LIFE: Love Infinitely Furthers Evolution by Sander R.B.E. Beals (good books to read .txt) 📖

preceeding Ellie up the stairs, and then seeing her rush up the stairs ending in the mirror of the bathroom cupboard mirror, reflecting Ellie opening it up to get the pills.....

And they are going all out too: where traditionally one or two cars would get crashed in a typical pileup, nowadays whole parking lots are demolished. Now to the logical mind, there is a limit to what you can do physically: if you know the amount of work involved in making one car perform a certain stunt, then it is obvious to the computing mind that instead of computing how it should be done physically, you could more easily just program the cars as 3D objects (which we already have from the computer games), and have them perform the stunts in realtime rendering, or even slow motion if your processing power isn't enough. Point is, the degree of detail is most probably a programming parameter, and if you can do Toy Story in say 100 hours back then, then Transformers 3 may take just about that time now, even though it looks physically perfect. In fact, the advertizing team proudly claimed that they had succeeded in keeping all transformations 'volume constant'....

And especially mixed with normal moviemaking, like in 'Tomorrow, when the war began" (which I'm playing now), it would be impossible to believe they'd explode a jet fighter worth millions just for a ten second dogfight scene. Still though, if not equipped with knowledge about state of the art computing, could the average viewer find a reasonable explanation for how it was done?

Well, maybe there is: back in the old days, when the colonists reached Africa, they ran into problems with the local natives, because of their belief that the camera would take a part of their soul essence as well, instead of just an image. Now believe it or not, not two years ago I got the experience that told me this way of thinking may still be alive as a primal fear. Back then, I travelled on the train to my hometown, and sat about seven meters from a lovely young lady. I had a camera on my lap, and for the briefest of moments thought about taking her picture. But since it would be too small anyway I skipped it, and forgot all about it. A week later I was walking with my wife, and a car stopped right by our side. Out came a distressed father, who said his daughter claimed I'd taken her picture. Because I hadn't, I could calmly answer him, and in the end reassure him enough so he went on. But it sure gave me some stuff to talk and think about, because even my wife doubted me for at least a day.... ;-)

But if in our primal mind we still fear we can lose part of our being, then there will probably be gazillions of images out there which we all attach to in one way or another. So what happens when you have a fair grasp of Infinity, and have come to the conslusion that nothing can ever completely fill it? No matter how many realities we create, either alone or together, there will always be more room for more dreams....

Right now, the kids in the movie are discussing just how far they will go against the occupation force that took their Aussie homeland while they were on vacation. And that clearly shows how they are all seeing the same problem from very different sides, but all of them are valid even if they are not 'real' to the others. So yes, I guess we must all be convinced by now that there are more realities than just our own personal one, or the ones we create.

Duality reigns, even here...

And then, coming home today, I exited the train right behind a guy who had a weird combination of characters on the neck of his T-shirt. You know the kind of nonsensical 'words' which T-shirt designers put on their products. This one said _77, which may have meant nothing to the other train passengers, but it set my mind in motion: "underscore seventy-seven", or in other words: "stress the combination of two sevens". And that was exactly the point I need to make here!

Remember the inside and the outside of the System boundary, the two layers of soap containing the water? Or even the two ends of a conversation? Right this moment Johnny Five is confessing to the priest, and the reaction of the clergyman clearly shows who is the most openminded of the two....

So up until this page, we've seen SevenSpheres in their flat configuration, two-dimensional as they are in their singular, simple form. With Johnny on screen explaining to Ben about his feeling lonely, Ben replies that he knows about it, and that together is way better, but at the same time soo much more difficult. So yes, you may have your collection of SevenSpheres in order, but the moment you meet someone else, theirs are going to be different in some way, unless your actually are a perfect match. And even if you have a prompter like Ben has in Johnny Five, things can and will go very wrong, if only to make them more interesting.

