General Announcement

Just like all dinosaurs it takes a long time for information to get from my tail to my head.  But after close to 80 pages of blog it has become obvious to me that it is difficult to make a comment or raise a question using blogger. So I make it a standard offer to write to me at my e-mail address with any questions or comments to be answered at the earliest convenience. My e-mail address is richard.charles.degeiso @gmail.com. 

I just recently, for Father's Day, got the Dragon software for speech recognition.   As a matter of fact, this software can not only record my voice and automatically transcribe it into Word documents, in this case, a blog page, e-mail and the like but it can read print and send to my microphone in a very pleasant female voice.  Perhaps that will encourage me to write my blog posts more frequently. Welcome to the technological age.  We shall see.

You and Me and Baby makes Threeeee

As I wrote in my last blog, the number three was used to give understanding to the concept or idea of what it was that one had under consideration. And I used the term 'attitude' which was the combination, so to speak, between 'experience' and 'opinion'. In other words, as one gains experience, one depends less on opinion in establishing his attitude. But in either case "attitude" always remains the sum of experience plus opinion and can never be 1oo% experience nor 100% opinion.
Our world is a dualistic world which is made up of a whole lot of "opposites". The Greeks, as least as we can tell, realized that there was something more than just the black/white of everyday existence and this they defined as the trichotomy or the Golden Mean or perhaps what Socrates meant as Values. In this case the 'value' is the mean or middle ground between two opposites and is the ordering rather than the resolution of the dualism.

The Number Three

During the year 1965, when I was a middle manager for the DuPont company at the largest plant they had at that time, we were confronted with a threatening and potentially crippling strike. The plant was about a mile in diameter and employed about 10,000 people both wage and salried and supplied a number of other plants with products and intermediates vital to their offerings to the public. So it was imperative that the Corporate folks do something to avert a strike and return operations to its normal efficiency and tempo. We had a meeting of all supervisory personnel, about 200-300 hundred of us and our guest speaker was an Industrial Psychologist. This man, whose name has long been erased from my memory, told us that in order to avert the strife of a strike, we had to change the attitude of the workers. My mind immediately jumped to Madison Avenue with its slogans and posters and the like. But no, he said, we didn't have time for that and it wouldn't be lasting enough so that we might solve this problem and create another one down the line somewhere. He said that we had to change peoples' attitude...theirs, ours and everybodys. And the way to do this was to keep in mind that

Attitude = Experience + Opinion

So we started a program which included representatives from all levels of employees, wage roll, supervisory, and management types. These folks were given information on all aspects of the operation of that plant. And literally what we did was to create an environment which opened up communications, made everyone aware that we needed each other and reduced it to experience as we met and learned to understand and trust each other. In other words we changed people's experience and changed the attitude on both sides actually.

About 4 years later, I joined the Sabian Assembly, met Marc Jones, studied Astrology and learned more than I ever could have imagined about the number 3.

That was over 40 years ago. And DuPont went on from there to develop a program of participatory management and they have continued to be a solid part of American industry. As far as I can see my pension is safe in their hands.

In 1969 I started the study of Astrology the Jones way. After 40-some years I finally began to see that Astrology was as easy as 1-2-3-4. In other words if you can count to 4, I can teach you Astrology. Astrology is not to predict tomorrow's lottery. Otherwise we would all be rich or at least share the wealth. Astrology is an organon, a tool, to help create simplicity from complexity.
And what more complexity could we find than the mind and character of man.

The Greeks who were part of the development of Astrology gave meaning to the threeness of things. We live in a dualistic world that is made up of opposites. The word for this perhaps is dichotomy or cutting in half. The Greeks recognized a third element was needed for greater understanding and they proposed a trichotomy or literal cutting into thirds. And hence the number 3. The Greek mind at least from Pythagoras on was exceptionally tuned to space and geometry as such and they realized that to really understand something there had to be more than just the two opposites. It couldn't just be black and white etc. there had to be a third factor which allowed connection between the two concepts. Today we can see this in our example of black and white as the color gray. As we proceed from the state of white(which is a blend of all colors) to the state of black(which is no color at all) we proceed through shades of gray. So we begin to see what the number 3 means in its general nature. It describes the process as we progress from one extreme to the other. The Golden Mean had very great meaning to the Greeks.

Requiem For A Lady Marine

Well folks... it has been about 90 days since I have posted anything. And while the old Walrus is quiet he definitely is not dead. Me and Barb have been on an adventure of our own. Ruthie, Suzanne's mother woke up one nite and had a fall injuring her spine. My son Luke called and had a spacie like conversation with her sooo... He immediately handed her over to Barbara who suspected a diabetic episode and convinced her to call the parameds on her Medic-Alert line. They came and stabilized her and hauled her off to the hospital. And here is where the adventure began.

The local hospital got the diabetes under control and then sent her to the rehab division to see about her back injury. This meant a long trip for us to visit at the hospital, pick up the mail at her apartment, wash her clothes and whatever. Round trip for any given day was about 30 miles. But we were the closest of her living relatives and besides we had the time. At this point the plot thickens so to speak.

