Montaigne’s library was not just a repository or a work space. It was a chamber of marvels.9/14/2014
Montaigne’s library was not just a repository or a work space. It was a chamber of marvels, and sounds like a sixteenth-century version of Sigmund Freud’s last home in London’s Hampstead: a treasure-house stuffed with books, papers, statuettes, pictures, vases, amulets, and ethnographic curiosities, designed to stimulate both imagination and intellect. The library also marked Montaigne out as a man of fashion. The trend for such retreats had been spreading slowly through France, having begun in Italy in the previous century. Well-off men filled chambers with books and reading-stands, then used them as a place to escape to on the pretext of having to work. Montaigne took the escape factor further by removing his library from the house altogether. It was both a vantage point and a cave, or, to use a phrase he himself liked, an arrière-boutique: a “room behind the shop.” “Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!” “How does one achieve peace of mind?” On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it. Montaigne used his essays to learn. Often, books need not be used at all. One learns dancing by dancing; one learns to play the lute by playing the lute. The same is true of thinking, and indeed of living. Every experience can be a learning opportunity: “a page’s prank, a servant’s blunder, a remark at table.” The child should learn to question everything: to “pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust.” Traveling is useful; so is socializing, which teaches the child to be open to others and to adapt to anyone he finds around him. Eccentricities should be ironed out early, because they make it difficult to get on with others. “I have seen men flee from the smell of apples more than from harquebus fire, others take fright at a mouse, others throw up at the sight of cream, and others at the plumping of a feather bed.” All this stands in the way of good relationships and of good living. It can be avoided, for young human beings are malleable. How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Researchers have found that memory follows a decay curve: new concepts need to be reinforced regularly, but the longer you’ve known a concept, the less regularly you need to review it to maintain accurate recall. Spaced repetition and reinforcement is a memorization technique that helps you systematically review important concepts and information on a regular basis. Ideas that are difficult to remember are reviewed often, while easier and older concepts are reviewed less often. Flash card software programs like Anki,1 SuperMemo,2 and Smartr3 make spaced repetition and reinforcement very simple. Spaced repetition systems rely on a “flash card” model of review, and you have to create the flash cards yourself. By creating flash cards as you’re deconstructing the skill, you’re killing two birds with one stone. Once you’ve created your flash cards, it only takes a few minutes each day to review them. By systematizing the review process and tracking recall, these systems can help you learn new ideas, techniques, and processes in record time. If you review the decks consistently, you’ll memorize necessary concepts and ideas extremely quickly. Create scaffolds and checklists. Many skills involve some sort of routine: setting up, preparing, maintaining, putting away, et cetera. Creating a simple system is the best way to ensure these important elements happen with as little additional effort as possible. Checklists are handy for remembering things that must be done every time you practice. They’re a way to systematize the process, which frees your attention to focus on more important matters. Scaffolds are structures that ensure you approach the skill the same way every time. Think of the basketball player who establishes a pre–free throw routine. Wipe hands on pants, loosen the shoulders, catch the ball from the ref, bounce three times, pause for three seconds, and shoot. That’s a scaffold. The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. The seeker comes in hope of finding something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend. He is offered instead the reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that’s all there is.
