October 2011
29 posts
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Reality distortion field (RDF)
is a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs’ charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Mac project. Bud Tribble claimed that the term came from Star Trek. Later the term has also been used to refer to perceptions of his keynote speeches (or “Stevenotes”) by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products.
The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs’ ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of superficial charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible.
[Wikipedia]
Walter Isaacson:He would tell me the same story three or four times, and each time it would be a little different. Nobody was lying or spinning. It’s just that Steve had such a strong force field that it seemed to almost distort the perceptions around him.
Tribble later told Isaacson that the phrase came from “The Menagerie” to describe how the Talosians created “their own new world through sheer mental force.”
Are you one of us, Steve?
” — Michael Hinman at: http://www.airlockalpha.com/node/8745/was-steve-jobs-a-talosian.html
“In order to develop equanimity in the face of the impermanence of our individual human form, we need to fully accept the reality of change. And the only way we can accept change is to cease from clinging. We have to cease from clinging to the body as it is or as it was or how we would like it to be. We have to accept impermanence in order not to suffer.”
—Bodhipaksa, Living as a River
“We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of its water.”
—David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“Beyond the reach of the five senses lies an invisible realm of infinite possibility, and the key to unfolding its potential is consciousness.”
—Deepak Chopra, War of the Worldviews: Science Vs. Spirituality
“Multitude cannot exist without its oneness and oneness cannot exist without determination by multitude.”
—Claus Janew, Blog at http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Claus_Janew/blog/33738_Definition_of_infinitesimality_structure
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In my view, the quantum observer is consciousness. The conventional definition of consciousness implies that it is a uniquely human property. For me, the aspect of consciousness that applies to humans should be called conscious awareness. I’m hereby introducing a new paradigm for the larger conept of consciousness of which conscious awareness is a tiny sub-set.
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Think of consciousness as the fifth force of nature. It is a fundamental property of the universe.
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Consider consciousness as if it were a force that is propagated via spectrum of vibrational frequency, similar to the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS).
We humans are able to perceive only a very tiny fraction of the EMS with our senses: visible light.
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Just as humans are only tuned-in to that band of the EMS corresponding to visible light, similarly we are only tuned-in to a very narrow band of the spectrum of consciousness. This is the band that corresponds to self awareness.
Jeff Hall—The Dimensions of Consciousness Blog at:
http://therealjeffhall.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-definition-of-consciousness.html
“Like Parmenides, Eucleides also maintained that “all is one,” and that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality (“being”)—a thesis that Plato would grapple with in later dialogues, including the Parmenides, the Sophist, and the Thaetatus (in which Eucleides himself appears).”
—James Miller, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche
“It may be that space and time as we understand them in our day-to-day lives are convenient fictions that come about as a result of the nature of our senses, and of the brain and consciousness that organize and seek to understand the information presented by those senses.”
—Bodhipaksa, Living as a River
“The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.”
—Ken Wilber (via heartmindspirit)
“What you are able to experience is completely limited by your biology. This differs from the commonsense view that our eyes, ears, and fingers passively receive an objective physical world outside of ourselves.”
—David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“The main point I want to make here, however, is that perhaps the most extraordinary feature of eternity consciousness is that it doesn’t feel extraordinary at all. It feels quintessentially natural that personal consciousness should be aware of its own Ground, while my first fifty-nine years of so-called “normal” consciousness, in ignorance of that Ground, now seem like a kind of waking dream. It was as if I’d been entranced from birth into a collective nightmare of separate individuals struggling in an alien universe for survival, satisfaction and significance.”
—Bernard Haisch, The Purpose-Guided Universe
“So perhaps, for the sake of argument, the lot of us would do best to assume that the void can’t stay void for long. That its hunger for adventure is as hopeless as ours. That its loneliness is even more so. And that thus, time and again, with a sally of doubt, the Dreamer’s the Dreamer, and we’re us, brushing eyebrows with it, and back we go.”
—Alex Shakar, Luminarium—”a strikingly metaphysical novel that never dematerializes into misty cliches, a book to challenge the mystic and the doubter alike.” –The Washington Post
“On at least one issue, then, the actual investigators in the realms of spirituality and science seemed to be in lockstep agreement: the self is a conditioned reflex; a needy, greedy concatenation of impulses; a position, ultimately, of ignorance.”
—Alex Shakar, Luminarium—”a strikingly metaphysical novel that never dematerializes into misty cliches, a book to challenge the mystic and the doubter alike.” –The Washington Post
“If it really is true that the essence of our endless consciousness predates our birth and our body and that it will survive death independently of our body in a nonlocal space where time and distance play no role, there will be no beginning or end to our consciousness.”
—Pim Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience
“All beings are vortices through which the world pours. All beings pass through each other. One being contains innumerable others. If we could free ourselves from our temporal blindness, we would see ourselves not as individual units, but as interconnected nodes within a cloud of matter and energy. The idea that the sixty or seventy or eighty liters of space that our limited body occupies is “our” space is hopelessly myopic. In reality we occupy the world and each other. This, in a sense, is our true form.”
—Bodhipaksa, Living as a River
“And here, deep within the absence of earthly temporality, the boundaries of my earthly body dissolved and I melted into the universe.”
—Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
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Plato:
The man who deludes himself into thinking that he has achieved real knowledge of the true, the just, and the good is liable to be a very poor judge of what is really true, just, and good, since the Forms exist independently of any earthly embodiment, and perhaps beyond any mortal comprehension.
” —James Miller, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche
“Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.”
—Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness
“In the Republic, Plato imagines the possibility of a city ruled by “philosopher-kings.” But he also imagines that a true philosopher, being happiest when contemplating the Forms, will have to be compelled to rule over others and forced to descend into the “cave” of human affairs—a treacherous realm where the semblance of good and evil, the just and the unjust, shadowbox for supremacy.”
—James Miller, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche
