Tag Archives: writing

June 16, 2011 · 11:59 pm

how my dad was attacked by a tree

Here some random thoughts, interspersed with more random thoughts as well as random quotes and random links, all to do with ideas about TRUTH and REALITY …

To start with – a piece written by my son when he was, huh, quite young, describing a true experience. He gave me permission to share it.

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On Tuesday the 3d of May 1989, at eleven o’clock, me and my dad set off to Driebergen, about 20 miles from Amsterdam. It took us 45 minutes to get there. We went to see dad’s old house and it looked still the same as when he had lived there 16 years ago. Then we drove to a tennis club, called Manger Cot’s (Cat?). Dad went to the club house to meet some of his old friends, like his tennis trainer, Bill, and his father, can’t remember the name. Then we had a look if the squash club was still there, but it wasn’t, so we had some lunch. After that we went to a music shop, and I mucked about on the drums while dad talked business with the shop keepers. Later we went into the woods and walked about.

On the way back, dad was brutally attacked by a TREEbrandishing a knife stained with blood from its previous victim. Dad fell over and when he got up he looked like Frankenstein with a massive cut down his forehead and blood dripping all over the place.

Dad said it didn’t hurt, but we still went to Peter’s house (a friend of my dad) to wash off the blood. But Peter wasn’t there, and neither was his wife. So we had to walk back to the car and drive to the music shop to clean up the wound. Then the shopkeeper said he knew where there was a surgery, so we went there. When we got there, dad went in to see the doctor, and I waited outside in the lobby. Dad came out with three stitches in his forehead and a big plaster over it.

By Yeshen

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The etymology of the word TRUTH indicates – good faith, fidelity, sincerity, veracity – and agreement of fact or reality. TRUTH has been subjected to many theories and definitions, here are some of them:

1 Correspondence Theory: In the words of Thomas Aquinas, ‘Truth is the equation of things and intellect.’

2 Coherence Theory: Truth is only what is coherent with the whole system.

3 Constructive Theory: Perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent to convention, human perception and social experience, in other words, every truth is socially constructed.

4 Consensus Theory: Whatever is agreed upon …

5 Pragmatic Theory: Truth is verified and confirmed by the results of putting one’s concept into practice. It is self-corrective over time.

6 Kierkegaard says – ‘Objective truths are final and static. Subjective truths are continuing and dynamic.’

7 Nietzsche thought untruth is better than truth if it has life-enhancement as consequence.

8 Fromm held Truth to be a functional approximation of reality.

9 Foucault refers to ‘Regimes of Truth’ that shift constantly throughout history.

10 Baudrillard: The simulacrum is true because it conceals that there is no truth.

11 Lao Tzu: Words of truth are always paradoxical.

12 A mystic, Hazrat Inayat Khan, expressed TRUTH like this: Those who see the truth uncovered, abandon reason and logic, good and bad, high and low, new and old … As water in a fountain flows in one stream but falls in many drops, divided by time and space, so are the revelations of the one stream of truth. Not everyone can comprehend the idea of different truths being derived from one truth. Common sense has been so narrowly trained in this world of variety that it naturally fails to realize the breadth and subtlety of a spiritual fact so far beyond the reach of its limited reasoning.

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Filed under Blog

Tagged as children, imagination, short story, storytelling, truth, writing, young people

May 25, 2011 · 1:15 pm

… battling with the branding goddess …

A branding-class expert is something to be … anyone can be an expert, but branding the expertise takes imagination combined with determination. Establish a need, provide a context, add a striking image, a name, and presto, you attract a following of customers. Be like a dog, bury the bone, and bury it well, then dress it up virtually, mark it, package it, and you have a brand, it’s your invention. Don’t deviate; be like the dog, only tolerate your own teeth marks on it. We admire the sheer ingenuity of branding, which has turned into an art form. Take computers – they are memory devices, communication devices, and much more. Apple took a sumptuous bite out of the computing potential by developing an aesthetic language, a shiny package, and a logo with irresistible symbolic power.

Examples of successful branding have helped the growth of a fat goddess that pervades all fields of commerce. Her indulgence irks. There is the ambient kind of branding, like-minded people gathering around new mind tools, new therapies and self-help advice. Creative approaches I’d playfully developed in my work with clients for over two decades are presented as the latest invention, the latest trick revealed. By naming an approach or concept anew and creating a media platform, an idea becomes owned with the shield of a trademark. No free lunch. The trend is relentless. Even common herbs are re-named and patented.

