Category: curiosity

A solution to the problem of ultimate boredom during exercise

To maintain one’s health, vigor, spirits and sex appeal, one should exercise regularly.
There is a big problem with this, however.
Exercise is SOOOO BORING!!!
If you choose to exercise by walking an hour a day, you walk the same route each day and eventually you get to know the plants, leaves and insects.
If you choose to run, swim or push weights, those exercises are repetitive and every time you do them, you perform substantially the same movements. If you are like me, you would scream of boredom within few days.
Competitive sport such as volleyball or basketball is always interesting. However, it requires the commitment of a group of people to meet few times a week. After one finishes one’s academic studies, such groups vanish into the thin mists of diversified jobs, family attractions, and varied volunteer obligations.

My parents found a solution to the problem of exercise boredom. The solution requires one to have a car and recommends that one live in or a near a big city with a lot of history and sights. Such as Jerusalem.

The idea is to drive by car each time to a different part of the city in question. Then park the car and walk in that part of the city for an hour. There are multiple benefits: exercise, no boredom, getting to know different parts of the city, cultivation of the ability to perform as a tour guide should this be necessary, knowing one’s way around the city should it ever be necessary to find some obscure address.

Yesterday I joined my parents in a tour of Beit Hakerem. My father showed me the pension (now hotel) where he recovered from the gunshot injury which he had during the 1948 War of Independence. We walked through a street which is too narrow for cars. The area was full of green and there were colors of flowers here and there. My mother told me that her father (my grandfather) worked also there as a construction worker when he was young. We know some people who live there. But yesterday did not get to see any of them.

Preservation of Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim holy sites

Two interesting Web pages about non-preservation of Muslim holy sites:

Updated at Sept. 17, 2012:
The second link above is dead. See the following links instead:

Zen outside the realm of martial arts; outside the realm of zen

Kan: The Intuitive Mind of the Martial Artist discusses one way of thinking, which is applied by masters of far Eastern martial arts, and which is suitable for winning battles.

This way of thinking is optimized to solve the problem of dealing correctly with unpredictable events, when response time is of the essence.

However, most of life, we do not have to deal with such events. We have the time to think with some leisure. Sometimes we are not in a battle situation at all, such as when we are creating a book or a painting or a software application.

In other cases, we are at war but events proceed sufficiently slowly that we can think for several minutes, or even for several days, before making the next move. Business competition is an example of such a war. There is almost always time to convene a meeting of the stakeholders and hash out a plan of action.

I wonder how do zen and other far Eastern philosophies deal with such situations.

Another question, to which I do not recall having seen an answer: every Westerner is familiar with the eerie and unreal feeling, which he has when he tries to grok zen. I wonder how do far Easterners feel when they learn our Western anti-zen philosophy. How do they look at it. With which problems it is better than zen at dealing with.

How did the superego come into existence and survive?

Thoughts after reading the article On awakening the intuitive mind as part of a modern lifestyle:

According to the article, the intuitive, unconstrained mode of thought is probably more productive than the usual constrained mode of thought.

The question is, then, why do we have at all a constrained mode of thought?

I suspect that the answer lies in the pack nature of humans. Humans are similar to dogs in following a leader. Several humans can switch between being leaders and being followers. When they are followers, they are supposed to subordinate their senses and thoughts to those of their leader. They should integrate with the pack way to maximize its effectiveness. The leader alone is supposed to have fully independent thoughts.

The symbolic representation of the above subordination is having in one’s mind the concept of a super-ego, a captain, who gives orders and does not allow the rest of one’s mind to have full freedom to follow wild thoughts.

When an human is alone or is the leader, he is supposed to make full use of his brain. Then the super-ego or the captain are supposed to go offstage until the human is again working in a subordinate role.

Consider the economics of the situation. One human with very free and productive mind can create intellectual output (say, a symphony, an inspiring book, or an ingenious computer program) at rate of say 100 times that of someone whose mind is always in the subordinated state.

However, if a great project needs the intellectual output of 1000 geniuses, then the only practical way to accomplish it is to subordinate the minds of millions of more or less ordinary people to accomplish the great project. It is even impossible to coordinate the workings of those 1000 geniuses without seriously impairing their individual intellectual outputs.

NOTE:
When considering a great project, consider the Manhattan Project, or the project of building a space station capable of housing one million humans.

Are you a single woman?

If yes, read What Lies Beyond the Haze of Social Conditioning? about what happens if one expands one’s consciousness and transcends above all the trifling and trivial problems, with which normal people preoccupy themselves.

Then, if the article resonates a chord within you, send me an E-mail message. Maybe you’ll find a soulmate.

At the moment, I am eagerly reading several articles from http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/archives/, in which also the above article appears. I did not feel like this since the time I found Steve Litt’s Troubleshooters.Com Web site, which teaches you everything you need to know to be able to troubleshoot malfunctioning equipment.