reason

The Living Death of Perpetual Emergency

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FearChris Floyd – The title of one of Christopher Logue’s multi-volume reworkings of Homer’s Iliad stands as the perfect encapsulation of our age: All-Day Permanent Red. We live in a time when the collective amygdala has been stoked into overdrive, sending messages of blank, blind fear that overwhelm the centers of reason, empathy and openness in our brains, propelling us into a state of inchoate anxiety that seeks release in tropes of extremist certainty and spasms of violence – active, verbal or vicarious.

This natural human propensity – which has waxed and waned in various forms over the centuries – has been magnified to the nth degree by the moral and psychological disfigurements of the Terror War. Today we also have the curse of 24/7 corporate news channels and the sleepless howling of the internet to batter the mind with an unending series of “urgent” dangers to our lives, our beliefs, our identities. This produces both a threat to tribal identities (political, religious, ethnic, racial, etc.), and a constant reinforcement of them – identities which we can see hardening across the spectrum in virtually every nation and culture.

A great deal of this is done deliberately. There are enormous profits and much power to be gained from war and rumors of war, from the militarization of society (including the police forces), and from the incessant stoking of fear at home and abroad. It is scarcely a secret that the United States has turned itself into a nation whose economic and political structures are now dependent on a globe-straddling system of military and economic domination.

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A New Theory Suggests All Conscious Thoughts And Decisons Are Actually Made By Your Unconscious

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Kristin Magaldi – We’ve always believed that conscious thought is the seat of all higher forms of human thinking; from art, to science, to language, our ability to process the world around us and reflect on deeper meanings has always seemed to be in the forefront of our minds. But what if all of our more abstract ruminations did not come from conscious thought at all? What if it was actually the unconscious dictating most of the things we do?

In the new paper published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University Ezequiel Morsella posits just that in what he calls the “Passive Frame Theory.” Morsella suggests that the conscious does not do nearly as much as we thought. In fact, conscious thought is just a small fraction of what is happening in the brain. Instead, it is the unconscious that is doing everything for us, and we are completely unaware of it.

To clarify, we are not talking about unconscious in the Freudian sense here; all of your thoughts and actions are not stemming from a strange attraction to your mother and a need to kill your father. Instead, according to Morsella, the unconscious is a type of processing plant that takes all decisions and thoughts that need to be made during the course of your day, and turns out an answer well-suited to the situation. Once it’s time to act on that decision, the unconscious hands the information over to the conscious mind, which believes it had it figured out all along.

Basically, your unconscious is like the ghostwriter who actually wrote the novel a celebrity published. Yes, the celebrity is getting all of the credit, but none of anything that was written was his idea. Continue reading →

Unreasonable Action Leads To Being Remarkable

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Inspire Me Today | June 8 2012

Be unreasonable!

If this were my last chance to share something with the world, I would encourage everyone to be unreasonable – be instigators of change!

You’ve been a good person, you’ve given of yourself, and you’ve done the right thing – most of the time. You have lived your life by others’ rules, those rules that you were taught as a child, those rules you taught to others.

But what one rule have you always wanted to break? I’m not talking about laws, or morality. I don’t mean robbing a bank or cheating on your spouse. What is that thing that you wanted to do that you were told you shouldn’t?

Like quitting a job you hate that “has great benefits”. Starting your own company in a field that everyone says is “too risky”. Deciding to perform the songs you wrote LIVE in front of an open-mic audience. Selling your house and moving to the Bahamas because it sounds like fun. What rule would not hurt anyone – but would be “wrong” to do?

I bet every time you thought about doing the “right thing” instead of freeing yourself to break that rule, some part of you cringed in resistance. How long have you been that reasonable person, doing what is expected of the average person?

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