He may only get to keep that which he is willing to let go of. The cool water of the running stream may be scooped up with open, overflowing palms. It cannot be grasped up to the mouth with clenching fists, no matter what thirst motivates our desperate grab. The pilgrim, whether psychotherapy patient or earlier wayfarer, is at war with himself, in a struggle with his own nature. All of the truly important battles are waged within the self. I know that though the patient learns, I do not teach. Furthermore, what is to be learned is too elusively simple to be grasped without struggle, surrender, and experiencing of how it is. As one Zen Master said to his now-enlightened pupil: If I did not make you fight in every way possible in order to find the meaning [of Zen] and lead you finally to a state of non-fighting and of no-effort from which you can see with your own eyes, I am sure that you would lose every chance of discovering yourself. Furthermore, what is to be learned is too elusively simple to be grasped without struggle, surrender, and experiencing of how it is. As one Zen Master said to his now-enlightened pupil: If I did not make you fight in every way possible in order to find the meaning [of Zen] and lead you finally to a state of non-fighting and of no-effort from which you can see with your own eyes, I am sure that you would lose every chance of discovering yourself. Whatever the initial motives, such a journey often gave the pilgrims new perspective on the meaning of their lives, made them “converts to better lives, [at least] for a time.”15 The metaphor of his journey is a bridge, and as the pilgrim crosses it, “a fiend clutches at him from behind; and Death awaits him at the farther end.”16 But there are companions and helpers along the way as well. One pilgrim may help another as when a blind man carries one who is lame upon his back, so that together they may make a pilgrimage that neither could make alone. If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients Your Four Dominant Emotions Today’s first assignment: Grab your journal, sit quietly, and reflect upon which four dominant emotions drive your behavior. Do you operate out of fear? Anger? Jealousy? Love? Joy? Courage? Be brutally honest with yourself. No one’s watching. Write your four down. It’s very important. The Kokoro quitter operated out of anger and fear of failure. They defeated him. Got your four down? Good. Now, answer the following questions: 1. What do these emotions keep me from creating in my life? 2. What beliefs create these four emotions? 3. What would I be like, and what would my life be like, if I could control these emotions? Now we’re getting somewhere. Next I want you to close your eyes, and envision four new ideal emotions that you strongly desire. Replace fear with courage, anger with joy, jealousy with acceptance, pessimism with trust. Whatever four emotions you originally chose to describe yourself, choose more positive emotions now. When you’ve written down your four, answer these questions: 1. What benefit would it bring me and others if I acted with these ideal emotions? 2. What beliefs do I need to change, and what new beliefs do I need to develop, to own these ideal emotions? 3. What would I be like and what would my life be like, if I replaced my original four dominant emotions with these four ideal emotions? Reflect on your answers daily for the next 3 weeks. After 21 days your new beliefs and emotions will begin to form habits, which will define your new character. 8 Weeks to SEALFIT: A Navy SEAL's Guide to Unconventional Training for Physical and Mental Toughness Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Greek philosophers were so adamant about character that they believed it defined one's value as a citizen. Heraclitus said that "character is destiny," and Aristotle told us that "to enjoy the things we ought to enjoy…has the greatest bearing on excellence of character" and "no one who desires to become good will become good unless he does good things." More recently Ralph Waldo Emerson advised that "character is higher than intellect," and Albert Schweitzer said that "example is not the main thing in life…it is the only thing! In a business case, a breach of trust can cause a transaction to fail, degrade one's reputation, and increase costs. Personal and team trustworthiness must be placed on the highest priority list, measured, and practiced. But how? Here are five simple steps:
Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level We do not like what is unfamiliar or unknown. To compensate for this, we assert ourselves with opinions and ideas that make us seem strong and certain. Many of these opinions do not come from our own deep reflection, but are instead based on what other people think. Furthermore, once we hold these ideas, to admit they are wrong is to wound our ego and vanity. Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. This ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties is what Keats called negative capability. All Masters possess this Negative Capability, and it is the source of their creative power. This quality allows them to entertain a broader range of ideas and experiment with them, which in turn makes their work richer and more inventive. Negative Capability will be the single most important factor in your success as a creative thinker. In the sciences, you will tend to entertain ideas that fit your own preconceptions and that you want to believe in. This unconsciously colors your choices of how to verify these ideas, and is known as confirmation bias. With this type of bias, you will find the experiments and data that confirm what you have already come to believe in. The uncertainty of not knowing the answers beforehand is too much for most scientists. In the arts and letters, your thoughts will congeal around political dogma or predigested ways of looking at the world, and what you will often end up expressing is an opinion rather than a truthful observation about reality. To put Negative Capability into practice, you must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. You consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. You observe a person or event for a length of time, deliberately holding yourself back from forming an opinion. You seek out what is unfamiliar—for instance, reading books from unfamiliar writers in unrelated fields or from different schools of thought. You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth. In order to produce work of any sort we must create limits on what we’ll consider; we must organize our thoughts into relatively cohesive patterns, and eventually, come up with conclusions. In the end, we must make certain judgments. Negative Capability is a tool we use in the process to open the mind up temporarily to more possibilities. Once this way of thinking leads to a creative avenue of thought, we can give our ideas a clearer shape and gently let it go, returning to this attitude whenever we feel stale or blocked. The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences, and relationships between what it processes. Your task is to feed this natural inclination, to create the optimal conditions for it to make new and original associations between ideas and experiences. And one of the best ways to accomplish this is by letting go of conscious control and allowing chance to enter into the process. Mastery Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Depending on where and how we are raised, we learn different ideas about what we need to be happy. These ideas often show up as either our fantasies or our beliefs about what we should be doing with our life. The most common beliefs are that marriage, love, having children, success, wealth, major achievements, fulfilling potential, making history, fame, power, respect, or travelling the world will make us happy. As soon as we believe that something is the key to our happiness, and we don’t have it, we have no choice but to think, “My circumstances aren’t good enough right now to be happy”, or “I need my circumstances to change for me to be happy”. These thoughts make us feel as if something is missing from our lives, and as though we are somehow lacking or incomplete. We then innocently blame our unhappiness on our seemingly insufficient circumstances instead of recognizing that it’s only our thoughts about our circumstances that have created these feelings. We first need to understand what our identity is. Our identity, or self-image, is our answer to the questions, “Who am I?”, or “How would I describe myself?” Part of our answers to these questions includes the facts of our age, gender, physical measurements, job title, education, living situation, marital status, and so on. However, the facts themselves aren’t what create our identity, emotions, or self-confidence. The basis for our self-image, and our ensuing happiness or unhappiness, is our opinion of ourselves (our thoughts about ourselves). For example, even if two people are the same age and have the same weight, education, and jobs, one person could be proud of himself, while the other person could be ashamed to have these very same characteristics. Basically, our self-image is predominantly made up of our opinions of all the facts, as well as our opinions of completely subjective topics such as our personality and whether we are attractive. Put simply, our identity is made up of thoughts (opinions). Psychological thoughts are the ones that decide whether something is “good” or “bad”, and these are the thoughts that create our suffering. For simplicity, our psychological thoughts are nearly all of our thoughts that have opposites. This is because if a thought has an opposite, then we will almost certainly consider one side to be “good” and its opposite to be “bad”. For example, if we think it is “good” to be rich, funny, skinny, and intelligent, then we would consider it “bad” to be poor, boring, overweight, and unintelligent. Our minds tend to be filled with the same psychological thoughts repeating themselves over and over again. Functional thoughts are mostly answers to the question “How do I do that?” Functional thoughts determine how to build something, how to get somewhere, or how to solve a particular problem at work. Purely functional thoughts don’t create suffering, only psychological thoughts do. However, most of the time, our functional thoughts are tainted by psychological thoughts. In any moment when we have no psychological thoughts, or we don’t believe our psychological thoughts, what remains is the experience of the present moment. When we don’t have or believe the thoughts that create our unwanted emotions, none of these emotions are experienced, and we get to experience the present moment. The ability to experience the awe of something simple arises in the moments when we have silence or space between our thoughts. It is like seeing something for the first time. This feeling is similar to the sense of wonder and innocent curiosity that young children have. A Guide to The Present Moment Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system—which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function—to become more dominant. Conversely, shallow breathing, breath-holding, and hyperventilating trigger the sympathetic nervous system toward a fight-or-flight state. In this state, our heart rate increases, our sense of satiety is compromised, and our bodies gear up for the physical activity that, historically, accompanied a fight-or-flight response. But when the only physical activity is sitting and responding to e-mail, we’re sort of “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” Our bodies are tuned to be impulsive and compulsive when we’re in fight-or-flight. We also become tuned to over-consume. In this state, we’re less aware of when we’re hungry and when we’re sated. We reach for every available resource, from food to information, as if it’s our last opportunity—pulling out our smartphones again and again to check for e-mail, texts, and messages. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series) Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Memory Nootropic Stack - Smart Drug Plan using over the counter I like this Memory Stack, it is composed of over the counter items.
