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Stephen Pickering

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  • What Must You Do to Start Your Life?

    “Just as those ignorant of the spot might pass, time and time again, over a buried treasure of gold and not find it, so do all creatures go daily to that Brahma-world in sleep and not find it.” ~ Ch?ndogya Upanišad 8.4.2

    It has to do with awareness. This door to awareness is somehow closed, and what we’ve got to figure out is how to open it.
    I really think that’s all there is to it. If we can open or ‘cleanse’ the doors of perception as Blake and the Doors put it, I really get the sense
    that the rest would take care of itself automatically. Like that flushing effect would flush out the Ego, and then an inpouring of ‘Cosmic’ energy
    would carry you to the finish line, or the goal, or however you want to put it. It’s a bit like breathing when you are sleeping or digesting your food
    or any of the trillions of complex actions your body does automatically without you having to even try.

    So how do we open that door? I don’t know. It may be the same in all of us, or each of us may have a unique thing that’s blocking us. I think it’s something that
    we inherently know, at least down deep, but that the fact that awareness, or consciousness is closed, or at least very restricted, is keeping us blindsided from
    even that one thing. You know there’s so many parables, ancient stories, about the man living his whole life on some land that he’s unaware
    that underneath is buried a treasure chest full of gold and jewels. And he spends his whole life toiling away in poverty, just getting by. The metaphor
    in that really seems to be pointing to what I’m trying to say here. It was simply lack of ‘awareness’ keeping him from that ‘treasure.’

    It could be that the value in a daily meditation practice is simply to make you aware of the obvious thing, ‘just under your feet,’ so to speak, that is blocking your awareness itself.

    Then ancient Vedas of India say: Being -> Consciousness -> Bliss. So if they are right, if we could just figure out what “Being” meant, in an everyday, practical way, then that could be
    the ‘ticket’ or the path to a recovery, an answer. I wrote in my last article on this subject that “Surrender” was the ticket. Well, surrender and being feel very related. This whole thing feels very similar to how Claire Weekes wrote, preached “Face. Do not run. Accept. Do not fight.” She was talking in terms of Nervous Illness. Nervous Illness is a state in which the nervous system registers feelings in a magnified way. Perhaps Nervous Illness and Ego are virtually the same thing? In her teaching the exagerated sympathetic nervous system exagerated the inbuilt functions of the “Fight or Flight” response which created a feedback loop that kept the Illness alive. It didn’t matter what originally caused the Illness. It was this current feedback loop keeping it alive. So the answer in her teaching was that you had to change your mood: You had to face your feelings and not run from them, and once you faced them you had to accept them (surrender) and not try to fight them. The instinct is the opposite. But with time and practice, acceptance could be cultivated as a mood.

    Maybe “Being” means that: Stop running and stop fighting. And by that I mean psychologically from your own mood. I don’t mean that like, out there in life you accept when a company has overcharged you or accept that your air conditioning is broken and not have it fixed! hahahahahahahahahaha. But what I am saying is that even “Out There” in the daylight world of your doings and goings, the back of your mind can still be a field of cultivated acceptance. That actually is one of the main themes of the Bhagavad Gita. Detachment from the outcome is the same as a mood of acceptance.

    Editors note: This is Page 3 in the ongoing “Ego” series.

  • On Ego, Page 2, The Cure is Surrender

    To become a god requires complete, unconditional surrender to the all, sacrificing your self (ego) to your Self (nature, Atman). In Norse Mythology, Woton hung himself upon a tree for 9 days, sacrificing himself to himself (Since he was already a god). The sense you get out of that is the need, in order for the ‘god’ energy to come through, of sacrificing, of lancing, the individual self, the separate, narrowly contained self (Which sounds a whole lot like the ‘Ego’) in order to let the ‘All’ (The infinite, the eternal) come through.

    Now this doesn’t mean you literally go out and ‘crucify’ yourself or hurt yourself physically in any way. This is a psychological thing. These metaphors, these allegories, point to psychological, spiritual ‘quests.’ It’s tricky because what is Ego exactly in your day to day life? It may be something relatively benign like this: Am I do this activity (job, hobby, social, sport) because I, myself, my ‘inner’ self (That’s the one closer to the ‘Atman’) want to do it, or am I doing it for something or someone else (attention, money, to please someone else)?

