birdhousekeeper ♣ histories

Elance Blog: Targeting Your Audience

2010-08-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

I'd like to share some good tips from the Elance Blog for writers: Targeting Your Audience

Two events and all the humble things

2010-01-20T21:43:00.000-08:00

The quiet sun arose in the midst of a foggy landscape behind trees sheltering the house, the house that belonged to a blue songbird. Every day he flew to the treetops, and with the fragrant winter’s breath he sang so gently a song that would get stitched up into the fog and swept away by the clement gestures of the wind. Spring would come and the trees would bring about blooms, as though they had been drinking the blue bird’s songs. For when they would unfold themselves they would sing fragrant songs. Is it true that nature is a metaphor of hope? He wondered. Perhaps it is, for the way it stands up every day on its own, rising in chorus with everything in it, exchanging a discreet understanding and sense of freedom and beauty. The blue songbird would rise up early every day to keep his day focused on observing the laws of nature. He would receive them as though they were the vital letters that any observing bird could open up and find the opportunity to become an active participant in the government of nature. He learnt that power was the government’s attribute, and so everything in nature was entitled to it. But ambition was not the quality of a powerful government, to remember the law was to remember humility. To forget the beauty of freedom in its simplicity was vanity, and that that was the first storm on hopes that leads to the shattering of a free land and its free birds. And with its ruinous arrogance makes birds dispirited and the gentle flowers discolored and pungent. When all it needs is a little bird’s want for grace and graciousness for the simple rising and setting of a sun and all those humble things in the world that go between these two events.

Patterns of actions, choices, creativity and wisdom

2010-01-11T17:11:00.001-08:00

How do historians explain the behavior of social orders?

Is it a paradox of human intelligence that it perceives the behavior of the universe in modes and patterns? If so, then with any subtle alteration in the mode of perception, our experience of reasoning and rationalization would become a more complex one. This is because we reason from memory. And we remember that a particular pattern of actions was repeatedly related to the formation of certain events, within our imagination of the nature of events. Hence, remembering is a science that is sensitive of, the intellectual and cultural impressions that human activity leaves upon the passing generations.

Wisdom is the knowledge of consequences. When you analyze the past, you judge the present against your understanding of a course of actions as though there were patterns in the way that actions lead to consequences.

If the nature that humans perceive, was not one that civilized the universe by allowing the movement of the universal patterns to follow code or law, then quite obviously, actions such as smoking tobacco would not lead to dehydration and water would not result in the hydration of our body. But if look at it this way, that our choices of action(s) were limited and there was no need for complete freedom, there would be no need for creation or hence, new laws. There would be no need for adaptation because evolution would only mean that species can exchange places with other species. It would be possible to redefine our concept of the future as though our actions could affect our past and future in chorus. Say if the Rubik's Cube was a metaphor of our knowledge about this phenomena (or theory), then the reactions of each movement (or action) would affect the state of the body without dismantling it. The possibility of what could have been done to it or what can be done to achieve its present state or any other possible state would remain limited.

However, the concept of creation is one most difficult to perceive because it is impossible to imagine a physical example of the action. One might need to consider the phenomena of nothingness and how we came to believe in the concept of zero to begin questioning our general understanding of creation as the making of something out of nothing. If something is there, it is there; but how do you believe that something that is not there, might be there… that is if you were to agree that there is no such thing as creation. If you favored the alternative, that creation is possible out of nothingness, you would be able to consider that there is no such thing as future because it isn’t there, and that only the present keeps becoming the past.

If our choices were unlimited and if we were able to create the choice that was impossible in the past, then it would make sense to agree that we have freedom of choice.

History is made up of the actions of humans, animals and nature. We are still in the process of discovering the intelligence in animals and nature that may be as sophisticated as that of humans. But if mankind has the ability to make self-destructive choices, can we truly consider our intelligence as more sophisticated than that of animals and other things in nature?

Then again, if wisdom was the ability to draw out an insight of the ways of nature into our choices, then even actions that are seemingly self-destructive/suicidal would be actions based on sensible reasoning. A wise person always needs a good enough reason to act upon the knowledge he has of the consequences. The more knowledge he has about the pattern of actions, the better he will be able to judge the consequences of his own choices. Based on wisdom, he is able to act creatively.