Today, as ever, survival of the fittest means assertiveness, magnetism, influence, and, or material resources. I wouldn’t talk like this if I had a rewarding brand going, would I? While I resist the branding-bug I am free to ask … what will be the consequences? Where will it all lead? Will there come a time when a cooperation so inclined could offer you a tempting reward for a scratch-sample of your skin and patent your DNA? Would our human-rights-act guard against this invasion? Could the race over ownership, patenting and branding spread as far as shaking together a new race in a test-tube?

I am selectively brand-blind. I try to resist slogans, signatures, icons or familiars that aim to burn and mark my memory. It takes alertness, counter-programming. Subliminal stimuli in advertisement were banned, but subliminal messages abound. I prefer to make fresh associations each day. I want to choose my own habits. I want a flexible identity, and space to grow irrationally, no forced order, please. My inner world deserves a room within the social order. I seek no fault, but I make a stand for my inner silence, and my trust in the unknown. Don’t package me, label me or fit me in pre-fabricated boxes. Meet me when and wherever we meet as if it was the first time … like this …

Am I fooling my contradictory self? Surfing virtual networks, I am drawn to a new brand, the no-brand orphans. I’ve met you out there, searching for kinship. You’re my audience. I wrote a story for you, about a heroine who does not want to comply with what is expected of her, knows well what she does not want and attracts more of the same, until she steps through the mirrors that reflect her.

Yet even when we are empowered by what we want, and this is the secret behind the presently fashionable ‘The Secret’ – psyche is not two-dimensional, it has multiple layers, and whether we are aware of this or not, life will pull us into another myth, and we will create another goddess we bow to.

Let me come clear, this is a plug for my book, a story in search of a platform, an attempt at branding :) Established publishers – big brands – may well have a niche for a heroine who starts out not knowing what she wants, a story transgressing genres, it remains to be seen. I haven’t begun querying yet. But if it came to self-publishing, I would need to address my kinship, other branding orphans. Are you out there?

4 Comments

Filed under Course of Mirrors, my book

Tagged as brand, branding-goddess, m, publishing, virtual, writing

May 14, 2011 · 10:01 am

… on awareness …

Magic or what? According to the Hindus everything is food, including sounds and visual vibrations – all kinds of impressions: stories, architectural proportions, union of forms and colours, harmonics and rhythms, dissonance, conflict and all the ideas with which we come in contact. All this, absorbed mechanically and mostly without awareness throughout the day, has made up our being and continues to do so, unless we wake up to this process and adjust our rituals.

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Psychological laws: excerpt from ‘The Act of Will’ by Roberto Assagioli M.D.

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1 Images or mental pictures and ideas tend to produce the physical conditions and the external acts that correspond to them. Every image has in itself a motor element.

2 Attitudes, movements, and actions tend to evoke corresponding images and ideas; these, in turn evoke or intensify corresponding emotions and feelings.

3 Ideas and images tend to awaken emotions and feelings that correspond to them.

4 Emotions and impressions tend to awaken and intensify ideas and images that correspond to or are associated with them.

5 Needs, urges, drives and desires tend to arouse corresponding images, ideas and emotions.

6 Attention, interest, affirmation, and repetitions reinforce the ideas, images and psychological formations on which they are centred.

7 Repetition of actions intensifies the urge to further reiteration and renders their execution easier and better, until they come to be performed unconsciously.

8 All the various functions, and their manifold combinations in complexes and sub-personalities, adopt means of achieving their aims without our awareness, and independently of, and even against, our conscious will.

9 Urges, drives, desires and emotions tend to and demand to be expressed.

10 The psychological energies can find expression: 1. directly, through discharge and catharsis, 2. indirectly, through symbolic action, 3. through a process of transmutation.

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After carefully contemplating these laws you will draw your own conclusions.

Here some practical examples: Having experienced Feldenkreis work, and practices deriving from it – after doing a gentle physical exercise and repeating it in my imagination only, with eyes closed, the same physical reactions happen in my body. This explains why active imagination can affect mind and body at a deep level and change physical symptoms as well as states of mind.

When I hit my toe, elbow or head on an object, I repeat the exact contact and, in my imagination, send the impact back. There remains hardly any pain and the usual swelling is mild or does not occur at all.

Therapeutically, if a tense or hurtful part of the body is listened to and allowed a voice, the result can be instantaneous, much like when you lower yourself at eye-level to a toddler who has a tantrum, and do nothing else but acknowledge the rage, surprise, surprise, the tantrum stops.

What seems like magic, is actually simple and applies both ways: physical activity influences mood and mind, active imagination influences mood and body. Many of our modern-day ailments derive from people not being able to listen to their bodies and/or not being able to use their imagination in a constructive way.

Reading and, even more deeply, writing, are indirect symbolic expressions of psychological energy, which explains the incredible power of stories :)