But why would I ever get the idea to pair up two of those flat SevenSpheres ? What kind of form would that amount to? Well, believe it or not, but the combination of two SevenSpheres is almost completely spherical when they are merged: with three additional spheres behind it in three of the six dimples available there, and three more on top of it in three of the six dimples at the front, we are able to pack exactly twelve spheres around the center concept, which we both agree on. I guess the best way of visualizing this process is the way two sea snails mate: they stick together with their 'feet', and then the contact plane between the two undulates. This happens with the SevenSpheres too, so they are no longer twodimensional. As the contact surface curves, the center spheres merge (they are the same concept a.k.a. Label) and the twelve sattelite concepts mingle, and in the end hopefully align so both of us think the same about a given concept. I guess that is a fitting ending of this paragraph, right about the moment that Johnny Five is officially recognized as the first truly robotic citizen of the United States. Yeah, there are citizens and then there are citizens, right? ;-)

Tuesday, which was only haunted by a lingering defect in my smartphone. I'll not divulge the brand, because stuff like that happens. With the diagram mentioned earlier in mind, you may ask: "Did you mess with it?", but then "Nope" would be your answer. It simply states that it has full reception of the nearest cell tower, but when push comes to shove, it'll refuse to send a simple text message, or build up a phone connection, claiming it can't reach the network. So somebody is lying obviously....

Now in the old days, stuff like that would irritate me like a herd of cockroaches on my matress: I'd actually lose my temper trying to explain it to the phone company helpdesk. But of course the person on the other end of the line also cannot help it, for he or she also did not mess with it. And that would mean they were often not really inclined to be helpful... Now that is an example of where SevenSpheres collide, with more or less catastrophical consequences. We can try fixing it with the poor idiot method mentioned earlier, but let's try something a bit more constructive:

The next diagram on the right here is coiled around a problem that needs solving. We have those in all kinds of severities, but the severity is usually very much a function of the being encountering the problem. The solution spiral however works for all of them, both the chilled-out dudes and the hyperventilating manager (No, not my boss ;-).

From problem solving, you can drop right into a simple fix, if you trust yourself enough to fix it on your own. You may of course be proven wrong later on, but that is not the point.

If you do not have that confidence, you may confide in someone else, in the hope their view on things might turn this situation around for you. That's in fact what I did when I concluded it probably was the phone that malfunctioned, and I knew it was only a few months old. But since I was unfamiliar with the warranty procedure, I phoned them to have the diagnosis confirmed, and the procedure checked.

With a nice lady on the end of the line, explaining the problem and keeping my cool wasn't hard, but then again no problem is these days anymore. We agreed it was the phone that malfunctioned, and she told me to take it to the nearest shop.

So that was my next step, and my next additional problem: no extra insurance meant no backup phone, but the simple fix was to ask my friend to return to me the simple dual SIM backup phone I keep for emergencies. And that fix was even more simple than I thought, because when I phoned him from my daughters' house, he told me the phone I wanted was in a drawer right beside my chair!

So, with a short detour across another SevenSphere (how to find a replacement), I landed back in the original circle, where my next step will be to take the phone to the store, and trust they will bring it back in working order, or even better.....

Note please, that no matter how many semicircles we have to travel through, most or all of them are circles oriented in such a way as to take us closer to the solution. Keeping your cool helps a lot in this, and realizing that you are really at the starting ramp of a rollercoaster: the moment you get to the next circle is like the hook that locks you at that particular height. Instead of looking at it as yet another problem to solve, you can look at it as another step towards the solution of the original problem (getting way up there)....

But maybe I'd better tell it with one of those seven word images: all six satellites are choices of Free Will, at any one moment you find yourself in. Together they determine your State of Mind:

It starts with observing, both an event and, immediately after that, your feelings about it. This forms a Trinity with Reinforcing and Weakening, as it pertains to your State of Mind. Don't worry, no matter which you choose, you can always explain any event in the direction you choose. Of course not everyone will buy your story...

Because Neutrality is the bossom buddy of Observation, the second Trinity starts here: the moment you decide on either Positivism or Negativism, you implicitly decide to either Strengthen or Weaken your current position with relation to the center of your Prime Objective, your ultimate goal: positivism makes what's negative more balanced, as negativism makes what's positive more balanced. Likewise, the other two combinations bring us more off-center.

This keeps going on, with you doing Lissajous figures around a perfect center, until the moment comes that you realize that all these labels are All One, and thus in fact indistinguishable and therefor not worth bothering about. That moment, even I as a bipolar could honestly say to my doctor: "Hey, keeping that Lifechart is a waste of time, because from now on my State of Mind is going to always be the perfect 50% between utter manic and utter depressive behavior. I can honestly say I've found my center, from now until forever."

Does that get boring? Not being angry when stuff goes wrong, and not feeling those pangs of joy when stuff goes unexpectedly good? In fact, all it does is reinforce your belief that whatever happens, it is for the good, instead of messing things up. I have a feeling that that State of Mind was what the Buddha found after all those years: any event can be taken