    That’s one idea. That first paragraph was a big, mythopoetic phrase. It’s great. It feels good to sing! But then the second paragraph explores how to take that ‘Poetic’ language and actually apply it to your life right here and now. I hate to use the word ‘practical,’ but it seems one has to find a way to translate these ideas, written thousands of years ago, and also in big, broad, philosophical language, into a ‘real world’ application. I think that’s a good way to continue the exercise, quest, adventure, in a way that honors both sides of the equation: The Mythic, on one hand, which inspires but feels ‘out there’ + the “So, what do I actually do!?!?!?!” which is of the here and now, feels more mundane, but at the same time feels real.

     

  • The Moments of the Big Bang From the Perspective of Inflation.

    In the moments of the Big Bang an amount of space the size of Molecule expanded to the size of the Milky Way Galaxy (100,000 Light Years) in a billionth of a billionth, of a billionth, of a second.

  • The Most Beautiful Sunrise Photo I’ve Ever Seen

    This was posted this morning by Rosa Golijan, a senior editor and writer at msnbc.com. I believe she mostly covers tech.
    I guess that’s the Brooklyn Bridge. Look at the symmetry. I don’t know if she planned it, but the Sun is in that perfect “rule of 3rds” position, at least horizontally. Vertically, it looks about in the middle, which is no matter, because the “rule of 3rds” is just a starting point, a jumping off point. But it’s just enough here, along with the color, the warm orange filling the whole frame, along with every part of the photo, from the river, to the sky, even the way the bridge is angled, everything seems to be flowing towards this focal point of the Sun. And that gives it a “3 D” effect, or more warmly, makes you feel like you are in the photo. And the real “Coup de Grace” is that perfectly straight, sword like, streak of Sun light that at the same time seems to come at you, and yet pull you in, and also act like a beam or a “ballast” that grounds the photo, not just in our eyes, or even our mind, but down into the soul.

    Photo by Rosa Golijan:

    http://facebook.com/rosa
    http://twitter.com/rosa

  • [Video] “The Clear Coast”

  • Cutting an Entire Bar Out of a Garageband Song

    • Click the “+” at the top of the App Window just below the “Mixer” heading to create an “Arrange Region”
    • I think it defaults to 4 bars, but you can take your cursor and make the arrange region any size you want
    • Click the region to highlight it in blue and then hit your delete key.

    This does a Delete + Move function so the area you want to get rid of dissappears and moves the entire rest of the song, including each track’s “meta” data, neatly together. Moving the meta data is important if you’ve created customized volume or panning sliders for individual tracks. Just moving the tracks themselves by dragging them doesn’t do this.

    This can be done anywhere in a song, but it occurred to me that usually when I make a recording I’ll have one or two bars at the opening of the song thats filled with silence or noise from getting ready to cut the take. And then when I’m done, I may have eight or nine tracks that need to be moved, along with their data to the actual beginning of the timeline or else when I exported it, the export would take that silence/noise with it. I needed a way to move all the tracks simultaneously, which is a terrible pain to do individually especially if, as is usually the case, many of the tracks aren’t “joined” and even then, there’s the problem of the meta data. I guess I wouldn’t have this problem if I did a count in, but even then, I think a count in is only one bar, and I usually need two before I’m ready to record.

    Hope this helps. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments.

    Update 4/30/10 – I just realized when I made “Quiet Town” today and needed to do the same thing that that little “+” below where it says “Mixer” at the top may not show up depending on your settings. If that’s the case you need to go to Track>>Show Arrange Track and click that, and then it will show up.

    Update 4/9/11 – What I’m doing now for my Garageband projects is using a program for Mac called Wiretap Studio. What this program does is record into a .wav file (that you can easily convert to .mp3) directly from the Mac Core Audio itself. You end up getting better results because when you export via Garageband usually one of two things happen. If you’ve selected “normalize” things sound fine, but usually the volume is way to low. And if you don’t select “normalize” you get the loudness, but at the expense of quality. A lot of clipping. Wiretap gives you the loudness of a contemporary CD, but with the clarity of how it actually sounds in Garageband itself. Also with this solution, I don’t have to worry about moving the tracks to the beginning of the garageband interface. I simply move the playhead to where I want to start the recording. Then I click record on Wiretap. Then I start the playhead. The few extra seconds in the Wiretap file can be cropped to give you better control over the beginnings and endings of songs.