that.

I made this chart to help with my studies:


The traceless warrior pointed me towards this art in 2001 (30 minutes has turned into 4 years…. so far):

Date: Wed Jun 27, 2001 1:22 pm
Subject: Ars Infusa

In response to my:
> Hello everyone,
> I've become obsessed with the Rules and the Enneagram.


Mushtaq said:

Hi Jeff,

Go here http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/4572/

read everything, apply it to what you are learning and tell me what you think.

(you have thirty min,,,,, starting now :-) ) (sorry, I couldn't resist)

*********************************************
LOL Mushtaq. It's taken me a while to fully appreciate that humour. I've been busy learning the alphabet, the definitions, the principles, rules, and practicing evacuating cameras. Goodness, greatness, duration, difference, concordance, How, Why, When, Majority, BC, BtB, BtC, CB.......... I'm afraid I've gone way past the 30 minutes.

Exercise

As like many people, I’ve gone through lots of ups and downs with exercising. I generally try to exercise every day, and would say I have managed to achieve an overall 55%-70% success rate. Up until late last year (2004) I pretty much followed a 5 day repeating sequence which I’ve summarized like this:

E-Books

As I started reading a lot of books, I found it somewhat cumbersome to carry around 4-5 books everywhere I went. Sometimes I would forget to bring the book I really wanted to read with me.

Other times I would find myself wanting to read (ie during a boring meeting) but job etiquette wouldn’t allow for that. Or sometimes as I did stuff on my computer, I would have 5 minutes as I waited for a job to finish, but again job etiquette doesn’t allow for reading books.

So I started scanning books and running them through an OCR so that I could just read them on my laptop as a text file.

About a year later I ran across a device called a Rocket E-Reader. It seemed a bit pricey, but I ended up purchasing one anyway.


That company went out of business after a couple of years. So, I ended up just loading books onto my Palm Tungsten T3.




I still prefer a reading device like the Rocket E-Book reader because of its paperback book size, unlike the tiny Palm or somewhat bulky laptop.