Larry-the-web-guy tells me that we now have four photo albums up, comprising 12 galleries — altogether, 133 photos.
Will probably do more after a while. I want to scan the photos I took in Peru in 1999 and get them put up too. (Some nice photos of Machu Picchu.)
But for the moment, I think it’s better to give Larry a rest!
Sooner or later, even Official Science “gets it,” and what had formerly been considered “merely anecdotal” becomes recognized as real. We are all one, in a very real if not always obvious way.
This, via Schwartzreport, from the Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403537.html?hpid=topnews
Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2008; Page A08
Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.
Years ago I read a very enlightening book by a man named Charles Hampden-Turner called Radical Man, in which he argued, from a psychological viewpoint, that when people spend enough time seeing things in a dualistic manner, they can lose the ability to perceive opportunities for cooperation across whatever lines separate them from their opponents. If this is true — and intuitively it seems to me that it must be true — what good end can political parties and ideological divisions come to?
You can already see it on AM talk radio, and political blogs, and any venue that clusters people of similar beliefs and emotional mind-sets. That way leads only downhill.
Interesting “coincidence,” if you happen to believe in coincidence. I got an email from someone asking to see the 10 black box sessions from 2004 that I had offered readers some while ago. Took me a while to find them. Then, sending them off, I glanced at the material and found this, which seems very appropriate today.
This material features me in the black box at The Monroe Institute on May 4, 2004, with Skip Atwater acting as monitor from outside the booth. TGU means The Guys Upstairs, meaning whatever unidentified intelligences I was contacting.
A thoughtful friend of mine responded to one of my political postings a while ago by saying (rightly) that our system was designed for a relatively small number of voters and a relatively short campaign, but today has become a “monster we know and dislike, where one’s vote counts one 200-millionth toward some outcome, where voters know that no matter how they vote, their entire state has been declared `safely’ in one camp or the other.”
He went on to say, “fortunately, each of us lives in an individual and not a mass world.”
I have thought about his comments for more than a month because on one level he’s absolutely right and on another level — well, I’m not so sure.