To make it easy on all of us, including Ruth, we had her admitted to the Pembrooke nursing home which is a 5-star facility and only a couple of miles from our home.
At this point the folks at Pembrooke found that she had been transported with an urinary tract infection which didn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling about the first hospital she was in. So she was transported to Chester County hospital which also was only a couple of miles from our home. And that was a good thing because it made our once and sometimes twice daily visits a lot easier. They discovered a Pseudomonas type bacteria and began treatment to eliminate it. The treatment worked, but an opportunistic yeast infection now showed up on the scene. The assault on the kidneys from all the fluids necessary as well as the stress of a congestive heart condition was too much for her poor body to handle and so she passed on Feb. 21, 2012.

At this point Barb and I could go no further. We turned the rest over to Paul and Corinne to close out the estate and make the final arrangements which they did in fine fashion. RIP Ruth Luckscheider Noel.

Vibrations

"Everything is energy and that is all there is to it." Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can't help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics. ~ Albert Einstein

My good friend Randy Hoel posted this on Face Book and it reminded me of a topic that was floating around in my mind. This is the concept used with "The Secret". This is the concept that gets results in sports, sales and all winning activities. After all Einstein is the one who said that all matter is energy so then all matter is composed of vibrations. The kids said it best when they identified with "good" vibes and "bad" vibes.

Consciousness may be thought of to consist of cognition and perception. The senses touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste bring to the brain the things of what we call the real world. And they do this by taking the vibratory signals and sending them through the nervous system to the receptors in the brain. At that point the cognitive part of the brain gives meaning and purpose to those signals and the whole process can be considered a mental chemistry. And in a very simplistic way the brain can be looked at as a radio station... one that receives and interprets vibrations while at the same time the whole body for example is sending its own set of vibrations out into the cosmos for the benefit of the rest of us receiving stations as well.

In a sense, so to speak, we each serve as reality for each other.

The statement by Einstein above illustrates the practice of the athlete with his 'zone', the denizen of the corporate world with his 'goals', the occultist with his 'meditation' and the devotee of the Secret with his 'collages' and the like. The Astrologer can define ones 'soul mate' if you like by finding these resonances when comparing the horoscopes of two people. Perhaps this works and perhaps this doesn't, but it sure does give explanation for the instant rapport some people show for each other.

A Blend of senses

My good friend Melody K. says in a comment to the last blog....

According to "See What I'm Saying, the extraordinary powers of our five senses" - Lawrence D. Rosenblum, we can hear shapes, hear spaces, smell fear, touch speech, taste odors, touch flavor, hear faces and so on. It's an interesting book and found it pertinent to our group in exploring "a thing is what it does". As you stated the importance of that the perceptual brain relies on multisensory perception and makes sense of things by way of that information. How the senses are used appears to be quite plastic, for example when it comes to recognizing speech the brain doesn't know if it's seeing or hearing. Additional senses maybe subsets of the five, such as echolocation and proprioception. We have and make use of senses of which we are not readily aware far more expansively and fluidly.

In a very interesting signature, the Lesson on Aristotle, entitled "Aristotle's Psychology V, Potentiality" studied by those students of the Sabian Assembly, which was dated 11/14/11 but written originally by Marc Edmund Jones in the 1950's, included a statement as such....

"Thus there are the objects or particular senses as illustrated by Aristotle in seeing a color, hearing a sound or tasting a flavor. Then there are movement, rest, shape and size which are shared by several senses."

Two things are interesting to consider. (1) Melody could not have read the above-quoted Lesson because it hadn't been available much before 11/14/11 and (2) Marc Jones' original commentary was published some 60-70 years before the book which served as her source.

So when you have a conversation with a woman and she continually taps your arm while she is talking to you.... it is not necessarily a sign of intimacy ... it's just that she hears you better that way.

It is vibes after all .....

Barbara and I were having lunch together and she made the comment that she just realized how precious our senses were. She became aware of some of our friends who had trouble seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting. My answer to that was that our senses are what make us conscious of our time and space reality. In controlled experiments, people deprived of their senses, all five at once, undergo strange and bizarre reactions in their minds and perhaps if left would have become insane.

Our senses all respond to vibrations, but vibrations of different frequencies. Our sense organs act like receiving stations for these vibrations and the neuronal system transmits these signals to the brain for processing. It would appear that all living organisms process these signals in the same way. This then activates the chemicals, perhaps in the reticular activating system(RAS) and calls for the organism to an action of flight or fight. Except in the case of humans.

Humans appear to have a higher level way of processing these experiences to give them meaning or value. In other words, not all pain is "bad" but that the pain may serve a higher purpose. For example the process of giving birth. The mother tolerates the pain with full knowledge that (1) it will be over soon and (2) that it will result in the goal of the process started, in most cases deliberately, nine months ago. And (3) humans can choose not to undergo this pain at all with the use of birth control. Animals respond to their hormone systems and have at least limited choice in the matter to say the least.

So it is in the areas of creativity, imagination and intuition where humans are better at processing the vibrations from the surrounding environment even tho the basic sensory machinery is the same.

The thought occurred to me that if we are receiving stations for vibratory phenomena then perhaps we can also be broadcasting stations as well. We run into this in Astrology quite a bit. Folks want to know (1) what is my purpose in life and (2) who or where is my soul-mate. Purpose in life is something that Astrology can help with most assuredly, but soul-mate.... well that is another proposition. When the Astrologer compares the horoscopes of two people the points of resonance can certainly be identified if they are there at all. And that information can then be used to explain any attraction between the two.