I have been looking for researching about different nootropic/ smart drug stacks, and found this one for Focus/ Studying.
Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. Visualization is an incredibly powerful technique that will enhance your mental strength, allow you to tap into more of your mind power, and allow you to accomplish more challenging tasks. It is the law of “win in your mind first,” and it is no surprise that great inventors, entrepreneurs, and athletes all use some form of visualization to create their desired outcomes in their minds while they act powerfully in the world. It is time we made this a routine skill. Visualization is the creation or re-creation of an external experience in your mind. Mental projection is visualizing a personal future state or victory. Visualized images create energy around a desired future experience before you experience it “for real.” I call this type of visualization a Future Me visualization because you are envisioning a future “ideal” version of yourself. You create the event in your mind well before it happens. The visualized event is then charged with emotions and vivid colors, sounds, smell, and tastes. You will reinforce those visual images through repeated practice sessions. This process plants a powerful seed in your subconscious mind of the potential energy for the event. Then as you work on the goal, your subconscious mind goes about supporting you with the resources necessary to nurture the event to its fruition. In a sense you could say that visualization rewires the System 1 brain to align with your goals. The second form of visualization is a Mental Rehearsal, whereby you practice a skill or prepare for an event in your mind. A SEAL platoon will “dirt dive” a mission to set the patterns for winning in the mind prior to executing it for real. The SEAL operator will walk through a dive profile on dry land while visualizing every detail. In this manner he performs all the major elements of the dive before ever getting wet. This was an important part of my mission prep when I was at SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1. The mini-sub dives were often six to ten hours in duration replete with complicated navigation patterns. Dirt diving the missions prior to launch proved crucial during the mission when fatigue and Murphy’s Law reared their heads. The mental rehearsal implanted the route in both conscious and subconscious minds and provided a memory aid as well as subtle physiological cues. Additionally, it helped identify potential challenges before the mission hit the reality of the deep face-to-face. Both forms of visualization can be performed from the first person or third person perspective. What I mean by this is that they can be imaged from your subjective frame as if you had a helmet camera on, or imaged from your objective frame as if watching yourself in a movie. Either method is effective; however, most people start with the objective frame and then migrate to the subjective frame as they gain experience. Visualization leads to improved concentration in that the practice of visualization requires you to develop greater powers of concentration due to the effort required to construct and maintain the visual imagery. In the early stages, the training can be frustrating, especially if you have difficulty holding an image in your mind for long. You may be more kinesthetic or auditory in nature; thus developing the capacity to visualize will take patience. You will experience enhanced confidence as the result of the training. When you can clearly visualize an event skill in advance, your mental practice is accepted as real by your body. Though not as visceral as the physical doing of the event, the visual practice is still felt internally and leads to more confidence every time you do it. This translates to more confidence as actual improvements in the skill accrue. Next, closely related to confidence is the greater emotional control you will experience. If you fear performing to some degree, which we all do (especially for scary things such as public speaking), visualizing the performance repeatedly will dampen that fear response when you perform the event live. A final note on visualization: When done well, a visualized event involves the sensations of feelings, emotions, and sounds to support the imagery. The objective is to create as realistic a mental representation as possible, as if you are really experiencing it. That is why it is really important to ensure that your image is positive, powerful, and as near to perfect as possible. Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level |
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