Excerpts from Book that I read

Meteor Crater in Arizona was created 50,000 years ago by the impact of a meteorite -- a relic of the early solar system. by analyzing the meteorite, scientists determined that the Earth is 4.55 billion years old

www.groundsforsculpture.org

As he recounts in his book, Lakoff en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff sometimes challenges his students in a class on semantics with a simple task: Don’t think of an elephant! The point is that, once the word in invoked, it automatically triggers a neural frame; you can’t ‘not’ think of an elephant. Lakeoff writes, “It’s not just the world ‘elephant’; it’s all words. And it’s not just one frame that’s activated unconsciously and automatically by words -- it’s a whole system of frames and metaphors. The more that system is activated, the stronger its synapses become, and the more entrenched it is in your brain -- all without your conscious awareness. That is why the conservative message machine, operating over thirty-five years, has been so effective.” It is also why, as Matt Bai chronicled in a fascinating ‘New York Times Magazine’ article, the Democratic Party rushed to adopt Lakoff’s ideas on framing in its recent campaigns. ~ Page 260 . . . On land, the heavy-weight brain champion is the African elephant. In terms of the absolute number of neurons, African elephants come out on top too, with an absurd 250 billion, around three times more than ours, in second place with around 86 billion. . . . Page 30 {From ‘Humanimal’ Author : Adam Rutherford}

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayward_Fault_Zone

Man is honored only by human, self-conscious labor, only by the labor that has for its end no “egoistic” purpose, but Man, and is Man’s self-revelation; so that the saying should be ‘laboro, ergo sum,’ (I work, therefore I am) I labor, therefore I am a man. The humane liberal wants that labor of the mind which works up all material; he wants the mind, that leaves no thing quiet or in its existing condition, that acquiesces in nothing, analyzes everything, criticises anew every result that had been gained. This restless mind is the true laborer, it obliterates prejudices, shatters limits and narrownesses, and raises man above everything that would like to dominate over him, while the Communist labors only for himself, and not even freely, but from necessity,” in short, represents a man condemned to hard labor. ~ Page 173

Little info on the letter "X"

. . . He is a middle-aged man who has ‘seen much, read much, and retained much’, a professional man of experience, a doctor, a military man, an artist, or a Don Juan. He has reached the time of life when, according to a respectful and comfortable myth, a man is freed from the passions and considers with an indulgent clear sightedness those he has experienced. His heart is calm, like the night. He tells this story with detachment. If it has caused him suffering, he has made honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and considers it as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis’. (viewed in relation to the eternal; in a universal perspective.) There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs, order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it. Moreover, had there this disturbance? The evocation of an abrupt change would frighten this bourgeois society. Neither the general nor the doctor confides his recollections in the raw state; there are experiences from which they have extracted the quintessence, and they warn us, from the moment they start talking, that their tale has a moral. Besides, the story is explanatory; it aims at producing a psychological law on the basis of this example. . . 126

Emily Dickinson wrote these words in a letter to a mentor asking him to tell her whether she was a decent poet: “The sailor cannot see the north, but knows the needle can.” Without clear introspective access, we are such sailors. But a fact of life in this century is that we have the needle -- in fact, several needles, the ones from science being the most obvious. These needles point toward the next (perhaps last?) frontier: that of allowing us to understand not just our place among other planets, our place among other species, but the very core of our nature. ` Page 265

. . . Kant meant that there can be no preconceived idea of a beautiful novel or a beautiful piece of music in the same way: the work of art is not an answer to a problem out in the world but an object of contemplation in the theater of the imagination that makes up its own problems and supplies its own solution. That is why painting with a paint-by-the-numbers set yields, in the terms described, a craft outcome, while committing to a blank canvas an entirely new, imaginative rendering of the Mojave Desert is an art. As art, it cannot be cranked out according to a routine or plan. - 229

Source of image: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHTuI40HjVE&t=615s Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships. Happiness, maturity, and even enlightenment require rejecting the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning and learning instead of questioning our feelings. The feelings themselves are real, and sometimes they alert us to truths that our conscious mind has not noticed, but sometimes they lead us astray.